When Ghosts Come Home(72)

He parked and he and Groom got out. Her father spent a few minutes talking with the deputy. Groom walked past them toward the airplane where its tail sat jacked up off the ground. A mechanic appeared from one of the hangars, pushing a huge chest of what Colleen assumed were tools. Colleen watched Groom until her father got back in the car.

“He’s an interesting guy,” she said.

“Who, Groom?” her father asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s one way of describing him.”

“You don’t like him?” she asked.

Her father drove through the parking lot and turned left onto Long Beach Road. “I like him fine,” he said. “About as much as I’ve ever liked an FBI agent.”

“He seems weird,” she said.

“This whole thing is weird.”

“I saw him last night on the pay phone outside the Carolina Motel,” Colleen said.

“Saw who?”

“Him,” she said. “The pilot. Groom.”

“Is that why you made that weird comment about the phone?” her father asked.

His seeing through what she’d thought was her cunning retort to Groom embarrassed her. “No,” she said. “Yes, kind of. It just seemed weird that he was on a pay phone in the middle of the night. And he was driving Mom’s car.”

“That’s because she let him drive it, Colleen. He went to the store. For aspirin and coffee.” Winston clicked on his blinker and turned right and drove toward Southport.

“And to use the phone, which he could’ve done at our house,” she said.

“Maybe he wanted privacy.”

“There’s a phone in his room,” Colleen said. “He told me he didn’t want to use your long-distance.”

“Well, that was kind of him,” her father said, and then he looked over at her. “When did he tell you that?”

Colleen felt her face reddening a bit. She should not be ashamed to have come in late, to have been drinking, to have been startled by Groom on the porch in the middle of the night, but something about neither her nor Groom acknowledging that in front of her parents made it feel like a shameful secret was now being unearthed.

“Danny thinks it’s all drug related,” she said. Her father looked over at her, his eyes lingering for a moment on her face before he turned back to the road.

“Oh, yeah? Is that what Danny thinks?”

“Yeah,” she said. “And he thinks that’s why Bradley Frye wants to become sheriff, so he can look the other way, like, maybe he’d get kickbacks or something.”

“Huh,” Winston said, acting as if he were amused. He drove in silence for a moment. “Well, I’ll tell you what: between your friends and your mother and her friends, I think we might just have this case cracked. The sheriff down in Horry County might have a case connected to the airplane and Rodney’s murder, but I’ll tell him not to worry about it.”

The intensity of her father’s sarcasm pushed around Colleen’s body like a physical thing that she could feel gathering around her face and shoulders. He was comparing her to her mother and her mother’s friends, and although he had never directly said so, and Colleen had never directly asked, she had a good idea what her father thought about her mother and her mother’s friends, largely because it was the same thing Colleen thought: her mother’s curiosity was trivial and gossipy, her interests fleeting and presumptive, as if the rules of the world were fixed in such a way that she could easily unravel their complexities if she and her friends just spent enough time talking about it on the phone.

Colleen wanted to find a way to remind her father that she’d graduated from law school, that in law school she had studied and learned the rules of evidence and criminal procedure, had, in fact, studied them more closely and with more intensity than her father ever had despite his decades of experience in law enforcement. If she had opinions on this case—and, if she were being honest, she didn’t—they would have been based on facts and education and expertise, not on gut instinct or intuition or gossip. She didn’t want to be like her mother, and she didn’t think she was, but perhaps she wasn’t much like her father either, a man she’d always held out as the epitome of fact-based rationality. She was more educated than either of them, had traveled more broadly than either of them, and, unlike them, was no longer living in the state of her birth. But the fact that she was not actually practicing law, that she had either postponed it or given it up altogether in favor of a child she did not have and a husband she was not with—a fact pattern that always hovered on the edge of her emotional periphery—shot through her heart with a cold bolt of self-realization. Maybe she wasn’t like her parents—an older couple set in their ways and beliefs, operating on emotion and intuition. She was worldly, educated, and enlightened, and all these advantages had landed her here, back home, feeling very much like the same adolescent she was before law school, before traveling, before marrying Scott and moving to Texas and losing her baby.

No, she wasn’t like her parents, but maybe she was worse.

Colleen couldn’t remember if she had ever been in the Grove before. Had she ever had a reason? She’d had Black friends when she was young, playing softball and other sports, seeing them at a few birthday parties when they were little or at after-school events like plays or dances or club meetings. But she couldn’t remember ever being inside one of the Black kids’ homes. No playdates or sleepovers or things like that. And then she realized that none of the Black kids she’d grown up with had ever been inside her home either. And here she was, a grown woman of twenty-six who’d lost a child, going to visit a widow inside the home of a Black classmate who’d been shot and killed. The mysteries of life always seemed vague and inexplicable to Colleen, and as her father drove past the small brick and clapboard homes, their yards alive with flowers and ornaments and outdoor furniture or choked with weeds, she couldn’t help but question the predestined vagaries of fate that had landed her here while also ending Rodney’s life.