I knocked softly at his door, carried the breakfast I’d prepared into him, nothing more than a single hard-boiled egg and black coffee, all he could get down.
“I’ve decided to do it,” I told him as I set the tray on his lap.
He stared listlessly at the egg and coffee. His hand moved toward neither one.
“I’m going to look for Gloria.”
He nodded wearily, the exertions of the day before now taking a terrible toll upon whatever reserves of strength he still possessed. “You got to find her, Roy,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “She knows what Porterfield done.”
“If he did anything,” I cautioned in a final hesitation before I took the plunge.
The old eyes leapt toward me. “Oh, he done something, all right. And he has to pay for what he done.” His half-curled fingers shook in the boiling air between us. “Otherwise … otherwise there ain’t …” He stared at me pleadingly. “Otherwise, they ain’t no use, Roy.” His head sank. His voice lowered. “No use to nothing on this earth.”
That was when I saw it plainly, the true quest of my father. I had been wrong. It wasn’t revenge he sought. It was meaning. Wallace Porterfield had to be guilty of something, and he had to be punished for it, not because my father wanted to avenge himself, but because he needed, powerfully and achingly, for the world to make sense.
And so I said, “I have a plan.”
My father lifted his head slowly.
“For finding Gloria. I got it from some detective novel I read years ago. I’m not sure it’ll work in real life, but there’s no harm in trying it.”
I waited for an response, but none came. Instead, my father drew in a long, heavy breath.
“I’m going to call Wallace Porterfield, and when he answers, I’m going to whisper a name. Mavis Wilde. Then I’m going to drive to Porterfield’s house and see if he gets in that big Lincoln of his.”
“Follow him if he does?” my father asked.
I nodded. “In the hope that he’ll lead me right to Mavis Wilde. From her, maybe I can get to Horace Kellogg’s daughter.”
My father nodded approvingly, though I’m sure he could see the same gigantic holes in the plan that were completely apparent to me. Porterfield could do nothing. Or he could simply call Mavis Wilde on the telephone. After so many years he might not even recognize her name.
“It may not work, of course,” I admitted as I rose and headed for the phone.
But, to my astonishment, it did.
The drive was almost seventy miles, and Porterfield drove it slowly through the rain, with an old man’s caution. From time to time he would nod to an approaching car, or wave to someone he recognized in one of the stunted towns through which we passed. But he never stopped, never veered, and in that steady, determined movement, I sensed an equally steady and determined purpose, so that I grew increasingly confident that the old sheriff was in fact leading me to Mavis Wilde, and that in finding her I would discover not only Porterfield’s crime, but something dark at the heart of my family’s life, the wellspring of our undoing-my father’s, Archie’s, mine-a place whose existence was curiously mirrored by where Porterfield led me, deeper and deeper into the woods, almost, it seemed to me, into a forest primeval.
Another twenty minutes passed before Porterfield finally turned into a muddy driveway, then brought his car to a halt before a small wooden house, remote and desolate, so nearly engulfed by the surrounding woods it seemed itself a kind of weed.
I swept past the house, drove on a few hundred yards, then turned back and drew close enough to keep an eye on it through a gap in the trees.
The Lincoln rested like a gleaming stone in front of the house. I could see Porterfield sitting behind the wheel, one hand in his lap, the other rising and falling rhythmically as he brought a cigarette to his mouth then drew it away again. I watched the gray smoke curl out of the open window, Porterfield nearly motionless, slouched in a heaviness that struck me as curiously melancholy, and which gave him the appearance of a man who in some deeply fundamental way was no friend to himself.
I don’t know exactly how long I waited, watching trails of rain streak down the windshield, only that I had nearly come to the conclusion that Porterfield had driven to this remote place for no better reason than to sit inside his big black car, smoking silently, adrift in ancient fears, as I imagined, an old lawman doomed to remain on stakeout forever, and that none of it, not one inch of the long drive from Kingdom City, had had anything to do with my phone call or the name I’d pronounced with a sinister whisper in Porterfield’s ear.
