Into the Web

by Thomas H. Cook

  “They wouldn’t get very far, Lila.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Lila said darkly. “Gloria’s underage. Her father could call the sheriff and have him arrested.”

  I glanced over to the concession stand, watched as Archie paid for a bag of popcorn, then handed it to Gloria.

  “He wouldn’t try to take Gloria away,” I told Lila confidently. “Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t know how to do it.”

  I was still holding firmly to that conviction when the movie ended two hours later. We drove Gloria back to her house, where she and Archie stood briefly at the end of the driveway, hidden behind the hedge.

  “Gloria’s really upset,” Archie said, when he got back in the car. “She thinks her daddy’s gonna beat her up.”

  Lila’s eyes shot back toward my brother. “Be careful, Archie, please. Be really careful.”

  The snow had thickened by the time we reached the house. For a moment, Archie remained in the backseat of the car as if in dread of what the night might bring were he left to his own devices.

  “It’s going to work out, Archie,” I assured him. “We’ll talk it all through when I get back.”

  He nodded reluctantly, and got out of the car, moved halfway up the driveway, then stopped as if by a black wall.

  “Go talk to him,” Lila urged me. “He’s lost without you.”

  I did as she asked, got out of the car and walked over to my brother.

  “Everything’s going to work out,” I promised him. “Believe me, Arch, everything’s going to work out.”

  “What if I was to do it, Roy? We could go to—”

  “Listen, just go inside and stay there.” I smiled. “We’ll talk it over in the morning.”

  Archie did not smile back. “Her daddy’s hurting her real bad, the things he’s saying to her. It’s not right, Roy, Calling her names. Hurting her like that. Threatening her.”

  I placed my hand on his shoulder, a little annoyed. “Archie, do what I told you. Go inside. In the morning, we’ll talk it over. There’s nothing you can do tonight anyway.”

  He nodded slowly, heavily, in that ponderous way of his. “Okay, Roy …” A small, tentative smile broke over his face. “Thanks.”

  “Are we clear on this, then?”

  “Yeah, we’re clear.”

  “Good,” I said, then glanced toward the house and saw my father standing in the lighted window. He was watching us, his eyes like two cold lights shining through the snow.

  “Go on inside now,” I told my brother.

  “Yeah, right,” Archie said, and stepped away.

  I darted back to the Chevy, expecting to see Archie already lumbering up the stairs and into the house. But he was still standing only a few feet from where I’d left him, as deep in thought as was possible for him, struggling to find a way out of his confusion.

  “He’ll be all right,” I told Lila as I turned the ignition.

  Lila’s eyes bored into my brother, “It won’t end here,” she murmured.

  She had never spoken more truly, it struck me now, as I watched Wallace Porterfield’s car move down the long road that fronted his house. For it never had.

  Chapter Nineteen

  He was on the front porch when I pulled into the driveway a few minutes later, his body tilted back in a spindly chair, his bare feet pressed down upon the un-painted wooden slats, a gaunt figure I could scarcely envision as the raging, vengeful man Wallace Porterfield had conjured up.

  And yet, I knew that age and illness are deceptive, that old killers must surely look like all old men, infirm and vaguely sorrowful. And so it was a younger, stronger man I made myself imagine as I studied him through the windshield, a man who’d sputtered madly as he’d loaded the pistol, his mind ablaze with what Horace Kellogg had done to him so many years before, all life suddenly reduced to a score he had to settle.

  “Where you been?” he demanded as I got out of my car.

  “I talked to Lonnie about what Doc Poole told me last night.”

  “I thought didn’t none of that matter to you.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  He scowled. “You ain’t gonna get no help from Lonnie.”

  “Well, he didn’t think much of the idea of my looking into Archie’s case, that’s true. But he didn’t try to stop me.”

  I came up the stairs, staring closely at my father, as if it were actually possible to look past his age and withered appearance, determine if he could have done what Wallace Porterfield suspected, murdered a man and a woman in cold blood.

