Into the Web (22 page)

I flipped through the file until I came to the release form. “In the place marked ‘Relationship,’ somebody wrote ‘Friend.’”

“Then presumably Miss Wilde was a friend of Gloria’s.”

“The file also says that she took Gloria to her own home,” I added. “In Pittsville. Was she young? Old?”

“Young,” Spencer answered immediately. “In her twenties, I’d say. Something like that. She was certainly a good deal younger than Sheriff Porterfield.”

“Do you remember anything else about her?”

“No. It was Porterfield who left a vivid impression. Partly his size, I suppose, but his authority too. He seemed in charge of everything. The woman was merely someone who worked for him. Or at least, that was the
impression I got. That she worked for him. Not professionally. Not in the sheriff’s department. But privately. In some low capacity.”

“Low capacity?”

“Well, she wasn’t dressed like a professional person. Rather gaudy, as I recall. Big plastic earrings. That sort of thing.” Spencer laughed. “Of course, she may not have been wearing plastic earrings at all, but she gave off that sort of impression. So this morning, when I read in Gloria’s file that the woman was from Pittsville, it didn’t surprise me.”

“What do you mean?”

“They have a women’s prison there,” Spencer said. “Mavis Wilde struck me as the sort of person who could easily have been familiar with the ‘inner workings’ of a place like Pittsville.”

“She was in on it, that woman,” my father snarled when I described the same scene to him a few minutes later. “Porterfield probably give her part of what he stole from Gloria.” His eyes flared with contempt. “Bought and sold, that woman. Bought and sold by Porterfield.”

The rabid nature of his response-his certainty that Mavis Wilde could be nothing more than one of Wallace Porterfield’s evil minions-gave no room for argument, so I offered none, but waited, certain that if I kept quiet, he would go on to another issue.

“It’s the Haldol that’s the point, if you ask me,” he blurted out after a moment. “That’s the reason Porterfield brought that girl all the way over here. To get her out of the way. Drug her up. So he could get his hands
on everything she had and people wouldn’t know what he was up to.”

He was now more convinced than ever that Wallace Porterfield had somehow profited from the murders of Horace and Lavenia Kellogg, reaped advantage from the very act that had destroyed his son, the fire burning so hot in him, he seemed almost entirely consumed by it.

“Porterfield was always grabbing for things,” he added. “Back in Waylord, he’d have some old shack condemned, drive the people out of it, then buy it hisself.” His face jerked into a scowl. “It’s in Porterfield’s blood to grab things. But this time it wasn’t just some old shack in the hills. It was a big, fine house. Must have set Porterfield’s mouth to watering.”

“The trouble is,” I reminded him gently, “everything Horace Kellogg had went to Gloria.”

“So he had that doctor drug her up,” my father said. “Had him fix it so Gloria couldn’t never think for herself. That way he could grab everything. Do it all legal too. Just say he had to take over ’cause Gloria didn’t have no sense.”

In his rage, my father seemed half mad now, half insane with his need to exact revenge on Wallace Porter-field. And yet, as I had to admit, there was reason in what he said, and logic too, a fearsome plausibility at every stage of the argument, so that in the slanted light I could see it all as my father saw it, Porterfield’s evil purpose carefully calculated and coldly carried out. All I had to do was imagine Porterfield as my father did, a man beyond human dimension, an evildoer of gargantuan appetite, with his pistol and his badge fully arrayed
in diabolical majesty, a conscienceless destroyer of the poor, the weak, all the malignancy of man festering in his vile heart.

Then, as if to stretch Porterfield’s imperial malice to the breaking point, my father said, “You know, it could be Archie never left his car, Roy.”

I stared at him, stunned.

“Maybe it was Porterfield in that house. Doing it all hisself. The murders. Ain’t nothing Porterfield wouldn’t do if they was something he wanted.”

“But what about the gun?” I reminded him, for the first time actually unnerved by my father’s extremity, the perilous swamp of fantasy into which he had now sunk. “Archie brought that gun, and it was the murder weapon.”

“How do you know for sure it was really that gun that done it?”

To my surprise, I had to admit that I didn’t know for sure that my father’s gun had been the weapon used that night.

My father pounced. “See what I mean?” he demanded. “We just took it for the truth. Everything Porterfield said.”

