When Ghosts Come Home Read online

  The day before Halloween and not as cold as it would be, but cold enough to send the vacationers scrambling back to work and to school and to their lives somewhere outside Oak Island. Even the soft-spoken, unassuming Canadians—the ones who hadn’t headed as far south as Myrtle Beach, whose wives had combed the autumn beaches in one-piece bathing suits while looking for sand dollars, and whose husbands had kept the municipal golf course open into the middle of the month—had all gone home.

  The island, thirteen miles long and four miles wide at its widest and sparsely dotted with old single-family homes, fishing shacks, vacation houses, and trailers, was heavily wooded and quiet. It ran east to west off the southeastern elbow of North Carolina. To people who lived there, it felt like a place that had either gone undiscovered or had been forgotten by the rest of the state, that feeling growing so strong as to be nearly palpable as the island changed seasons and a blanket of unperturbed silence settled over it. As fall turned toward winter, the island always seemed to grow smaller, more remote, more insular.

  There was no clock in Marie’s car, and Winston had forgotten his watch where he usually left it beside his wallet and keys on the counter, but it was nearing 4:00 a.m. by the time he headed east down Oak Island Drive. Most of the businesses—a fudge shop, a T-shirt store, a pancake house, all the motels—had been shuttered for the off-season. The few places that had remained open for the winter had been closed for hours. After he and Marie had left Gastonia in 1963 and moved to Oak Island, they had joked that the island rolled up its sidewalks at 6:00 p.m., which was ironic only because there were no sidewalks. Winston thought then and he still thought now that the island would make an ideal place for someone to hide, and perhaps that’s what he’d been doing all these years.

  As he drove across the bridge above the waterway, Winston watched the light from the Caswell Beach lighthouse at the far eastern end of the island strafe the waterway in perfect increments. It flashed in his rearview mirror, and for a moment he could both see and feel its light in his eyes. When Marie’s car climbed to the top of the bridge, the beacon light from the tiny airport appeared through the distant trees on his left. He had been at this exact spot on the bridge at night what must have been a million times over the years, and each time he felt like he was leaving the bright gleam of the lighthouse for the tiny spot of the beacon light, a light that was overwhelmed by the darkness of the mainland that waited for him in the woods across the water.

  When Colleen was a little girl, both when they reached the apex of this bridge and the even taller and more magnificent drawbridge that spanned the Cape Fear River, her voice would come from the backseat, asking, “What would happen if we fell from here?” and Winston would consider what would cause someone to topple from such a height to the water below. Suicide? A vehicle fire? A bridge collapse? He pictured himself and Colleen holding hands and climbing over the guardrail before leaping into the still waters. No matter how many times she asked, he always answered her question with the same response: “I would save you.”

  But as she grew older her questions became more particular: “What would happen if we drove off the bridge?” or “What would happen if our car flipped over the side?” The more questions she asked, the more her fear became corporeal, and she began to construct detailed stories of the tragedies that would await them. Winston always knew the answers to the questions she had, because he had trained—made all his deputies train, as a matter of fact—for water rescues. The county was dotted with water: lakes, canals, creeks, and waterways disguised as rivers. They had encountered submerged vehicles before, and he’d pictured himself seat-belted into the driver’s seat of a car upside down underwater, Colleen in the backseat. There would be about thirty seconds before the interior filled with water. He would remove his seat belt, reach back, and do the same to Colleen’s. He would pull her into the front seat, and, as water poured into the car, he would use the spring-triggered pin on his key chain (he made Marie and all his deputies carry them) to break the window and climb out. He would remind himself to follow the bubbles to the surface, Colleen clutched in his arms, his eyes searching for the light above him while his lungs waited for air.

  But he didn’t explain all of this to Colleen when they passed over bridges during her childhood. Instead, he would look at her in the rearview mirror when she was young enough to sit in the backseat, or he would turn his head to look at her when she was old enough to sit beside him, the water through her window stretching out below them beneath the bridge, and he would always say the same thing: “Don’t look down, don’t look back. Just look where we’re going.”