Then a muddy blue sedan suddenly appeared in the distance. It slowed as it neared the driveway, then made a wide turn. As it turned, I saw a woman behind the wheel, her face obscured by rain and fog. She drove up beside Porterfield and got out. I leaned forward, tried to determine if this could be the vulgar, dark-haired woman Dr. Spencer had glimpsed in the lobby at Daytonville, but her head was covered by a bloodred hat, her body by a yellow slicker. And so I could make out nothing about her except that she walked through the sheeting rain with a determined stride, giving no notice to the old white dog that suddenly pranced up beside her, then tagged behind for a few feet before drifting away again. Instead, she continued on until she reached the passenger door of Porterfield’s car, opened it, and got inside.
I waited, able to see no more than faint smudges behind the Lincoln’s foggy windows, the occasional curl of smoke that swept up from the driver’s side when a window was cracked to let it out.
A few minutes later, the passenger door opened again. The woman emerged from the car, bent against the rain. She gave a quick nod, then slammed the door. Stepping back, she watched, her back to me, as Porter-field pulled away.
I waited until the Lincoln’s red taillights had disappeared into the mist before I turned into the driveway. I heard my father’s voice in my mind, Oh he done something, all right, and for the first time I believed him, believed that through the years Wallace Porterfield and Mavis Wilde had been partners in a criminal collusion, hiding Gloria Kellogg from the world, along with all she must have known about what really happened after my brother brought his battered old Ford to a halt behind the tall dark hedge.
I’d completely embraced the reality of their conspiracy by the time I reached the door of the cabin, accepted it fully, completely, and with the kind of certainty we can feel only when we have come to believe that we will indeed confront the secret scheme that steals our happiness away, make it deal a few last cards face up.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The first card turned abruptly when the door opened to my knock, the face upon it hard and brittle, with matted, unwashed hair. I guessed her age at around fifty, though she might easily have been ten years older. And yet, I had no doubt I knew who now stood before me in the doorway. There were no plastic earrings, no cheap costume jewelry, but the essential nature of Spencer’s description remained fully visible in the predatory gleam of her dark eyes. There was something low about her, and it struck me that this baseness was the soil from which she’d sprung and in which she was truly and eternally rooted. Time might remold the features of her face, pluck the plastic earrings from her ears, but she would remain forever what she had forever been: a wholly purchased soul.
“Mavis Wilde,” I said then, when she remained silent. “My name’s Roy Slater. I’m—”
“I know who you are,” the woman said.
Her face was narrow, shrunken, so that she looked curiously mummified, eyes and mouth little more than holes cut clumsily out of a leather sack.
“Wallace said you might show up here. Said you called his house this morning. Said my name and hung up.”
“How’d he know it was me?”
She grinned mockingly. “There’s ain’t much Wallace don’t know.” The grin twisted from mockery to amusement. “He drove slow so you wouldn’t lose him.”
“Porterfield likes playing with people.”
She eyed m
e silently, taking my measure, but without fear, so that I sensed that she’d faced down a lifetime of threatening men. “Wallace said you was all stirred up about them murders. The ones your brother done.”
“I’m looking into it.”
She stared at me as if she were trying to decide whether to hear me out or close the door in my face, able to do either with equal indifference.
“Well, you might as well come in, Roy Slater. It’s been a long time since a man set foot in this old place.”
I stepped into the house and peered about the room. The water-stained wallpaper had peeled away like a leper’s skin and the scarred floor was scattered with old magazines, piles of yellowing newspaper.
“I ain’t got around to pitching all this stuff out,” Mavis said. “Tried to sell this place, but way out here in the boonies, ain’t no buyers.” She slumped down on a faded red sofa, then slung her legs up onto the pocked wooden table that stretched before it. “It ain’t too smart, fooling with Wallace, you know. He don’t like people poking into his private business.”
“Was this place one of his ‘private businesses’?”
She cackled loudly. “You might say we did some business. You ain’t never been in a cathouse before, have you, Roy, honey?”
