Colleen felt her face reddening a bit. She should not be ashamed to have come in late, to have been drinking, to have been startled by Groom on the porch in the middle of the night, but something about neither her nor Groom acknowledging that in front of her parents made it feel like a shameful secret was now being unearthed.
“Danny thinks it’s all drug related,” she said. Her father looked over at her, his eyes lingering for a moment on her face before he turned back to the road.
“Oh, yeah? Is that what Danny thinks?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And he thinks that’s why Bradley Frye wants to become sheriff, so he can look the other way, like, maybe he’d get kickbacks or something.”
“Huh,” Winston said, acting as if he were amused. He drove in silence for a moment. “Well, I’ll tell you what: between your friends and your mother and her friends, I think we might just have this case cracked. The sheriff down in Horry County might have a case connected to the airplane and Rodney’s murder, but I’ll tell him not to worry about it.”
The intensity of her father’s sarcasm pushed around Colleen’s body like a physical thing that she could feel gathering around her face and shoulders. He was comparing her to her mother and her mother’s friends, and although he had never directly said so, and Colleen had never directly asked, she had a good idea what her father thought about her mother and her mother’s friends, largely because it was the same thing Colleen thought: her mother’s curiosity was trivial and gossipy, her interests fleeting and presumptive, as if the rules of the world were fixed in such a way that she could easily unravel their complexities if she and her friends just spent enough time talking about it on the phone.
Colleen wanted to find a way to remind her father that she’d graduated from law school, that in law school she had studied and learned the rules of evidence and criminal procedure, had, in fact, studied them more closely and with more intensity than her father ever had despite his decades of experience in law enforcement. If she had opinions on this case—and, if she were being honest, she didn’t—they would have been based on facts and education and expertise, not on gut instinct or intuition or gossip. She didn’t want to be like her mother, and she didn’t think she was, but perhaps she wasn’t much like her father either, a man she’d always held out as the epitome of fact-based rationality. She was more educated than either of them, had traveled more broadly than either of them, and, unlike them, was no longer living in the state of her birth. But the fact that she was not actually practicing law, that she had either postponed it or given it up altogether in favor of a child she did not have and a husband she was not with—a fact pattern that always hovered on the edge of her emotional periphery—shot through her heart with a cold bolt of self-realization. Maybe she wasn’t like her parents—an older couple set in their ways and beliefs, operating on emotion and intuition. She was worldly, educated, and enlightened, and all these advantages had landed her here, back home, feeling very much like the same adolescent she was before law school, before traveling, before marrying Scott and moving to Texas and losing her baby.
No, she wasn’t like her parents, but maybe she was worse.
Colleen couldn’t remember if she had ever been in the Grove before. Had she ever had a reason? She’d had Black friends when she was young, playing softball and other sports, seeing them at a few birthday parties when they were little or at after-school events like plays or dances or club meetings. But she couldn’t remember ever being inside one of the Black kids’ homes. No playdates or sleepovers or things like that. And then she realized that none of the Black kids she’d grown up with had ever been inside her home either. And here she was, a grown woman of twenty-six who’d lost a child, going to visit a widow inside the home of a Black classmate who’d been shot and killed. The mysteries of life always seemed vague and inexplicable to Colleen, and as her father drove past the small brick and clapboard homes, their yards alive with flowers and ornaments and outdoor furniture or choked with weeds, she couldn’t help but question the predestined vagaries of fate that had landed her here while also ending Rodney’s life.
Her father drove into the Grove and slowed down, coming to a stop at the side of the street. He put the car in park. Colleen lifted her head from the passenger’s-side window. They both sat without moving.
“I’m sorry,” her father finally said.
She looked over at him. “For what?”
“For what I said. I shouldn’t say things like that. I’d love to hear any ideas you’ve got. That lead down in Horry County probably isn’t going to pan out.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” she said.
“I’ve just got a lot on my mind,” he said. “I had to fire a deputy yesterday because of this mess that Bradley Frye caused here in the Grove, and that’s put me a man down, and I’ve had to keep somebody out at the airport. There’s just a lot going on.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Well, there’s no need for you to say that to me,” he said.
“What about Mom’s?”
“Mom’s what?” he asked.
“Mom’s ideas about the case,” she said. “You want to hear more of those?”
He laughed, nodded his head.
He dropped the car into drive and they continued on. “I think I’ll hold off on hers if that’s okay.”
Winston turned into the driveway of a small, wooden-frame house. A burgundy sedan was parked on the road in front, and a white Datsun sat in the driveway with a pickup truck. A sheet of plywood had been nailed to the front of the house, apparently to cover a window that had been broken. By the time Colleen had taken off her seat belt, Rodney’s father had stepped out onto the small porch. To Colleen he looked the same as he’d looked when she was in high school, despite the spots where his hair was graying around his temples. The same thick glasses, the same rigid demeanor. He wore a blue button-down shirt and khaki pants, and he stood with his hands in his pockets, watching Colleen and Winston as if he’d been waiting for them, uncertain whether to welcome them or ask them to leave.
“Mr. Bellamy,” Colleen whispered to herself, obviously loud enough for her father to hear from where he sat behind the steering wheel.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice edged with resignation. He turned off the engine and opened his door. Colleen climbed out and followed her father down a short walkway to the porch.
“Morning, Ed,” her father said.
“Sheriff,” Bellamy said, nodding his head toward Winston, his voice portraying neither a warmth of welcome nor a coldness of indifference. Bellamy looked past Winston to where Colleen stood behind him. His face softened slightly, the way it would when a student would accidentally do or say something funny in class. “Colleen Barnes,” he said.
She smiled and gave him a small wave. She suddenly felt very shy. “Hello, Mr. Bellamy,” she said. “I am so sorry.”
“Come on now, you’re grown,” he said. “Call me Ed.” Colleen could never imagine calling him by his first name. “You’re not in school anymore,” he said, his face cracking into a slight, nearly imperceptible smile. “Y’all come on. Janelle’s expecting you.”