When Ghosts Come Home(17)

“Rodney wasn’t involved with drugs,” Bellamy said.

“I’m not saying he was, Ed.”

“I’m saying he wasn’t, Winston. I don’t even want to hear that or see that mentioned anywhere.”

“Right now, all I know is that your son was murdered, and I want to find out who did it,” Winston said. He’d looked back toward the house, saw that the blinds were parted in the room where the teenaged boy had appeared at the doorway. The boy must have understood that Winston had spotted him, because the blinds closed. “Who’s that boy inside?”

Bellamy had looked back toward the house, the spell of his anger and grief broken for a brief moment.

“His name’s Jay,” he’d said. “He’s Janelle’s little brother. She brought him up from Atlanta.”

“How old is he?” Winston had asked.

“Fourteen. He got into some trouble down there. Her folks didn’t know what to do with him.” He exhaled and put his hands in his pockets. “She and Rodney brought him up here this summer.”

“What kind of trouble did he get into?”

“I don’t know, Sheriff,” Bellamy had said. His gaze turned back to Winston in what could only be perceived as a hard stare. “The kind of trouble boys get into everywhere. I tried telling Rodney not to take him in. I tried telling him how hard it is to—” He had stopped speaking for a moment, had crossed his arms and then raised a hand to cover his mouth. Winston waited. Bellamy crossed his arms again. He looked up at Winston. “I tried telling him how hard it is in this country to raise a Black boy into a man.”



On his way back to the airport, Winston went through the Hardee’s drive-through for coffee. He knew he needed to eat something, but he couldn’t imagine choking down a biscuit, even though he knew that black coffee wasn’t going to be easy on his empty stomach.

When he turned left onto Long Beach Road, he saw the Food Lion sitting up ahead on his left, and he decided to pull into the parking lot. As far as Winston knew, this was the only business that was open twenty-four hours that also sold diapers. If Rodney Bellamy was heading anywhere in the middle of the night, this would’ve been it. Winston drove through the parking lot, his neck craning one way and another, his eyes scanning the horizon toward the southwest for any glimpse of the sky above the airport. He parked Marie’s car at the top of the lot close to the road, and then he climbed out and stood there for a moment, taking sips of the hot, bitter coffee.

From where he stood, he could see the airport’s beacon. It would have been even more visible in the middle of the night with its bright light and the absence of car headlights on the road. If Rodney Bellamy had been standing where Winston was standing now, he would have had an unobstructed view of the aircraft coming in. Winston walked to the middle of the lot and found that he could still see the beacon light, although he could no longer see the entire expanse of airspace over the runway. But the airplane had been loud enough to awaken him and Marie, loud enough to shake their house—or at least to have made them think their house had been shaken—so if Rodney had heard it, perhaps he had run out to the road in time to see it disappear beneath the distant tree line.

And what had taken him out there? The belief that he’d witnessed a plane crash? Winston couldn’t explain it, but he knew Rodney hadn’t been involved in drugs. That didn’t make any sense. He and Janelle had only recently moved back to Southport. Rodney hadn’t had the kind of time it would take to embed himself with an operation like this. But had it been dumb luck that found him standing in this parking lot at the exact moment that the aircraft had come in? Had it been simple curiosity that led him to climb back into his car and go check out what he’d seen and heard? Perhaps, like Winston, he’d expected to find a crash landing, a fiery wreckage, victims strewn along the runway. Instead, someone had shot him in the chest and left him to die, and what had Rodney thought in the seconds before that happened? Winston hated to consider it, but more than that he hated that Ed Bellamy and Rodney’s widow would spend the rest of their lives considering it long after Winston’s role in the investigation was over.

He swallowed the last bit of his coffee and walked back to his car. Since he was heading back to the airport, he figured he’d better have something to say to the news crews, who wouldn’t leave unless he did. He found a pad inside the pocket of his jacket and jotted down a few notes about what he knew, what was safe to say without speculating.

When he got to the airport, he saw Bellamy’s car where it still sat parked, the police tape that now cordoned it off blowing in the breeze. He pulled into an empty space in front of Sweetney’s office. Dorsey’s white Cadillac and Sweetney’s truck sat unmoved from where they’d been parked that morning. There was Kepler’s cruiser and a few other cars in the lot that Winston didn’t recognize. Another news van had joined the other two, and it sat parked on the grass on the edge of the lot. It was a television station from Myrtle Beach.

Dorsey must have been waiting for Winston to arrive, because as soon as Winston got out of the car, notepad in hand, Dorsey opened the door to Sweetney’s office and called out to him. He waved for him to come inside. “Come on in here, Columbo,” Dorsey said. He stepped back inside the office and let the door close behind him.

Winston spoke to a couple of the reporters and promised to be with them in a few minutes. Inside the office, he found Sweetney sitting behind his desk and Dorsey standing by the bookshelf full of model airplanes, studying them as if they could reveal something about the abandoned aircraft just outside. Dorsey looked up and nodded at the chair in front of Sweetney’s desk. “Have a seat, Sheriff,” he said.