Into the Web (7 page)

“I don’t know,” I answered.

He looked at me doubtfully. “You ain’t got no idea at all?”

“There was a gun next to him. And there was blood on his face and mouth.”

He suddenly grew very still. “Lila know him?”

“I suppose she did. He lived on her land.”

“They wasn’t related, was they?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then how come you went up to her house?” “That was Lonnie’s idea.”

The mention of his name seemed to fill my father’s mind with an odd suspicion. “What’d he say? About going up to Lila’s house?”

“Just that Spivey lived alone. On Lila’s land and so she—”

“-Must have something to do with that feller being dead.”

I shook my head. “Lonnie didn’t give any indication of—”

“Snooping after dirt,” my father interrupted. “His old man was always up in Waylord doing the same thing. Snooping for dirt on people just like Lonnie’s trying to get dirt on Lila.”

“Why would Lonnie want to ‘get dirt’ on Lila?” I asked.

“Them Porterfields don’t need a reason to go after somebody.”

“He was just doing his job, Dad,” I said, eager to drop
the subject and thereby sidestep the enmity that seemed the very bedrock of my father’s life.

“Lonnie’s going after Lila,” my father said with absolute certainty. “You better go see Lila. Let her know what Porterfield’s up to.”

“You don’t have any evidence that Lonnie’s up to anything,” I reminded him.

“Maybe so, Roy, but it wouldn’t hurt, you going up to have a word with Lila.”

“What’s on your mind, Dad? What’s this business of me going up to see Lila all about?”

He appeared to search for a lie into which he could retreat but found none, and so perhaps answered with the truth. “I just figured maybe you two could start up again. You’d like to do that, wouldn’t you, Roy? I mean, you ain’t never really give up on her, have you?”

What had never ceased to amaze me was how right my father could be, how clearly he could see the mark, hit it with a word or look. He had read a thought I’d barely perceived myself, that I’d never wholly given up on Lila. But I’d also learned that fruitless love is just another added ache, and so I’d learned to think of Lila like a character in a book, distant and unreal. In an instant, my father had seen all of that, how carefully I had worked to rid myself of Lila, and how fully I had failed to do it.

“It ain’t too late for you or her to … get together,” he said.

“Yes, it is, Dad. I’m not going to get involved with Lila Cutler. I’m not going to marry her somewhere down the line. I’m going to teach school in California,
live alone in a small apartment. That’s my future. I know you don’t like it, but you might as well accept it.”

My father’s eyes lowered slightly, and he released a soft breath. “Okay,” he said. “I just figured she probably still loved you, that’s all. In that way, I mean, that you do just once.”

“I’m not sure she ever loved me like that.”

“Seemed to,” my father said. “From the way she looked at you.”

He meant the night I’d brought her to meet him, the only time he’d ever seen us together.

“Bet she cried her eyes out when you left for college,” he added now.

“Why can’t you let this go, Dad? About Lila and me.”

He looked vaguely insulted by my question. “Because I’m your father, and it’s my job to make a difference. To maybe say that you don’t have to live the way you do, Roy. That maybe it ain’t too late for you and Lila to—”

“Why are you so intent on Lila being the one I should marry, the mother of my children, and all that?”

“ ’Cause I know she’d be a good one. Wife and mother. Comes from good stock.”

“Good stock? She’s not a heifer, Dad.”

“Don’t answer me in that smart way, Roy.”

“You know the point I’m making.”

“Well, here’s
my
point,” my father said. “I know Lila comes from good folks. ’Cause I knew her mother back in the old days. Betty Cutler. She was the best friend of another girl I knew. Girl I used to squire around a little. Deidre, her name was. Deidre Warren. And, like I said, Betty was her best friend. Always together, them two.
People used to say it like it was one name, like they was just one person. ‘Here comes Betty-and-Deidre,’ they’d say. And sure enough, there they’d be. Betty-and-Deidre out for a stroll. Betty-and-Deidre having ice cream at the company store.”

“So this was when you worked at the mine?”

