Into the Web (15 page)

My order came a few minutes later, brought by a freckled-faced boy in a wrinkled uniform, a paper cap resting uneasily on his head.

“Three,” he said.

I looked at him quizzically.

“Your order number,” the boy added dully.

I glanced at the paper receipt half crumpled in my hand. “Oh, yeah, right.”

He placed the plate on the table before me. “Thanks for eating at Crispy Cone.”

I ate slowly, stalling for time, dreading the moment when I would have to return, lie in the dark, turn toward
the window, and see Lila’s face reflected in the glass, all memory of her, the long summer days, the times we’d made love beside Jessup Creek, all of that now stained by the grim half-light of our last encounter, sealed in the dark chamber of Lila’s cryptic words:

Because I knew …

I finished the sentence myself.

… that you were there.

The jukebox started up suddenly, and I turned toward it.

At the far end of the room, two teenage couples jostled about playfully, the girls giggling shyly, the boys winking to each other and shifting restlessly in their seats. Twenty years before, it might have been Lila and me in that same booth, facing Archie and Gloria, all of us on yet another double date, just back from the movie house in Kingdom City.

We’d gone out together perhaps thirty times, just four high school kids, nothing to take note of, and certainly nothing to fear.

By then Horace Kellogg had realized that Gloria was not just dating Archie, but that she’d fallen in love with him.

I’d first learned of the change on a chilly September night as Archie sat disconsolately on the side of his bed. “Mr. Kellogg says I got to stop seeing Gloria. Says we’re moving too fast, her and me.”

“What does Gloria think?” I asked.

“She says we should run away and get married and not pay no attention to what her daddy says.”

“Where does that leave you, Arch?”

“I don’t know, Roy. What do you think about it? Us running off, I mean.”

I knew that Archie undoubtedly lacked the necessary skills to plan and execute anything even remotely as complicated as eloping with Horace Kellogg’s daughter, so I said, “I think Mr. Kellogg will probably simmer down after a while.”

“No,” my brother told me. “He won’t, Roy.”

Now, watching the boys across the room, I marveled that I had not taken my brother’s grim certainty more seriously.

It was only an hour later, Lila now with me in the car, listening as I related what Archie had told me, that I realized just how serious the situation might become.

“I think he’s going to do it, Roy,” she said. “I think he’s going to run off with Gloria.”

I looked over at her and fairly swooned at how luminous her face appeared in the car’s darkened interior.

“Once he starts it, he won’t know how to stop,” she added, her voice grave, like one who’d already glimpsed what was to come, my brother’s car lurching along the tall hedges that bordered the Kelloggs’ newly paved driveway, gray footprints in the path that led from his car to the white door, the way that door opened slowly to reveal Lavenia Kellogg’s doomed face.

The teenagers rose and made their way out to the parking lot. There they gathered briefly beside a light
blue Ford, the Crispy Cone’s flashing sign winking brightly in its shiny chrome grille.

Through the restaurant’s window I watched them talking, the two boys still at each other playfully, bobbing and weaving, the girls giggling wildly, all of them utterly carefree and unselfconscious, youth like a blindfold wrapped around their eyes.

They piled into the car a few minutes later, driving away quickly, tossing gravel behind the whirling tires to leave a curving trail behind them that tormented me like the one I’d left behind so long ago, two gray lines through the freshly fallen snow that had covered the road past Horace Kellogg’s house.

“You finished?”

I glanced toward the voice, high and reedy, of the woman who stood above me, her apron stained with ketchup, mustard, cooking oil.

“I’ll take your plate if you’re finished,” she said, already reaching for the plate, so that the metal name tag on her uniform glinted in the cruel fluorescent light, drawing me away from what Archie had later done that night, returning me to what I had done instead.

“Porterfield,” I said.

She looked at me quizzically. “Do I know you?” “You’re Lonnie Porterfield’s daughter, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

In the red uniform, with a small paper cap pinned to her hair, she looked even younger than her years, which I guessed at about fourteen.

“My name’s Slater. Roy Slater. Your father and I went to high school together.”

“Oh yeah, I heard him mention you at home. You
were with him when ya’ll found that dead guy in the woods. My name’s Jackie. Nice to meet you.”

