Into the Web (21 page)

“Were he and Horace Kellogg close friends?”

“They may have been, but I didn’t see them together all that often. I saw Wallace with Lavenia from time to time, but not much with Horace.”

“With Lavenia?”

“That’s right. She’d drop by the sheriff’s office from time to time.”

“Alone?”

“Sometimes with Gloria, but usually alone. When Gloria was a little girl, Lavenia sometimes left her there. In the office there with Wallace, I mean. She seemed to trust him.”

“I didn’t think anyone trusted Wallace Porterfield.”

Doc Poole chuckled. “Everybody trusts someone, Roy. And I guess Lavenia, for whatever reason, felt that Wallace would take care of Gloria. Which he did, I guess. When she was a child, and later too, after the murders.”

“Until he took her to Daytonville,” I pointed out. “Why did he take her there?”

“Because she was in such bad shape. He couldn’t take care of her anymore.”

“What do you mean, ‘bad shape’?”

“She kept trying to kill herself. After Archie, I mean. That’s why Porterfield took her to Daytonville. So she could be looked after full-time.”

“He had her committed?”

“Yes, he did,” Doc Poole replied. “Gloria was sixteen, Roy. A minor. Wallace was her legal guardian.”

“So he could just take her to the state asylum and leave her there?”

“Well, no, not exactly. It had to be certified. Gloria’s condition. That she was a danger to herself. State law says a doctor has to do that. But once I signed the paper, Wallace could commit her.”

“You certified Gloria?”

Doc Poole was silent a moment. Then, softly, he said, “Yes.”

“Just on Porterfield’s recommendation?”

“Not on that alone, no. But I had very much in mind the fact that Archie had killed himself not long before. Another young person dead, I didn’t want that. There were already too many people dead in this thing. I sure didn’t want Gloria added to the list.”

“So she was definitely suicidal?”

“Wallace said she was,” Doc Poole answered. “He keeps a gun cabinet in his living room. Full of pistols, rifles. Must have been twenty or thirty guns. He showed me where Gloria had tried to break into the cabinet. Desperate to get her hands on a gun. To use on herself, that’s what Wallace said. She wanted to ‘be with that boy,’ as he put it.”

“Did you examine Gloria?”

“Of course I did,” Doc Poole answered. “But to tell you the truth, there wasn’t much to see when it came to Gloria. The whole time I tried to talk to her, she just sat at the dining room table there in Wallace’s house. Head down. Hands in her lap. Pretty much out of it, as far as I could determine.”

“Did she say anything?”

“I asked her a few questions. I’d never been asked to certify anybody before, and I figured that once she was in Daytonville, the people there would take a closer look at her. Professional people.” He looked at me pointedly, so that I knew he was now coming to the real reason he’d acted so quickly in regard to Gloria’s commitment. “The fact is, Gloria didn’t need to be living in that house with Wallace Porterfield.”

“Why?”

He seemed reluctant to answer, but after a moment his hesitancy was overcome, it seemed to me, by the demands of a larger truth. “Porterfield had a reputation, Roy. For liking … young girls. Teenage girls.” He seemed vaguely embarrassed by the details. “He’d gotten a few in the family way. Usually poor girls, or girls who didn’t have daddies or grown-up brothers to protect them. That’s the type Wallace went after. Girls with relatives or boyfriends in trouble with the law. I never got the idea that he … did anything to Gloria, but I figured it was better to get her away from him. I mean, with his wife dead and Lonnie in the army, it was just the two of them in that house.”

“So you signed the commitment papers.”

“Yes,” Doc Poole answered. “And Wallace took her
right then.” The old doctor appeared to see again what he’d seen that day, Porterfield slowly leading Gloria Kellogg to his car, placing her inside it, driving away. “Just put her in his patrol car and drove her to Daytonville.”

“Did you ever see Gloria again?”

“One time,” Doc Poole answered. “I drove up to Daytonville about two weeks later. She was in a bare room. Just a bed. Dressed in a hospital gown. She was pretty out of it. Drugged up, I think.”

“How long did she stay there?”

“Maybe a month or so. I got a letter from Daytonville. It said that she’d been released.”

“Released? To whom?”

“A woman. I don’t remember her name, but they’d know who she was, the people over in Daytonville. You could go over and ask them about it.”

“But would they be willing to tell me who she was?”

“Normally, no. But we’ll work around that.”