“That’s right. Betty was a miner’s daughter. A miner I worked with back then. Harry was his name. Big feller. Cussed all the time.” His eyes lowered to his hands again, the mangled fingers that he couldn’t shape into a fist. “When you started going up to see Lila, I knew who she was. Knew she was Betty Cutler’s girl. From good stock, like I said. Salt of the earth.” He nursed his thoughts briefly, then added, “I guess this thing with Spivey, him living on Lila’s land, I guess that brought it all back. Them old days up in Waylord.”

During the long summer of our courtship, he’d never said a single word against Lila. The reason had always seemed obvious to me. Lila was a girl from the hills, from fabled Waylord, a girl whose family name my father had instantly recognized. A pretty girl. A smart, lively girl. From the first glimpse of her, he’d given every evidence of being pleased to see her, even honored by the fact that I’d presented her to him, though even then he might well have guessed why I’d done it. That it had come from my need to show him that I’d won a girl more beautiful than my mother had ever been, a smarter girl, more ambitious. I’d waved Lila like a red cape in my father’s face.
Take that
, I’d thought as I’d drawn Lila beneath my arm,
Take that, old man.

She’d worn a dark green dress that night, her long
hair falling to her shoulders. My father had risen from his chair to greet her.

“So you’re Lila,” he said. He drew the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, slapped a bit of tobacco from his taut belly. “Excuse my appearance. I wasn’t expecting Roy to bring nobody by.”

“That’s okay, Mr. Slater,” Lila said gently.

“You’re mighty pretty.” His gaze was oddly wistful.

“Thank you, sir.”

A light burned softly behind his eyes. “Take care of her, Roy. You only get one chance.”

“He seemed nice,” Lila said later.

Even as she’d uttered the word, I’d seen his shadow like a stain on the grass as he’d handed Archie the pistol, Scooter barking madly now, twisting about, his tail wagging furiously, a memory that had sent a poison through my nerves.

And so I’d told Lila the story of how, several years before, Archie and I had run away, then related the gruesome details of what my father had done about it, the terrible punishment he had devised. “Nice?” I’d repeated starkly at the end of it. “Believe me, Lila, you don’t know him.”

Nor had I ever known him either, I thought now, watching as he withdrew back into himself, lighting his first cigarette of the day, waving out the match.

“Leave me be now,” he said.

I nodded and left the room, and with it the old mystery of my father, the coal-black stone from which he had been formed.

Chapter Six

I
was sitting in the living room, trying to close out the steady drone of the television in my father’s bedroom while I read one of the books I’d brought with me from California, when the phone rang.

I knew that my father would make no effort to answer it, and so I walked into the living room and answered it myself.

“Morning, Roy.”

“Morning, Lonnie.”

“Your daddy get through the night okay?”

“Some dog kept him up.”

I could tell by Lonnie’s voice that he hadn’t called to check on my father. Something else was on his mind.

“Listen, Roy,” he said, “I’m at my office here in Kingdom City. I got Lila Cutler down here.”

I pictured her as she’d looked the last time I’d seen
her, in that white dress with the long blue sash, eighteen years old, with dark red hair that hung over her shoulders, a crinkle in her nose when she smiled.

“She’s not saying much,” Lonnie went on. “Won’t tell me anything about Clayton. That’s why I’m calling. I thought you might drop by this morning, talk to her a little bit.”

Before I could protest, he added, “Look, Roy, I let something slip. To Lila, I mean. When I was talking to her this morning. I let slip that you were back in Kingdom County. When I told her the story about Ezra finding the body, then going up to Jessup Creek. It just slipped out that you happened to come along. And the thing is, it had an effect on her.”

“Lonnie, I—”

“No harm in you coming by, right? Talking to her?”

I could have gotten out of it, simply told Lonnie that too much time had passed, but something fired in me, perhaps no more than the odd, inexplicable need we sometimes feel to open that book we’d long ago shoved into a corner of the closet, gaze at that one photograph again.

“All right,” I said, giving no hint of what had actually determined my decision.

“Thanks, Roy. See you in a few minutes.”

My father gave every intention of being entirely captured by an episode of
Petticoat Junction
when I walked into his room.

“I’m going out for a while,” I told him.

His eyes stayed fixed on the screen.

“You need anything before I go?”

His gaze fell to his hands. His fingers uncurled, then curled again. “Listen here, Roy,” he muttered. “I’d like for you to stay gone awhile. I just want to be by myself.”

