For a long time I stared down at the pictures, Lavenia Kellogg’s blasted head, the tortured body of her husband, and struggled to picture my brother holding the gun that had carried out these murders, reaching for it in his belt, squeezing down on the trigger, watching as small geysers of blood leapt from the fleeing bodies, splattering walls, pooling on the floor. In the midst of all this horror, Archie remained utterly incongruous, a piece I could not make fit in a murderous puzzle.
Other pieces fit perfectly, however. A white identification tag hung from the trigger guard of my father’s gun, but otherwise it was the same thirty-eight my father had handed to Archie as we’d crossed the field toward Scooter. It still contained the single shell Porter-field had mentioned earlier, the old sheriff so supremely confident that he alone would retain possession of my father’s gun that he had not even bothered to unload the murder weapon.
Holding it now, feeling its weight, its terrible reality, I still could not imagine Archie aiming it at anyone. And yet, he had incontestably confessed to two murders, admitted them immediately, in his first conversation, if it could be called that, with Porterfield. Nor over the next three days had he recanted a single word of that confession despite the many opportunities he’d had to do so. Times when I’d been alone with him in his cell, when he could have merely leaned over, whispered, I didn’t do it, and left the rest to me.
In fact, rather than take back a single word of what he’d said to Porterfield outside the Kellogg house, Archie had consistently elaborated upon the events he’d only haltingly described on that first occasion, adding more and more detail, painting an utterly persuasive picture of how he’d drawn up behind the hedge, honked to signal Gloria, then, when she did not emerge, trudged up the snowy drive to the house.
He’d encountered Mrs. Kellogg at the door, he said. She’d told him that Gloria was upstairs in her room, and that the girl was going to stay there. She’d tried to close the door in my brother’s face, but Archie said he’d pushed it back open and stepped inside. Mrs. Kellogg had then called for her husband, he said, an act that had panicked him so that he’d reached beneath his hunting jacket to where my father’s pistol was tucked inside his belt.
Mrs. Kellogg had screamed, Archie said, then turned toward the stairs. That’s when he’d fired. One shot. Directly into the back of Lavenia Kellogg’s skull. She’d fallen backward, then tumbled down the stairs, landing at their foot just as Horace entered from the adjoining living room. Like his wife, he’d fled at the sight of the gun in Archie’s hand, back toward the rear of the house, Archie following him all the way, firing as he went, hitting Mr. Kellogg again and again, until they’d finally reached the den. Kellogg had rushed for the gun cabinet, his wounded leg buckling under him, so that he’d finally stumbled into the corner beside the cabinet, the spot where Archie had at last caught up with him and fired the shot that killed him. After that, Archie had run back through the living room to the front door and then out of the house and down the path to the old Ford, where he remained, waiting for Gloria, everything a blur until a light flashed in the distance, two headlights coming toward him, snow sparkling in their narrow beams.
This was the story my brother told and retold, and it was easy for me to imagine him sitting in his stark cell, Porterfield standing near its center, crowding the cramped space, drawing in the light.
And yet Porterfield’s intimidating presence had failed to elicit from my brother the one thing the old sheriff had already come to suspect: that someone else had been with him that night, either egging him on to murder, or committing murder himself.
I had no doubt that Porterfield had spent a great deal of time talking to Archie, for the final confession had to have been pieced together by Porterfield himself. Archie, in the best of times, would not have been able to accomplish such a fluid narrative. And yet, for all the many times Porterfield had coaxed Archie to tell it one more time, my brother had persistently refused to reveal at least one detail of that bloody night, the fact that I’d stopped on the road across from his car, rolled down my window, and called to him.
Hey, Arch, what are you doing?
We’re running off, Roy. Gloria and me.
You mean, right now?
Right now.
Where you going?
Nashville, I guess.
So, you’re really going to do it?
Yeah. I got to, I guess.
I might have stopped him, I thought now, might have gotten out of my car, walked over to my brother, and brought the whole foolish scheme to a grinding halt. I knew it would have taken no more than a few words from me to have changed his mind, nothing more than the most rudimentary reminder that he had little money and no job, that he knew no one in Nashville who might lend them a helping hand. Hadn’t he even given me the perfect opportunity to do all of that?
But I’d left him there, waiting for Gloria, as I pulled away, the feel of Lila’s body still warm on mine, mindlessly joyful with what I’d proven to myself only minutes before, that Lila Cutler was indeed “fresh,” a wild happiness flooding through me, blinding me to my brother’s peril so that I’d offered him nothing but a wink and some careless words of advice that he’d never mentioned to Wallace Porterfield, words I’d said only minutes before the murders, my final words, as it had turned out, before leaving my brother to his fate: Okay, Arch, but don’t leave any witnesses.
Chapter Eighteen
You ’bout finished up in there?”
I turned toward the door of the garage, the old pistol still in my hand, and peered out to where Wallace Porterfield stood like a stone, blocking the light. His eyes fell toward the pistol. “Just throw that thing back in the box,” he said, now clearly impatient to be done with me.