“No, I haven’t.”
She plucked a purse from the table, grabbed a pack of cigarettes from it. “Well, ain’t that pitiful,” she said, and cackled again. “This little place used to be full of boys. Mostly from the army base they used to have ’bout fifteen miles from here. Different bunch of boys every night. Come from everywhere, them boys. Every part of the country.” She let her gaze drift about the room. “I had five, six girls working here.” Her eyes settled upon me. “Don’t look so surprised by my telling you all this. I ain’t hiding nothing. I done my time for running this place, so I ain’t got no reason to be afraid of you.” She lit the cigarette. “Besides, I never seen nothing wrong in it. Hell, we had plenty of boys just like you come over here. Come all the way from Kingdom City. Looking for a little … experience.” Her eyes narrowed into small reptilian slits. “But you didn’t come all the way from Kingdom County to hear about my glory days, did you?”
“No.”
“Come over here about them murders. That’s what Wallace told me. That you got it in your head your brother didn’t kill them people.”
“That’s right.”
“Wallace said if you showed up, I ought to ask you a question.” The grin returned, a mocking challenge.
“Who done it? That’s what Wallace told me to ask you. If your brother didn’t do it, then who did? Wallace said to ask you that, see what you said.”
“I don’t have to jump through a hoop for Wallace Porterfield,” I answered, an anger as fierce and terrible as my father’s flashing through me. “He’s not going to play with me anymore.”
“He ain’t playing with you.” Mavis said it firmly. “At least, not much. If Wallace was really playing with you, honey, you’d know it.”
“Well, he tried to make me believe that my father had something to do with the murders,” I told her. “Two sets of footprints, he said. Coming from my brother’s car. He said one of those sets belonged to my father.”
“Maybe it did.”
“No, it didn’t.”
Mavis peered at me for a moment, then said, “Well, don’t none of it matter to me anyway.” She leaned forward and crushed the cigarette into a dirty glass. “I don’t know nothing about them murders. Happened all the way over in Kingdom County. Heard about ’em, but that’s all.” She sank back against the stained cushions, her eyes bright with malice. “Wallace said you’d be asking about Gloria. Said you wouldn’t never heard of me if you hadn’t been snooping around, asking questions about that girl. Well, go ahead. Whatever questions you got, ask them. Then get on back home ’cause I ain’t got no more business with you.”
“You came with Porterfield to Daytonville the day he picked up Gloria?”
“Sure did.” She laughed cheerlessly. “But, hell, they ain’t no mystery to that. Wallace needed help, that’s all. In getting Gloria. So I come along with him.”
“Why did he need your help?”
“To take care of her after he took her out of that nuthouse she was in. He needed somebody to look after her for a while.”
“Why you?”
“ ’Cause he trusted me. All those years he come over here. We had a little arrangement. While he was sheriff, I mean. All that time, I never told a soul.”
“He was one of your … customers?”
“No, Wallace didn’t never want no whore,” Mavis said. “He always brought his own girl with him. He just needed a place to bring her, that’s all. Out of Kingdom County, I mean. Private. Him being the law over there and all.” She slung her arm over the back of the sofa and grinned. “You ever just needed a place, Roy?”
“Where did you take Gloria when you left Daytonville that day?”
Mavis dragged a skinny hand through the matted curls of her hair. “Brung her home with me. And seen after her real good too. In my own house. Not here. I got another place in Pittsville. That’s where Gloria stayed. A nice place, where I could see after her proper, or make sure somebody kept an eye on her if I was gone. Girl couldn’t do nothing for herself. I mean, she wasn’t no cripple or nothing. She could walk around, talk to you. Stuff like that. Just didn’t have no get-up-and-go. But she had to be watched. Wallace was real firm about that.” Afraid she’d kill herself.
I heard my father’s voice: Probably wasn’t nothing wrong with Gloria, ’cept Porterfield wanted to get rid of her. “Are you sure of that?” I asked.