“All right, Dad. If you’re sure you won’t need me.”

“Dead sure,” he said.

Though it served as the county seat, Kingdom City was little more than a street along which shops and offices had been built, most of plain red brick. There was a barbershop complete with a twirling barber pole, the only sign in town that actually moved. The rest were made of tin or wood, with a smattering of pink or pale blue neon. Mr. Clark still had the drugstore I’d worked in as a boy, but Billings Hardware, where Archie had worked, sorting nails, stacking paint, mopping the floor, was now in other hands. I could still recall Mr. Billings’s face in the days following Archie’s arrest, how baffled he’d looked that the boy who’d worked for him, meekly obeyed a thousand petty orders, could explode so suddenly.

But it wasn’t Archie I thought about that morning. It was Lila as I remembered her, a girl who’d seemed to take life as a dare.

You don’t believe me, Roy? You don’t believe I’ll do it?

At first I’d thought her reckless, but it was really a fierce certainty that she could triumph over anything that drove her forward. I couldn’t help but wonder what the woman would be like now.

Lonnie was outside his office when I arrived, propped back in a metal folding chair, a red Coca-Cola machine humming softly at his right. His cruiser stood freshly polished and gleaming a few feet away, the words “Sheriff Only” stenciled in bright yellow on the asphalt pavement beneath its rear bumper.

“I should be doing some paperwork, but it’s just too damned hot inside,” he said as I came toward him. “I been trying to get the county to buy me an air conditioner, but they won’t do it.” He tipped forward in his chair. “Thanks for coming in, Roy. I appreciate it. I really do.”

“I doubt I can be of much help.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Lonnie said. He grinned. “Seemed to me like I caught a little spark there, buddy. A little spark still burning for you.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “Where is she?”

“First cell on your right.”

“She’s in the jail?”

Lonnie chuckled. “No, ’course not. I mean, she is, but the cell’s not locked. Just a place for her to sit until she goes back home.”

“So she can go home anytime she wants?”

“Well … no … not exactly. It’s a protective-custody sort of thing. ’Cause she wouldn’t say anything. About Spivey, I mean. She identified the body, but she wouldn’t answer any questions about him. Not one. And no matter how you look at it, Clayton Spivey died under mysterious circumstances, which means that until Doc
Poole takes a close look at the body, I got to assume there could have been foul play.”

“What does any of this have to do with keeping Lila in a jail cell?”

“Like I told you, Roy, it’s not locked. Of course, if you prefer, I could arrest her.”

“For what?”

“Suspicious behavior.”

“That’s not a charge, and you know it.”

“It’d stick long enough for me to find a better one if I needed to.” He winked. “I’d just tell Judge Crowe I think it’s pretty damn suspicious. This fellow found dead in the woods. A man that lived on her land.”

“And only that,” I said. “A tenant. With no other connection.”

“Anyway, him dead in the woods and she won’t have anything to do with me. A duly constituted authority. Hell, all I got to do is tell the judge she’s not cooperating.”

There was no point in arguing about it. Nothing had really changed in Kingdom County. Lonnie ran things in the same way his father had run them before him, with a cavalier certainty that he’d be protected by the old chain of command that flowed from the courthouse to the governor’s mansion in one long, unbroken line of cronyism.

“Is Lila expecting me?” I asked.

“Nope,” Lonnie answered. “You’ll be a big surprise.”

But from the expression on Lila’s face, my sudden appearance was far more than a surprise. She looked astonished, as if she’d long ago dismissed me from her mind.

“Roy,” she said quietly.

“Hello, Lila.”

She sat on a metal cot covered by a thin striped mattress, her hands in her lap. Her hair had darkened but still threw off fiery tints. There were lines now at the corners of her eyes, and fainter ones crisscrossed her brow, but otherwise she appeared remarkably unchanged, no more than a blink away from the Highland beauty she’d been.

The cell door was open. I stepped inside.

“This is ridiculous,” I told her. “Lonnie having you sit back here. Probably illegal too.”

She gave a quick laugh. “He’s trying to scare me. But it won’t work.” She smiled softly. “Lonnie told me you’d come back home,” she said. Her gaze was steady, yet oddly probing. “He said you were a friend of his.”