Colleen looked back out toward the runway, but she was too far away from the windows to see anything. She turned and looked down the expanse of the terminal, expecting to see her father walking toward her, smiling with relief at having landed safely. But there was no one there that she knew.
“Yes,” the woman said into the phone. Colleen turned back around and looked down at the woman. She smiled at Colleen as if getting someone to answer on the other end had accomplished half of what she’d set out to do. “Do we have any flights in from Oak Island today?” she asked. She kept her eyes on Colleen’s, nodding as if she was learning important information. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Okay.” She hung up the phone. “I’m sorry,” she said. “There are no flights scheduled from Oak Island today.”
“This isn’t a scheduled flight,” Colleen said. “I mean, like, this isn’t an airline. I need to know where a plane would land if the police or the FBI were flying it.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” the woman said. “We don’t have any flights today from—”
“Jesus,” Colleen said. She turned away from the woman, and then she walked back toward the windows and looked out. She walked halfway down the terminal, and she looked out the windows there. She still did not see the airplane, and she still did not see her father or Groom or the police or the FBI. She could feel her heart in her chest, and she knew her vision was narrowing as if she were looking at the world through a periscope. She walked back to the information desk. The woman saw her coming. She smiled hesitantly.
“I need to use your phone,” Colleen said.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “We just don’t have any flights—”
“I know that,” Colleen said, louder than she’d intended. “I understand that. I still need to use your phone.”
The woman kept her eyes on Colleen and lifted the phone from her desk and set it on the counter between them.
“I need a phone book,” Collen said.
The woman nodded, and she bent at the waist and opened a couple of cabinets at her knees. She found a phone book and handed it to Colleen. Colleen flipped through the pages and found what she was looking for. She dialed the number. It was Saturday, well past 9:00 a.m. The office would be open. That’s where her father would be. That’s where they had taken him instead of leaving him at the airport to wait for her.
A woman’s voice answered on the other end. “FBI Resident Agency, Wilmington,” the woman said. “How may I direct your call?”
“I’m looking for my father,” Colleen said. The woman behind the desk stared at her intently, and Colleen turned her back and spoke quietly into the receiver. “His name is Winston Barnes. He’s the sheriff in Brunswick County.”
“Okay,” the woman said. “Okay, let me—” Colleen could hear the sounds of something—papers rustling, static. She could hear the woman speaking to someone else in the room, her voice muddled as if her hand had been placed over the phone’s receiver. Colleen closed her eyes and tried to recall the names of the agents her father had mentioned.
The woman’s voice came back on the line. “I’m sorry,” she said, “can you hold—”
“Rollins,” Colleen said, the agent’s name suddenly popping into her mind. “Agent Rollins.”
“Okay,” the woman said again.
“Is something wrong?” Colleen asked. “I’m at the airport to pick up my father.”
“Give me one more moment,” the woman said.
Colleen held the phone against her ear with her left shoulder, and she folded her arms across her chest. She closed her eyes tight, realized she was holding her breath while the line remained silent on the other end. And then a man’s voice came on.
“Agent Rollins,” the man said. “Is this—？”
“Colleen Banks,” she said. “Sheriff Barnes’s daughter. I’m looking for him. He was supposed to meet me—”
“And you said your name is—”
“Colleen Barnes,” she said. “Jesus, Colleen Barnes. My dad is Winston Barnes.”
“Ma’am,” Rollins said, “I understand that you’re frustrated. I know your father. I’ve worked with him. We’re trying to figure out what happened.”
“What do you mean ‘what happened’？” she asked. “What happened? What are you saying?”
“Miss Barnes,” he said, “that aircraft hasn’t landed. At this moment, we can’t confirm—”
“No. That’s not right,” Colleen said. She felt her knees grow soft and begin to buckle. She straightened her body. She held the phone with her left hand and reached back to the counter with her right to steady herself. “No, no, no,” she said. “I saw it take off.”
“We know it took off, Miss Barnes. We’ve been in contact with the airport down in Oak Island. The plane should’ve landed forty-five minutes ago. We’re working to locate it right now.”
“Honey,” the woman behind her said. Colleen realized she was leaning against the counter, and she turned and saw that the woman at the desk was standing now, reaching her arms out to Colleen as if to steady her. “Are you okay?” the woman whispered.
Colleen looked at the phone in her hand. The agent’s voice was still coming from it. She wanted to hang up and call someone who could give her answers, but who? Scott? Her mother? Her father’s office? She knew no one would be able to tell her anything because there was nothing to tell. She hung up the phone.
She was crying by the time she made it back to the windows at the mouth of the terminal. She lifted her hands to her face and held her fingers together as if she were praying, but she wasn’t praying. She was scanning the runway for anyone or anything that looked like her father or Groom or the airplane. She tried to control her breathing, and she wiped tears from her eyes so that if there was something to see, she would see it.
Colleen did not know it then, could not have known it, but by May she would be pregnant with her second child, and she and Scott would have moved back to North Carolina, buying a home in Wilmington with plenty of room for the new baby and for her mother should she ever decide to join them. Scott would take a job as a prosecutor at the federal courthouse downtown, and she would spend the summer before the baby was born in September studying for the North Carolina bar exam.
She would be sitting at her desk, her study guide open, pages and pages of multiple-choice questions spread out in front of her, when she received the phone call from Agent Avery Rollins, informing her that her father’s body had been discovered by hunters in the woods a few miles north of Burlington, Vermont, near the border. He had been stripped of everything—his badge, his belt, his weapon, the boxes of evidence he’d planned to hand-deliver—but they had identified him by the patches on the sleeves of his uniform and the watch that Colleen’s mother had bought for him just before Colleen was born. The bullet that killed him would later match the bullet that had killed Rodney Bellamy, but the weapon would never be found. A few days later, the FBI’s Miami field office would finally release a statement saying that Agent Tom Groom had taken a vacation on the same day the DC-3 landed on the coast of North Carolina; they’d had no idea that he was even in the state, and they certainly had not sent him to fix and fly an airplane. The aircraft had disappeared, and so had he.