“How?”

Doc Poole smiled the smile of one who’d spent his life skirting bureaucratic hurdles. “I could tell them that you’re working for me, the county coroner. That you’re checking into something.”

I looked at him doubtfully. “Into what?”

“Into what you really are looking into, Roy,” Doc Poole replied. “An old murder case.”

“Just got shed of her,” my father said later that evening as we sat together at the supper table. The food on his plate was untouched. “Probably wasn’t nothing wrong
with Gloria ’cept Porterfield needed to get rid of her. So he brung her over to Daytonvile and just left her to rot.”

“But she really may have needed professional help, Dad,” I countered. “It was Doc Poole who signed the papers, remember?”

This made no chink in the armor of my father’s certainty.

“Just shipped her off when he was done with her,” he insisted. “Shipped her off and kept it a secret. Locked her up so nobody would know where she was.”

“People knew where Gloria was. It was in the paper, Dad. That she was in Daytonville.”

“Didn’t want nobody to know what he’d done,” my father said as if he hadn’t heard me, though I knew he had. “Must of had people down there working for him.”

“Down where?”

“In the nuthouse,” my father answered. “Must have had somebody down there helping him out.” He raised an empty fork, then lowered it. His eyes cut over to me. “Porterfield never did nothing without he thought it through first. So they had to be somebody in on it down there.”

“In on what?”

“Whatever he was fixing to do,” my father exclaimed. He appeared irritated with my denseness, the fact that the conspiracy was not as clear to me as it was to him. “Whatever he had to do to keep it all for hisself, Roy. Everything that would have gone to Horace Kellogg’s daughter.”

I smiled, but only as a way of covering the alarm I felt. “I think you’re getting a little ahead of yourself, Dad,” I said cautiously. “You don’t have any real evidence
that Wallace Porterfield was trying to get control of Gloria’s inheritance.”

My father ignited. “Well, he sold off the house, didn’t he? That big old house and everything in it?” He gave a bitter snort. “Everybody figured he was doing it for Gloria. Selling it all, giving her the money. But he was doing it for hisself. And with Gloria locked up at Daytonville, he had a free hand. Wasn’t nobody to stop him after that. Not once Gloria was out of the way.”

“But she wasn’t out of the way,” I countered. “She was in Daytonville. But even then, she wasn’t there for long. If Porterfield had really wanted Gloria out of the way, wouldn’t he have kept her in Daytonville instead of allowing her to be released?”

“Released to some woman,” my father said, repeating what I’d told him a few minutes before.

“That’s right.”

“Then that there woman must have been the one that was in on what Porterfield was up to,” my father said triumphantly.

“There’s no evidence Porterfield was up to anything, Dad.” I sat back, stared at him, at the ire flashing in his eyes. “You hate Wallace Porterfield more than you ever hated anybody, don’t you?”

He pushed his plate away, plucked a cigarette from the pack in his pocket. “He ain’t fit to live, you ask me.” He lit the cigarette and took a long draw, his gaunt face ringed in wisps of feathery smoke. “We got to find out what Porterfield done to Horace Kellogg’s daughter. We got to go over to Daytonville and find out.” He crushed the cigarette into the mound of mashed potatoes that
rested, uneaten, on his plate. “I got at least that much left in me. The strength for one last trip.”

I might have argued that he didn’t, that the yellow had deepened in his eyes, that he no longer ate enough to sustain himself, that he was now in the last stage of his disease. I might have encouraged him to withdraw from this futile battle, seek, in the final days of his life, whatever serenity might be possible. But watching him at that moment, the way his eyes darted about, the twitching in his hands, I realized that it was not serenity my father longed for. It was the fire and sword of battle, the high hope of facing Wallace Porterfield as he had so many years before, repeating the words he’d blurted out then,
You’re a liar. And a thief.

Chapter Twenty-Two

A
nd so, as we set out for Daytonville, I knew that this final trip was in some sense metaphorical, a last voyage taken with my father across the charred landscape of his youth. I looked at his crooked hands, smelled the odor of cigarettes in his skin and hair, and sensed the brutal, smoldering core of him, the wrong he’d suffered, distant and unrightable, but which he now sought beyond all reason to avenge. To get Wallace Porterfield was his only goal, the one blaze that still burned in him, and for which he seemed perfectly willing to devote whatever energy was left in him, the flame of retribution so greedy and voracious, so much the firestorm that propelled him, that I took it for the only one.

