Into the Web Page 12

  “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

  Doc 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 l
east 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.

  “Porterfield knew I worked at the drugstore just down the block from his office,” I said. “He could have come by, asked me anything. Even taken me in for questioning like he did Lila.”

  “Yes, he could have.”

  “But he went up to Waylord instead.”

  “That’s right,” Doc Poole said. “And he never bothered talking to you because Lila told him that you were with her, and so you couldn’t have had anything to do with the murders. I didn’t mean to stir this whole thing up again, Roy. It was just this business of Sheriff Porterfield saying that Archie hadn’t done it alone has always bothered me. But the sheriff couldn’t have thought you had anything to do with it, if that’s what you’re thinking, Roy. Not after talking to Lila.” He offered the placebo of a smile. “So, there’s really no mystery, is there?”

  “No,” I answered, although I knew that at least one mystery remained: for if Lila had told Sheriff Porterfield I was with her at the time of the murders, she’d lied.

  Why?

  My father was sitting in his bed, shirtless, his back pressed up against the headboard, his gaze fixed on the flickering television screen.

  “Doc Poole says you don’t want any more visits,” I said as I walked into the room.

  “That’s right.”

  “And no more medicine either.”

  He nodded, his attention still riveted to the television. “That’s right. It wouldn’t be fair to them bugs.”

  With that, he fell silent, pretending to be entirely engaged in a rerun of I Love Lucy, though I could tell that something was playing in his mind.

  I lowered myself into the chair beside his bed. “Doc Poole mentioned something about the murders. He said Sheriff Porterfield believed that Archie didn’t tell the whole story about what happened that night. Did you ever doubt that Archie told the whole story, Dad?”

  “No,” my father answered. He shifted about, one hand scratching at the other. “Because of the way he done it. I mean, to Horace Kellogg.”

  I knew what he meant. The Kelloggs had been shot repeatedly. Even so, it had never struck me that the manner of the shooting could have served as evidence against my brother, though at that moment I realized that it had done precisely that in my father’s mind.

  “It reminded me of Scooter,” my father added. “What Archie done to Horace Kellogg. Blowing off parts of him one at a time. Figured he must have been mighty mad at him. ’Cause of the way he was treating that daughter of his. Calling her dirty names.” He paused a moment, then spit out a final line, his words laced with ire. “Hitting her.”

  Like Henry Warren hit Deidre, I thought.

  “Archie told you that?” I asked.

  “Told me that night,” my father said. “Said he was going to rescue Horace Kellogg’s daughter. Next thing I seen, he was heading out to his car, buttoning that old checkered jacket of his.”

  “Rescue her,” I repeated, remembering how lost and frightened Archie had looked when I’d come upon him later that same night.

  “Figured he might do it too,” my father said. “Just run off with that girl and them two make a life somewhere Horace Kellogg couldn’t get a hold of them.”

  I shook my head. “They could never have done that.”

  “No, probably not,” my father said with a sigh. “Not with Horace Kellogg in the picture. Gun-thug that he was.”

  “Gun-thug? Horace Kellogg was a banker, Dad.”

  “He was a gun-thug before that. And gun-thugs don’t never change. Ain’t but one thing they understand.”

  A terrible possibility crossed my mind. “Did you tell Archie to take a gun with him to the Kelloggs’ that night?”

  My father looked at me sternly. “I didn’t tell Archie nothing.”

  “So he just took it? That old thirty-eight of yours. He just took it on his own?”

  “Archie never done nothing on his own. I figured it must have been Horace Kellogg’s daughter that told him to bring a gun with him.”

  In my mind I saw Gloria standing beside my brother as they had at Potter’s store that night, snow falling in a white veil all around them, an icy wind ripping at her hair, her eyes frantic, desperate, her small hands jerking at my brother’s checkered jacket.

  We sat in silence for a long time, my mind replaying all I’d never been able to forget about that distant, murderous night, all the questions Porterfield might have asked: Did you see Archie that night? What did he say to you? What did you say to him? What did he want you to do? Did you do it?

  “Sheriff Porterfield did some asking around,” I said finally. “Because he didn’t believe Archie’s confession.”

