“The caller said this one’s uninhabited,” Rudy said.
“Who called it in?” Winston knew the development sat along the water at the mouth of the waterway, but it backed up to a forest that served as a border between it and the Grove. Winston imagined Bellamy standing on his back deck in his boxer shorts and white tank-top undershirt, squinting into the distance at a dark plume in the moonlight, convinced he smelled smoke.
“I’m not sure exactly who called it in,” Rudy said. He read off the name and address, but Winston didn’t recognize either one.
“Probably somebody living in the development,” he said. “I guess I’ll ride out there. It’s Halloween night, after all. It’s probably just some kids raising hell.” He hung up and, as quietly as he could, dressed in his uniform in the darkness to which his eyes had finally adjusted.
When he was dressed, he stood by the bedroom door and waited, listening for Marie, but she didn’t stir in her sleep or say a word to let him know she was awake.
“Marie,” he whispered, but still nothing. He walked out into the hallway, but just before he stepped onto the stairs, he happened to look at the closed door at the end of the hall, and he suddenly remembered that Groom was staying with them. The thought of leaving Marie and Colleen home alone with a stranger, no matter who that stranger was, gave him pause.
He stepped back toward his and Marie’s bedroom and reached around to push in the button that locked the bedroom from the inside. He pulled the door closed, pausing just before the latch clicked into the catch on the strike plate. He and Marie rarely closed their bedroom door, and he couldn’t recall a time when they had ever locked it at night, even when Colleen was younger and living at home.
The door to Colleen’s room sat opposite the landing at the top of the stairs, and when Winston placed his hand on the doorknob and tried to give it a gentle turn, he found that she had locked it before going to bed, and he felt a satisfied sense of her being his daughter, suspecting that she too had felt safer with her door locked while a virtual stranger was sleeping just down the hall.
Winston had never seen the new development he was en route to, but, following Rudy’s directions, he found it easily. He took the bridge off the island and drove toward the airport, where he knew Kepler was out there on the runway, pulling his shift to keep an eye on the plane. None of the officers who’d been assigned a night watch were excited about it, but Winston knew it was something that had to be done. So much of the investigation had been taken from his office. He didn’t want to lose what little bit of claim he still had.
Just before the airport, Winston turned right off Beach Road onto an unmarked blacktop road called, according to the street sign, Fishcamp Road. He’d driven past it probably a million times over the years, never having or feeling a reason to turn down it. He’d always assumed that eventually it would turn to gravel before winding down to the waterway, where, as the street name suggested, primitive camps sat on private land where families had fished for generations.
But that’s not what Winston found when he clicked on his cruiser’s high beams and drove toward the development. The road had been freshly paved, the grass mowed low and the woods cut back to reveal a five-foot strip on either side of the road. Ahead, his headlights fell on the entrance to the development, which comprised two cement signs encrusted with oyster shells that rose up from the manicured, landscaped beds on either side of the road. Dim lighting that had been hidden by clumps of variegated monkey grass that ringed the beds illuminated the gold, metal letters that spelled out the development’s name: Plantation Cove.
Winston wasn’t surprised by the name. All along Highways 87 and 133 leading into and out of the county, forests were slowly being clear-cut and reseeded with developments that were named with some take on the word or idea of plantation: Plantation Woods, Tara Oaks, Brunswick Plantation. The irony was not lost on Winston that nearly all these communities were developed with northern capital and that the majority of people who bought or built homes inside them were retired couples from New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio who were in search of second homes where they could escape the snow and weather for the mild winters of the North Carolina coast. But he also wondered if it was more than that, especially given the seeming mania for the reanimation of the plantation past. Perhaps by accident of their regional births these seasonal transplants felt they were now reclaiming the power of a past that had left them out, a past that they, at least by virtue of wealth and neighborhood title, could now lay some claim to.
Plantation Cove had held on to its old, mossy oak trees while managing to bulldoze nearly every other tree in sight. Because of this, Winston had an easy time spotting the fire truck and the volunteer fire department vehicles that congregated in front of an under-construction two-story house just a few streets over from the entrance road.
Winston drove past a few completed homes with green, sodded yards and cars in the driveway, some with curious neighbors on their porches and lights burning in downstairs windows, others dark and seemingly empty. Several lots had been cleared, foundations dug, the stick-built frames rising from the sandy soil that would somehow, months from now, look like a yard.
After entering the neighborhood from Beach Road, Winston remembered what Bellamy had said about Bradley Frye wanting the land where the Grove sat, and, even in the dark of night, Winston could imagine the forest that divided the two communities being cleared, the tiny homes in the Grove being razed, a new, much grander entrance to Plantation Cove being erected right on 87 where locals and tourists alike would have to drive past it on their way in and out of downtown Southport. Night rides, shooting off guns, and flying the Confederate flag seemed like a bad way to induce a community to give up its roots, but Winston had seen this before a decade earlier when the schools desegregated, and he’d seen it work. All people, no matter their race, were motivated by fear and power more than they were motivated by money or pride, and he figured Bradley Frye’s nighttime rides were just the opening shots in what would be a long, protracted war.
Winston came to a stop sign. In front of him, the land gave way to a marsh that then gave way to the bank of the waterway. He could see where more land had been cleared, and he imagined that a marina with boat slips, a clubhouse, and a swimming pool would be under construction soon. On his left he could see the faint streetlights of downtown Southport. On his right, the sweeping beam of the lighthouse at the far eastern end of the island. Ahead, on the other side of the bay, another island, a private island where the wealthy had built grand homes and a resort called Bald Head, sat in the unseeable darkness. It was part of the county, but the residents, most of them seasonal and only reachable by boat and then by golf cart as there were no cars on the island, wanted as much to do with the mainland as mainlanders wanted to do with them, and that was okay with Winston.
Down the darkened street to his left, Winston saw flashlights moving through the shell of a home that was under construction. A fire truck and two pickups that probably belonged to volunteer firefighters sat out front. He turned and drove toward them. He pulled the cruiser behind the fire truck, grabbed his own flashlight, and climbed out.