Into the Web

  “Up to what?”

  My father seemed annoyed by the question. “All I know is, Porterfield didn’t call his deputy, and that seems mighty peculiar to me.”

  “Maybe his deputy was sick,” I offered. “Or maybe he was out of town. You’d have to ask this Charlie Groom if you—”

  “Charlie Groom’s been dead ten years,” he said.

  “Were there any other deputies?”

  “Not steady ones. If Porterfield needed help, he’d just call a guy in and deputize him. Like Lonnie done you, sending you after Lila. Getting you to help him find dirt on her.”

  “What makes you think he was trying to find dirt on Lila?”

  “Maybe ’cause he wanted her for hisself,” my father answered with a terrible certainty that he was right, that the Porterfields of Kingdom County sat on the satanic throne, pouring ruin into the cup from which all others drank. “Lila wouldn’t pay Lonnie no mind. Went with you instead. So Lonnie wanted to get even with her. That’s why he said that to her on the road. ’Cause he wanted to hurt her and make you look small.”

  And he had done that, I thought with a terrible sense that I’d fallen into the trap Lonnie Porterfield had set for me. Suddenly I found myself imagining life in the same way as my father imagined it, an evil agency sleepless at its core, forever plotting schemes of dark entrapment. It was not a vision of things I wanted to accept.

  “I don’t think Lonnie was ever interested in Lila,” I said.

  “ ’Course he was,” my father countered. “Lonnie knew you was aiming to marry Lila and he was jealous of that. That’s why he yelled at her that night with you right beside her. So she’d have second thoughts.”

  There was no point in arguing the matter, so I said, “Well, one thing’s for sure. I never had any second thoughts. Not about Lila. I just wanted to marry her and raise a family. That’s all I wanted.”

  “I didn’t know that, Roy,” my father said. “That you wanted that more than anything.”

  “What did you think I wanted?”

  “To get away,” he answered. “Seemed like that was always on your mind. Getting away from … me.”

  I understood then how personally my father had taken my determination to leave Kingdom County, and thus how during all the time he’d watched me plot the route, he must have thought of it as a flight from himself.

  “It wasn’t anything against you,” I said. “My needing to leave here.”

  My father nodded. “Didn’t know that,” was all he said.

  We arrived at Daytonville State Asylum at just after one in the afternoon. By then my father looked considerably more weary than he had at the beginning of the trip. The long flight of stairs that led from the street to the building’s high wooden entrance seemed beyond his power.

  “I’d better just sit here in the shade,” he said after I’d brought the car to a halt beneath a large oak. “You go on in.”

  Doc Poole had called ahead, and so I was quickly ushered into the office of Dr. William Spencer, who served, according to the sign posted on the door, as the asylum’s administrative director.

  Spencer was a short, middle-aged man with a rounded belly that spilled over the front of his trousers. He wore a light serge suit with the jacket unbuttoned, his pants held up by wide black suspenders. The degrees that hung from the wall behind his desk made it clear that he’d had a formidable education, medical school at Tulane, special training in psychiatry at Vanderbilt, and more postgraduate work at Emory in Atlanta. His tone was predictably professional and matter-of-fact.

  “Dr. Poole says you work for the Coroner’s Office,” he said, offering his hand. “An investigator.”

  I nodded.

  “And that you’re looking into a murder case,” Spencer went on. “The Kellogg murders.” He waited for me to give a reason, for this interest. When I didn’t, he said, “Well, have a seat, Mr. Slater. I’ll help you all I can.” He picked up a folder that rested on the desk in front of him and handed it to me. “This is all the information I have on Gloria Kellogg. As you can see, it’s pretty slim. Miss Kellogg was only here for a month or so. Not much time to get to know her. Psychologically speaking, I mean.”

  There’d been only one formal report, I noticed as I flipped through the pages of the file.

  “L. P. Mitchell,” I said, glancing at the name signed at the bottom of it.