  My father gave a little snort. “I ain’t interested in nothing Wallace Porterfield ever done.”

  “Evidently he thought someone else must have been involved in the murders.”

  My father returned his gaze to the television. “Sounds like Porterfield was just playing with people,” my father said. “Messing with their minds.”

  “Did he ever speak to you?”

  “No.”

  “He spoke to Lila. Doc Poole told me that. He said he went up to Waylord the morning after the murders and took Lila in for questioning.”

  My father’s gaze swept back to me. “And Lila never said nothing to you about it?”

  “No, never,” I said. “And Porterfield never talked to me at all.”

  A dark fire lit my father’s eyes. “He was after you though, Roy,” he said with a sudden terrible certainty. “That’s why he talked to Lila. ’Cause he was wanting to put them murders on you too.”

  I saw Archie’s car beside the hedge that bordered the Kellogg house, his face peering at mine, his voice pleading, Will you go with me, Roy?

  “There’s no evidence that he was trying to pin anything on me, Dad.” I said, now wanting merely to close a subject that had abruptly turned down a forbidden corner.

  “No? Then how come he drove all the way up to Waylord and talked to Lila? He sure didn’t think she had nothing to do with killing nobody. It must have been you he was after. It don’t make you mad, him doing that?”

  “After all these years? No, it doesn’t make me mad.”

  “So you ain’t gonna do nothing about it?”

  “What difference would any of that make now?”

  “You ain’t gonna do nothing?”

  “No.”

  He stared at me a moment, then said, “Suit yourself,” and returned his eyes to the television.

  Suit yourself.

  Those had always been the words he’d used when he’d had enough of me.

  I’m going to stay in California.

  Suit yourself.

  Never marry.

  Suit yourself.

  No kids.

  Suit yourself.

  “It’s all too far back, Dad. It wouldn’t make any difference what I found out.”

  My father held his gaze on the television, his eyes yellow and watery. “Suit yourself.”

  With that, he grasped the ball bat beside his bed, brought himself to his feet, and trudged into the bathroom, leaving me alone beside his cluttered bed.

  I waited for him to return, but he never did, so after a time I rose and headed for my room. On the way I saw him in the kitchen, standing beside the refrigerator, gently holding the jar of bugs as if he preferred their company to mine.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Most of us make them sudden
ly, our most fateful choices, but those who stop to think things through rarely make any better ones. All that night, as I tossed on my bed, I reasoned that there was no point in “getting mad,” no point in finding out why, twenty years before, Wallace Porterfield had thought or done anything, and certainly no reason to believe that whatever he’d thought or done could possibly matter to me now. Surely, the best argument was to let sleeping dogs lie.

  But there are certain questions that we avoid at our peril, certain things that if we do not know them will forever hold our lives in thrall. That’s why adopted children so often leave those who kept them to search for those who let them go. It’s easy to live without knowing the history of the universe, but hard to live without knowing the history of yourself.

  “Hey, Roy,” Lonnie said with a wide smile when I entered his office the next morning. “You looking for another case to work on, or is this just a social call?”

  “Well, actually, I am looking into another case.”

  “Oh yeah, which one?”

  “Archie’s,” I said. “I’d like to take a look at whatever file you have on his case.”

  “You mean the murders?” Lonnie asked unbelievingly. “That file’s nearly twenty years old, Roy. You got a reason for wanting to see it?”

  “Yes, I do,” I told him. “Something Doc Poole mentioned when he looked in on my father last night.”

  Lonnie gave a chuckle. “What would Doc Poole know about that case?”

  “Well, it was actually something your father told him,” I answered. “That he believed that Archie hadn’t told the truth about the murders.”

  Lonnie offered a quick laugh. “Roy, you know as well as I do that Archie sat right in this office and told my daddy the whole story.”

  Standing before Lonnie’s desk, looking into his eyes, I knew how frightened my brother must have been as he’d faced the far more menacing figure of Wallace Porterfield. He’d been a teenage boy from a family of no standing, easily confused, easily led, charged with the murder of a banker and his wife. How small and helpless he must have felt, something Wallace Porterfield could scrape from the bottom of his glossy boots and be done with.