When Ghosts Come Home(44)

“Listen here, boy,” the man from the woods said. “We don’t need y’all bringing drugs into this county. We think it’s time y’all pack up, get on back down to Georgia, take that peach of a sister back where she belongs.”

Jay felt something wet on his arm, and he realized it was a tear and that he’d been crying. He did not know how long he stood there, but it seemed that hours passed. He kept his finger on the rifle’s trigger, kept it raised and pointing blindly into the light.

“You think about what I just told you,” the man’s voice finally said. “You think about it.”

There was the sound of car doors opening and closing, and suddenly the bright light waned as vehicles backed out of Janelle’s yard and swung around in the street in front of the house. Jay kept the rifle raised, but when he looked to the road, he saw men in the back of the trucks, some of them sitting on the sides of the trucks’ beds and holding Confederate flags on long poles, others standing behind spotlights fastened to the trucks’ roofs. A few trucks spun their tires and kicked smoke into the air, and then they tore off down the road toward Southport. The last truck to leave their yard was a big dually with lettering on the side. It flew a Confederate flag from the back of its cab. There was the sound of a gun being fired into the air, and Jay flinched and ducked from the doorway back into the darkened house. He heard laughter, more squealing tires, and then the night went silent and dark.

He closed the door and locked it, even though he knew it offered them absolutely no protection from whoever the people were who had been waiting for him outside. They were gone, for now, but Jay knew they would return, and he would be ready.





Chapter 7




Marie was still sleeping soundly when Winston slipped out of bed the next morning. After getting dressed, he fought the urge to open Colleen’s door to peer in at her while she slept. He told himself that he’d decided not to open her door because he was afraid of waking her, but he secretly knew that he was afraid of seeing a woman who would leave home again instead of a little girl who might just stay forever.

The night before, he’d gone to sleep with worry strapped to him like a dynamite vest, each of the worries packaged like a tiny bomb that he either had to snuff out or face the possibility of it blowing a hole through his heart while his mind wrestled itself toward sleep. He thought about his time in Korea, thought about how—although he’d seen no live combat—he was always aware and afraid of the possibility of something being tossed his way. How would he have responded? Would he have run? Thrown himself on top of it? Picked it up and tossed it back? Later, he would hear of guys in Vietnam launching their bodies on top of hand grenades that had been thrown by villagers—women and children who hated the soldiers as much as their fathers and husbands did. He imagined those men’s hollowed-out bodies, their forever unseeing and unblinking eyes, and he thought of Ed Bellamy during his time in that country. He knew that Bellamy had been a marine, but he did not know in what capacity he had served.

Winston had closed his eyes, pictured Ed Bellamy as a young man, alone in a rice paddy as a helicopter hovers overhead, the winds from its rotors bending the limbs of trees and fluttering Bellamy’s flak jacket. In this vision, Ed Bellamy is even younger than the son who’d be found dead on a runway all these years later. Winston thought of Rodney Bellamy as just a child, and he knew that he saw the man as such because he’d been in school with Colleen, whom he would always see as a child no matter how old she grew to be.

And in thinking of Colleen, Winston was forced to finger another tightly packed package of explosive. When he’d first laid eyes on her at the airport, the weight of her sadness had overwhelmed him, but unlike Marie’s sadness, which caused him to withdraw, Colleen’s grief pulled him closer, and the closer he got the more he realized he could not defuse Colleen’s bombs because he could not even defuse his own.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Winston brewed a pot of coffee as the world lightened outside, and then he stood and stared out the windows toward the waterway while he drank his first cup of the day. Little more than twenty-four hours had passed since he had stood there wondering what he would find at the airport, and he could not believe all that had happened. The airplane. Bellamy’s body on the runway. Glenn’s stumbling upon him and nearly getting shot. The sudden phone call from Colleen that had surprised him more than anything he could have discovered at the airport in the middle of the night. And now here he was, setting off on another errand that would inevitably surprise him just as much as the others: an FBI agent from Florida who could supposedly fix and fly the airplane, a man Rollins had said was named Tom Groom, was expecting Winston to pick him up at the Wilmington airport. And Groom would be staying with him and Marie in what suddenly felt to Winston like a full house.

He’d tried his best to hide his frustration with Rollins over the phone last night. It was true that the hotels had closed up shop for the winter, but he knew other arrangements could’ve been made, and there were better options than having a stranger stay with him and Marie. This option was just the cheapest and the least disruptive to the day-to-day operations of the FBI’s Wilmington field office. Winston was certain that Marie was excited by the idea of having someone stay with them, but he was afraid that it—along with Colleen’s visit—would take a toll on her, although she’d never show it, especially not in front of a guest.