To my surprise, she seemed offended by my doubt. “ ’Course I’m sure. Ain’t no reason for Wallace to have told me nothing like that if he didn’t believe it. That was why he took her to Daytonville in the first place. ’Cause he couldn’t keep her from bumping herself off and run Kingdom County at the same time.”
“Maybe he just wanted to get rid of her.”
Mavis snorted. “Oh yeah? Well, let me tell you something-if Wallace Porterfield wanted to get rid of that girl, he’d have got rid of her. They wouldn’t be no driving her over to Daytonville. Talking to all them doctors. Or taking her out again and putting her with me. And I’ll tell you something else while I’m at it: Long as I had charge of Gloria, she was well took care of.”
“How long did you ‘have charge’ of her”?
“Couple months, that’s all. Wallace paid me good for it too. But she was a whiny little thing. Money or not, I was glad to see her go.”
“Go?” I asked, now aware that I might have to follow those lost steps too, but which I felt utterly resolved to do. Gloria had become to me some frail child out of a dark fairy tale, bewildered, wandering lost in the forest, dropping bread crumbs in a futile attempt to leave a trail.
“Yeah, Wallace sent her down south.” Mavis struggled to her feet, walked to a small table, and retrieved a single white envelope. “Wallace brought me this letter when he come over this morning. He said to give it to you since you seemed so all fired up about knowing what happened to Gloria.”
“He thinks of everything, doesn’t he?” I asked stiffly.
“Yeah, he does.” Mavis’s voice was metallic. “Here. Read it. And then git gone. I ain’t got no more time to fool with you.”
The letter was from a place called Bryce Treatment Center, located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It stated that on June 9, 1974, Gloria Lynn Kellogg, age 26, had died of a brain aneurism. As Miss Kellogg’s “only living relative,” Wallace Porterfield was assured that everything possible had been done for her, and was asked to make the necessary funeral arrangements.
“Why does this say that Porterfield is Gloria’s only living relative?” I asked.
“ ’Cause he was.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“I don’t care whether you do or not,” Mavis snapped. “But I know for a fact Wallace and Gloria’s mother was
cousins. That’s why she come to Kingdom County in the first place, ’Cause Wallace said he’d put her husband on as a deputy.”
“Where was the rest of her family?”
“Wallace never said. Told me he was stuck with Gloria, ’cause her mother was his cousin. That nobody else would lift a finger for her, so it was up to him to see after her. Which he did.”
I felt a small thread snap in the elaborate fabric of conspiracy my father had woven so persuasively.
“Fact is, Wallace done what he could for Gloria,” Mavis said. “Spent a fortune on her. Keeping her in that hospital down south. Cost him a whole hell of a lot of money to do that.”
“But it wasn’t his money,” I argued, determined to stitch the tapestry up again, make it tough and strong, able to bear the weight of my father’s anguished need to bring logic to the universe. “Porterfield used Gloria’s money to—”
“Gloria’s money?” A laugh rattled from Mavis’s twisted mouth. “Gloria didn’t have no money.”
“Of course she did,” I said emphatically. “The money she inherited. From her father.”
Mavis’s laugh jangled again. “Gloria’s daddy was a thief. Give hisself big loans from his own bank. It all had to be paid back. That damn girl didn’t have a penny.”
“But the house and everything in it,” I persisted, conjuring up my father’s description of the auction, people gathered in the wide front yard, bidding on furniture, dishes, finally the riches of the house itself, Porterfield in charge of it all, watching greedily as Gloria’s patrimony was sliced into pieces and carted away.
“Wallace had to sell off everything,” Mavis informed me. “They was big people had a stake in that bank. They had to be paid back or it would all have got out about Gloria’s daddy. So Wallace paid them. Time it was over, there wasn’t a penny left for nothing.” She laughed. “Wallace used to say your brother done that no-account daddy of Gloria’s a favor by shooting him. Said Horace Kellogg would have ended up in the penitentiary pretty soon anyway. Said he got what he deserved when your brother killed him.”