When Ghosts Come Home(5)

Winston took his walkie-talkie from his belt and radioed Rudy.

“How’s it look out there?” Rudy asked.

“Quiet,” Winston said. “But there’s a vehicle in the lot. If you’d run the plate for me.”

“Of course,” he said.

Winston stepped around to the back of the car and read out the license plate.

“Back in a second,” Rudy said.

Winston slipped the walkie-talkie onto his belt and walked around to the front of the car. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the Datsun’s fender. He looked toward the trees on the other side of the runway, his eyes searching for movement or a beam of light or whatever it was that could have made the sound that had woken him and Marie, but there didn’t seem to be anything to see. His nose caught the cool, swampy scent of the waterway, just a mile or so to the south, and he thought of Marie on the other side of the water, lying awake in bed and waiting to hear the noise of his keys turning the lock on the front door. He thought of the sound they’d heard that had jolted them from sleep; the way it seemed to vibrate along the roof of the house, the deep hum it had sent through his body. He didn’t know what else to do while he waited to hear back from Rudy, so he set off across the grass-covered field toward the runway.



The lot where Winston waited sat closest to the south end of the runway, where two white lights marked either side of the landing strip, and Winston knew that if what they’d heard was an airplane then this was where it had touched down. The runway was made of grass—it would not be paved for a couple more years—and it was useless to search it for tracks that this potential airplane or any other may have left behind. The expanse of runway stretched ahead of him toward a stand of pine trees that rose out of the dark night a couple thousand feet ahead. Another set of lights marked the middle of the runway on either side, and a third set illuminated its northern end, but these lights were designed to be seen from the air, not from below. The sun would be up in a matter of hours, but Winston didn’t want to wait for the sun. He knew that if something was hiding from him there at the end of the runway he would have to go there to find it.

He nearly jumped when his walkie-talkie crackled to life with the sound of Rudy’s voice.

“Got it,” he said.

Winston slipped the radio from his belt and held it to his mouth. “Go ahead.”

“It’s a 1978 Datsun registered to a Rodney Edward Bellamy. Want his birth date and address?”

“Hang on to them. Won’t do me any good out here,” Winston said, not because he didn’t need the information, but because he already knew it. Rodney Bellamy had gone to school with Colleen. He was the son of Ed Bellamy, one of the only Black teachers in Brunswick County, and one of the people who’d stood up against harassment and violence during school integration. Bellamy was a history teacher, but he was also a de facto civil rights leader, and he and Winston had worked together just as many times as they’d butted heads. A decade before, Ed had served as the face of integration in the county schools, and Winston had done everything he could to ensure that the county didn’t have the kind of violence that Wilmington had experienced, but of course there was violence. Winston couldn’t stop it all, especially when he knew that half his deputies hadn’t wanted their own kids sitting alongside Black children, and they especially didn’t want men like Ed Bellamy explaining the law to them.

Winston agreed with the stances Bellamy had taken over the years. But he also knew the importance, especially in a place like Brunswick County, of walking that fine line of legal authority and cultural memory. Ed Bellamy understood it too, meaning he understood that what people like Winston believed in private and what they were willing to say in public were not always the same thing. Ed Bellamy was bold and outspoken because he believed he had to be to get things done. Winston was deliberate and careful for the exact same reason.

“Owner lives over in the Grove,” Rudy said.

“Yep,” Winston said. “Thanks, Rudy.”

He slipped the walkie-talkie back onto his belt and then he set off toward the end of the runway, the sound of his footsteps falling silently on the ground beneath him.

Later, when he would think back on this moment, Winston would realize that he had been able to sense the enormity of the airplane before he even arrived and saw it for the first time. It sat sideways at the very end of the runway. Its silvery body was perhaps twenty yards long, and its wingspan easily thirty. Up close, it shimmered beneath the faint moonlight like a mirror, the two huge propellers on either wing stilled like closed eyes, as if the airplane had been sleeping when Winston found it, the cargo doors on its right side thrown open like a breathing mouth that sucked in air. Winston did not know much about airplanes aside from his brief brushes with them while serving in Korea, but he knew this airplane was old—perhaps a World War II relic—and that it had been too large for this runway, and that was why it sat in the position it did, a quarter of the way into a full turn that the pilot must have made to keep it from plunging into the trees just beyond the runway’s end, the rear landing gear snapped in half and the tail resting awkwardly on the ground.

Winston unholstered his pistol and stood with it down by his side.

“Hello!” he called. He waited, but all he could hear was what seemed like the sharp, tinny silence of the airplane’s presence. “Anybody in there?”