  “Dr. Mitchell, yes,” Spencer said. “He was in charge of the hospital in those days.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Dr. Mitchell retired not long after Miss Kellogg was released,” Spencer answered. “He lived to quite a ripe old age, but unfortunately he died two years ago.”

  “Did you ever talk to Gloria Kellogg?” I asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I did. I was right out of college. Dr. Mitchell was my boss at the time. He sent me in to see Miss Kellogg. Pretty much a test, as he told me. Of my powers of observation.”

  “What did you observe?”

  “Extreme withdrawal,” Spencer replied. “She was correctly oriented, as we say, to time and place. She wasn’t hallucinating. But beyond that, if you don’t mind a vulgar phrase, there was nobody home.” He shrugged. “Of course, I saw her for only a few minutes on the day she was admitted. Dr. Mitchell spent more time with her after that, but it was not a case I recall ever discussing with him.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry to rush, but I have to see a patient in another wing.” He rose. “Take as long as you like to look over the file. If you need to talk to me again, let me know, but to tell you the truth, Mr. Slater, I really don’t have any more information on this matter.” He shook my hand again, walked to the door, then turned. “By the way, wasn’t the boyfriend executed?”

  I saw my brother as Wallace Porterfield must have seen him the morning he came back down the corridor to Archie’s cell, a body dangling from the bars, head down, face blackened.

  “No,” I said. “The boyfriend hung himself.”

  Something rose in Spencer’s mind. “Had that already happened when Gloria came here?”

  “Yes, it had.”

  He considered this for a moment, then said, “I suppose that’s why she was kept on suicide watch, then. Not only what she’d been through, but the fear that she might have entered into some kind of death pact with her boyfriend. Teenagers do that sort of thing, you know.” He shrugged. “Well, like I said, take as long as you want with the file.”

  With that, he stepped from the room and closed the door, leaving me alone.

  The admission form of Daytonville State Asylum was the first paper in the file.

  According to its record, Wallace Porterfield had arrived with Gloria at ten o’clock on the morning of February 15, 1964. At that time Gloria’s possessions had been carefully inventoried. They’d consisted of a small suitcase, two nightdresses, a bag of toiletries complete with soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, and shampoo. Gloria had also packed several blouses, a wool sweater, and two pairs of denim jeans. She’d worn a watch, which was taken from her, presumably because its metal band was considered dangerous. She’d also brought along the gold locket Doc Poole had mentioned to me and which upon admission was also taken from her.

  By ten-thirty, according to the admission form, Gloria had changed into the pale blue dress mandated by the asylum, and had been taken to Room 316 in an upstairs ward designated as “Secure.”

  Briefly, I tried to imagine the girl I’d known, Archie’s girl, sitting alone on a stripped mattress, facing the bare plaster walls of the Daytonville State Asylum. I saw her thin body draped in the blue institutional dress, her hair falling uncombed to her shoulders, her eyes locked in the terrible inwardness she’d fallen into since that snowy night when she’d waited for my brother to come for her, claim her, sweep her away to distant Nashville. Never had she seemed more lost to me, more frail, more completely and eternally destroyed.

  And yet there was far worse in store for Gloria, a fate duly recorded in her file, and which I asked Spencer a
bout when he returned to the room an hour later.

  “They gave her Haldol,” I said. “That’s a pretty powerful drug.” I glanced at the file. “It probably made her condition much worse.”

  Spencer returned to the chair behind his desk. “No one knew that at the time, of course. I’m sure Dr. Mitchell believed that it was in Gloria’s best interest, given her condition.”

  “How would you describe her condition?”

  “Stricken,” Spencer answered. “I believe that’s the word I used in my note to Dr. Mitchell. You no doubt read it in the file there.”

  “Stricken by guilt. That’s what you wrote.”

  “The guilt she felt for what happened. The murders. Particularly her father.”

  “Why her father?”

  “Because he suffered so much. Evidently he was shot quite a few times. Of course, it was Gloria’s boyfriend who’d actually murdered her father, but she blamed herself anyway.”