  “He sent me over to Wallace Porterfield’s house,” I added. “It seems he keeps the county police files in his garage. They don’t belong to him, of course, but he keeps them anyway.”

  “Nobody ever made Wallace Porterfield do right,” my father said, his voice swelling with rancor, so that it suddenly struck me that revenge was perhaps the real engine that had propelled his life.

  “Porterfield believes that you came with Archie to Horace Kellogg’s house that night,” I told him bluntly.

  My father snorted but gave no other response.

  I sat down next to him. “He thought you might have committed the murders, then walked back here through the woods.”

  “Why would I have murdered them people? I didn’t care nothing about Horace Kellogg’s daughter.”

  “But you knew Kellogg, didn’t you?”

  “I knew him.”

  “According to Porterfield, there was bad blood between the two of you.”

  My father didn’t meet my eyes. “Told you I killed him ’cause of that?”

  “Well, it would have been a motive, wouldn’t it?” I drew the pistol from beneath my shirt. “And it was your gun.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “I took it from a box of stuff Porterfield had.”

  “Why’d you do that, Roy? So you could show it to me? You believe him, don’t you?”

  “There were tracks,” I said. “Footprints. It looked like someone came with Archie to Kellogg’s house that night. In his car, I mean. Walked up to the house with him.”

  “And you think it was me?”

  “I’m just telling you what Porterfield thinks.”

  “I don’t give a shit what Wallace Porterfield thinks. I’m asking what you think!”

  When I didn’t answer, he added, “What about the woman, Roy? Horace Kellogg’s wife. She was killed too, ain’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “In all your life, Roy, have you ever seen me lift my hand against a woman?”

  In all my life, I had not.

  “I wasn’t the best husband ever was, but did you ever see me touch your mother, no matter how mad I got?”

  He peered at the gun as if it were a decaying carcass. “Don’t lay no murder of a woman on me. ’Cause it ain’t right to think I’d do something like that.”

  I realized then the vast effect of my father’s lost romance, that Deidre Warren’s death, the part he’d played in it, had forever placed him beyond the harming of a woman. Men he might cheerfully destroy with the single sweep of a flaming sword, but no woman would ever have a thing to fear from him.

  “Porterfield was just goading you,” he added now. “It’s a game he’s always liked. Making people believe stuff about each other that ain’t so. He done it up in Waylord all the time. Played people off against each other. He liked doing it. Made him feel powerful. Bet he done it to Lila too, that time he talked to her about the murders.”

  “Done what?”

  “Planted something in her mind,” my father answered. “About you. You said it was never the same between you and Lila,” he went on, and I could see the storm begin to take shape in his mind. “Never the same after them killings.”

  “Yes, but that had—”

  “Maybe it was Porterfield caused that,” my father interrupted. “Maybe Porterfield played with Lila when he went up and talked to her that day. Told her it was you done the killings. Put that
in her head.”

  Suddenly, without my willing it, this seemed entirely plausible. “He might have,” I admitted. “I mean, I was there that night.”

  “You was there?” my father asked. His eyes were two probing needles. “You seen Archie?”

  “He was just sitting in his car,” I said. “Waiting to go up to the house, I guess. Still trying to figure out what to do.” What I had done fell upon me like a heavy stone. “And I let him down. I’d been with Lila, and I was … I don’t know … I just wasn’t thinking. So I didn’t try to stop him. I just wished him luck and told him … well … not to leave … any … not to leave any witnesses.”

  My father turned away and stared out at the deserted road.

  “Archie never told Porterfield about my being there,” I went on. “But Porterfield knew it anyway. He told me that this afternoon. That he’d always known I was there that night.”

  My father remained silent. He stared at me as if he’d never seen me before.

  “No one ever knew about my being there,” I said. “I never told anyone. I guess I was … ashamed of what I said to Archie, that I may have contributed, you know, to what he did.”

