When Ghosts Come Home(89)

“Agent Rollins,” the man said. “Is this—?”

“Colleen Banks,” she said. “Sheriff Barnes’s daughter. I’m looking for him. He was supposed to meet me—”

“And you said your name is—”

“Colleen Barnes,” she said. “Jesus, Colleen Barnes. My dad is Winston Barnes.”

“Ma’am,” Rollins said, “I understand that you’re frustrated. I know your father. I’ve worked with him. We’re trying to figure out what happened.”

“What do you mean ‘what happened’?” she asked. “What happened? What are you saying?”

“Miss Barnes,” he said, “that aircraft hasn’t landed. At this moment, we can’t confirm—”

“No. That’s not right,” Colleen said. She felt her knees grow soft and begin to buckle. She straightened her body. She held the phone with her left hand and reached back to the counter with her right to steady herself. “No, no, no,” she said. “I saw it take off.”

“We know it took off, Miss Barnes. We’ve been in contact with the airport down in Oak Island. The plane should’ve landed forty-five minutes ago. We’re working to locate it right now.”

“Honey,” the woman behind her said. Colleen realized she was leaning against the counter, and she turned and saw that the woman at the desk was standing now, reaching her arms out to Colleen as if to steady her. “Are you okay?” the woman whispered.

Colleen looked at the phone in her hand. The agent’s voice was still coming from it. She wanted to hang up and call someone who could give her answers, but who? Scott? Her mother? Her father’s office? She knew no one would be able to tell her anything because there was nothing to tell. She hung up the phone.



She was crying by the time she made it back to the windows at the mouth of the terminal. She lifted her hands to her face and held her fingers together as if she were praying, but she wasn’t praying. She was scanning the runway for anyone or anything that looked like her father or Groom or the airplane. She tried to control her breathing, and she wiped tears from her eyes so that if there was something to see, she would see it.

Colleen did not know it then, could not have known it, but by May she would be pregnant with her second child, and she and Scott would have moved back to North Carolina, buying a home in Wilmington with plenty of room for the new baby and for her mother should she ever decide to join them. Scott would take a job as a prosecutor at the federal courthouse downtown, and she would spend the summer before the baby was born in September studying for the North Carolina bar exam.

She would be sitting at her desk, her study guide open, pages and pages of multiple-choice questions spread out in front of her, when she received the phone call from Agent Avery Rollins, informing her that her father’s body had been discovered by hunters in the woods a few miles north of Burlington, Vermont, near the border. He had been stripped of everything—his badge, his belt, his weapon, the boxes of evidence he’d planned to hand-deliver—but they had identified him by the patches on the sleeves of his uniform and the watch that Colleen’s mother had bought for him just before Colleen was born. The bullet that killed him would later match the bullet that had killed Rodney Bellamy, but the weapon would never be found. A few days later, the FBI’s Miami field office would finally release a statement saying that Agent Tom Groom had taken a vacation on the same day the DC-3 landed on the coast of North Carolina; they’d had no idea that he was even in the state, and they certainly had not sent him to fix and fly an airplane. The aircraft had disappeared, and so had he.

But Colleen was months away from learning those things. For now, she stood at the windows inside the airport, for how long she did not know, unaware that she was waiting for a plane that would never land. The certainty of her father’s death and the possibility of new life were still months away. She saw a passenger jet lift from the runway and soar out over the trees. She watched the airplane flash in the sunlight as it ascended, and she imagined all the passengers aboard it looking out their windows at the receding earth below, while the ghosts of the people they’d left behind floated alongside them, staring into the windows, tapping on the glass, begging not to be forgotten.





Acknowledgments




Writing a book is an incredibly long and solitary process, but I am fortunate to have had so many people encourage me and assist me along the way. I especially want to thank my editor, David Highfill, for helping me find the story, as well as Nat Sobel and Judith Weber for the love and attention they give everything, from my books to my family. I also want to thank Sharyn Rosenblum for bringing her energy and heart to the finish line, and Tessa James for bringing order to the chaos.

Thank you to my incredible students and my colleagues in the English Department at the University of North Carolina Asheville, where writing and literature are not only taught, but valued and sustained. I also want to thank Chancellor Nancy Cable, Vice Chancellor Garikai Campbell, Vice Chancellor Kirk Swenson, and David and Dianne Worley.

My endless gratitude to the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines, North Carolina, and the Doubletree Hotel at Biltmore Village in Asheville, North Carolina, where so much of this novel was written and revised.

I am fortunate to have an incredible community of family, friends, creatives, musicians, and writers who pushed this book forward in so many ways, and I am so lucky that there are simply too many of them to mention by name. I hope a heartfelt thank-you will suffice.