  “Did she say anything else about the murders?”

  “No.”

  “How about the boyfriend?”

  He shook his head. “We never got around to talking about him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, her guardian came into the room and she got very quiet after that.”

  “Her guardian. Wallace Porterfield.”

  “Yes,” Spencer said. “He sat down on the bed beside her, and the two of them just sat there until I left the room. I don’t believe I ever spoke to her again.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she was Dr. Mitchell’s patient,” Spencer replied. “I’d see her in the dayroom from time to time, of course, but I never talked to her again.”

  “Did Porterfield ever show up again?”

  “Not that I know of. At least, not until that last day. The day Miss Kellogg left.”

  I glanced down at the file. “Gloria was released to a woman named Mavis Wilde. Do you know who she is?”

  “No, I don’t,” Spencer answered. “But I know she came with Sheriff Porterfield that morning. When Gloria was taken out of the hospital.”

  I flipped through the file until I came to the release form. “In the place marked ‘Relationship,’ somebody wrote ‘Friend.’”

  “Then presumably Miss Wilde was a friend of Gloria’s.”

  “The file also says that she took Gloria to her own home,” I added. “In Pittsville. Was she young? Old?”

  “Young,” Spencer answered immediately. “In her twenties, I’d say. Something like that. She was certainly a good deal younger than Sheriff Porterfield.”

  “Do you remember anything else about her?”

  “No. It was Porterfield who left a vivid impression. Partly his size, I suppose, but his authority too. He seemed in charge of everything. The woman was merely someone who worked for him. Or at least, that was the impression I got. That she worked for him. Not professionally. Not in the sheriff’s department. But privately. In some low capacity.”

  “Low capacity?”

  “Well, she wasn’t dressed like a professional person. Rather gaudy, as I recall. Big plastic earrings. That sort of thing.” Spencer laughed. “Of course, she may not have been wearing plastic earrings at all, but she gave off that sort of impression. So this morning, when I read in Gloria’s file that the woman was from Pittsville, it didn’t surprise me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They have a women’s prison there,” Spencer said. “Mavis Wilde struck me as the sort of person who could easily have been familiar with the ‘inner workings’ of a place like Pittsville.”

  “She was in on it, that woman,” my father snarled when I described the same scene to him a few minutes later. “Porterfield probably give her part of what he stole from Gloria.” His eyes flared with contempt. “Bought and sold, that woman. Bought and sold by Porterfield.”

  The rabid nature of his response-his certainty that Mavis Wilde could be nothing more than one of Wallace Porterfield’s evil minions-gave no room for argument, so I offered none, but waited, certain that if I kept quiet, he would go on to another issue.

  “It’s the Haldol that’s the point, if you ask me,” he blurted out after a moment. “That’s the reason Porterfield brought that girl all the way over here. To get her out of the way. Drug her up. So he could get his hands on everything she had and people wouldn’t know what he was up to.”

  He was now more convinced than ever that Wallace Porterfield had somehow profited from the murders of Horace and Lavenia Kellogg, reaped advantage from the very act that had destroyed his son, the fire burning so hot in him, he seemed almost entirely consumed by it.

  “Porterfield was always grabbing for things,” he added. “Back in Waylord, he’d have some old shack condemned, drive the people out of it, then buy it hisself.” His face jerked into a scowl. “It’s in Porterfield’s blood to grab things. But this time it wasn’t just some old shack in the hills. It was a big, fine house. Must have set Porterfield’s mouth to watering.”

  “The trouble is,” I reminded him gently, “everything Horace Kellogg had went to Gloria.”

  “So he had that doctor drug her up,” my father said. “Had him fix it so Gloria couldn’t never think for herself. That way he could grab everything. Do it all legal too. Just say he had to take over ’cause Gloria didn’t have no sense.”