  When Winston pulled Marie’s car into the otherwise empty gravel parking lot at the airport, the only thing he found waiting for him was a two-door white Datsun with North Carolina plates. It surprised him to find a car parked here this late, but he wasn’t concerned. Perhaps it had broken down on Long Beach Road and someone had helped the driver push it into the lot before giving them a ride home. Perhaps someone had parked it here before piloting a private jet, although, given the make of the car, that seemed unlikely. Perhaps it was just abandoned.

  He was not driving his cruiser so he did not have his standard-issue flashlight, but he cupped his hands around the Datsun’s driver’s-side window and peered into the car’s interior. There was nothing to see aside from a crumpled pack of crackers on the passenger’s seat, an open cassette case of Michael Jackson’s Thriller on the center console, and an empty Styrofoam cup of what looked to have been coffee resting beside it. A child’s seat was installed in the backseat, and an unzipped gym bag rested beside it, but from what Winston could see through the window it didn’t hold anything interesting. This car could have belonged to Colleen or certainly to someone her age, and the contents revealed no great clues as to who owned it or why it was parked in an empty airport parking lot in the middle of the night.

  Winston took his walkie-talkie from his belt and radioed Rudy.

  “How’s it look out there?” Rudy asked.

  “Quiet,” Winston said. “But there’s a vehicle in the lot. If you’d run the plate for me.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  Winston stepped around to the back of the car and read out the license plate.

  “Back in a second,” Rudy said.

  Winston slipped the walkie-talkie onto his belt and walked around to the front of the car. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the Datsun’s fender. He looked toward the trees on the other side of the runway, his eyes searching for movement or a beam of light or whatever it was that could have made the sound that had woken him and Marie, but there didn’t seem to be anything to see. His nose caught the cool, swampy scent of the waterway, just a mile or so to the south, and he thought of Marie on the other side of the water, lying awake in bed and waiting to hear the noise of his keys turning the lock on the front door. He thought of the sound they’d heard that had jolted them from sleep; the way it seemed to vibrate along the roof of the house, the deep hum it had sent through his body. He didn’t know what else to do while he waited to hear back from Rudy, so he set off across the grass-covered field toward the runway.

  The lot where Winston waited sat closest to the south end of the runway, where two white lights marked either side of the landing strip, and Winston knew that if what they’d heard was an airplane then this was where it had touched down. The runway was made of grass—it would not be paved for a couple more years—and it was useless to search it for tracks that this potential airplane or any other may have left behind. The expanse of runway stretched ahead of him toward a stand of pine trees that rose out of the dark night a couple thousand feet ahead. Another set of lights marked the middle of the runway on either side, and a third set illuminated its northern end, but these lights were designed to be seen from the air, not from below. The sun would be up in a matter of hours, but Winston didn’t want to wait for the sun. He knew that if something was hiding from him there at the end of the runwa
y he would have to go there to find it.

  He nearly jumped when his walkie-talkie crackled to life with the sound of Rudy’s voice.

  “Got it,” he said.

  Winston slipped the radio from his belt and held it to his mouth. “Go ahead.”

  “It’s a 1978 Datsun registered to a Rodney Edward Bellamy. Want his birth date and address?”

  “Hang on to them. Won’t do me any good out here,” Winston said, not because he didn’t need the information, but because he already knew it. Rodney Bellamy had gone to school with Colleen. He was the son of Ed Bellamy, one of the only Black teachers in Brunswick County, and one of the people who’d stood up against harassment and violence during school integration. Bellamy was a history teacher, but he was also a de facto civil rights leader, and he and Winston had worked together just as many times as they’d butted heads. A decade before, Ed had served as the face of integration in the county schools, and Winston had done everything he could to ensure that the county didn’t have the kind of violence that Wilmington had experienced, but of course there was violence. Winston couldn’t stop it all, especially when he knew that half his deputies hadn’t wanted their own kids sitting alongside Black children, and they especially didn’t want men like Ed Bellamy explaining the law to them.

