She stood and walked to the door, turned the lock on the knob, and opened it. Her father leaned against the door frame in the hallway. She opened her hand and showed him the ring. He was already wearing his uniform, but his eyes were red and rimmed with sleeplessness, and his face had a look of confused exhaustion.
“Why are you showing me that?” he asked.
“I figured you were looking for it,” she said. “I had it in my room.”
He took it from her and held it in his hand. “I don’t think your mother even noticed it was gone,” he said.
Colleen leaned out into the hallway and saw that the door to Groom’s room was open, but he was nowhere in sight. And then she heard the shower turn on in the bathroom across the hall.
“I need you to ride out to Rodney Bellamy’s house with me,” her father said.
“Why?”
“I need to question his widow,” he said. “I know Rodney was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I need to at least ask about it now that she’s had a day or two to recover from the shock of it.” Her father stepped back and folded his arms. He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “And there’s some other things.”
“What other things?” she asked.
“Bradley Frye,” her father said. “He’s been driving through the Grove at night with some of his good ol’ boys, flying rebel flags, shooting guns in the air, trying to scare people. I need to let her know I’m working on it.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” she said.
“I didn’t figure it would.”
“I saw him out last night with Danny. Danny said that he—” But she was interrupted by her mother’s voice calling from downstairs.
“Y’all come on down here and eat,” she said. “Tell Mr. Groom that food’s on the table.”
Her father had turned toward the stairs at the sound of her mother’s voice. He looked back at Colleen, and his face had changed; he now looked annoyed, frustrated.
“You’ll have to meet our FBI pilot,” he said. “We’re going to drop him at the airport on the way. Let him get back to work so he can get this damn plane out of here.”
She considered telling her father that she’d met Groom only a few hours earlier, that she’d seen her mother’s car parked outside the Carolina Motel and found him on the pay phone in the empty parking lot, that later she’d discovered him waiting for her when she returned home. But she didn’t feel like explaining any of that to her father this early in the morning, didn’t feel like admitting that she’d been drunk and confused and caught off guard. “What’s he like?” she said instead.
Her father looked at the closed bathroom door across the hallway. He lowered his voice. “He’s kind of uptight,” he said. “Most of those FBI guys are.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That makes sense.”
Her father went downstairs, and soon she could hear his and her mother’s muffled voices coming from the kitchen. She knew he was probably teasing her mother about not knowing where her ring had been. Across the hall, the shower was still running.
Without thinking—at least without thinking clearly—Colleen crept down the hall past the bathroom toward the room where Groom had spent the night. She peered inside the open door. The bed was tightly made on the single mattress atop the simple frame that her parents had always kept pushed in the corner for guests who never came. Her mother’s old sewing machine sat beside the bed on top of an old card table; several small chests with drawers full of ribbon, thread, and needles were stacked beside it. The boots that Groom had been wearing last night rested side by side beneath the bed. An army-green duffel bag sat beside them. Otherwise, there was nothing in the room that spoke to the fact that someone had spent the night there.
Colleen turned and looked down the hall behind her, made certain that she could hear the water continuing to run in the shower. She walked into the bedroom and knelt on the floor, and then she unzipped the duffel bag and opened it just enough to see the contents. The shirt and pants that she’d seen Groom wearing on the front porch were folded on top. The first pocket she reached into held a money clip with Groom’s Florida driver’s license on top of what looked to be several folded twenty-dollar bills. In one of the back pockets, Colleen found a black wallet, and when she opened it she saw Groom’s FBI identification, along with a gold badge. Her hands began to shake when she saw it, as if the gravity of what she’d just done had only now settled over her. She snapped the wallet closed and put it back, doing her best to fold the pants and shirt in the same manner she’d found them. Something crinkled inside the bag, and when she looked beneath the clothes, she found a shopping bag from Sears. Inside were a couple of polo shirts and a second pair of brown pants, the tags still fastened to them, along with a receipt from the store in Wilmington. At the bottom of the bag was a pack of black socks and an open package of men’s briefs. Beneath the shopping bag was a holstered pistol and an open carton of a foreign brand of Asian cigarettes that Colleen had never seen before.
Colleen had grown up around guns, and seeing the weapon was not what bothered her about the luggage. After all, Tom Groom was an FBI agent. Of course he carried a gun and a badge. What gave her pause were the new, unworn clothes inside the shopping bag and the receipt from the store in Wilmington. She knew her father had picked up Groom at the airport, and she didn’t remember him saying anything about taking Groom by the mall. She wanted to pause for a moment to parse the mystery in front of her—but in her pausing she realized that she hadn’t been listening for the shower. She frantically stuffed the clothes back into the shopping bag, and then rearranged Groom’s worn clothes on top of it before zipping the duffel bag closed and repositioning it where she’d found it beside his boots. She could now hear that Groom had turned the shower off, and she did her best to move silently down the hall. She walked into her bedroom and closed the door behind her. Her heart was racing, and she closed her hands into fists to keep them from shaking. Nothing had scared her except her reckless decision to snoop through Groom’s room, but now that she’d gotten away with it, she found that something scared her still.
In the hallway, she heard Groom open the bathroom door and walk toward his room. He closed the door, and she wondered if the room felt like a different room than the room he’d spent the night in. Did something in his training or capability or character make it apparent to him that his belongings had been disturbed?
Colleen opened the top drawer in her dresser, grabbed socks and a pair of underwear, and then she found jeans and a shirt and opened her door and fled across the hallway to the bathroom.
When she came downstairs, Colleen found her mother sitting at the table with Tom Groom, the two of them talking over country ham biscuits that her mother had made that morning. Her father stood watching them from the kitchen, his back leaning against the counter in front of the sink, his hands holding a coffee cup that was lifted and held to his lips as if he were considering blowing on it to cool it down.
From her seat at the table, Colleen’s mother watched her come down the last few steps and make the turn toward the kitchen.