When Ghosts Come Home(64)

In what felt like one motion, Colleen turned the key in the already unlocked door, pushed it open, and nearly fell into the small foyer at the bottom of the stairs. She caught herself by holding on to the doorknob, and she gathered her breath before turning to look back outside. When she did, she saw that a man stood smoking at the other end of the porch, his presence so clear as to seem impossible to have overlooked. She was shocked to recognize him as the man she had seen on the pay phone just a few minutes before.

“I didn’t want to scare you,” the man said.

“I’m not scared,” Colleen said. She slid the key out of the lock and slipped it into her back pocket. “You didn’t scare me.”

“Good,” the man said. He took another drag on his cigarette, and then he tapped the ash over the railing and onto the pine straw bed below. “I’m Tom Groom,” he said. “The pilot.”

“Okay,” Colleen said, mostly because her heart was still racing and she did not know what else to say.

“Your dad picked me up today,” he said. He stubbed out his cigarette on the railing and took a step toward her. The halo of light coming from the fixture above the front door fell on him from only the chest down, but Colleen could still see his face. He was older than she had assumed after hearing his voice, perhaps in his early forties. He wore a dark polo shirt and what appeared to be slacks. The light shone on an old pair of well-cared-for leather boots.

“I think I saw you earlier,” Groom said. He put his left hand on the railing and slipped his right hand, which held the cigarette lighter, into his pocket. Over the sounds of the night, Colleen could just barely make out the noise of him grinding the striker with his thumb from inside his pocket.

“Yeah,” Colleen said. “I think so. At the motel. I saw my mother’s car.”

“Yeah,” he said. “She asked me to get some things from the store, and I thought I’d make a call while I was out. I didn’t want your parents getting charged the long-distance.”

“They wouldn’t mind,” she said.

“Well, it’s not even worth mentioning to them,” he said. “Not worth worrying about.”

Colleen nodded.

“Your mother said you’re visiting from Texas?”

She nodded again.

He stopped speaking and turned to look out at the quiet, empty street. He looked back at Colleen.

“Was that your boyfriend?”

“What?”

He asked her again, but before he could finish the question a second time, she stopped him.

“No,” she said, “no, that was a friend.” Suddenly, she felt more exposed than when she’d first discovered that his eyes had been on her without her knowing it, and she stepped inside the doorway and began to close the front door.

“Sorry if I asked too many questions,” Groom said. “And sorry again if I scared you.”

“It’s okay,” she said, her hand still pushing the door closed even as she spoke.

“Nice to meet you,” he said. She closed the door and left him on the porch.

She hadn’t realized it before now, but she was nearly out of breath and her heart was racing. She was afraid that Groom would open the door and find her still standing there, so she slipped out of her shoes and, without turning on any lights, walked into the kitchen.

Standing at the sink, she stared through the window into the dark backyard for a moment, and then she ran water from the tap and took a glass from the cabinet and filled it. She sipped the water, tasting the Oak Island tinge, what they’d always described as beach water instead of tap water, and she swished it around her mouth and spit it into the sink, hoping it would take the aftertaste of beer with it.

She took another drink of water and swallowed it, and then she lowered her eyes from the window to the counter where her mother had left her rings by the sink in a small, handmade ceramic bowl the color of blue sky. She’d done this Colleen’s whole life: slipped off her rings and left them in the bowl each evening after dinner before washing the dishes, cleaning the kitchen, and heading upstairs to read before going to bed. Colleen had never thought about her mother’s ritual or the vulnerability of jewelry left so close to the sink and its drain. But now, with a stranger smoking cigarettes on their front porch in the middle of the night—a stranger who’d be sleeping down the hall from her with access to the entire house while no one was awake or watching—her mother’s rings suddenly seemed under threat, as if leaving them out for the night guaranteed their disappearance by morning.

Colleen set her glass down on the counter and used her finger to sort through the rings in the bowl until she found her mother’s engagement ring, at least what had served as her mother’s engagement ring for nearly twenty years. Her mother’s first ring, the one her father had proposed with when he got down on one knee alongside the banks of Lake Gaston back in 1954, had been replaced after the tiny solitaire diamond, what her father had since referred to as diamond dust, had fallen from its setting one day while her mother was cutting the grass in the front yard a few years after they’d moved to Oak Island.

After the diamond had gone missing, Colleen’s father came home from work one afternoon and found Colleen playing in her room while her mother was busy vacuuming downstairs. Colleen’s father stepped into her room and shut the door behind him, the sound of the vacuum now a muffled purr aside from the clacking sound the plastic wheels made as her mother pulled it across the floor in the foyer.