Into the Web (19 page)

I saw the dark men who’d closed in on my father by the candy counter of the Waylord company store.

“Kellogg helped you,” I said. “With that … lesson?”

Porterfield grinned. “He wasn’t much older than your daddy was, but Horace sure did his share.”

The one thing I would not let myself do at that moment was collapse under the great weight of what Porterfield had just revealed.

“But you never even talked to my father,” I said. “You never even questioned him about whether he was—”

“Why should I?” Porterfield blurted out. He regarded me as if I were a small child stupidly fending off an enormous dragon. “Jesse Slater wouldn’t have said anything to me. Not like that whining brother of yours. Sputtering and crying. Jesse wouldn’t have broken down like that. Never. Got too much gumption.” He shrugged. “I figured that in the end, I’d get it out of your brother, but once he was dead there was nothing I could do but drop the whole thing, just let your daddy go. Pride, that was your daddy’s downfall. Too much pride for a little shit Waylord boy.” He cackled dryly. “But like I said, I knew it couldn’t have been you shooting that gun. Because you don’t have your daddy’s gumption.”

He hit the button inside the car and turned toward the wheel as the darkly tinted window glided into place.

During the next few minutes I learned just how swiftly and completely denial can block the mind’s communication with the heart. For as I watched Porterfield back out of the driveway of his house, my own mind furiously blocked me from any serious consideration of the terrible suspicion the old sheriff had voiced about my father.

And so, during the next few seconds I went over everything about that murderous night but the possibility that my father could have had anything to do with it.

Methodically, meticulously, I relived every detail of it again, so that I saw myself behind the wheel of the Chevy, heading up to Waylord at just before six that evening, gray clouds already hanging low and dark overhead, feeling again the cold drizzle they released as I came to a halt in Lila’s drive.

Lila had come out immediately, dashing happily across the bare yard, wrapped in a dark red coat, a clear plastic rain hat around her hair. Bursts of mist came from her mouth as she leapt into my car, snuggling up against me, smiling, pretending to shiver,
Brrrr.

We’d headed back down to the valley, talking all the way, full of the brilliant future we’d begun to imagine for ourselves, that I’d go to college, get my degree, then return and marry her. I’d get a teaching job and then she’d go to college too. We’d raise a family. The future had never looked brighter than on that snowy night.

The more immediate plan was far more achievable,
of course: a double date no different from the many others we’d had in the past.

Archie was pacing back and forth when Lila and I pulled into the driveway that evening. He looked stricken and confused, the way he always did when things began to overwhelm him.

“We can’t pick up Gloria at her house,” he said as he threw himself into the backseat of my car. “She had a big fight with her daddy and ran over to Potter’s Grocery.”

The first scattered flakes of snow began to fall as we pulled up to Potter’s Grocery. Gloria was waiting anxiously behind its misty front window, her expression hardly less stricken than Archie’s.

Her tone was grave as she slid into the backseat. “I don’t know what Daddy’s going to do, Archie.”

Archie drew her beneath his arm. “Maybe we’ll just run off, then,” he said.

We decided to go to the movie house in Kingdom City. Once there, Gloria and Archie went directly to the counter to buy popcorn, leaving Lila and me at the front of the theater.

“He’ll do it, you know,” Lila told me. “He’ll run off with Gloria.”

“They wouldn’t get very far, Lila.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Lila said darkly. “Gloria’s underage. Her father could call the sheriff and have him arrested.”

I glanced over to the concession stand, watched as Archie paid for a bag of popcorn, then handed it to Gloria.

“He wouldn’t try to take Gloria away,” I told Lila
confidently. “Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t know how to do it.”

I was still holding firmly to that conviction when the movie ended two hours later. We drove Gloria back to her house, where she and Archie stood briefly at the end of the driveway, hidden behind the hedge.

“Gloria’s really upset,” Archie said, when he got back in the car. “She thinks her daddy’s gonna beat her up.”

Lila’s eyes shot back toward my brother. “Be careful, Archie, please. Be really careful.”

The snow had thickened by the time we reached the house. For a moment, Archie remained in the backseat of the car as if in dread of what the night might bring were he left to his own devices.

