Into the Web (20 page)

I’d left Kingdom County shortly after Archie’s death, and so I’d never read anything concerning the aftermath of the homicides. Because of that, I was stunned to learn how viciously my brother had been demonized in those weeks following the murders. Even his suicide in the county jail had done little to dampen the community’s blazing outrage. Weeks after the murders, his name was invoked in articles and editorials, used as an example of all that was “cancerous” in American youth.

Not even Archie’s teachers had found anything good to say about him. He’d “seemed sweet,” they said, but this sweetness might well have been no more than the “clever ruse” of a boy who all seemed to have forgotten was by no means clever.

The brother I’d known and loved was obliterated in all of this, so much transformed that in photographs he appeared eerily sinister even to me, a boy staring dead-eyed at the camera, dull and emotionless, Sheriff Porterfield perpetually rising like a huge column at his side.

Oddly enough, it was Porterfield who’d offered the only defense of Archie, though it was no more than an official recognition that he’d never been in trouble before, nor given anyone reason to suspect him capable of such a crime. Of his suicide, Porterfield had said only, “Well, I guess God’s justice was served,” and left any further public comment to others.

As for Gloria Kellogg, she’d made no comment of any
kind ever, as far as I could find. The papers told me no more than I’d learned at the time, that Gloria had been found upstairs in her bed, taken into custody by Sheriff Porterfield, then released after having made a statement which in every detail backed up my brother’s confession.

After that, as far as the old accounts were concerned, Gloria had simply vanished, so that I had no way of knowing where she’d gone or what had happened to her, or whether, in the deep, deep night, she ever heard those shots again, felt her soul freeze behind the bedroom door.

If so, I could find no hint of it, no trail to follow, and yet I continued to sit at the library table, working with a fierce determination that was not in the least intellectual, and which would not release me until I finally chanced upon a single short news item.

It had appeared nearly six months after the murders, little more than an official notice that an estate sale of all items in a house listed at 1411 County Road. Everything in the house was to be liquidated in a sale the paper called “the final chapter in the Kellogg Murders,” and which was to be conducted on behalf of Gloria Lynn Kellogg, “currently in residence at Daytonville.”

Daytonville, I thought, the name like a bell ringing in my head, a little town in the far northeast corner of the state, known chiefly for the mental hospital that had long ago been established there, the name since then used like a threat by parents and teachers:
You better straighten up, boy, or they’ll be sending you to Daytonville.

“She must have had some kind of breakdown,” I told my father when I got home later. “A pretty bad one if she had to be taken to Daytonville.”

We were in the backyard, where I’d found him standing beside the sagging rusty fence that bordered it. He listened silently, taking long draws on his cigarette, peering at the tip as I went on, remaining silent even after I’d finished my account. For a time he stared at the copy of the notice I’d brought from the library, then he shook his head.

“‘On behalf,’” he said, quoting the paper. “‘The sale is to be conducted on behalf of Gloria Lynn Kellogg.’”

“Because she’s in a mental hospital,” I explained. “Because she had a breakdown of some sort.”

My father thrust the notice back at me. “Unless it was just a way of getting control of things.”

“What do you mean?”

“Porterfield,” my father said. “He could have fixed it where he got control of things by putting Horace Kellogg’s daughter in the state asylum. He could have got control of things that way, everything that girl had.”

This did not seem likely, and I said so. “Whatever Gloria had would have gone to her next of kin. But she’d have to be declared incompetent. That’s a court matter. Out of Porterfield’s control.”

“Nothing was out of Porterfield’s control,” my father answered.

I saw another fiber grow in the tangled web my father had begun to weave.

“I remember that sale. They put everything out in the front yard. Had tags hanging off everything. Tables. Chairs. Lamps. A whole house full of furniture put out
in the yard. And once they got everything sold, they had a big auction for the house.”

“The Kellogg house was auctioned? When?”

“ ’bout two months after they sold everything that was in it,” my father answered. He eyed me darkly. “Porterfield run the whole show that time. Set right up there with the auctioneer. I seen him settin’ there when I drove by.”

“What are you getting at, Dad?”

