Which, as I realized, had finally brought me full circle, back to the reason I’d whispered Mavis’s name in Porterfield’s ear, back to that snowy night twenty years before, the wild shots that had rung out behind the ornate door of 1411 County Road.
“Did Gloria ever talk to you about the murders?” I asked.
“She had this old locket. Said her grandmother give it to her. It brought things back when she fiddled with it.”
“Things?”
“Just got her to whining over it,” Mavis answered. “Said she had to have the damn locket ’cause she was gonna hock it. When they got away, I mean. Her and that boyfriend of hers, your brother. Anyway, Gloria said he didn’t have no money so she was gonna take that locket to wherever they went once they got away. That’s all she ever said about them killings. Just how, come hell or high water, she had to have that damn locket, and she aimed to get it no matter what he said.”
“What who said?”
“Her boyfriend, I guess,” Mavis answered. “The one she was running off with. He didn’t want her to get that locket, but Gloria said she had to have it, and she wasn’t going to leave without it.”
“But she did have it,” I said, baffled. “She had it when Porterfield found her that night.”
Mavis shrugged. “All I know is she had to have it. That’s what Gloria told me. That she had to have that locket and she wasn’t going to let him stop her. Said they fought about it ’Cause he didn’t want her to go get it.”
Go get it. I felt something shift in my mind, saw Archie’s car parked beside the hedge, two people in the front seat, arguing desperately. I have to have it, Archie. No. I’m going back for it. Gloria, don’t. I have to have it! Then the door of my brother’s old black Ford opened, Gloria racing out into the night, turning up the driveway, leaving the tracks in the snow that Wallace Porterfield had later seen.
“Did Gloria say what happened after she went back for the locket?” I asked.
“Just that she went to her room to get it, and she had it right in her hand when all hell broke loose downstairs. All this screaming, she said. Her mother screaming for her father, telling him that this boy had a gun.”
I heard my brother’s anguished apology, I didn’t mean for her to see it.
Lavenia Kellogg, I thought, imagining Archie’s panic as Horace Kellogg rushed toward him. So fast. Rushed into the room and saw the pistol, turned and ran toward where he hoped to find his own. So fast. A woman fleeing up the stairs. So fast. A man running down a corridor. So fast. And so no time to think, to argue, to explain, no time to do anything but reach for the pistol they’d already seen and with it stop the screaming and the panic, the chaos and the terror, the wild rush of time, because everything was happening … so fast.
“Oh, Archie,” I whispered.
Mavis toyed absently with her hair. “Well, you got any more questions?”
“No,” I answered. Now I knew, accepting the fact that Wallace Porterfield had had nothing whatsoever to do with my brother’s death, nor the murders themselves, nor ever connived to gain advantage from either of them. He had “played” with me, the old devil in him bent on tormenting me, but he was innocent of the deaths that had wrecked my family’s life.
“That’s it, then?” Mavis asked.
The gavel fell. Case closed, I thought, on Wallace Porterfield.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” Mavis said. “ ’Cause Wallace figured you was after him.”
“I was,” I admitted.
Mavis snorted. “I’m surprised ain’t nobody ever come after him before you,” she said, her voice filled with admiration for the aging sheriff, the evil he’d done yet always managed to escape. “ ’Course, Wallace had a way of scaring people so they wouldn’t tell.” She laughed. “Especially them girls he brought here.” She walked to a cabinet, drew out a bottle of whiskey, and poured herself a drink. “Brought in for questioning, he called it.”
Doc Poole’s voice sounded in my mind, Betty said he took Lila in for questioning.
“Did you ever see any of these girls?” I asked. Mavis took a swig. “Seen ’em all.”
“Did you ever see a girl with bright red hair?”
Mavis set down her glass. “Red hair?” She laughed again, but mirthlessly. “No, I didn’t never see no girl with red hair.” She glanced away, her eyes squeezing together slightly as if trying to bring that very girl into focus, the one she hadn’t seen. “You better be on your way. I ain’t got no more time for this.”
“A girl with red hair,” I repeated coldly. “Brought in for questioning.”
Mavis walked to the sofa, snatched up the yellow slicker, and began to put it on. “I don’t remember no girl with red hair. Come on now, I got to go.”
My father’s accusation leapt from my mouth. “You’re a liar.”
Mavis stepped to the door and opened it. “Get out of here now.”
I didn’t move. “Porterfield brought a girl here. She had red hair. Her name was Lila Cutler.”
Mavis watched me tensely, her body rigid, eyes defiant. “I ain’t telling you nothing.”
I felt something rise, fierce and newly born in me, my father’s ancient rage. “What did he do to her?”
“He didn’t do nothing,” Mavis snarled. “Get out of here!”
