When Ghosts Come Home(15)
Outside, a crew from Channel 3 had set up a camera in the parking lot on the edge of the field that led toward the runway. The newly arrived reporter looked up at Winston where he stood outside Hugh’s office. She didn’t look a day older than twenty, her big, blond hair barely registering the breeze. “Sheriff?” the reporter called, but Winston waved her off. She’d talk to Channel 9’s reporter. He knew they’d compare notes, coming to the conclusion that they had no option but to wait for his statement.
Winston looked out toward the runway. Kepler still loomed like a scarecrow over Bellamy’s body, the tarp that covered it stirring almost imperceptibly in the breeze. Winston saw that Dorsey and Sweetney had begun walking back toward the office, and just as Winston and Dorsey locked eyes, Dorsey raised his hand and pointed at the television crews gathering in the parking lot. Winston raised his eyebrows and shook his head in warning. There was no way in hell he wanted Dorsey out in front of the investigation. Dorsey nodded as if he understood, and Winston followed the sidewalk toward Marie’s Regal where it still sat parked beside Bellamy’s Datsun. Before climbing behind the wheel, Winston heard Dorsey call out to him, but he let the breeze carry Dorsey’s voice far away from his ear.
Death had brought Winston to someone’s door on only a few occasions during his time as a police officer in Gastonia and as a member of the sheriff’s department in Brunswick County, but it had rarely been murder that sent him. He was usually consoling mothers, fathers, and spouses, and then glossing over the details of car crashes, drownings, and other accidents. It wasn’t often that he had to explain to someone that another person had taken the life of their parent or child or, in this case, husband.
After leaving the airport, he tried to calculate how long it would have taken Bellamy to leave the principal’s office and go back to his classroom for his car keys, how much time would be required to find a substitute to take over his class for the day, and how many minutes a grieving father would need to drive the eighteen miles from the high school to Rodney’s house in the Grove. Fifteen? Twenty? Certainly no less.
Winston drove as slow as he could down Howe Street into downtown Southport, the water rising up before him at the end of the street. Here the Atlantic Ocean merged with the Cape Fear River as it led northwest to Wilmington and the Intracoastal Waterway to the southwest, which separated Oak Island from the mainland, and here, centuries earlier, pirates had reigned. Now the sleepy town depended more on the treasure of tourists than it did on the bounty of pirates. At the end of Howe, Winston turned right and drove along the water where boats of all kinds and sizes were tied up in slips and restaurants that had been closed for the season sat empty and dark. He made another right and circled back toward North Lord Street, where he drove into the Grove and found a little white house with a well-manicured yard and a tan sedan parked haphazardly behind a pickup truck in the driveway. A little of the tension that had been building inside Winston released itself because he knew that Bellamy had beaten him there.
Winston parked Marie’s car on the street in front of the house. Just up the road, a Black boy played with a little dog at the edge of a yard. The boy, who might’ve been three or four, must have held something in his hand that the dog wanted because the dog was leaping for it, and the boy was laughing, holding his clenched fist above his head. For a moment, Winston found himself back in Gastonia, sitting behind the steering wheel as a much younger man, the errand that brought him to park alongside the street just as tragic as the one that brought him to the Grove now. The little boy opened his palm and the dog took something from it. He wiped his hand on his shirt, and then he looked up the road at Winston. The sight of the little boy was almost too much for him to bear. The little boy ran back toward his house, the dog following, and Winston climbed out of the car.
He figured the truck parked in the driveway must have belonged to Rodney and that he had been driving his wife’s Datsun last night. The irony of that discovery settled on his chest with a weight that surprised him. He closed his car door and made his way across the yard. He could hear Janelle’s cries before he even stepped onto the porch.
On most occasions, the sound of a doorbell is loud and cheerful, loaded with mystery and curiosity and expectation. Doorbells have an element of surprise that feels manipulative—almost evil—when announcing the news of death. Winston had spent a lot of time thinking about this over the years, and he thought about it again at that moment as he delivered three almost silent knocks on Janelle Bellamy’s door. Inside, the woman’s cries seemed to go silent, and Winston feared that, in her sudden grief, Janelle might believe that he was Rodney returning home, that there had been some great mistake and that her husband was still alive. He feared that she would open the door and find him instead.
But when the door opened, there stood Ed Bellamy, his eyes damp and his face already collapsed with the kind of exhaustion that only grief can bring. He nodded at Winston. “Sheriff,” he said.
They shook hands, and for a moment Winston wanted to pull Bellamy into an embrace, but instead he just stepped into the living room, and Bellamy closed the door behind him. The interior of the small house reminded Winston of his and Marie’s home back in Gastonia: the living room full of secondhand furniture; the short hallway on the left that led to a kitchen and probably a small laundry room; the hallway on the other side of the living room, the open bathroom door on the right, the three closed bedroom doors on either side of the hallway just beyond it. Something about the house—the arrangement of the furniture or the smell of new carpet—told Winston that Rodney and Janelle Bellamy had not been living here for very long, and now, if she stayed in their home, she would be living here without him.