“I’ve been here a few times,” I told her. “But I’ve never seen you here before.”

“I usually work the morning shift, that’s probably why,” Jackie said. “But Sue got sick, so I had to come in for her tonight.” She glanced about warily, as if determining if the coast was clear, then slid into the seat opposite me. “You’re the one from California, right? Been out there a long time, my daddy said.”

“A very long time.”

She studied me a moment. “Like I said, Daddy was talking about you. How you was helping him find out about that fellow you found dead.” Her eyes widened. “Did you see his face?”

“Yes.”

“All bloody?”

“There was some blood.”

Jackie cringed. “My daddy sees stuff like that all the time, but it makes me woozy.” One hand leisurely scratched the other, pink nails drawing white lines across her pale flesh. “I can’t look at that kind of stuff.”

A sharp laugh broke from her. “Imagine me up there with you and Daddy. I’d have been barfing all over the place.” She glanced about the restaurant again. “I’m not supposed to talk to customers.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t.”

But she paid no mind to this. “Can I ask you something? Do you live in Hollywood?”

“No. I live in northern California.”

She was clearly disappointed to hear it. “What brings you back to Kingdom County?”

“My father’s dying.”

Jackie’s eyes registered no response. “They make movies about people that go to Hollywood to be in the movies,” she added. “So, how come you went out there?”

“College,” I said.

“I’m going to college. Kingdom Community. Soon as I graduate high school. I’m going to study hotel management. I was thinking about California. They’ve got lots of hotels out there.”

She looked at me quizzically. “Have you ever been to Hollywood?”

“No, I haven’t.”

Once again, she took this in her stride. “What happened anyway? To that guy ya’ll found. He was dead already when you got there, Daddy said.”

“He had a disease.” I told her.

“Like a heart attack or something?”

“More or less.”

“You didn’t know the guy?”

“I never met him.”

She offered a quick “Hmm,” then added, “But you knew the woman that came down to identify him. That’s what Daddy said.”

“We went to school together.”

Jackie’s eyes lit briefly on something over my shoulder, then returned to me, bright with a shrewd intuition. “Did ya’ll date, that woman and you?”

“Yes, we did.”

“My daddy wants me to date boys that go to the community college. Not these boys around here.” She gave
me a conspiratorial wink. “But I don’t always do that. Sometimes I even go over to Busters. That’s where the local boys hang out.” She laughed. “It’s okay as long as my granddaddy don’t find out about it.” She lowered her voice slightly. “Long time ago he was the sheriff of Kingdom County.”

“I know,” I said. “But why wouldn’t you be more concerned about your father finding out about your going over to Busters?”

She laughed. “Daddy? He don’t have no control over me. Never has.”

“But your grandfather does?”

Something darkened in her eyes. “He ain’t to be crossed, my granddaddy.”

“But he’s an old man. What could he—”

“Plenty,” Jackie said. “He could do plenty. And he would too. Granddaddy can’t stand them boys over at Busters. Says they’re trash. If he found out I was dating one of them, he’d fix him good.”

Make sure his loving days were over, I thought.

She smiled brightly again. “You know, I heard my daddy and my granddaddy talking about you. About how you was helping Daddy out. My granddaddy said they wasn’t no use in having you look into it ’Cause you’d be on her side. If it turned out that feller was shot or something. And that woman done it. The one you dated. My granddaddy said you wouldn’t help out on that, ’Cause you owed her a favor.”

“I don’t think your grandfather could know anything about me,” I said. “Or any … woman.”

“Oh, I bet he could,” she said confidently, standing
her ground. “Back when he was sheriff, Granddaddy knew everything that went on in Kingdom County. He told my daddy she’d saved you a world of trouble one time and that was a favor you had to pay back.”

“I can’t imagine what he was talking about,” I said.

Chapter Fifteen

D
oc Poole was on the way to his car when I pulled into the driveway later that night, lugging the same battered bag he’d brought to my mother’s bedside during her final illness.

“Evening, Roy,” he said as I got out of my car. “I was just looking in on Jesse. He’s not doing very well, is he?”

