Into the Web (25 page)
He was standing uneasily in the backyard when I got back home, framed by the dense woods beyond him, a gaunt figure now with little left to waste away. He glanced toward me as I approached, then returned his gaze to the forest.
“I went to the store,” I said when I stopped at his side. I took the package from my shirt pocket and held it out to him. “I thought you might be out of cigarettes.”
He took the pack from my hand. “You go over to Porterfield’s?”
“Yes, I did.”
He opened the cigarettes, thumped one out. I lit it for him.
“Somebody shot him,” I added.
He toed the ground with the tip of his boot.
I looked at him softly, watched as his eyes touched mine, then flitted away. “Saved me a world of trouble,” I told my father.
We didn’t speak of it again. Nor was the name of Wallace Porterfield mentioned in my father’s house until Lonnie showed up at our door three days later.
“Roy, I need to ask you a couple of questions,” he said.
I let him in, and for a moment he stared around, taking in my father’s few battered possessions. I knew what he was thinking, that you could take a boy out of Waylord, but he’d always be the same, low and without ambition, doomed to make nothing of himself.
“Where’s your daddy?”
“Sleeping.” I nodded toward the couch by the window. “Have a seat.”
He eyed the sofa as if it were a rotting stump. “No, I’ll stand.”
“What’s on your mind, Lonnie?”
“I guess you must have heard about what happened to my daddy.” His voice was a thin wire.
“Of course.”
Lonnie’s eyes fled toward the window. “Looks like somebody just drove up and motioned Daddy over,” he said. “Best we can figure, when he got to the car, whoever it was just shot him in the head. With a thirty-eight. Shot my daddy point-blank.”
I saw what I thought my father must have seen, Wallace Porterfield striding toward his car, leaning in, then the fiery blast, Porterfield stumbling backward, arms flailing, his face locked in dark wonder that Jesse Slater had come for him at last.
“So the thing is, Roy, I’ve been looking into it, you
know? Checking various things, trying to figure out who might have done it. Daddy had lots of enemies, of course. A long list. But the thing is, well, I noticed something on his phone records. The thing is, he got a call real early last Wednesday morning. Now, Daddy’s friends all know that he sleeps late. So I figured it couldn’t have been a friend that called him. So I had the phone company run a check. And it turns out the call came from your daddy’s phone. The one right here in this house.”
I said nothing.
“Well, I got to thinking, and of course I know that there was bad blood between your daddy and my daddy. It goes back a ways, but bad blood is bad blood, if you know what I mean. And so, I have to ask about that call, Roy.”
“I called your daddy,” I said flatly.
“You called him?” Roy asked, surprised. “Why?”
“I wanted to ask him a few questions.”
“About what?”
“About a whorehouse he ran over near Pittsville some years back. I was wondering how many girls he brought over there and raped.”
Lonnie’s face turned scarlet. “You have a gun, Roy?”
“Just an old rifle.”
“I’m looking for a pistol.”
“Then you’re looking in the wrong place.”
“I’ll decide that,” Lonnie said.
“Not without a warrant,” I told him.
“I don’t need a search warrant.”
“Well, yes, Lonnie, actually, you do.”
“Just where do you think you are, Roy?”
“I’m in my father’s house,” I said with a sudden shiver of pride. “And it’s time for you to leave it.”
“Do you think you can stop me from getting that gun?” His sneering laugh was exactly like his father’s. “I can get a warrant and tear this place apart.”
“Then go get your warrant.”
Lonnie stared at me, “I’ll be back,” he said. “First thing tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
Lonnie glared at me but said nothing else, though I noticed that when he pulled out of the driveway, he turned on the siren to let me know just how powerful he was.
I waited until it died away before going into my father’s room.
He started slightly when I shook him awake.
“Where’s the gun, Dad?”
“Where it always is.”
“I don’t mean the rifle. The pistol. The thirty-eight.”
He nodded toward the little table beside his bed. “Top drawer.”
I opened the drawer and found it lying in a pile of matchboxes, old keys, whatever my father had thrown into the drawer over the last twenty years. The white evidence tag still dangled from its trigger guard.
“Lonnie’s looking for this,” I said.
“Then let him have it.”
He’d said it with such indifference to the consequences that for an instant I wondered if he’d actually fired it three days before. I smelled the barrel and recognized the acrid scent: burnt powder.
“Give it to him, Roy,” my father said. “It don’t make no difference to me.”
“He’ll arrest you, Dad.”
“So what? I’d get my three squares.”
“I’m not letting him take you to jail.”
“Why not?”
The truth came from me before I could stop it. “Because I want to be with you,” I told him. “Until the end. And I’m going to make sure I can.” I tucked the pistol into my belt just as my brother had done twenty years before.
I made my father’s dinner a few hours later. He was too weak to make it to the kitchen, so I brought it to his bed. We talked awhile of nothing in particular, then he said, “What’d you do with that gun? Throw it into the creek or something?”
“No, they’d find it in the creek if they looked hard enough. Metal detectors could find it buried too. And I figure I’d be followed if I suddenly went for a drive.”
