“Well, rise and shine,” her mother said.
Colleen gave a halfhearted smile and walked past the table and into the kitchen. She took a glass down from the cabinet and filled it with ice and then, leaning behind her father, water from the sink. She took a sip and looked from one of her parents to the other.
“Do y’all have any Tylenol?” she asked.
“As a matter of fact, we do,” her mother said. She pointed to the cabinet just inside the kitchen to Colleen’s right. “Thanks to our guest. He ran out last night and got some.”
“And coffee,” Colleen’s father said.
“Well, I need both,” Colleen said. She opened the cabinet and found the pill bottle. She unscrewed the lid and popped two into her mouth. She took another sip of water and swallowed.
“Colleen,” her mother said, her voice lilting in a way that told Colleen that she had done something moderately disappointing. Her mother gestured across the table. “This is Tom Groom. He’s the pilot who’s going to—”
Colleen opened her mouth to interrupt, to let her mother and father know that they’d already met. It seemed awkward to act otherwise in front of Groom, but he beat her to it.
“Nice to meet you, Colleen,” he said. He smiled.
His greeting caught Colleen off guard, and, as she stood there, she understood that something secret had passed between them, but she didn’t quite know what it was. Her discovering him at the pay phone? His smoking on the porch late at night? Her coming in drunk after her parents had gone to bed? Or maybe it was the first words he’d said to her—“Don’t let me scare you”—which now seemed more ominous in her memory than they did when she’d heard them spoken.
“Nice to meet you,” Colleen responded. She took another sip of her water, crunching bits of ice with her teeth. She imagined her headache already receding, the Tylenol dissolving in her stomach and passing into her bloodstream to do whatever it would do to ease the pain in her head and make everything seem clearer.
Now the three of them—Colleen, her father, and Groom—rode up Beach Road toward the airport after crossing the bridge. Colleen sat in the passenger’s seat of her father’s cruiser. Groom sat in the back.
Colleen and her father made small talk during the drive. He didn’t ask her about Danny. He’d never asked her about Danny, and she knew it was because he viewed Danny as reckless and impulsive, and of course he sensed things about Danny that he didn’t know how to broach.
Mostly, Colleen and her father’s discussion focused, as usual, on her mother and her cancer. Does she seem tired to you? Has she been eating? What do her doctors say? Colleen would have forgotten that Groom was even in the car with them had his voice not finally broken the silence of the backseat.
“Sheriff Barnes, I want to thank you again for letting me stay with your family,” Groom said. “For putting me up and driving me around. I really appreciate it.”
“It’s a pleasure,” her father said. He looked into the rearview mirror and smiled at Groom. “We’d be eating, sleeping, and driving around anyway, whether you were here or not, so we might as well have you with us.”
“I guess that’s true,” Groom said. The car grew quiet. The only sounds were the hiss and crackle of the CB radio. Her father had turned it down when they got in the car, and the voices coming across it sounded like whispers. “That reminds me,” Groom said, “if anybody needs to come into my room for anything, just come on in.”
Colleen’s heart felt like a fist had been closed around it. She realized that she wasn’t breathing. She waited for Groom to say something else, but her father spoke instead.
“No,” Winston said, “it’s all yours. There’s nothing any of us need in there.”
“Well, just come on in if you change your mind,” Groom said.
“A phone,” Colleen said. Her father looked over at her as if trying to make sense of the words she’d just spoken. She gathered herself, finding courage in her frustration that Groom seemed to be trying to pin her in. “I mean, there should be a phone in there,” she said. “At least I think there is. If there’s not, I can take the one out of my room and put it in there for you.”
Colleen heard Groom shift in his seat.
“There’s one in there,” he said.
“I thought there might be,” Colleen said. “Feel free to use it.”
Winston turned the cruiser left off Beach Road and into the airport parking lot. Two cars were parked out in front of the office. He drove by the office, past small hangars. The doors of a few were open, revealing small, single-engine airplanes where men, presumably the planes’ owners, seemed to be working on them or otherwise tinkering around inside the bays.
Past the hangars, they turned onto the runway, where crime scene tape was intertwined through sets of sawhorses. The airplane glinted beneath the sun at the far end. Colleen had only seen it from far away, but at this close distance it seemed enormous. A patrol car sat parked on the runway behind it. The way the sunlight fell, no one could be seen inside. The door to the patrol car opened, and a deputy stepped out and stretched his arms over his head.
“Has he been out here all night?” Colleen asked.
“Not all of it,” her father said. “But most of it.”
He parked and he and Groom got out. Her father spent a few minutes talking with the deputy. Groom walked past them toward the airplane where its tail sat jacked up off the ground. A mechanic appeared from one of the hangars, pushing a huge chest of what Colleen assumed were tools. Colleen watched Groom until her father got back in the car.
“He’s an interesting guy,” she said.
“Who, Groom?” her father asked.
“Yeah.”
“That’s one way of describing him.”
“You don’t like him?” she asked.
Her father drove through the parking lot and turned left onto Long Beach Road. “I like him fine,” he said. “About as much as I’ve ever liked an FBI agent.”
“He seems weird,” she said.
“This whole thing is weird.”
“I saw him last night on the pay phone outside the Carolina Motel,” Colleen said.
“Saw who?”
“Him,” she said. “The pilot. Groom.”
“Is that why you made that weird comment about the phone?” her father asked.
His seeing through what she’d thought was her cunning retort to Groom embarrassed her. “No,” she said. “Yes, kind of. It just seemed weird that he was on a pay phone in the middle of the night. And he was driving Mom’s car.”
“That’s because she let him drive it, Colleen. He went to the store. For aspirin and coffee.” Winston clicked on his blinker and turned right and drove toward Southport.
“And to use the phone, which he could’ve done at our house,” she said.
“Maybe he wanted privacy.”
“There’s a phone in his room,” Colleen said. “He told me he didn’t want to use your long-distance.”
“Well, that was kind of him,” her father said, and then he looked over at her. “When did he tell you that?”