I strode across the room, grabbed the door, slammed it, then grabbed Mavis Wilde by the throat and squeezed with a violence that seemed to build with each passing second.
Mavis’s eyes bulged, her face fixed in animal terror. She was gasping for air, but I didn’t care. “He said she wasn’t worth the fight.” She gasped. “Said she wasn’t even fresh.”
My fingers bit into her throat. “Tell it all.”
“I thought he’d gone too far this time.” Mavis’s fingers clawed at my hand. “The way she fought him. I thought, ‘He’s gonna have to kill her ’cause that one ain’t gonna take it. She’s gonna tell for sure what he done to her.’ But he started telling her how he had the goods on her boyfriend. He said, ‘You keep your mouth shut about this if you want that boyfriend of yours to stay alive. ’Cause I can arrest him anytime I want to.’ That’s what Wallace told her. That she either keep her mouth shut or he’d make sure that boyfriend of hers paid for it good.”
I released Mavis Wilde’s throat and she sank to the floor, sucking in great gulps of air. “I guess she never said nothing about what he done,” she gasped, “ ’cause nobody never come over here looking to make Wallace pay.”
Betty Cutler’s condemnation cut through my mind, You’re not the man your daddy was.
True enough, I thought. Until now.
Chapter Twenty-Five
My father’s eyes fluttered open as I slammed into his room. He saw the rage in my face, the steaming wave I rode.
“Roy? What happened?”
I jerked open the door of his closet. “Porterfield.” He stirred on the bed, kicking at the sheets. “What are you looking for?” “This.”
He stared at the rifle in alarm. “What’s got into you?”
“Where are the shells?”
“Put that gun down.”
He lifted himself to a sitting position, then drew his legs over the rumpled side of the bed. “Put it down, Roy.”
I jerked open the top drawer of his bureau, the place he’d always kept his bullets in the past, and there it lay, a box of shells nestled among his socks and underwear.
“Roy, stop it,” my father said. “Gimme that gun.”
I opened the breech and shoved a bullet into the cylinder. “Wallace Porterfield is going to pay.”
I started for the door, but with an unexpected burst of energy, my father staggered forward and blocked my path. “Roy, give me that goddamn gun.”
“Get out of my way, Dad.”
For a moment, our eyes locked. Then my father stepped aside to let me pass.
I turned toward the door, heard my father rustle behind me, then a groan, like someone lifting a crushing wei
ght, and after that, blackness.
I didn’t know how much time had gone by before I saw light again. My eyes opened, then closed, then opened again, a space of murky shadows. Minutes passed, and the shadows fled, the room now illuminated by a blinding shaft of sunlight.
I lay facedown on the floor, and it took me some time to realize that I was still in my father’s bedroom. Everything was silent, and in that silence I remembered the way I’d turned from my father, the sound of his groan, but it was only when I saw Archie’s baseball bat on the bed that I realized what he’d used.
Woozily, I staggered to my feet and looked around for the rifle. It wasn’t there. I stumbled out of the room, rubbing the knot at the back of my skull, and peered out the front window.
He was sitting silently on the old orange sofa behind me, the rifle in his lap. “You all right?” he asked.
When I only glared at him, he said, “I had to stop you, Roy.”
“You haven’t stopped me,” I said, the rage building again, fired by a terrible image of Lila on her back, Porterfield’s massive bulk rising and falling above. “I’m going to make him pay, Dad.”
I strode across the room and yanked the rifle from his hand.
“Roy, wait!” my father cried. “I ain’t losing nothing else to Wallace Porterfield!”
But I was already to my car. My father clung helplessly to one of the supporting posts of the porch as I drove away.
The anger continued to mount as I made my way toward Porterfield’s house, a bloodred tide that swept me down the long, winding road to where I hoped to find the old sheriff sitting in malevolent splendor, still the evil king at the rotten heart of Kingdom County.
I’d already begun to imagine the terrible violence of the coming confrontation when I drew in upon the house and saw the flashing lights.
Lonnie’s patrol car was parked in the driveway, along with two others from the State Police. An ambulance rested in the driveway, its double doors open.
I saw Lonnie standing beneath the great oak in his father’s yard, three uniformed officers around him, and there, a few yards away, lying on his back on the green lawn, the enormous figure of Wallace Porterfield.
A uniformed officer strode toward me as I approached the house.
“We’re not letting traffic through right now,” he said when I came to a stop.
“What happened?”
“It’s Wallace Porterfield,” the officer said. “Somebody shot him.”
I glanced toward the figure in the grass, the empty lawn chair beyond him, his now-vacant throne.
My father’s voice gathered around me: I ain’t losing nothing else to Wallace Porterfield.
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 t
o 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.”