“Where you gonna hide it, then?” my father asked.
“I have an idea,” I answered. “I got it from a short story I read a long time ago.”
“Helps you out, I guess,” my father said. “All that reading.”
He soon fell into a fitful sleep. By then it was night. I put on dark clothes, left the house, and for the next hour made my way through the woods surrounding Cantwell until I finally reached the long, wide lawn of Wallace Porterfield.
The garage wasn’t locked, and so I entered it silently, found the box that contained the Kellogg file, and placed the pistol snugly among the other evidence of Archie’s
crime. Evidence concealed as evidence, like a letter hidden among other letters, with due thanks to Mr. Poe.
Then I stole back into the darkness, through the woods, and home.
Lonnie arrived the next morning with two deputies. I met him at the door.
“I’ve come for the gun,” he said.
“And the warrant?” I asked.
He gave it to me, and I let him in.
“The gun’s in my father’s closet,” I said. “He’s sleeping in that room. Don’t wake him.”
Lonnie stomped into my father’s room, rummaged through the closet, and found the rifle. Through it all I didn’t hear my father stir.
“Is that rifle the only gun in the house?” he demanded when he returned to the front door.
“Yes, it is.”
“You don’t have a thirty-eight anywhere around? You swear that, Roy?”
I stiffened to attention, lifted my hand, mocking the stance he’d used when he deputized me two months before, and stared down at him coldly. “On my brother’s grave.”
Lonnie handed me the rifle. “One of these days I’ll be coming back,” he warned.
But he never did.
Chapter Twenty-Six
M
y father lived for three more weeks, and during that time I never left him again save for one brief trip to the library, where I checked out a book about how things work, how they are put together, everything from a spinning wheel to an electric generator. Each night I read to him from that book.
During that time, we stayed in his room together, not for minutes, but for hours, not only in the morning and the afternoon, but throughout the night, he in his bed, I seated beside it. His untroubled sleep comforted me, and my sleepless vigilance comforted him.
One night I awakened to find him staring at me silently, his face bathed in moonlight, an odd smile on his lips.
“What is it?” I asked.
One hand crawled into the other. “The balance,” he said.
I buried him on a hot, sweltering day in the middle of August. Doc Poole came to the funeral, and a few of the men who’d once welcomed my father into their circle, lifting their bottles of beer to him and clapping him softly on the back as he moved among them. A few people came down from Waylord too, people I’d never known, nor even heard of. Lila came, but her mother didn’t. “Mama died last week,” she told me.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.
She nodded softly and offered her hand. “Well, goodbye, Roy.”
I gave her no indication of what I’d learned from Mavis Wilde, but merely stood mutely at my father’s grave and watched Lila walk out of the cemetery to where her old car baked in the hot summer sun. She got in and drove down the dusty road and away, falling, falling, as it seemed to me, into the web of Waylord.
It took nearly a month to sell the house, then another week to empty it in preparation for its new owners, a young couple with their first baby on the way.
During those long days, I gathered the few things my father had left behind, sold some of them to a local furniture dealer and burned the rest in a kind of funeral pyre behind the house.
After everything was settled, I packed my car with the single suitcase I’d brought with me nearly three months before, took the road that led once again past the old ball field, then through Kingdom City, and finally to the interstate highway whose westbound route led to California. Just before reaching it, a field of wild-flowers
rose to my right, weaving white and red in the summer sun. I pulled over and stared out over the field for a time. Then I set my mind on a different course.
She was in her garden when I found her, a soft mountain breeze playing at the hem of her plain white dress. She drew off the wide bonnet as I came toward her, hung it on a tomato post like a helmet over a rifle butt.
I handed her the flowers. “I picked them on the way up the road.”
She brought them to her face. “You can smell the wildness in them. Not like the ones you buy in stores.” She lowered her face toward the flowers again, then glanced up at me. “Thanks for coming by, Roy.”
“My father thought I should have fought for you,” I said.
She shook her head. “That was a long time ago.”
“If you were willing, I’d stay around awhile. See how things work out.”
She shook her head. “Roy, it’s …”
“I know it’s not exactly like jumping off a cliff behind you, but it’s the best I can do. I’m not all that agile anymore.”
She smiled.
“Lila—I know what you did for me.”
Her smile faded, but in her eyes something wild and lovely bloomed.
About the Author
THOMAS H. COOK is the author of eighteen novels, including
The Chatham School Affair
, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel;
Instruments of Night; Breakheart Hill; Mortal Memory; Sacrificial Ground
and
Blood Innocents
, both Edgar Award nominees; and
Moon over Manhattan
, which he co-authored with Larry King. He has also written two works about true crimes,
Early Graves
and
Blood Echoes
, which was also nominated for an Edgar Award. He wrote the novelization of the SCI FI Channel television event,
Taken
, and has co-edited, with Otto Penzler, two anthologies of American crime writing.
He lives in New York City and Cape Cod.
INTO THE WEB
A Bantam Book / June 2004
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2004 by Thomas H. Cook
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
For information address: Bantam Books, New York, New York.
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-57357-5
v3.0
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three