When Ghosts Come Home(4)

The island, thirteen miles long and four miles wide at its widest and sparsely dotted with old single-family homes, fishing shacks, vacation houses, and trailers, was heavily wooded and quiet. It ran east to west off the southeastern elbow of North Carolina. To people who lived there, it felt like a place that had either gone undiscovered or had been forgotten by the rest of the state, that feeling growing so strong as to be nearly palpable as the island changed seasons and a blanket of unperturbed silence settled over it. As fall turned toward winter, the island always seemed to grow smaller, more remote, more insular.

There was no clock in Marie’s car, and Winston had forgotten his watch where he usually left it beside his wallet and keys on the counter, but it was nearing 4:00 a.m. by the time he headed east down Oak Island Drive. Most of the businesses—a fudge shop, a T-shirt store, a pancake house, all the motels—had been shuttered for the off-season. The few places that had remained open for the winter had been closed for hours. After he and Marie had left Gastonia in 1963 and moved to Oak Island, they had joked that the island rolled up its sidewalks at 6:00 p.m., which was ironic only because there were no sidewalks. Winston thought then and he still thought now that the island would make an ideal place for someone to hide, and perhaps that’s what he’d been doing all these years.

As he drove across the bridge above the waterway, Winston watched the light from the Caswell Beach lighthouse at the far eastern end of the island strafe the waterway in perfect increments. It flashed in his rearview mirror, and for a moment he could both see and feel its light in his eyes. When Marie’s car climbed to the top of the bridge, the beacon light from the tiny airport appeared through the distant trees on his left. He had been at this exact spot on the bridge at night what must have been a million times over the years, and each time he felt like he was leaving the bright gleam of the lighthouse for the tiny spot of the beacon light, a light that was overwhelmed by the darkness of the mainland that waited for him in the woods across the water.

When Colleen was a little girl, both when they reached the apex of this bridge and the even taller and more magnificent drawbridge that spanned the Cape Fear River, her voice would come from the backseat, asking, “What would happen if we fell from here?” and Winston would consider what would cause someone to topple from such a height to the water below. Suicide? A vehicle fire? A bridge collapse? He pictured himself and Colleen holding hands and climbing over the guardrail before leaping into the still waters. No matter how many times she asked, he always answered her question with the same response: “I would save you.”

But as she grew older her questions became more particular: “What would happen if we drove off the bridge?” or “What would happen if our car flipped over the side?” The more questions she asked, the more her fear became corporeal, and she began to construct detailed stories of the tragedies that would await them. Winston always knew the answers to the questions she had, because he had trained—made all his deputies train, as a matter of fact—for water rescues. The county was dotted with water: lakes, canals, creeks, and waterways disguised as rivers. They had encountered submerged vehicles before, and he’d pictured himself seat-belted into the driver’s seat of a car upside down underwater, Colleen in the backseat. There would be about thirty seconds before the interior filled with water. He would remove his seat belt, reach back, and do the same to Colleen’s. He would pull her into the front seat, and, as water poured into the car, he would use the spring-triggered pin on his key chain (he made Marie and all his deputies carry them) to break the window and climb out. He would remind himself to follow the bubbles to the surface, Colleen clutched in his arms, his eyes searching for the light above him while his lungs waited for air.

But he didn’t explain all of this to Colleen when they passed over bridges during her childhood. Instead, he would look at her in the rearview mirror when she was young enough to sit in the backseat, or he would turn his head to look at her when she was old enough to sit beside him, the water through her window stretching out below them beneath the bridge, and he would always say the same thing: “Don’t look down, don’t look back. Just look where we’re going.”



When Winston pulled Marie’s car into the otherwise empty gravel parking lot at the airport, the only thing he found waiting for him was a two-door white Datsun with North Carolina plates. It surprised him to find a car parked here this late, but he wasn’t concerned. Perhaps it had broken down on Long Beach Road and someone had helped the driver push it into the lot before giving them a ride home. Perhaps someone had parked it here before piloting a private jet, although, given the make of the car, that seemed unlikely. Perhaps it was just abandoned.

He was not driving his cruiser so he did not have his standard-issue flashlight, but he cupped his hands around the Datsun’s driver’s-side window and peered into the car’s interior. There was nothing to see aside from a crumpled pack of crackers on the passenger’s seat, an open cassette case of Michael Jackson’s Thriller on the center console, and an empty Styrofoam cup of what looked to have been coffee resting beside it. A child’s seat was installed in the backseat, and an unzipped gym bag rested beside it, but from what Winston could see through the window it didn’t hold anything interesting. This car could have belonged to Colleen or certainly to someone her age, and the contents revealed no great clues as to who owned it or why it was parked in an empty airport parking lot in the middle of the night.