  My father chewed his bottom lip for a moment, then said, “Well, if Archie never told Porterfield you was there, and you never told nobody, then how come he knew it?”

  “I asked him that myself. He just said he had eyes in the clouds.”

  My father sniffed. “Ain’t nobody got eyes in the clouds. Not even Wallace Porterfield. Somebody had to have told him, Roy. Ain’t no other way he could have found out about it.” He seemed to be watching a strange conspiracy unfold, and was now so deep in thought, he seemed almost a different person, solemn, meditative, like one abruptly awakened to all he’d let blindly pass. “Ain’t nobody else could have told Porterfield nothing about that night.

  “Gloria,” he murmured. “It must have been Gloria.”

  Chapter Twenty

  I started looking for her the very next morning, before my father rose. I knew that I could have once again gone to Lonnie, asked him if he had any idea of what had become of Gloria Kellogg after the murder of her parents, but by then I’d come to see him as my father did, not just as the son of Wallace Porterfield but the keeper of Porterfield’s malicious flame.

  And so rather than go to Lonnie’s office, I went to the little redbrick building that housed the Kingdom County Library.

  I started with the back issues of the Kingdom City Banner, the only newspaper in Kingdom County. By the extent of the coverage it became clear that the Banner had regarded the two killings as the major news event of the decade. Ministers had used the crime to rail against the evils of modern life, citing the movies, books, and even the drugstore detective novels they claimed my brother had habitually read, though I knew that he’d never gotten more than a few pages into any one of them before he’d passed it over to me.

  I’d left Kingdom County shortly after Archie’s death, and so I’d never read anything concerning the aftermath of the homicides. Because of that, I was stunned to learn how viciously my brother had been demonized in those weeks following the murders. Even his suicide in the county jail had done little to dampen the community’s blazing outrage. Weeks after the murders, his name was invoked in articles and editorials, used as an example of all that was “cancerous” in American youth.

  Not even Archie’s teachers had found anything good to say about him. He’d “seemed sweet,” they said, but this sweetness might well have been no more than the “clever ruse” of a boy who all seemed to have forgotten was by no means clever.

  The brother I’d known and loved was obliterated in all of this, so much transformed that in photographs he appeared eerily sinister even to me, a boy staring dead-eyed at the camera, dull and emotionless, Sheriff Porterfield perpetually rising like a huge column at his side.

  Oddly enough, it was Porterfield who’d offered the only defense of Archie, though it was no more than an official recognition that he’d never been in trouble before, nor given anyone reason to suspect him capable of such a crime. Of his suicide, Porterfield had said only, “Well, I guess God’s justice was served,” and left any further public comment to others.

  As for Gloria Kellogg, she’d made no comment of any kind ever, as far as I could find. The papers told me no more than I’d learned at the time, that Gloria had been found upstairs in her bed, taken into custody by Sheriff Porterfield, then released after having made a statement which in every detail backed up my brother’s confession.

  After that, as far as the old accounts were concerned, Gloria had simply vanished, so that I had no way of knowing where she’d gone or what had happened to her, or whether, in the deep, deep night, she ever heard those shots again, felt her soul freeze behind the bedroom door.

  If so, I could find no hint of it, no trail to follow, and yet I continued to sit at the library table, working with a fierce determination that was not in the least intellectual, and which would not release me until I finally chanced upon a single short news item.

  It had appeared nearly six months after the murders, little more than an official notice that an estate sale of all items in a house listed at 1411 County Road. Everything in the house was to be liquidated in a sale the paper called “the final chapter in the Kellogg Murders,” and which was to be conducted on behalf of Gloria Lynn Kellogg, “currently in residence at Daytonville.”

  Daytonville, I thought, the name like a bell ringing in my head, a little town in the far northeast corner of the state, known chiefly for the mental hospital that had long ago been established there, the name since then used like a threat by parents and teachers: You better straighten up, boy, or they’ll be sending you to Daytonville.

