When Ghosts Come Home(2)

“I know, honey,” he said. He fought the urge to break his gaze from hers, to drop his chin to his chest. He considered sitting down on the bed beside her, but he knew that doing so would delay his leaving even longer. “I know. Maybe she’ll call tomorrow. If not, we’ll call her. Maybe we can try getting ahold of Scott at work, ask him how she’s doing.” He’d said all of these things many times since he and Marie had come home from Texas, and he was tired of saying them, but he knew that, when it came to their daughter, Marie needed to hear certain things, and he knew that it was his job to say them.

For Winston, what had been a charming bedside scene—a scene of Marie worried over him in the middle of the night—had devolved into a kind of repulsion at Marie’s mentioning their daughter’s name. Winston’s grief for Colleen was caustic, and he knew it had turned poisonous, infecting his heart and hardening it against Marie’s own particular brand of grief and her need to share it with him. Unlike Marie, Winston’s sadness was a thing he could bear only when he was alone.

He reached for her, held her fingers with the tips of his, gave her hand a little shake.

“We’ll call the house again tomorrow,” he said. “And then we’ll get ahold of Scott at work if we need to.”

Marie smiled a weak smile and lowered herself to her pillow. She closed her eyes, and Winston kissed her forehead again. He stood up straight and looked down at her. He watched her turn away from him and pull the covers up over her shoulders.

When the telephone rang on the dresser across the bedroom, Winston jumped like he’d heard a slammed door or a gunshot. Marie didn’t even stir. “I bet that’s Rudy,” she said.

“I bet you’re right,” Winston said, trying to hide the breathless surprise in his voice. “There’s my call.” He left the bedroom for the hallway and took the stairs down to the kitchen, where the telephone was still ringing. He picked it up.

“Calls are coming in about some sort of noise out at the airport,” Rudy said. “Sounds like it might be a plane crash.”

“We heard it too,” Winston said. “I was about to call in and tell you I’m headed out that way.”

“You want backup?” Rudy asked, his voice as raspy and whispery as it always was. Winston knew Rudy smoked cigarettes and drank coffee in the dispatch room all night long during his shifts, but Rudy was the best they’d ever had, and he’d work the night shift when no one else wanted to, so Winston was willing to let Rudy’s smoking slide.

“No,” Winston said. “No sense in waking up somebody who’s not already awake or pulling somebody else off patrol.”

“All right, Sheriff,” Rudy said. “Call if you need something.”

Winston found his boots in the laundry room. He took his jacket from the hall closet and slipped it on, unlocked the safe in the back of the closet, and removed his pistol and holster. He lifted his walkie-talkie from the shelf above him and turned it on, its low white hiss breaking the silence of the quiet house.

Once he had his gear, Winston stood at the bottom of the stairs by the front door, listening for something, but for what he did not know.

“Marie,” he said. His voice escaped his throat in a whisper. “Marie,” he said again, “I’ll be right back.”

There was no sound from upstairs. The silence of the house encircled him, but Winston knew that Marie was awake, her eyes closed, her ears trying to do the same. He could almost feel her heart beating from where he stood at the front door, and for a moment he considered going back upstairs and touching her one last time, but he unlocked the front door, opened it, and stepped out into the night instead.

The black sky and its pinpricked canopy of stars pressed down on Winston as if he could reach up and push it away. The air was cool and heavy, and he could smell the trees—pines, yaupons, oaks—the moss that hung from them, the brackish air coming from the waterway behind him, the salty tang of the ocean on the other side of the island. The world was near silent, but he could hear the water moving.

Winston was halfway down the gravel walk when he looked up to find that Marie’s burgundy Regal was parked behind the cruiser. Instead of taking the time to move it he climbed inside Marie’s car and started the engine. The radio came on, a late-night talking head discussing Mondale’s slim chances against Reagan. Winston clicked the radio off and turned to back Marie’s car out of the driveway.

On the passenger’s seat were the posters and flyers that Marie had picked up that afternoon in Southport, each one featuring a photograph of a younger version of Winston, the photograph accompanied by the phrase Vote for a man you can trust. He had been forty-eight years old the first time he had run for sheriff, and now he was sixty, almost twenty years older than his opponent. Something about seeing his young face and thinking about the even younger face of Bradley Frye—the man who would probably defeat him—embarrassed Winston.

Bradley Frye was the son of a local developer named Everett Frye, who’d spent decades building up this part of the North Carolina coast. Condominiums, shopping centers, expensive vacation houses. Now that the elder Frye was dead, his son seemed hell-bent on clear-cutting swaths of land and stamping out track homes and new developments on the sandy, swampy soil where forests and wetlands had sat just days before. Winston figured Bradley Frye was either making a fortune or driving himself into unimaginable debt. Regardless, he now had his sights set on local government, beginning with the sheriff’s office. Although he’d gained some small amount of notoriety as a basketball player at Brunswick County High School in the late 1950s, Frye had never left the county after graduation. In his twenties he set about furthering his name by showing up drunk and looking for girls at high school parties, and when county schools integrated in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Winston knew Frye as one of the local boys who’d load up in trucks to harass and beat up Black students protesting just up the road in Wilmington. In the years since, Frye had tried to soften the perception that people had of him—a good ol’ boy with a rich daddy who could afford to play nationalist—by wearing golf shirts, khaki pants, and work boots while on job sites. And now forty-one-year-old Bradley Frye was the first challenger Winston had faced in nearly twelve years as sheriff, and something about seeing his own much younger face on the campaign posters in Marie’s car told Winston that he was probably going to lose. Bradley Frye had used his inheritance to make a name for himself as a businessman, and over the summer he’d papered the county with billboards, yard signs, newspaper ads, and even a television commercial. The election was just a week away, and Winston knew it was all coming down to money; Bradley Frye had it, and Winston didn’t, and that made him even more afraid of losing, especially when he considered what the loss of their income and health insurance would mean for Marie.