When Ghosts Come Home(83)

Now Winston and Bellamy sat alone at the conference table. Once the questioning had ended, Winston had allowed Jay to leave the conference room and disappear into the restroom.

Winston hadn’t said a word to Bellamy about what had happened to Frye, and Bellamy hadn’t asked him a thing about the blood spatters on his shirt. Bellamy sat, his fingertips on the edge of the table, his eyes looking down at his hands from behind his thick glasses. Winston watched him for a moment. The room was quiet.

“It’s a mess, isn’t it?” Winston finally said.

Bellamy spoke without raising his head. “Turn this boy loose, Winston.”

“Ed, I can’t just—”

“Yes you can, Winston,” Bellamy said. “You’re the sheriff. You know you don’t have to charge him if you don’t want to.”

“People know what he did, Ed.”

“Who?” Bellamy asked. He looked at Winston. “You? That dead boy laying in Janelle’s yard? That cracker you already fired? Who knows, Winston?” Bellamy put his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Jay’s parents are coming up here tomorrow for Rodney’s funeral. And they’re planning to take him back to Atlanta. What his daddy’s going to do to him is much worse than anything you can think of doing. I promise you that.”

“Is Janelle leaving too?” Winston asked.

“You bet your ass she’s leaving,” Bellamy said. The force of his words and the anger behind them caught Winston off guard.

A toilet flushed across the hall, and Winston pictured Jay now standing at the sink, washing his hands and staring at himself in the mirror, wondering how he’d come all the way from Atlanta to set houses on fire while people were being shot left and right. Winston figured it must’ve been a hell of a thing for a kid that age to think about. His own mind flashed back to those moments he’d spent at the barrel end of Frye’s gun. Had Winston finally felt what he’d made James Dixon feel all those years ago in the pharmacy back in Gastonia? There’d been no one there to protect Dixon at the last second before Winston took his life, but tonight had gone differently for Winston. He looked at Bellamy where he still sat with his elbows on the table. “You still have that Winchester?” he asked.

Bellamy was still for a moment, and then he leaned back in his chair and interlocked his fingers in his lap. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” he said.

“That sniper rifle you were telling me about.”

“I haven’t shot that thing in years,” Bellamy said.

“Well, I might need to take a look at it.”

Bellamy shook his head. “I don’t know that I could even find it.”

Winston smiled, shook his head too. “I thought Bradley Frye was going to blow my brains out tonight,” he said.

Bellamy removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “He could have,” he said. “But he didn’t.” He put his glasses back on and looked at Winston. “Now turn this boy loose.”

The bathroom door opened out in the hall and Winston heard Jay’s footsteps as he walked toward the conference room. Jay stopped in the doorway and leaned against the door frame, his hands stuffed deep inside his pockets. He seemed diminished now, even smaller than when they’d arrived, even younger than when Winston and Glenn had found him, crying in his bedroom closet after Frye had been shot. Winston wondered how he had ever mistaken this terrified boy for a grown man. Bellamy turned his head just enough to see Jay over his shoulder. He looked back at Winston. “Turn him loose,” he said.

“I’d really be sticking my neck out, Ed,” Winston said.

“I know,” Bellamy said. “I know all about sticking your neck out. I know all about that.”

Winston sat quietly for a moment, his mind trying to parse the difference between the right thing and the legal thing, and somewhere just beyond his grasp was an answer that wrapped together everything that had happened so far—Rodney’s murder, the mystery surrounding the airplane, the fires, Frye’s having been shot before his eyes—in a way that made it all, if not palatable, then at least easier to look at without causing anyone more pain. But Winston couldn’t find the words, so instead he gestured with his head toward Jay, and Bellamy stood up from the table and walked toward the door. “Come on, son,” he said.

Winston stood and walked toward the door too, and he watched as Bellamy and Jay made their way down the hall to the reception area. “No more fires, Jay, okay?”

Jay stopped walking and turned to face Winston. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“Come on, son,” Bellamy said again.



When Winston parked Glenn’s cruiser in front of Janelle’s house, he found Glenn standing out by the road. The ambulance was gone, and with it Frye’s body. The Grove had reclaimed its quiet stillness. Aside from the porch light, Janelle’s house was dark. Winston knew that by now Bellamy had returned Jay and gone back to his own home, which sat just a few streets away. Winston imagined Jay inside the house now, lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying the night’s events in his head just as Winston himself had done during the drive and would continue to do in the few hours he would lie beside Marie before he would have to rise from bed and drive Groom to the airport for the final time.

Winston got out and walked around to the passenger’s side of the cruiser, and Glenn got in behind the wheel. They drove back to Plantation Cove for Winston’s car where he’d left it parked at the scene of the fire. Winston looked at his watch; it was after 3:00 a.m.