“He rallied a little this morning,” I told him. “But it didn’t last.”

“He doesn’t want me to check on him anymore.” He slapped his hat softly against his leg. “I figured he’d come to that conclusion when he didn’t show up for his appointment this afternoon.”

“I didn’t know he had an appointment.”

“He didn’t want you to know, I guess.”

“He’s ready to die,” I said.

Doc Poole nodded. “Yeah. To tell you the truth, he
was lucky to have had the time he did, considering what they did to him when he was a boy.”

I remembered what Asa Hopper had told me before, that a young doctor had come up from Kingdom City, treated my father as best he could.

“So it was you,” I said. “You were the young doctor who came up to Waylord after the beating.”

“That was the first time I ever saw Jesse. Didn’t think he’d make it. I really didn’t.” He paused a moment, regarding me closely, then added, “You’ve had your share of trouble, too. That terrible thing with Archie.”

I suddenly saw something in the old doctor’s eyes.

“You came to see Archie that last night,” I said. “I passed you in the corridor as I was leaving.”

Doc Poole yanked a handkerchief from his back pocket and swabbed his neck. “Yeah, I looked in on him. But when I left, I didn’t have any inkling what Archie was going to do, did you? It’s hard to kill yourself that way.”

I shook my head. “When I left he told me that he’d see me in the blackberry patch.”

“That was all?” Doc Poole asked.

“Yes.”

This brief answer seemed to satisfy a gnawing question. “Well, I’d better be going. Good night, Roy. Let me know if I can be of any help.”

He’d already gone a few steps before I drew him back with a question. “Did something happen that night? Between you and Archie?”

Doc Poole hesitated a moment, an old man trained in keeping confidences. “No, nothing happened between Archie and me,” he replied. “But Sheriff Porterfield said
something strange when I left that night, and I always wondered if he mentioned it to you.” He looked oddly pained, as if something had long ago caught in his soul, a tiny hook he had not been able to shake loose. “Porter-field said that Archie hadn’t told the whole story about the murders.”

“Did he give you any idea of what the ‘whole story’ was?” I asked.

Doc Poole shook his head. “He just felt that Archie was covering up for somebody.” He looked at me solemnly, like someone giving a dreadful diagnosis. “That somebody else was involved in the murders. Somebody besides Archie. He didn’t say who he thought it was. Just somebody else.”

“Why did he think that?”

“Sheriff Porterfield doesn’t give reasons for what he thinks if he doesn’t want to. Did Archie ever talk to you, Roy? About that night?”

“Not really,” I said, still holding my brother’s frantic whisper close inside:
I won’t tell nobody, Roy. Nobody will ever know.

“So, Sheriff Porterfield never brought it up to you, this idea of someone else being involved in the killings?”

“No,” I said, remembering the times I’d run across Sheriff Porterfield in the days following the murders, the way he’d regarded me with a sense of catlike pursuit, waiting for me to make a wrong move.

“I guess he didn’t think he needed to,” Doc Poole said. “Since he knew you were with Lila.”

“Did he tell you that I was with Lila at the time of the murders?”

Doc Poole tensed slightly. “Lila told him you were
with her. When he went up to Waylord and talked to her. She never told you that?”

“No.”

“Well, Sheriff Porterfield told me that he took Lila in for questioning and that she put him straight about the whole thing. Told him that you were with her when Archie did it.”

“But he never took
me
in for questioning,” I insisted. “Why would he have taken Lila’s word for it?”

“I guess he believed her,” Doc Poole said.

“But if Porterfield didn’t believe Archie’s confession, if he believed someone else had been with him that night, then why wouldn’t he have at least questioned me about it?”

“I don’t know, Roy. I only know that he went up to Waylord the very next morning.”

I’d already gone to work at Clark’s Drugs on the morning after the murders, thinking that Archie had probably made it to Nashville by then, that he and Gloria were no doubt holed up in some small hotel or rooming house, safely away from Kingdom County, never even remotely imagining that Archie hadn’t fled from County Road, but had simply sat behind the wheel of his car, stunned and baffled, until Sheriff Porterfield had arrived, arrested him, and taken him to jail.