Rather than answering me directly, my father said, “They’s something ain’t right in all this, Roy. Something we ain’t got to yet.” He tossed the remainder of the cigarette across the fence, then drew another one from his pocket. “It’s like a joke somebody’s telling, only it ain’t a joke, just works like one. You can’t git none of it unless you git it all.”

Another thought circled like a buzzard in his mind.

“Could be Porterfield had it all figured out even before them murders, Roy. What he’d do if something happened to Horace and his wife. How he could git his hands on what was theirs.” He lit the cigarette and waved out the match. “He was always figuring like that. How to git his hands on other people’s things. That’s the way Porterfield is. Always plottin’ things out. Settin’ out there in that big yard of his. In that chair he’s got. Year after year. Cold, hot. It don’t never matter to him. He’s always settin’ there in the yard, figuring something out. Seen him many a time when I’d pass by.”

“Why would you be passing by Wallace Porterfield’s house?”

“On the way somewhere,” he answered with a shrug.

“Wallace Porterfield’s house isn’t on the way to anything, Dad. It’s at the end of a long road.”

“When I went ridin’ around, I’d pass by it sometimes.” He smiled cunningly. “Bet Porterfield already had it figured out what he’d do if something happened to Horace Kellogg. Probably said, ‘If he ever gets killed someway, this here is how I can get all he’s got for my own-self.’”

“I don’t think that’s likely, Dad.”

His eyes shot over to me almost angrily, as if I’d suddenly proven myself disloyal. “What’s likely for a normal feller ain’t got nothing to do with Wallace Porterfield.”

His reaction was so fierce, I immediately retreated into a less aggressive form of reasoning. “Well, if Porter-field can plot things that far ahead, then he also has plenty of time to figure out how to cover his tracks.”

“A man can’t never cover everything though. They’s always somebody looking. When your mama first got pregnant, seemed like the whole world got pregnant at the same time.”

I stared at him blankly.

“They wasn’t no more women pregnant than they’d ever been around here, but it seemed like it,” he went on. “It’s just that I hadn’t noticed none of them before.”

“Where are you going with this, Dad?”

“It’s just one of them ‘observations’ you’re always talking about, Roy. When something’s on your mind, you notice things. Like pregnant women when your wife is pregnant. If something’s gnawing at you, you notice everything that reminds you of it. Even over twenty years, it keeps gnawing. And so you keep noticing things.
Little things or big things. It don’t matter. Something about it don’t let you rest.”

His eyes narrowed and I saw that he was coming to his point.

“Doc Poole,” he said. “If they was something off about all this business with Gloria, he’d have noticed it. It would have kept on gnawing at him.” He tapped the side of his emaciated skull. “Up here.”

“I don’t know, Dad, Doc Poole might—”

“What Porterfield said struck in Poole’s craw. I bet other things stuck in it too. Things about Gloria, maybe.”

“Yes, but …”

“You check with Poole, Roy,” my father said in a tone that made it clear he would brook no argument.

I started to protest, but my father turned abruptly, like a general from a subordinate, the order given and thus beyond both refusal and appeal.

Chapter Twenty-One

I
didn’t find Doc Poole at his office when I went there early the next morning.

A fat woman in a white uniform told me that he’d gone up to Waylord School, to a summer session where kids who’d been held back the year before could try again at the subjects they’d failed in hope of passing a test at the end of the summer and returning to school with their own class in the fall. It was something new, the nurse told me, started by Doc Poole and more or less subsidized by him.

“Doc’s an old bachelor, you know,” the woman said with a wry wink, “so he’s got nothing better to spend his money on.”

He was standing beneath the largely inadequate shade of a tall pine, when I reached the school an hour later. A group of children were playing in a dusty field not
far away, dressed in the hand-me-down clothes of Waylord.

“Morning, Doc,” I said as I came up beside him.

“Hey there, Roy.” He was clearly surprised to see me, but there was also faint alarm in his expression. “Is it Jesse? You need me to—”

“No, no,” I said hastily. “He’s the same.”