I turned back toward the box, intending to return the pistol to it, then I felt an irrational need to defy Wallace Porterfield, and instead tucked the old gun into my belt and covered it with my shirt.
“Hurry up, now,” Porterfield said. “I got business to attend to.”
I paid no heed, but methodically returned the files to the envelope, then the envelope to the box.
“Don’t play with me, boy. Don’t ever do that.”
Before I could respond, he snorted. “You don’t favor your daddy. He was a pretty good-looking kid.” He smiled. “I taught him a lesson once.” His eyes were two dark fires. “Saved him from a world of trouble. Fucking shame he didn’t teach the same lesson to your brother.”
I said it coldly: “To know his place.”
The smile vanished, and Porterfield stared at me now, like a hawk watching a small gray mouse scurry across an exposed field. “So you know about that lesson I gave your daddy? I figured he must have told you about it.”
“He never told me, no,” I answered. “I heard about it in Waylord.”
Porterfield seemed pleased that the tale was still being recounted. Then another thought appeared to enter his mind, crowding all thought of my father and that lesson in brutality entirely from his brain. “Find anything in that file you wanted to look at?”
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
He caught the steely tone in my voice, but it meant nothing to him, all bravado the same, equally empty, all men the same, but half of him.
“What’s that?”
“I noticed you’ve got Archie’s statement and Gloria’s, but one statement’s missing. The one you took from Lila Cutler.”
“Why would I have a statement from her?”
“Because you took her in for questioning. So I was just wondering where her statement is.”
“I probably didn’t write one up,” Porterfield answered, sounding weary of being confronted with such a tedious and inconsequential matter.
Even so, I pressed him. “Which would have been unusual for you.”
His eyes turned cold. “You got any other questions, son?”
“Well, actually, I do. I was wondering where that second person went. The one who came with Archie. You never told m
e who you thought it was.”
“There’s no way of knowing that,” Porterfield answered.
“But you must have a theory?”
“My theory is that whoever came with your brother that night didn’t want to get caught the way your brother did. And so this second person up and left.”
“Left for where?”
“Well, let me see,” Porterfield said, broadly pretending to speculate on the matter. “Left for home, I guess. Left for wherever he’d come from. Through the woods maybe. That’s where you live, right? Over around Cantwell?”
“Yes.”
“That’s less than a mile from the Kellogg house as the crow flies, wouldn’t you say?”
“Probably.”
“So this second person could have gone on foot. Whoever it was that came with your brother in that old car of his could have gone right through the woods, and there wouldn’t have been no sign of it. Snow would have covered his tracks by full daylight.”
“So I guess you’ll never know who it was,” I told him.
“I guess not,” he said, growing impatient again. “Come on out of there now, I got things to do.”
I stepped out of the garage, watched as he closed and locked the door.
“I still have a few questions,” I said. “About the investigation.”
He seemed barely to hear me, or to care so little about what I’d said that he felt no need to respond.
“About what Archie told you when you talked to him.”
Porterfield lumbered back toward his house, throwing words over his shoulder. “Who cares what that boy told me? It wasn’t the truth anyway. Except in patches.” He stopped, turned, and looked me dead in the eye. “He left things out, you know. Said he didn’t see a living soul after he got to the house that night.” He waited for me to respond, or perhaps only to squirm beneath his accusatory gaze. “But he saw you, didn’t he, Roy?”
“Yes, he did.”
As if satisfied with my answer, Porterfield turned and headed toward his car, his great bulk casting a black stain over the ground beside him. “Saw you, but didn’t tell me a thing about it.”
“I pulled up just across the road from him,” I said, walking quickly in order to keep at his side.
“I know you did.” Porterfield’s eyes were on the Lincoln now, staring at it intently, as if looking for a smudge on its shiny exterior.
“And if you’d ever asked me about it, I’d have told you so.”
“Maybe you would have. But your brother didn’t. That’s the point.”
“He was trying to protect me. Trying to make sure I didn’t get … that I wouldn’t be a suspect.”
“I knew he was protecting somebody,” Porterfield said. “Knew all the time that he wasn’t dealing with me straight.”
We reached his car.
Porterfield grabbed the door handle but didn’t open it.
“But there wasn’t any need to press him on it,” he told me. “Because I already knew that you never got out of your car. So whether you were there or not, it didn’t matter to me as far as those killings were concerned. You never got out of your car. End of story.”
“How do you know I never got out of my car?” I persisted.
“ ’Cause I got spies everywhere, son,” Porterfield said as he jerked the handle and yanked open the car door. “I got eyes in the clouds. Step back now, I got to go.” He began to roll up the window.
Eyes in the clouds, I thought, watching him drop into his big black Lincoln, half believing that he did possess such vast malignant powers.
“How did you know I didn’t get out of my car that night?” I asked.
“What difference does it make, long as I knew it wasn’t you that came with your brother over to Horace Kellogg’s house. Who it was that did come with him, that’s what I wanted to know. But he never broke on that, your brother. Never told me who it was.” He began to roll up the window. “Step back, now, I got to go.”