“It’s going to work out, Archie,” I assured him. “We’ll talk it all through when I get back.”

He nodded reluctantly, and got out of the car, moved halfway up the driveway, then stopped as if by a black wall.

“Go talk to him,” Lila urged me. “He’s lost without you.”

I did as she asked, got out of the car and walked over to my brother.

“Everything’s going to work out,” I promised him. “Believe me, Arch, everything’s going to work out.”

“What if I was to do it, Roy? We could go to—”

“Listen, just go inside and stay there.” I smiled. “We’ll talk it over in the morning.”

Archie did not smile back. “Her daddy’s hurting her real bad, the things he’s saying to her. It’s not right, Roy, Calling her names. Hurting her like that. Threatening her.”

I placed my hand on his shoulder, a little annoyed. “Archie, do what I told you. Go inside. In the morning, we’ll talk it over. There’s nothing you can do tonight anyway.”

He nodded slowly, heavily, in that ponderous way of his. “Okay, Roy …” A small, tentative smile broke over his face. “Thanks.”

“Are we clear on this, then?”

“Yeah, we’re clear.”

“Good,” I said, then glanced toward the house and saw my father standing in the lighted window. He was watching us, his eyes like two cold lights shining through the snow.

“Go on inside now,” I told my brother.

“Yeah, right,” Archie said, and stepped away.

I darted back to the Chevy, expecting to see Archie already lumbering up the stairs and into the house. But he was still standing only a few feet from where I’d left him, as deep in thought as was possible for him, struggling to find a way out of his confusion.

“He’ll be all right,” I told Lila as I turned the ignition.

Lila’s eyes bored into my brother, “It won’t end here,” she murmured.

She had never spoken more truly, it struck me now, as I watched Wallace Porterfield’s car move down the long road that fronted his house. For it never had.

Chapter Nineteen

H
e was on the front porch when I pulled into the driveway a few minutes later, his body tilted back in a spindly chair, his bare feet pressed down upon the un-painted wooden slats, a gaunt figure I could scarcely envision as the raging, vengeful man Wallace Porterfield had conjured up.

And yet, I knew that age and illness are deceptive, that old killers must surely look like all old men, infirm and vaguely sorrowful. And so it was a younger, stronger man I made myself imagine as I studied him through the windshield, a man who’d sputtered madly as he’d loaded the pistol, his mind ablaze with what Horace Kellogg had done to him so many years before, all life suddenly reduced to a score he had to settle.

“Where you been?” he demanded as I got out of my car.

“I talked to Lonnie about what Doc Poole told me last night.”

“I thought didn’t none of that matter to you.”

“I changed my mind.”

He scowled. “You ain’t gonna get no help from Lonnie.”

“Well, he didn’t think much of the idea of my looking into Archie’s case, that’s true. But he didn’t try to stop me.”

I came up the stairs, staring closely at my father, as if it were actually possible to look past his age and withered appearance, determine if he could have done what Wallace Porterfield suspected, murdered a man and a woman in cold blood.

“He sent me over to Wallace Porterfield’s house,” I added. “It seems he keeps the county police files in his garage. They don’t belong to him, of course, but he keeps them anyway.”

“Nobody ever made Wallace Porterfield do right,” my father said, his voice swelling with rancor, so that it suddenly struck me that revenge was perhaps the real engine that had propelled his life.

“Porterfield believes that you came with Archie to Horace Kellogg’s house that night,” I told him bluntly.

My father snorted but gave no other response.

I sat down next to him. “He thought you might have committed the murders, then walked back here through the woods.”

“Why would I have murdered them people? I didn’t care nothing about Horace Kellogg’s daughter.”

“But you knew Kellogg, didn’t you?”

“I knew him.”

“According to Porterfield, there was bad blood between the two of you.”

My father didn’t meet my eyes. “Told you I killed him ’cause of that?”

“Well, it would have been a motive, wouldn’t it?” I drew the pistol from beneath my shirt. “And it was your gun.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“I took it from a box of stuff Porterfield had.”

“Why’d you do that, Roy? So you could show it to me? You believe him, don’t you?”