“I been thinking about something you told me,” he said as we turned onto Route 6, the road that would finally wind its way through the mountains, then across a narrow valley, and terminate in Daytonville.

“What’s that?”

“Porterfield that night,” my father answered. “In Horace Kellogg’s house. Was he in there a long time? By hisself, I mean. Before Doc Poole come by?”

“About thirty minutes, I guess,” I said, trying to recall what Porterfield had written in his report.

“Thirty minutes,” my father mused. “Wonder what he was doing all that time.”

“It could have been anything, Dad. He went through the whole house, I imagine. And Gloria was in a terrible state. He probably spent a little time trying to calm her down before he called Doc Poole.”

“Left Archie settin’ outside in his car all that time. Handcuffed and just settin’ there.” He looked at me. “Never even called for Charlie Groom. That deputy he had back then. Don’t that seem peculiar? Here he is, Sheriff Wallace Porterfield with two dead bodies, a girl clear out of her mind, and the guy that did the killing settin’ in a car, and he don’t call for no help. Don’t call nobody for thirty minutes. Why not, Roy?” Before I could answer, he added, “Because he didn’t want nobody in that house with him, that’s why. Because he was up to something.”

“Up to what?”

My father seemed annoyed by the question. “All I know is, Porterfield didn’t call his deputy, and that seems mighty peculiar to me.”

“Maybe his deputy was sick,” I offered. “Or maybe he
was out of town. You’d have to ask this Charlie Groom if you—”

“Charlie Groom’s been dead ten years,” he said.

“Were there any other deputies?”

“Not steady ones. If Porterfield needed help, he’d just call a guy in and deputize him. Like Lonnie done you, sending you after Lila. Getting you to help him find dirt on her.”

“What makes you think he was trying to find dirt on Lila?”

“Maybe ’cause he wanted her for hisself,” my father answered with a terrible certainty that he was right, that the Porterfields of Kingdom County sat on the satanic throne, pouring ruin into the cup from which all others drank. “Lila wouldn’t pay Lonnie no mind. Went with you instead. So Lonnie wanted to get even with her. That’s why he said that to her on the road. ’Cause he wanted to hurt her and make you look small.”

And he had done that, I thought with a terrible sense that I’d fallen into the trap Lonnie Porterfield had set for me. Suddenly I found myself imagining life in the same way as my father imagined it, an evil agency sleepless at its core, forever plotting schemes of dark entrapment. It was not a vision of things I wanted to accept.

“I don’t think Lonnie was ever interested in Lila,” I said.

“ ’Course he was,” my father countered. “Lonnie knew you was aiming to marry Lila and he was jealous of that. That’s why he yelled at her that night with you right beside her. So she’d have second thoughts.”

There was no point in arguing the matter, so I said, “Well, one thing’s for sure. I never had any second
thoughts. Not about Lila. I just wanted to marry her and raise a family. That’s all I wanted.”

“I didn’t know that, Roy,” my father said. “That you wanted that more than anything.”

“What did you think I wanted?”

“To get away,” he answered. “Seemed like that was always on your mind. Getting away from … me.”

I understood then how personally my father had taken my determination to leave Kingdom County, and thus how during all the time he’d watched me plot the route, he must have thought of it as a flight from himself.

“It wasn’t anything against you,” I said. “My needing to leave here.”

My father nodded. “Didn’t know that,” was all he said.

We arrived at Daytonville State Asylum at just after one in the afternoon. By then my father looked considerably more weary than he had at the beginning of the trip. The long flight of stairs that led from the street to the building’s high wooden entrance seemed beyond his power.

“I’d better just sit here in the shade,” he said after I’d brought the car to a halt beneath a large oak. “You go on in.”

Doc Poole had called ahead, and so I was quickly ushered into the office of Dr. William Spencer, who served, according to the sign posted on the door, as the asylum’s administrative director.

Spencer was a short, middle-aged man with a rounded belly that spilled over the front of his trousers.
He wore a light serge suit with the jacket unbuttoned, his pants held up by wide black suspenders. The degrees that hung from the wall behind his desk made it clear that he’d had a formidable education, medical school at Tulane, special training in psychiatry at Vanderbilt, and more postgraduate work at Emory in Atlanta. His tone was predictably professional and matter-of-fact.