  Winston agreed with the stances Bellamy had taken over the years. But he also knew the importance, especially in a place like Brunswick County, of walking that fine line of legal authority and cultural memory. Ed Bellamy understood it too, meaning he understood that what people like Winston believed in private and what they were willing to say in public were not always the same thing. Ed Bellamy was bold and outspoken because he believed he had to be to get things done. Winston was deliberate and careful for the exact same reason.

  “Owner lives over in the Grove,” Rudy said.

  “Yep,” Winston said. “Thanks, Rudy.”

  He slipped the walkie-talkie back onto his belt and then he set off toward the end of the runway, the sound of his footsteps falling silently on the ground beneath him.

  Later, when he would think back on this moment, Winston would realize that he had been able to sense the enormity of the airplane before he even arrived and saw it for the first time. It sat sideways at the very end of the runway. Its silvery body was perhaps twenty yards long, and its wingspan easily thirty. Up close, it shimmered beneath the faint moonlight like a mirror, the two huge propellers on either wing stilled like closed eyes, as if the airplane had been sleeping when Winston found it, the cargo doors on its right side thrown open like a breathing mouth that sucked in air. Winston did not know much about airplanes aside from his brief brushes with them while serving in Korea, but he knew this airplane was old—perhaps a World War II relic—and that it had been too large for this runway, and that was why it sat in the position it did, a quarter of the way into a full turn that the pilot must have made to keep it from plunging into the trees just beyond the runway’s end, the rear landing gear snapped in half and the tail resting awkwardly on the ground.

  Winston unholstered his pistol and stood with it down by his side.

  “Hello!” he called. He waited, but all he could hear was what seemed like the sharp, tinny silence of the airplane’s presence. “Anybody in there?”

  He only raised his gun when the bouncing beam of a flashlight caught his eye. Someone was coming across the grassy field from the parking lot on his right. Winston turned in that direction, and that’s when his eyes fell on the body of a Black man lying on the grass alongside the runway. In the scattered beam of the approaching light, Winston saw that the front of the man’s shirt had been blown wide open and his chest was dark and damp with blood. The man’s eyes were open, but it was clear to Winston that he was dead.

  He trained his pistol on the approaching flashlight, and he wondered who had shot the man on the ground in front of him, wondered if that same person was approaching him now. He was surprised by the night’s turn of events, but in that moment nothing in him was scared. He was simply ready.

  Behind the beam of the flashlight, Winston was able to make out the darkened face of thirty-four-year-old Captain Glenn Haste. He’d worked for the sheriff’s department for almost thirteen years, and during that time Winston had never seen Glenn’s face reveal an ounce of fear, but now his eyes were struck with panic. Winston lowered his pistol, allowed himself to exhale. He realized that his hands were shaking.

  “Jesus, Glenn,” he said. “I almost shot you.”

  “Well, Sheriff, I’m glad you didn’t.” Glenn lowered his eyes and his flashlight to the dead man on the ground between them, and Winston suddenly understood that the fear on Glenn’s face had not come from a fear of his being shot, but from the shock of stumbling upon what appeared to be a shooting in the line of duty. Glenn kept his beam on the man’s chest, the blood so fresh as to glisten in the light. He raised his eyes to Winston.

  “Sheriff?” he said.

  Winston, understanding the look on Glenn’s face and the implied question in his voice, took an unconscious step away from the body. He looked down at the dead man, and a long-buried shame and terror washed over him.

  “No,” Winston said, nodding his head toward the body. “No, this wasn’t me. I found him here. He was down when I got to him.”

  He tried to slip his pistol back into its holster, but he discovered that his hands were still shaking, and he had to reach across his body to hold the holster with his free hand so the pistol’s barrel could find it. He looked down, saw that Glenn’s flashlight gleamed in the dead man’s open, unseeing eyes.