I glanced out over the field to where the children rushed about in the sweltering heat, boys in torn trousers, girls in faded shorts. It took only a slight turn of mind for me to imagine my father among them, dashing across the field to catch a tattered softball, a Waylord boy, with Waylord grit, determined to fight bare-knuckled to the end.

“They play hard, Waylord kids,” I said.

“Yes, they do.” Doc Poole kept his eyes on the field. “You never cared for sports, did you, Roy?”

“No, I tended to hole up in the library. It was my little fortress, I guess.”

Doc Poole looked at me quizzically. “Against what?”

The answer occurred to me so swiftly, I must have known it all my life. “Against my father,” I answered. “The library was the one place I knew he would never come to get me.”

“Why not?”

“Because it intimidated him,” I answered, surprised at how wily I’d been as a boy, how clever in the way I’d sought to best my father, to make him feel crude and inadequate. “I used to take books home just so he’d see them in my room. I used books like weapons. Threw them at him, like rocks.”

Doc Poole watched me, a country doctor’s long experience hovering in his wrinkled face. “Coming home’s not easy, is it, Roy?” he asked softly.

“You learn things, that’s for sure.”

He patted the empty metal chair beside him. “Take a load off. Watch the game awhile.”

I looked out toward the field. “It hasn’t changed much,” I said, “the way things are up here.”

“No, not much,” Doc Poole agreed. “It was hard enough when the mine was going. When it closed, it just got worse.”

“How’d you happen to settle here? In Kingdom County, I mean.”

“I was born in Kingdom County,” Doc Poole answered. “Came right back after medical school.”

“You never thought of going anywhere else?”

“No,” Doc Poole answered.

“It’s all I thought about. Getting away. Living anyplace but here.” I glanced to where a blackboard had been nailed to a tree, the parts of speech written out in yellow chalk. “Where’s the teacher?”

“She left last week. Got a better offer in Welch. I’m looking for someone to take over next fall.” He smiled. “Job’s open if you want it.”

I shook my head. “I’ve made my escape, Doc.”

Doc Poole’s eyes drifted back to me. “What’s on your mind, Roy? Why’d you drive all the way up here?”

“I mentioned what Porterfield said to you about the murders to my father and it got him thinking about things. He’s pretty fired up. Wants to know all he can. The fact is, I don’t really expect to find anything new. But I’m going through the motions. I went over the file
on the case. I even talked to Porterfield himself, but I didn’t get anything out of that.” I offered a cold laugh. “Except that he believes my father came with Archie that night.”

Doc Poole looked at me, astonished. “What?”

I waved my hand dismissively. “Anyway, my father wanted me to talk to you. He seems to think you may be able to help clear up a few things. About Gloria, in particular.”

“Gloria?”

“Well, you were with her that morning, right?”

“Yes, I told her that her parents were both dead. That Archie had confessed to it all. She didn’t say much of anything, as I recall.” Doc Poole seemed to return to that distant morning, see again the small sunny room where he’d found Gloria hysterical in her bed. “I remember that she had her coat on. Even though she was under the covers. And little red rubber boots. Made me think if she’d just made it down the stairs and out the door before Archie got inside, that, well, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now talking about that night.” He thought a moment, then added, “And she had a little gold locket in her hand. Wouldn’t let go of it. Wallace finally pried it out of her fingers and dropped it in his pocket.” He seemed to see the locket disappear into Porterfield’s pocket. “Then he took Gloria over to his place. That’s where she stayed after that. I offered to take her home, let her stay with me, but Wallace said it was up to him to see after her. He said he was her legal guardian.”

“Porterfield took Gloria to his own house? Why?”

“Because he was her legal guardian.”

“Porterfield was Gloria’s legal guardian?”

Doc Poole smiled. “I was surprised by that myself. Wondered over it so much, I finally went down to the courthouse and looked it up. Turns out it was true. He’d been named Gloria’s legal guardian just a few days after she was born. He was the executor of the estate too, so with Horace and his wife both dead, Wallace had to see after everything. Not only Gloria but …”

“Everything she owned,” I said, repeating my father’s words. “Why would Porterfield have been the executor of Horace Kellogg’s estate?”

Doc Poole shrugged.