“But Archie said some things too, Dad. He confessed, remember? And not just to Porterfield. To me.”

“Could have been Archie got scared and just up and said them things,” he said. “Maybe he would have took it back. Maybe that’s why …” His eyes widened. “Maybe that’s why he’s dead, Roy, ’cause he was about to take it all back.”

The mad flame leapt again, hot and wild. “You got to
find Gloria, Roy,” he declared with the insane certainty of one who could no longer entertain a separate reality, nor give the slightest credence to a world other than the one smoldering in his mind. “She’s the only living witness. You got to find her and make her tell the truth.”

I
waited until I’d heard the last of his movements behind the door, the final agitated twist and turn of his body in the tangled sheets, then the long, heavy exhalation of breath that signaled that he’d passed into unconsciousness at last. Then I crept to where the telephone rested on a small wooden table in the living room and called Doc Poole.

“Something wrong, Roy? You sound—”

“It’s my father, he’s—”

“I’ll be right over.”

“No, wait,” I said hastily. “It’s not physical exactly. Well, maybe it is, I don’t know. That’s why I’m calling, I guess.”

“What is it, Roy? What’s the matter with Jesse?” “He seems … crazy.”

From the sound of his voice, and the steady nature of
his response, this did not appear to surprise Doc Poole in the least.

“What’s he doing? Tell me exactly.”

“He’s got this idea in his head. Lots of ideas, really, but they’re all connected to one thing. He’s absolutely certain that Porterfield is behind everything. The Kellogg murders. Archie’s suicide. Gloria’s institutionalization.” I waited for a response, then added, “It’s my fault. I should never have started looking into it.”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” Doc Poole assured me. “It’s dementia. He could have had a little stroke.”

“What can I do?” I asked, and heard the helplessness in my voice.

“Not much, unless you want to … calm him down.”

“I don’t want to drug him, Doc. These are the last days of his life. I want him to live them … aware.”

“Then you’ll just have to play along with him, Roy,” Doc Poole said. “You could argue with him, but it wouldn’t do any good. He’d fight you tooth and nail, and after a while you two probably wouldn’t even be speaking to each other again. So you just have to climb into his mind. Play along with whatever crazy stuff he comes up with.”

I tried to do exactly that as I lay sleepless in bed a few hours later. I tried to climb into my father’s mind, search through it as if it were the charred ruin of a devastated house. I went over all his theories about what Wallace Porterfield had done, judged each as utterly unproved, even beyond proof. And the more I weighed the facts, the more obvious it became that the facts themselves did not matter to my father. But this truth only led to a final question: How would I be measured as a son if I
didn’t join my father in this doomed quest to bring Wallace Porterfield to his knees?

I knocked softly at his door, carried the breakfast I’d prepared into him, nothing more than a single hard-boiled egg and black coffee, all he could get down.

“I’ve decided to do it,” I told him as I set the tray on his lap.

He stared listlessly at the egg and coffee. His hand moved toward neither one.

“I’m going to look for Gloria.”

He nodded wearily, the exertions of the day before now taking a terrible toll upon whatever reserves of strength he still possessed. “You got to find her, Roy,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “She knows what Porterfield done.”

“If he did anything,” I cautioned in a final hesitation before I took the plunge.

The old eyes leapt toward me. “Oh, he done something, all right. And he has to pay for what he done.” His half-curled fingers shook in the boiling air between us. “Otherwise … otherwise there ain’t …” He stared at me pleadingly. “Otherwise, they ain’t no use, Roy.” His head sank. His voice lowered. “No use to nothing on this earth.”

That was when I saw it plainly, the true quest of my father. I had been wrong. It wasn’t revenge he sought. It was
meaning.
Wallace Porterfield had to be guilty of something, and he had to be punished for it, not because my father wanted to avenge himself, but because he needed, powerfully and achingly, for the world to make sense.

And so I said, “I have a plan.”

My father lifted his head slowly.

“For finding Gloria. I got it from some detective novel I read years ago. I’m not sure it’ll work in real life, but there’s no harm in trying it.”

I waited for an response, but none came. Instead, my father drew in a long, heavy breath.

