When Ghosts Come Home(65)

Her father had never closed her bedroom door upon entering before, and she feared that she was in trouble; her child’s mind immediately flipped through a catalog of infractions that she could have committed in the recent past. But her fears were allayed when she saw her father’s face. He wore his tan sheriff’s deputy uniform, and he took something from his pocket and held it in his closed hand. He knelt in front of Colleen where she sat on her bed.

“You want to see something pretty?” he’d asked.

Colleen, suspecting that he’d gotten a present for her, nodded her head, afraid to speak for fear of ending a moment that felt like a dream. Her father opened his hand and revealed what rested in his palm: a simple platinum ring holding a solitaire diamond that Colleen would later learn was just over a carat, something she knew both thrilled and embarrassed her mother. Her parents were not fancy people. The nicest thing her father owned was the silver-faced Bulova watch her mother had given him just before Colleen was born. He still wore that watch, its nicks and scratches and the dozens of bands he’d gone through proving its age and wear.

Now, looking at her mother’s ring, Colleen could remember her shock at its beauty and simplicity. When she’d held out her hand, her father had dropped the ring inside, and she’d immediately marveled at the weightlessness of such a gorgeous, delicate thing.

She still felt that way as she held the ring now in the soft light coming from the stars outside the kitchen window. She remembered what her father had said to her as she slipped the ring onto her tiny finger.

“Take it downstairs to your mother,” he’d said. “Say, ‘Look what I found out in the yard.’” And that became the joke. The original diamond chip had fallen into the grass years earlier and, over time, had grown into the diamond ring her mother had worn ever since her father brought it home.

But when Colleen had gone downstairs, the ring firmly clenched in her closed hand, her mother had not heard her calling for her over the sound of the vacuum. And by the time her mother turned around and used her foot to click off the vacuum’s motor, she had seen Colleen standing in front of her holding the ring like a reward for the work her mother had just completed. Of the lines her father had fed her, Colleen had only been able to say the words “Look what I found” before her mother had dropped the vacuum to the floor and plucked the ring from Colleen’s hand.

Now Colleen slipped the ring onto her finger and crept upstairs, still sensing Groom outside on the porch, and slipped into the bathroom, where she found what must have been his zipped-tight leather shaving kit sitting on the counter. She turned the light on and brushed her teeth, marveling at her drunkenness and the glimmer of the diamond solitaire, while she moved the toothbrush around inside her mouth and stared at her hand in the mirror.

She kept the ring on after she changed out of her clothes and climbed into her unmade bed, closing her eyes as the room began its now-familiar cycle of rotations. She rolled to her side, closed her eyes so tightly that she saw stars and pops of light, and spun her mother’s ring on her finger, repeating, over and over, “Look what I found. Look what I found,” still whispering it while she listened to Groom trudge up the stairs, go into the bathroom, and run the water and flush the toilet before closing the door to the office at the end of the hall, the final sound she heard before the night fell into silence.





Thursday, November 1, 1984





Chapter 11




The sound of the phone ringing on the dresser on the other side of the bedroom ripped Winston from sleep just after 2:00 a.m. He leapt from bed and bounded across the room in two strides, snatching the phone from the cradle as if it were a bomb he hoped to defuse before one more ring detonated it. He was out of breath by the time he whispered into the receiver.

“Yeah,” he said.

It was Rudy on dispatch, the same raspy, relaxed voice he’d heard on the kitchen phone two nights ago.

“There’s a structure fire right off Beach Road,” Rudy said. “Call just came. County fire’s been dispatched, but I figured you’d want to know too.”

Winston really didn’t want to know about structure fires, at least not at this time of the night, but he was on call again because he was taking Englehart’s place after firing him that afternoon.

“Where is it off Beach Road?” Winston asked.

Rudy described it; it was the new development where Bradley Frye was building houses. Winston didn’t know if any of the homes were finished or occupied yet.

“The caller said this one’s uninhabited,” Rudy said.

“Who called it in?” Winston knew the development sat along the water at the mouth of the waterway, but it backed up to a forest that served as a border between it and the Grove. Winston imagined Bellamy standing on his back deck in his boxer shorts and white tank-top undershirt, squinting into the distance at a dark plume in the moonlight, convinced he smelled smoke.

“I’m not sure exactly who called it in,” Rudy said. He read off the name and address, but Winston didn’t recognize either one.

“Probably somebody living in the development,” he said. “I guess I’ll ride out there. It’s Halloween night, after all. It’s probably just some kids raising hell.” He hung up and, as quietly as he could, dressed in his uniform in the darkness to which his eyes had finally adjusted.