“Sorry if I asked too many questions,” Groom said. “And sorry again if I scared you.”
“It’s okay,” she said, her hand still pushing the door closed even as she spoke.
“Nice to meet you,” he said. She closed the door and left him on the porch.
She hadn’t realized it before now, but she was nearly out of breath and her heart was racing. She was afraid that Groom would open the door and find her still standing there, so she slipped out of her shoes and, without turning on any lights, walked into the kitchen.
Standing at the sink, she stared through the window into the dark backyard for a moment, and then she ran water from the tap and took a glass from the cabinet and filled it. She sipped the water, tasting the Oak Island tinge, what they’d always described as beach water instead of tap water, and she swished it around her mouth and spit it into the sink, hoping it would take the aftertaste of beer with it.
She took another drink of water and swallowed it, and then she lowered her eyes from the window to the counter where her mother had left her rings by the sink in a small, handmade ceramic bowl the color of blue sky. She’d done this Colleen’s whole life: slipped off her rings and left them in the bowl each evening after dinner before washing the dishes, cleaning the kitchen, and heading upstairs to read before going to bed. Colleen had never thought about her mother’s ritual or the vulnerability of jewelry left so close to the sink and its drain. But now, with a stranger smoking cigarettes on their front porch in the middle of the night—a stranger who’d be sleeping down the hall from her with access to the entire house while no one was awake or watching—her mother’s rings suddenly seemed under threat, as if leaving them out for the night guaranteed their disappearance by morning.
Colleen set her glass down on the counter and used her finger to sort through the rings in the bowl until she found her mother’s engagement ring, at least what had served as her mother’s engagement ring for nearly twenty years. Her mother’s first ring, the one her father had proposed with when he got down on one knee alongside the banks of Lake Gaston back in 1954, had been replaced after the tiny solitaire diamond, what her father had since referred to as diamond dust, had fallen from its setting one day while her mother was cutting the grass in the front yard a few years after they’d moved to Oak Island.
After the diamond had gone missing, Colleen’s father came home from work one afternoon and found Colleen playing in her room while her mother was busy vacuuming downstairs. Colleen’s father stepped into her room and shut the door behind him, the sound of the vacuum now a muffled purr aside from the clacking sound the plastic wheels made as her mother pulled it across the floor in the foyer.
Her father had never closed her bedroom door upon entering before, and she feared that she was in trouble; her child’s mind immediately flipped through a catalog of infractions that she could have committed in the recent past. But her fears were allayed when she saw her father’s face. He wore his tan sheriff’s deputy uniform, and he took something from his pocket and held it in his closed hand. He knelt in front of Colleen where she sat on her bed.
“You want to see something pretty?” he’d asked.
Colleen, suspecting that he’d gotten a present for her, nodded her head, afraid to speak for fear of ending a moment that felt like a dream. Her father opened his hand and revealed what rested in his palm: a simple platinum ring holding a solitaire diamond that Colleen would later learn was just over a carat, something she knew both thrilled and embarrassed her mother. Her parents were not fancy people. The nicest thing her father owned was the silver-faced Bulova watch her mother had given him just before Colleen was born. He still wore that watch, its nicks and scratches and the dozens of bands he’d gone through proving its age and wear.
Now, looking at her mother’s ring, Colleen could remember her shock at its beauty and simplicity. When she’d held out her hand, her father had dropped the ring inside, and she’d immediately marveled at the weightlessness of such a gorgeous, delicate thing.
She still felt that way as she held the ring now in the soft light coming from the stars outside the kitchen window. She remembered what her father had said to her as she slipped the ring onto her tiny finger.
“Take it downstairs to your mother,” he’d said. “Say, ‘Look what I found out in the yard.’” And that became the joke. The original diamond chip had fallen into the grass years earlier and, over time, had grown into the diamond ring her mother had worn ever since her father brought it home.
But when Colleen had gone downstairs, the ring firmly clenched in her closed hand, her mother had not heard her calling for her over the sound of the vacuum. And by the time her mother turned around and used her foot to click off the vacuum’s motor, she had seen Colleen standing in front of her holding the ring like a reward for the work her mother had just completed. Of the lines her father had fed her, Colleen had only been able to say the words “Look what I found” before her mother had dropped the vacuum to the floor and plucked the ring from Colleen’s hand.
Now Colleen slipped the ring onto her finger and crept upstairs, still sensing Groom outside on the porch, and slipped into the bathroom, where she found what must have been his zipped-tight leather shaving kit sitting on the counter. She turned the light on and brushed her teeth, marveling at her drunkenness and the glimmer of the diamond solitaire, while she moved the toothbrush around inside her mouth and stared at her hand in the mirror.
She kept the ring on after she changed out of her clothes and climbed into her unmade bed, closing her eyes as the room began its now-familiar cycle of rotations. She rolled to her side, closed her eyes so tightly that she saw stars and pops of light, and spun her mother’s ring on her finger, repeating, over and over, “Look what I found. Look what I found,” still whispering it while she listened to Groom trudge up the stairs, go into the bathroom, and run the water and flush the toilet before closing the door to the office at the end of the hall, the final sound she heard before the night fell into silence.
Thursday, November 1, 1984
Chapter 11
The sound of the phone ringing on the dresser on the other side of the bedroom ripped Winston from sleep just after 2:00 a.m. He leapt from bed and bounded across the room in two strides, snatching the phone from the cradle as if it were a bomb he hoped to defuse before one more ring detonated it. He was out of breath by the time he whispered into the receiver.
“Yeah,” he said.
It was Rudy on dispatch, the same raspy, relaxed voice he’d heard on the kitchen phone two nights ago.
“There’s a structure fire right off Beach Road,” Rudy said. “Call just came. County fire’s been dispatched, but I figured you’d want to know too.”
Winston really didn’t want to know about structure fires, at least not at this time of the night, but he was on call again because he was taking Englehart’s place after firing him that afternoon.
“Where is it off Beach Road?” Winston asked.
Rudy described it; it was the new development where Bradley Frye was building houses. Winston didn’t know if any of the homes were finished or occupied yet.