  “She must have had some kind of breakdown,” I told my father when I got home later. “A pretty bad one if she had to be taken to Daytonville.”

  We were in the backyard, where I’d found him standing beside the sagging rusty fence that bordered it. He listened silently, taking long draws on his cigarette, peering at the tip as I went on, remaining silent even after I’d finished my account. For a time he stared at the copy of the notice I’d brought from the library, then he shook his head.

  “‘On behalf,’” he said, quoting the paper. “‘The sale is to be conducted on behalf of Gloria Lynn Kellogg.’”

  “Because she’s in a mental hospital,” I explained. “Because she had a breakdown of some sort.”

  My father thrust the notice back at me. “Unless it was just a way of getting control of things.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Porterfield,” my father said. “He could have fixed it where he got control of things by putting Horace Kellogg’s daughter in the state asylum. He could have got control of things that way, everything that girl had.”

  This did not seem likely, and I said so. “Whatever Gloria had would have gone to her next of kin. But she’d have to be declared incompetent. That’s a court matter. Out of Porterfield’s control.”

  “Nothing was out of Porterfield’s control,” my father answered.

  I saw another fiber grow in the tangled web my father had begun to weave.

  “I remember that sale. They put everything out in the front yard. Had tags hanging off everything. Tables. Chairs. Lamps. A whole house full of furniture put out in the yard. And once they got everything sold, they had a big auction for the house.”

  “The Kellogg house was auctioned? When?”

  “ ’bout two months after they sold everything that was in it,” my father answered. He eyed me darkly. “Porterfield run the whole show that time. Set right up there with the auctioneer. I seen him settin’ there when I drove by.”

  “What are you getting at, Dad?”

  Rather than answering me directly, my father said, “They’s something ain’t right in all this, Roy. Something we ain’t got to yet.” He tossed the remainder of the cigarette across the fence, then drew another one from his pocket. “It’s like a
joke somebody’s telling, only it ain’t a joke, just works like one. You can’t git none of it unless you git it all.”

  Another thought circled like a buzzard in his mind.

  “Could be Porterfield had it all figured out even before them murders, Roy. What he’d do if something happened to Horace and his wife. How he could git his hands on what was theirs.” He lit the cigarette and waved out the match. “He was always figuring like that. How to git his hands on other people’s things. That’s the way Porterfield is. Always plottin’ things out. Settin’ out there in that big yard of his. In that chair he’s got. Year after year. Cold, hot. It don’t never matter to him. He’s always settin’ there in the yard, figuring something out. Seen him many a time when I’d pass by.”

  “Why would you be passing by Wallace Porterfield’s house?”

  “On the way somewhere,” he answered with a shrug.

  “Wallace Porterfield’s house isn’t on the way to anything, Dad. It’s at the end of a long road.”

  “When I went ridin’ around, I’d pass by it sometimes.” He smiled cunningly. “Bet Porterfield already had it figured out what he’d do if something happened to Horace Kellogg. Probably said, ‘If he ever gets killed someway, this here is how I can get all he’s got for my own-self.’”

  “I don’t think that’s likely, Dad.”

  His eyes shot over to me almost angrily, as if I’d suddenly proven myself disloyal. “What’s likely for a normal feller ain’t got nothing to do with Wallace Porterfield.”

  His reaction was so fierce, I immediately retreated into a less aggressive form of reasoning. “Well, if Porter-field can plot things that far ahead, then he also has plenty of time to figure out how to cover his tracks.”

  “A man can’t never cover everything though. They’s always somebody looking. When your mama first got pregnant, seemed like the whole world got pregnant at the same time.”

  I stared at him blankly.

  “They wasn’t no more women pregnant than they’d ever been around here, but it seemed like it,” he went on. “It’s just that I hadn’t noticed none of them before.”