When Ghosts Come Home(55)

A door had closed between them, and Winston could feel that a coldness had seeped in. He now foresaw a relationship with Vicki that would be cast in the full light of their prejudices. There would be a sudden stop to small acts of kindness and shared joys, which could never transpire again without an unease that would color their every interaction.

Winston removed his hands from the counter and stood up straight. He kept his eyes on Vicki’s. “Vicki,” he said, “you are not an officer of the law in Brunswick County, and it is not your job or responsibility to decide what is and what is not illegal. It is your job to share all messages with me, regardless of who they are from and regardless of what they are. Is that clear?”

Another moment passed between them, their eyes still on each other, and in that moment Winston understood that, at least on this issue and probably many others that would be revealed and come to bear on their lives in significant and insignificant ways, Vicki had sided with Bradley Frye and people like him, and he knew that she would vote for Bradley Frye next week. Nothing had changed, but something had been revealed, and Winston had not seen it coming, although he had lived with it and worked alongside it every day of his life for almost two decades. This new knowledge diminished him, and he felt smaller standing in front of Vicki now than he had when he arrived at her desk buoyed by the righteous anger of justice and accountability. Winston found himself suddenly and acutely aware that he had run out of allies and that he was alone, both the arbiter of justice and the witness to justice gone awry.

“Vicki, listen to me,” he finally said. “Let me be clear. This isn’t a game of Black versus white. This isn’t white boys and Black boys getting in fights at the high school over the decisions adults have made.” He leaned forward, put his fingertips on the counter as if balancing the weight of his body on their points. “We’ve already had us one murder; I don’t want to have another one. We’re sitting on a powder keg here, and I don’t need anybody in this office playing with matches, Vicki, okay?”

She hesitated. Winston looked into her eyes, imagined her mind tossing around words and phrases she’d grown up hearing, long-held beliefs that she insisted on holding against Black men like Ed Bellamy and his dead son. Asking her to work against suspicions and beliefs so deeply held as to seem intrinsic to life was like asking Vicki to attempt the impossible task of separating her skin from her own skeleton.

“Yes, sir, Sheriff,” she said.

“I need you,” Winston said, “not to be on my side, but to be on the side of the law. I have to know that I can trust you, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. She scooted her chair even closer to her desk and cast her eyes back down at her work. A storm had passed between them, destroying every structure in sight and ripping trees from the earth, but neither of them would ever acknowledge the carnage, choosing instead to live exposed to the elements in silence.

Winston watched her work for a moment, and then he asked, “Who answered Bellamy’s call last night?”

Vicki stopped what she was doing and sat still for a moment, and then she turned and referenced a clipboard that sat on the edge of her desk.

“Deputy Englehart,” she said, her voice escaping like a muttered admission that was outing a conspirator in the face of an authority who already knew the full scale of the operation.

“Can you give me his phone number?”

She looked through a few papers, grabbed a pen and scribbled the number on a yellow legal pad, and tore the sheet free. She passed it to Winston through the open window. He took it without saying a word, and then he turned and walked back to his office.

Winston found Bellamy with his back turned, his gaze fixed on the wall of framed photographs. Winston picked up the telephone receiver on his desk and dropped the paper with Englehart’s number on it beside the cradle. “Excuse me,” he said. “I have to make a call.”

Bellamy did not turn around at the sound of Winston’s voice. “Take your time,” he said.

Winston dialed Englehart’s number, and then he sat on the edge of the desk while the phone rang. It was just after noon, and he imagined Englehart still sleeping after being on call the night before, his closed eyes and his oily face lying in bed in a darkened too-hot room where a ceiling fan creaked above him, the closed blinds hot with the heat of the afternoon sun beating down on the windows. Englehart would stir when he heard the phone, perhaps snore himself awake at its ringing.

When Englehart’s voice came on the line, Winston could not tell whether or not he’d been sleeping. It was the same syrupy, plaintive voice Englehart always used, and Winston imagined that voice speaking to Ed Bellamy the night before from the inside of a darkened patrol car while Bellamy stood on his porch with a rifle in the middle of the night. Winston looked over at Bellamy now where he still stood with his back turned. He knew Bellamy was listening, even if he wasn’t watching.

“Englehart?” Winston said.

“Yeah?”

“This is Sheriff Barnes.”

“Morning, Sheriff,” he said.

Winston almost corrected him and said, “Afternoon,” but he thought better of it. He resettled himself on the edge of his desk. His back was to Bellamy now, and he wondered if Bellamy had turned to watch him.

“I heard about what happened last night out in the Grove. You mind sharing with me what you saw?”