“You’re wrong about that,” the man said. He raised his free hand and pointed behind him. “I own every stretch of this land from the waterline”—he swept his arm around and pointed toward the Grove behind the boys—“to the little shantytown right there, and I’ll come to own it soon enough.” He lowered his arm and looked at Jay, and then he tossed the rifle on the ground at Jay’s feet. “Get home, boy.” He looked at Cody. “I know your daddy,” he said, “and I don’t think he’d look kindly on you running around with colored boys. Don’t let me catch y’all back here again.” He stared at them for another moment, and then he turned and disappeared into the trees.
Jay and Cody stood there until they could no longer hear the man’s feet moving through the woods, and then Jay bent to gather the rifle in one hand and the case in the other. They ran in separate directions: Jay headed back between the fences that separated Rodney and Janelle’s property from the neighbors’， while Cody tore along the edge of the woods toward his family’s land. Neither of the boys had said a word.
Jay squatted next to the house before rounding the corner to the driveway, and he quickly checked the rifle for scratches or smudges or fingerprints. Seeing none, he laid it carefully back in its case and closed it. He picked it up by the handle and carried it around to the front of the house and through the front door. Once he was inside, he’d inspected the case with the same quick meticulousness with which he’d inspected the weapon, and seeing nothing that caught his eye, he set the case back on the top shelf on Rodney’s side of the closet.
The man’s cologne seemed to linger in the small closet, but Jay thought it possible that the scent had either become trapped in his nasal cavity or perhaps had burrowed into his brain. He spent the rest of the day in this jittery, adrenaline-driven state of apprehension and fear, waiting for a knock on the door or a telephone call that would relay to Janelle or Rodney exactly what had transpired in the woods right behind their house. But neither the knock nor the call came that afternoon or evening, and by the time he was brushing his teeth and getting ready for bed, Jay felt certain that the only person he would ever talk to about what had happened in the woods was Cody himself, and he doubted that Cody would say a word to anyone, mostly because, like Jay, he didn’t seem to have anyone to say it to.
It was hours later, well after Jay had drifted off to sleep, that he was awakened by the baby’s crying and kept awake by the whispers of his sister and brother-in-law. He looked at the clock on his bedside table. It was a few minutes before 3:00 a.m. Jay had never been awake in Janelle’s house that late at night, and he wondered if the whispering between Janelle and Rodney was something that happened every night, or if the baby always woke and cried each night at this time.
And then he feared that something else had kept Janelle and Rodney from sleeping. Perhaps the man from the woods had called Rodney at work and told him what had happened. Jay replayed every conversation he’d had with his sister and Rodney that evening during dinner and later when they’d carved two pumpkins on the front steps, searching each discussion they’d had for any hint that either of them knew something. Or perhaps Rodney had sensed something in the closet, perhaps he had caught a whiff of the man’s cologne and asked Janelle about it. Perhaps they had sought out the source of the smell and opened the rifle’s case and discovered something different about it, although Jay couldn’t imagine what that would be. He’d put it back exactly as he’d always put it back each time he’d taken it down from the shelf. But then fear gripped him by the neck when he realized he could not remember which way the case had been facing when he’d taken the rifle down, and he could not remember which way he’d left it facing when he’d put it back.
He lay in bed listening to their quiet voices, and then he heard Rodney’s heavy footsteps in the hallway, and then the sound of the front door opening and closing quietly. In the driveway, Janelle’s car started, and the yellow glow of the Datsun’s headlights illuminated the blinds that covered the window above Jay’s bed.
He wondered where Rodney was going this late at night, and he wondered if Janelle was still awake, still staring at the rifle inside the open case that Rodney had left on their bed, her mind doing its best to decide whether or not Jay was to blame. Jay decided that he would wait to see what they asked him in the morning, and he hoped that he could catch the school bus without seeing either one of them so that he could find Cody and they could get their stories straight.
And school was where he’d been the next morning when Mr. Bellamy, Rodney’s father, opened the door to his math class and gestured to the teacher to join him in the hall. It wasn’t uncommon for a teacher or the principal or another administrator to interrupt a class to speak with a teacher, but even though he knew this, Jay could not stop the thrumming of his heart nor deny the sudden clamminess of his skin. Why did it have to be Rodney’s father at the door?
Jay’s teacher stepped halfway through the doorway and looked at him, and then she said his name and waved him out into the hall. “Get your things,” she said.
Jay stood, his body and legs feeling rubbery and cold, and slid his book and papers into his backpack. He could feel the other students’ eyes on him, and although none of them were speaking, he knew they were all wondering what the quiet Black kid from Atlanta had done.
His teacher was waiting for him at the door, and she put her hand on his shoulder as he passed through the doorway and into the hall, where Mr. Bellamy stood, his hands in his pockets. Jay had never spoken to Mr. Bellamy at school and had spent very little time with him outside of it, so he did not know how to read the man’s face.
“Jay,” Mr. Bellamy said. “Something terrible has happened.”
Chapter 5
The airport in Wilmington, North Carolina, especially in 1984, was small, and Colleen couldn’t help but think of it as a miniature model of a real airport. After getting off the phone with her mother, she found a bench near the curb outside baggage claim and took a seat, her suitcase on the ground at her feet and her purse resting on her lap. She wore a jean jacket over the T-shirt she had slept in the night before and a pair of white jeans with black Keds. She slid her headphones over her ears and pressed play on her Walkman; Pat Benatar’s “Shadows of the Night” came on in mid-song. She remembered a pair of black sunglasses in her purse. When she looked for them, she found the dog-eared copy of T. Berry Brazelton’s Infants and Mothers that she’d been carrying around in her purse for nearly a year like some kind of talisman that could change her fate. She thought about pulling out the book and flipping through its pages, but instead she found her sunglasses and slid them on, and then she sat there and cried.
A handful of taxis was lined up by the curb. A middle-aged Black man stood with his elbows propped above the driver’s-side door of the taxi closest to Colleen. He looked at her across the roof of the car and nodded hello. He wore black sunglasses too, and he also wore one of those yellow-tinted visors that you picture card dealers wearing in dark, smoky rooms where men hide out from their wives and the police.