  “No sign of a weapon,” Glenn said. “Know who he is?”

  “I think so,” Winston said. “I had Rudy run the plates on that Datsun in the parking lot.”

  Winston knelt down beside the body and checked for a pulse. He didn’t find one. He patted the man’s pockets, and then he turned him slightly at the hips and felt his back pockets until he found his wallet. He slipped it out and removed the man’s driver’s license.

  “Yep,” he said. He looked up at Glenn. “Rodney Bellamy.” He looked at the license again. “Twenty-six years old. Lives over in the Grove.”

  “Ed Bellamy’s son,” Glenn said.

  “Yep,” Winston said again. He looked inside the wallet, found a couple of twenties and a few smaller bills. Bellamy didn’t seem to have been robbed. He slipped the driver’s license back inside and stuffed it into Bellamy’s front pocket.

  He didn’t know what it would mean to find Ed Bellamy’s son shot dead on the runway in the middle of the night, but he knew it would mean something. Winston respected Ed Bellamy, and he feared him a little too. Both were reasons to dread making the phone call to tell him what had happened to his son.

  “You okay, Sheriff?” Glenn asked.

  Winston looked up at Glenn, and then he looked down at his hands. He clenched them into fists to hide their trembling. “Yeah,” Winston said. “Yeah. You just surprised me coming up on me like that.” He peered over Glenn’s shoulder as if he were looking for anyone else who might be coming across the field. He looked back at Glenn. “What even made you come out here? Rudy get ahold of you?”

  “Marie called,” Glenn said.

  “Marie called you? At home?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said you thought a plane might’ve crashed.” Glenn looked away as if what he was about to say next was going to embarrass both of them. “She said she didn’t want you out here by yourself. I told her I’d come have a look around.”

  Winston sighed and shook his head. He wanted to be angry with Marie for calling Glenn, for overstepping and making Winston look like he couldn’t handle his job on his own, but everything that had happened—the plane crash, almost shooting Glenn, finding Rodney Bellamy’s body—crowded out his anger so that he had hardly conjured an ember of rage before it snuffed itself out.

  Glenn smiled as if the embarrassment were behind them both. �
�I also wanted to come out because I’ve never seen a plane crash before.”

  Winston turned to his left and pointed at the end of the runway. “Well, it’s your lucky night, I guess.”

  Glenn raised his flashlight and aimed the beam past Winston. “There it is,” Glenn said.

  Winston’s eyes followed the beam of light where it shone on the plane’s body, the open cargo doors, the frozen propellers. “Yep, there it is,” he said. “Not much of a crash, but it’s a whole lot of plane.”

  “Looks empty to me,” Glenn said.

  “We’re still going to have to clear it,” Winston said.

  Guns raised, the two men made their way toward the plane. They stopped at the open cargo doors in the middle of the fuselage, and Glenn knocked on the exterior with his flashlight. There was an echo as if he had banged on the bottom of an enormous, upturned metal canoe. The nose of the airplane, propped up by the wheels beneath either wing, loomed above Winston on his right, but the fuselage narrowed greatly toward the end where it rested on its tail, the rear landing gear having completely collapsed.

  The aircraft seemed simultaneously powerful and frail, and Winston could not believe that something so large could take to the sky nor that something so powerful could be grounded so easily. He reached out and placed his open hand on the airplane’s body, nearly expecting to feel the rise of its breathing. He smacked it twice as if patting the belly of a horse before climbing into the saddle. “Hello,” he called out. “Brunswick County Sheriff’s Department.” He nodded at Glenn, who raised his pistol, pointed his flashlight into the darkness of the aircraft’s interior, and stepped up inside. Winston, his pistol also raised, stood by the door and listened to the creaking of the airplane’s body as Glenn’s footsteps shuffled around inside.