“There were tracks,” I said. “Footprints. It looked like someone came with Archie to Kellogg’s house that night. In his car, I mean. Walked up to the house with him.”

“And you think it was me?”

“I’m just telling you what Porterfield thinks.”

“I don’t give a shit what Wallace Porterfield thinks. I’m asking what you think!”

When I didn’t answer, he added, “What about the woman, Roy? Horace Kellogg’s wife. She was killed too, ain’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“In all your life, Roy, have you ever seen me lift my hand against a woman?”

In all my life, I had not.

“I wasn’t the best husband ever was, but did you ever see me touch your mother, no matter how mad I got?”

He peered at the gun as if it were a decaying carcass. “Don’t lay no murder of a woman on me. ’Cause it ain’t right to think I’d do something like that.”

I realized then the vast effect of my father’s lost romance,
that Deidre Warren’s death, the part he’d played in it, had forever placed him beyond the harming of a woman. Men he might cheerfully destroy with the single sweep of a flaming sword, but no woman would ever have a thing to fear from him.

“Porterfield was just goading you,” he added now. “It’s a game he’s always liked. Making people believe stuff about each other that ain’t so. He done it up in Waylord all the time. Played people off against each other. He liked doing it. Made him feel powerful. Bet he done it to Lila too, that time he talked to her about the murders.”

“Done what?”

“Planted something in her mind,” my father answered. “About you. You said it was never the same between you and Lila,” he went on, and I could see the storm begin to take shape in his mind. “Never the same after them killings.”

“Yes, but that had—”

“Maybe it was Porterfield caused that,” my father interrupted. “Maybe Porterfield played with Lila when he went up and talked to her that day. Told her it was
you
done the killings. Put
that
in her head.”

Suddenly, without my willing it, this seemed entirely plausible. “He might have,” I admitted. “I mean, I was there that night.”

“You was there?” my father asked. His eyes were two probing needles. “You seen Archie?”

“He was just sitting in his car,” I said. “Waiting to go up to the house, I guess. Still trying to figure out what to do.” What I had done fell upon me like a heavy stone. “And I let him down. I’d been with Lila, and I was … I
don’t know … I just wasn’t thinking. So I didn’t try to stop him. I just wished him luck and told him … well … not to leave … any … not to leave any witnesses.”

My father turned away and stared out at the deserted road.

“Archie never told Porterfield about my being there,” I went on. “But Porterfield knew it anyway. He told me that this afternoon. That he’d always known I was there that night.”

My father remained silent. He stared at me as if he’d never seen me before.

“No one ever knew about my being there,” I said. “I never told anyone. I guess I was … ashamed of what I said to Archie, that I may have contributed, you know, to what he did.”

My father chewed his bottom lip for a moment, then said, “Well, if Archie never told Porterfield you was there, and you never told nobody, then how come he knew it?”

“I asked him that myself. He just said he had eyes in the clouds.”

My father sniffed. “Ain’t nobody got eyes in the clouds. Not even Wallace Porterfield. Somebody had to have told him, Roy. Ain’t no other way he could have found out about it.” He seemed to be watching a strange conspiracy unfold, and was now so deep in thought, he seemed almost a different person, solemn, meditative, like one abruptly awakened to all he’d let blindly pass. “Ain’t nobody else could have told Porterfield nothing about that night.

“Gloria,” he murmured. “It must have been Gloria.”

Chapter Twenty

I
started looking for her the very next morning, before my father rose. I knew that I could have once again gone to Lonnie, asked him if he had any idea of what had become of Gloria Kellogg after the murder of her parents, but by then I’d come to see him as my father did, not just as the son of Wallace Porterfield but the keeper of Porterfield’s malicious flame.

And so rather than go to Lonnie’s office, I went to the little redbrick building that housed the Kingdom County Library.

I started with the back issues of the
Kingdom City Banner
, the only newspaper in Kingdom County. By the extent of the coverage it became clear that the
Banner
had regarded the two killings as the major news event of the decade. Ministers had used the crime to rail against the evils of modern life, citing the movies, books, and
even the drugstore detective novels they claimed my brother had habitually read, though I knew that he’d never gotten more than a few pages into any one of them before he’d passed it over to me.