“I’m going to call Wallace Porterfield, and when he answers, I’m going to whisper a name. Mavis Wilde. Then I’m going to drive to Porterfield’s house and see if he gets in that big Lincoln of his.”

“Follow him if he does?” my father asked.

I nodded. “In the hope that he’ll lead me right to Mavis Wilde. From her, maybe I can get to Horace Kellogg’s daughter.”

My father nodded approvingly, though I’m sure he could see the same gigantic holes in the plan that were completely apparent to me. Porterfield could do nothing. Or he could simply call Mavis Wilde on the telephone. After so many years he might not even recognize her name.

“It may not work, of course,” I admitted as I rose and headed for the phone.

But, to my astonishment, it did.

The drive was almost seventy miles, and Porterfield drove it slowly through the rain, with an old man’s caution. From time to time he would nod to an approaching car, or wave to someone he recognized in one of the stunted towns through which we passed. But he never stopped, never veered, and in that steady, determined
movement, I sensed an equally steady and determined purpose, so that I grew increasingly confident that the old sheriff was in fact leading me to Mavis Wilde, and that in finding her I would discover not only Porterfield’s crime, but something dark at the heart of my family’s life, the wellspring of our undoing-my father’s, Archie’s, mine-a place whose existence was curiously mirrored by where Porterfield led me, deeper and deeper into the woods, almost, it seemed to me, into a forest primeval.

Another twenty minutes passed before Porterfield finally turned into a muddy driveway, then brought his car to a halt before a small wooden house, remote and desolate, so nearly engulfed by the surrounding woods it seemed itself a kind of weed.

I swept past the house, drove on a few hundred yards, then turned back and drew close enough to keep an eye on it through a gap in the trees.

The Lincoln rested like a gleaming stone in front of the house. I could see Porterfield sitting behind the wheel, one hand in his lap, the other rising and falling rhythmically as he brought a cigarette to his mouth then drew it away again. I watched the gray smoke curl out of the open window, Porterfield nearly motionless, slouched in a heaviness that struck me as curiously melancholy, and which gave him the appearance of a man who in some deeply fundamental way was no friend to himself.

I don’t know exactly how long I waited, watching trails of rain streak down the windshield, only that I had nearly come to the conclusion that Porterfield had driven to this remote place for no better reason than to
sit inside his big black car, smoking silently, adrift in ancient fears, as I imagined, an old lawman doomed to remain on stakeout forever, and that none of it, not one inch of the long drive from Kingdom City, had had anything to do with my phone call or the name I’d pronounced with a sinister whisper in Porterfield’s ear.

Then a muddy blue sedan suddenly appeared in the distance. It slowed as it neared the driveway, then made a wide turn. As it turned, I saw a woman behind the wheel, her face obscured by rain and fog. She drove up beside Porterfield and got out. I leaned forward, tried to determine if this could be the vulgar, dark-haired woman Dr. Spencer had glimpsed in the lobby at Daytonville, but her head was covered by a bloodred hat, her body by a yellow slicker. And so I could make out nothing about her except that she walked through the sheeting rain with a determined stride, giving no notice to the old white dog that suddenly pranced up beside her, then tagged behind for a few feet before drifting away again. Instead, she continued on until she reached the passenger door of Porterfield’s car, opened it, and got inside.

I waited, able to see no more than faint smudges behind the Lincoln’s foggy windows, the occasional curl of smoke that swept up from the driver’s side when a window was cracked to let it out.

A few minutes later, the passenger door opened again. The woman emerged from the car, bent against the rain. She gave a quick nod, then slammed the door. Stepping back, she watched, her back to me, as Porter-field pulled away.

I waited until the Lincoln’s red taillights had disappeared into the mist before I turned into the driveway. I heard my father’s voice in my mind,
Oh he done something, all right
, and for the first time I believed him, believed that through the years Wallace Porterfield and Mavis Wilde had been partners in a criminal collusion, hiding Gloria Kellogg from the world, along with all she must have known about what really happened after my brother brought his battered old Ford to a halt behind the tall dark hedge.

I’d completely embraced the reality of their conspiracy by the time I reached the door of the cabin, accepted it fully, completely, and with the kind of certainty we can feel only when we have come to believe that we will indeed confront the secret scheme that steals our happiness away, make it deal a few last cards face up.