I put my hand on the glass. “You think it was my father.”
The window stopped its upward glide, but Porter-field didn’t answer, and in that interval I saw Archie lean toward the passenger door of the old Ford rather than scoot over to it, lean far over whatever blocked his way, something in the front seat, I imagined suddenly, hunched down, hidden.
“Son, is that something you really want to know?” An unmistakable hint of warning crawled into Porterfield’s voice, a sense of someone who already knew what lay in wait behind the unopened door.
“Of course it is.”
“Well, why don’t you figure it out for yourself, then. You like playing cop, don’t you? Figure it out. It’s not that hard.”
“Why don’t you just tell me,” I demanded.
Porterfield’s eyes glowed. “Whose gun was it? The one I found next to your brother?”
I saw the pistol pass from my father’s hand to Archie’s on the morning he’d forced him to kill Scooter, felt something deep inside myself first shudder, then grow cold. “It was my father’s gun,” I said.
“Yep, it was,” Porterfield agreed quietly. “And his fingerprints were probably all over it. But what would that prove? It was his gun, ’course it would have his fingerprints on it. But you don’t just get evidence from guns and such. They’s always a man that’s part of it, that has to go with it.”
I could see something curling around in Porterfield’s mind, a small black snake.
“So I asked myself,” he added, “who would have had the gumption to do such a thing? And a reason to do it? A reason to get back at Horace, shoot him the way he was shot. Who would have hated Horace that much?”
I stared at him, puzzled.
“Your daddy never told you about Horace?”
“He said he was a gun-thug.”
“He was a deputy is what he was,” Porterfield said. “Worked for me as a deputy for quite a few years. Came with me up to Waylord when I had business there. People to straighten out. People that had got above themselves. People that needed to be taught a lesson. People like your daddy.”
I saw the dark men who’d closed in on my father by the candy counter of the Waylord company store.
“Kellogg helped you,” I said. “With that … lesson?”
Porterfield grinned. “He wasn’t much older than your daddy was, but Horace sure did his share.”
The one thing I would not let myself do at that moment was collapse under the great weight of what Porterfield had just revealed.
“But you never even talked to my father,” I said. “You never even questioned him about whether he was—”
“Why should I?” Porterfield blurted out. He regarded me as if I were a small child stupidly fending off an enormous dragon. “Jesse Slater wouldn’t have said anything to me. Not like that whining brother of yours. Sputtering and crying. Jesse wouldn’t have broken down like that. Never. Got too much gumption.” He shrugged. “I figured that in the end, I’d get it out of your brother, but once he was dead there was nothing I could do but drop the whole thing, just let your daddy go. Pride, that was your daddy’s downfall. Too much pride for a little shit Waylord boy.” He cackled dryly. “But like I said, I knew it couldn’t have been you shooting that gun. Because you don’t have your daddy’s gumption.”
He hit the button inside the car and turned toward the wheel as the darkly tinted window glided into place.
During the next few minutes I learned just how swiftly and completely denial can block the mind’s communication with the heart. For as I watched Porterfield back out of the driveway of his house, my own mind furiously blocked me from any serious consideration of the terrible suspicion the old sheriff had voiced about my father.
And so, during the next few seconds I went over everything about that murderous night but the possibility that my father could have had anything to do with it.
Methodically, meticulously, I relived every detail of it again, so that I saw myself behind the wheel of the Chevy, heading up to Waylord at ju
st before six that evening, gray clouds already hanging low and dark overhead, feeling again the cold drizzle they released as I came to a halt in Lila’s drive.
Lila had come out immediately, dashing happily across the bare yard, wrapped in a dark red coat, a clear plastic rain hat around her hair. Bursts of mist came from her mouth as she leapt into my car, snuggling up against me, smiling, pretending to shiver, Brrrr.
We’d headed back down to the valley, talking all the way, full of the brilliant future we’d begun to imagine for ourselves, that I’d go to college, get my degree, then return and marry her. I’d get a teaching job and then she’d go to college too. We’d raise a family. The future had never looked brighter than on that snowy night.
The more immediate plan was far more achievable, of course: a double date no different from the many others we’d had in the past.
Archie was pacing back and forth when Lila and I pulled into the driveway that evening. He looked stricken and confused, the way he always did when things began to overwhelm him.
“We can’t pick up Gloria at her house,” he said as he threw himself into the backseat of my car. “She had a big fight with her daddy and ran over to Potter’s Grocery.”
The first scattered flakes of snow began to fall as we pulled up to Potter’s Grocery. Gloria was waiting anxiously behind its misty front window, her expression hardly less stricken than Archie’s.
Her tone was grave as she slid into the backseat. “I don’t know what Daddy’s going to do, Archie.”
Archie drew her beneath his arm. “Maybe we’ll just run off, then,” he said.
We decided to go to the movie house in Kingdom City. Once there, Gloria and Archie went directly to the counter to buy popcorn, leaving Lila and me at the front of the theater.
“He’ll do it, you know,” Lila told me. “He’ll run off with Gloria.”