When Ghosts Come Home(82)

A shot rang out, and Winston flinched as a warm spray of blood hit his face. He blinked and opened his eyes to see Frye staggering toward him, the front of his shirt dark and heavy with blood. Frye’s eyes stared wildly at Winston, and his lips moved as if he were trying to say something important but couldn’t find the words. The pistol slipped from Frye’s grip, and he looked down at his chest, gently placing both hands on his shirt. His fingers touched the bloody fabric as if searching for something, and Winston knew that he was watching a man die before his eyes, the force of life slowly leaving him. Frye collapsed to his knees at Winston’s feet, and Winston stepped back just as he fell facedown on the grass.

It had all happened with such speed that Winston had not had time to consider the danger he might be in, but now he raised his eyes and scanned all he could see of the street. Someone had taken the shot that killed Frye from a pretty good distance, and they had either disappeared into the night or remained hidden and still. At the top of the road, Glenn had hunkered down inside his cruiser’s half-closed back door. He peered around it and looked at Winston. “Where’d that shot come from?” he yelled.

Winston signaled for Glenn to stay low, and then he bent at the waist and crept across the yard toward the cruiser. Winston knelt beside Glenn, his back against the rear fender. “It came from the other side of the road,” Winston said.

“Is Frye—”

“Yeah,” Winston said. “I think so.” He looked down into the yard, and he could see the bottoms of Frye’s boots where he’d fallen.

“Shit,” Glenn said.

Both of them stayed like that, their breath coming short and fast, the night otherwise resettling itself. A few dogs barked. Winston could hear voices in a few of the nearby houses. He knew people were looking out their windows, trying to figure out what they’d heard, what they could see without putting themselves in danger.

“Whoever it is isn’t shooting at us,” Glenn said, but Winston didn’t want to take any chances.

“We don’t know that for sure.”

He looked over the top of the trunk toward the other side of the road, and then he rose and raised his pistol, making a long, slow sweep from his left to his right, his eyes scanning darkened windows, roofs, the tree line, front porches, and the shadows cast by cars, bushes, and houses. There was nothing to see, but Winston kept looking. The shot could have come from anywhere, but not just anyone could have made a shot like that in the dead of night.

Glenn crept to the front fender and assumed the same position as Winston. They stayed that way as the thrum of crickets and frogs returned to a low roar, as dogs in backyards settled in for the night, as lights in living rooms and on front porches began to shut off one by one. Soon the only lights left burning were behind them in Janelle’s windows and on her front porch, and the only sound was the idling of Bradley Frye’s engine where his truck still sat parked in the road.



An hour later, Winston sat at the table in the small conference room at the sheriff’s office. Jay, freshly out of handcuffs, sat on his right, Ed Bellamy beside him. The boy was a minor, and because Janelle didn’t want to bring the baby and because she couldn’t leave him at home, she’d asked Bellamy to accompany him, and Winston had agreed. But he’d kept Jay handcuffed and made him ride in the back of Glenn’s cruiser in order to scare him as much as possible.

And Jay seemed scared. He sat, his uncuffed hands in his lap, either staring at the flecks of Frye’s dried blood on Winston’s shirt or turning his head to look at Bellamy for guidance after each question Winston asked.

Jay had told them everything, from hanging out with some white kid in the neighborhood to taking Rodney’s rifle out of his closet. He told them about meeting Frye in the woods, about him showing up outside Janelle’s house with a posse of men on the night after Rodney’s body had been discovered. The kid was scared and angry and hurt, and Winston didn’t blame him for what he’d done. He’d wanted to do much worse to Bradley Frye, but now someone had gone and done it for him. It made it hard for him to want to bring charges against Jay, especially with all he and Janelle and Bellamy had been through.

Once Winston and Glenn felt comfortable leaving their spots by the road, they’d gone into Janelle’s house, weapons still drawn, to retrieve Jay. Janelle had been in the baby’s room, holding the sleeping boy with the light off and the door open. She hadn’t spoken or even acknowledged Winston’s presence in the doorway when he tried to explain to her what had happened and what they were now doing inside her house.

They’d found Jay, his hands still cuffed behind his back, hiding in his closet, tears streaking his cheeks, his chest heaving in choked-back sobs.

“They tried to kill me,” he kept saying.

“That shot wasn’t meant for you, son,” Winston had said in return. He waited inside the house until the ambulance arrived and the paramedics covered Frye’s body. After that, he led Jay out of the house to the backseat of Glenn’s cruiser.

Winston left Glenn behind to secure the crime scene and deal with the coroner’s office, and he and Jay rode in silence to the office, where they waited for Bellamy to arrive. In the meantime, Winston had already heard from the fire department. The fire in Plantation Cove had essentially burned itself out before they’d arrived. Englehart had been right behind the fire department, none of whom had known he’d been fired from the sheriff’s office. They’d left him there, thinking he’d be securing the scene, and that had pissed Winston off. He’d had about all he could stand of Billy Englehart.