Into the Web (7 page)

“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.

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.

“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.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I told her. “I just happened to be over at his house when we heard about Clayton Spivey.”

She nodded. “I identified him this morning.”

“I know,” I told her. “And Lonnie should have let you go after that. There’s no reason you should be—”

“He can’t hold me, I know that,” Lila said firmly. “Why are you here, Roy? Back in Kingdom County?”

“My father’s dying,” I answered. “I’ve come back to take care of him until it’s over.”

“Did you bring your family with you?”

“I don’t have a family.”

Shadows flitted behind her eyes. “I’ve thought of you a lot over the years.”

I smiled. “We had some good times, didn’t we?”

A vision formed in my mind. It was not just of myself
and Lila, but of Archie too, and Gloria, all of us sitting at one of the little concrete picnic tables along the edge of the old rock quarry, Archie so moonstruck, so happy to be loved, he’d seemed almost to float in the warm spring air. Then it was only Archie I saw, sitting in his cell, reaching for my hand,
I ain’t told the sheriff nothing, Roy, and I ain’t going to.

Her gaze darkened mysteriously, a storm cloud in her mind. “You knew what you wanted.”

And what I’d wanted more than anything was Lila. Watching her now, I could see my own younger self in her eyes, the valley boy who’d spotted her at a dance, summoned the courage to approach her.

She drew in a long breath, and the dark cloud disappeared. “So, you finished college and stayed in California.”

“A little town in the northern part of the state,” I told her. “I teach at a school there.”

“Good for you,” Lila said. Her eyes lowered to her hands, then rose again. “Well, thanks for dropping by, Roy.”

I knew that I was being dismissed, but I held my place at the entrance to the cell. “Lonnie tells me you’re not saying much, Lila. About Clayton, I mean.”

Her voice chilled. “I say as much as I want to say.”

“Lonnie’s just doing his job, you know. Just trying to find out a few things so that—”

“He’s pretending he thinks Clayton Spivey was murdered,” Lila interrupted sharply. “But I know better than that. Clayton had been sick for years. And lately he’d gotten a lot worse.”

“Well, there was a gun near the body,” I said, trying to
put the best light on my detective-story understanding of Lonnie’s tactics. “And so until Doc Poole can take a look, he has to assume that—”

“I came down to identify the body,” Lila said, the fire of her youth suddenly returning. “I did it out of respect for Clayton. And it’s all I’m going to do. I’m not at the beck and call of Lonnie Porterfield, and I never will be.” She gazed at me in the way she had as a girl, eyes that peeled me back layer by layer. “I’m not going to play by Lonnie Porterfield’s rules.”

“I can see that.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I don’t want to talk to Lonnie or about Lonnie.”

With that, it was clear she’d closed the subject, and I half expected her to rise, stride out of the cell and through Lonnie’s office, but she remained in place, her face brightening somewhat, as if hit by a ray of light.

“Remember that day at Taylor’s Gorge?” she asked.

I saw her leap up from the blanket we’d spread across the ground.

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

“Remember what we did?”

She was racing now, at full speed, toward the overhanging cliff, a gray wall that rose above the sparkling water.

“Yes, I remember.”

I’d run after her, watching, amazed, as she hurtled forward, sleek as a deer over the forest floor, then out into the bright light that hung in a blinding curtain over the cliff’s rocky ledge.

“Do you know what the best part was?” Lila asked.

oShe’d never slowed, never for an instant, but had dove out into the glittering air, her white feet like two small birds taking flight from the stony edge.

She stared at me now with the same willful gaze she’d had that afternoon. “The way you came running and leaped off that cliff right behind me.”

I felt the earth fall away, its heavy pull release its grip, saw the dark water below.

She looked at me pointedly. “You wouldn’t do that now, would you?”

“No.”

She shrugged. “I guess I wouldn’t either,” she said.

Lonnie was sitting in his office when I left her a few minutes later. He plucked a thin cigar from his mouth, its white plastic tip well chewed. “Well, what’d she tell you?”

“Nothing. At least, nothing about Clayton.”

“But she did talk to you, right?”

“Only about the old days. You know, when we were in high school together. I told her you needed to clear a few things up. That there was a gun near the body. She said she came down to identify the body, and that’s all she’s going to do.”

Lonnie crushed the cigar against the sole of his shoe. “I just can’t figure out why she won’t answer a few questions and be done with it, Roy.”

I knew the answer, saw Lila at my side, holding my hand, the two of us moving slowly down the road as the pickup closed upon us, then rattled past, a load of
drunken boys slouched inside it, waving whiskey bottles in the dark air.

“I can’t figure it out,” Lonnie repeated.

“She doesn’t have anything to hide,” I told him.

He considered this a moment, then said, “Maybe you could help me out a little more on this, Roy.” He nodded toward the overhanging hills. “Go back up to Waylord. Ask around. About Clayton. You know, among the neighbors. They’d talk to you, those people up there. You got roots up there.”

“In Waylord? What roots? I’ve always lived in the valley.”

“But your father’s from up there. All they’d need to know is that you’re Jesse Slater’s son. They all remember him up there.”

“Why would they remember my father?” I asked. “He left Waylord when he was sixteen. And as far as I know, he’s never been back.”

“Believe me, that won’t matter,” Lonnie insisted.