Once Glenn returned to the plane, he handed over the evidence kit, and Winston made his way toward the cockpit, moving uphill against the backward tilt of the plane. He dusted the cockpit controls carefully, paying special attention to the spots on the yokes where he knew thumbs and fingers would have been clenched tight as the plane came in over the trees not long ago. He moved to the instrument panel. Glenn held the flashlight while Winston worked. When he finished, he unspooled the tape and placed it over the spots where he believed good prints were most likely, but when he lifted the strips of tape and held them to Glenn’s light, not a single fingerprint was revealed. He tried again, but there was nothing to see.
“Maybe a damn ghost flew it,” Glenn said.
“Or they wore gloves and wiped everything down,” Winston said. “But there’s got be a fingerprint somewhere in this airplane.”
If they found prints, Winston’s office had no way of running them. He’d have to send them off to Wilmington, if not Raleigh. Even when the FBI stepped in—which Winston knew would happen no matter how long he put off calling them—it would be days before the fingerprints revealed anything. News of the airplane’s appearance and Bellamy’s murder would spread quickly, and Winston knew that everyone in the county would watch how the sheriff’s office handled it, and then they would vote. Election day was just a week away, and Winston’s chances to influence the opinion of his constituents were running out. But, for now, he had all the time he needed out here on the runway in the middle of the night, Glenn and him inside an airplane that was empty but for the sounds of their footsteps echoing against the metal walls. They worked slowly. There was no reason to rush. No one knew what had happened but them. The airplane had already landed, and whoever had landed it had disappeared. The only person who might have seen them was Rodney Bellamy, and he wasn’t talking.
Chapter 2
She had not set the alarm clock because it was not hers; the alarm clock belonged to Scott, and it was already set for 5:00 a.m. Waking at that hour left him plenty of time to eat something at home, hit the gym at the health club he’d joined as soon as they’d moved to Dallas, shower, and make it to the courthouse by 7:00 a.m., which, he’d confided to Colleen, was almost half an hour earlier than any of the other first-year assistant attorneys were willing to arrive.
That morning, she’d been able to slip from bed at 3:00 a.m. with only a muttered “You okay?” from Scott where he lay, his back turned toward her. “Yes,” she’d said. “I just can’t sleep,” but he had already tumbled back into a deep slumber.
They had not built the house they lived in, which was something she had dreamed of their doing together, but it was only twenty years old and new enough so that the oak floors did not squeak and the doors opened and closed securely and quietly, which was a far cry from the house she’d grown up in on the waterway in Oak Island, with its paper-thin walls, worn carpets, crooked staircase, and linoleum floors. She had been near silent as she walked across her and Scott’s bedroom, opened the door, stepped into the hallway, and closed the door behind her.
The house had been dark and quiet, the only sound being the mechanical hum of the German grandfather clock that the previous owners had left behind. It now sat at the top of the stairs at the far end of the hallway. Their first night in the house, the clock had chimed with a series of deep, resonant melodies, and Colleen and Scott had been launched from their mattress as if they’d been electrocuted. Colleen had grown so used to being pregnant that her belly’s unwieldiness was a feature of her new body that she never lost track of, but she had lost track of it that night. In her sleep and sudden waking confusion she had panicked at the heavy weight sitting atop her middle, and she had only calmed when Scott found her hand in the darkness and the two of them had lain together without speaking, listening to the slow, deep chimes of a song that seemed born in a distant era and a dark, forested continent that felt very far from their new lives in Texas.
The next morning, Scott had opened the glass cabinet and disabled the clock’s chimes. In the bottom of the cabinet they had discovered a stack of old editions of the Dallas Morning News, each one marking a historic event: Pearl Harbor; the Armistice; the assassinations of Jack and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; the moon landing; and every presidential election since World War II, ending with the November 4, 1980, headline “Gipper Cruises to Victory over Carter,” along with a photo of Reagan and his wife waving from the stage on election night.
She and Scott had flipped through all the newspapers, wondering why someone had saved them, brought them to this house, and then left them abandoned in the bottom of the clock. Their talk turned to birth announcements, and they decided that, when the baby came in June, they would run announcements in Wilmington for Scott’s parents, Oak Island for Colleen’s, and here in Dallas for their own new family because this city would be the baby’s home.
When they returned the newspapers to the bottom of the clock’s cabinet, they stacked them oldest to most recent, just as they’d found them. Now each time Colleen saw the grandfather clock, as she had on this dark morning, where it stood sentinel at the far end of the hallway, she thought vaguely but powerfully of time and change and tragedy and life and all the ways we hang on to these things, store them, and then take them out over the years to leaf through the memories in their pages.
To the right of their bedroom was the open door to what they called the office, a room full of boxes of their law school texts, a desk, and a few chairs. Across the hall was a guest room, the bed still made from when Colleen’s mother and father had stayed just a few months before. They’d flown in for the birth, which was something she’d actually felt guilty about, given how expensive it was and how inexperienced her parents were with flying. Scott’s parents had also flown in from North Carolina. They had stayed in a hotel, but none of them had stayed for very long.
The room beside the guest room was empty, but the last room on the right at the top of the stairs was home to the carefully and blissfully decorated nursery, a room whose door had remained closed since she and Scott had arrived home from the hospital. Colleen had stayed downstairs, leaning against the kitchen counter, while Scott had gone up and closed the nursery’s door before Colleen followed behind him and headed for their bedroom. The next day, she bent in the hallway and stuffed a rolled towel beneath the nursery’s door. She did not want to go in, but she also did not want whatever remained inside the room—memory, magic, hope, perhaps a spirit or a ghost—to escape.
In her bare feet and as quietly as she could, Colleen now padded down the curved staircase to the foyer below. They had not meant to buy a house this grand. Even with the new baby on the way, why did they need three thousand square feet, four bedrooms, and a “keeping room” in a house that already had a living room? But it was 1984 and Scott was an assistant U.S. attorney at the federal courthouse in Dallas, and money didn’t seem to be a factor for them. It had never been a factor for Scott, and his father—who’d gotten Scott an interview for the job because he’d been college roommates at the University of North Carolina with the Texas attorney general and had kept in touch ever since—had talked so much about a first home as an investment. So, here they were, investors in a nearly empty home that was much too large for two people who rarely found themselves living in the house together unless lying in silence in bed at night.