  In his rage, my father seemed half mad now, half insane with his need to exact revenge on Wallace Porter-field. And yet, as I had to admit, there was reason in what he said, and logic too, a fearsome plausibility at every stage of the argument, so that in the slanted light I could see it all as my father saw it, Porterfield’s evil purpose carefully calculated and coldly carried out. All I had to do was imagine Porterfield as my father did, a man beyond human dimension, an evildoer of gargantuan appetite, with his pistol and his badge fully arrayed in diabolical majesty, a conscienceless destroyer of the poor, the weak, all the malignancy of man festering in his vile heart.

  Then, as if to stretch Porterfield’s imperial malice to the breaking point, my father said, “You know, it could be Archie never left his car, Roy.”

  I stared at him, stunned.

  “Maybe it was Porterfield in that house. Doing it all hisself. The murders. Ain’t nothing Porterfield wouldn’t do if they was something he wanted.”

  “But what about the gun?” I reminded him, for the first time actually unnerved by my father’s extremity, the perilous swamp of fantasy into which he had now sunk. “Archie brought that gun, and it was the murder weapon.”

  “How do you know for sure it was really that gun that done it?”

  To my surprise, I had to admit that I didn’t know for sure that my father’s gun had been the weapon used that night.

  My father pounced. “See what I mean?” he demanded. “We just took it for the truth. Everything Porterfield said.”

  “But Archie said some things too, Dad. He confessed, remember? And not just to Porterfield. To me.”

  “Could have been Archie got scared and just up and said them things,” he said. “Maybe he would have took it back. Maybe that’s why …” His eyes widened. “Maybe that’s why he’s dead, Roy, ’cause he was about to take it all back.”

  The mad flame leapt again, hot and wild. “You got to find Gloria, Roy,” he declared with the insane certainty of one who could no longer entertain a separate reality, nor give the slightest credence to a world other than the one smoldering in his mind. “She’s the only living witness. You got to find her and make her tell the truth.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I waited until I’d heard the last of his movements behind the door, the final agitated twist and turn of his body in the tangled sheets, then the long, heavy exhalation of breath that signaled that he’d passed into unconsciousness at last. Then I crept to where the telephone rested on a small wooden table in the living room and called Doc Poole.

  “Something wrong, Roy? You sound—”

  “It’s my father
, he’s—”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  “No, wait,” I said hastily. “It’s not physical exactly. Well, maybe it is, I don’t know. That’s why I’m calling, I guess.”

  “What is it, Roy? What’s the matter with Jesse?” “He seems … crazy.”

  From the sound of his voice, and the steady nature of his response, this did not appear to surprise Doc Poole in the least.

  “What’s he doing? Tell me exactly.”

  “He’s got this idea in his head. Lots of ideas, really, but they’re all connected to one thing. He’s absolutely certain that Porterfield is behind everything. The Kellogg murders. Archie’s suicide. Gloria’s institutionalization.” I waited for a response, then added, “It’s my fault. I should never have started looking into it.”

  “It’s nobody’s fault,” Doc Poole assured me. “It’s dementia. He could have had a little stroke.”

  “What can I do?” I asked, and heard the helplessness in my voice.

  “Not much, unless you want to … calm him down.”

  “I don’t want to drug him, Doc. These are the last days of his life. I want him to live them … aware.”

  “Then you’ll just have to play along with him, Roy,” Doc Poole said. “You could argue with him, but it wouldn’t do any good. He’d fight you tooth and nail, and after a while you two probably wouldn’t even be speaking to each other again. So you just have to climb into his mind. Play along with whatever crazy stuff he comes up with.”

  I tried to do exactly that as I lay sleepless in bed a few hours later. I tried to climb into my father’s mind, search through it as if it were the charred ruin of a devastated house. I went over all his theories about what Wallace Porterfield had done, judged each as utterly unproved, even beyond proof. And the more I weighed the facts, the more obvious it became that the facts themselves did not matter to my father. But this truth only led to a final question: How would I be measured as a son if I didn’t join my father in this doomed quest to bring Wallace Porterfield to his knees?