Free Into the Web by Thomas H. Cook Page B

Juanita said. “The old sheriff. ’Cause of the way he done people way back when. Always going up and down the road in that big car of his.”
    I turned toward the road and saw Wallace Porterfield as I thought Juanita Her-Many-Horses must have seen him years before, huge and weighty behind the wheel of his cruiser, prowling the roads of Waylord like a ravenous wolf. “Always looking for bad things on people. You must of heard that.”
    “Why would I have heard it?”
    “ ’Cause he was looking for dirt on Lila’s mama.”
    “When was this?”
    “That summer you was coming up to see Lila. Done it all summer. All fall. Didn’t stop till winter. Guess he figured he couldn’t find nothing on her, so he just give up.” She looked at me shrewdly. “Or maybe he just figured she already had trouble enough. What with Lila going through all that trouble, you know, because of your brother. Them killings.”
    The dark hedge that bordered County Road surfaced in my mind, the lights from my car cruising down it until they reached Archie’s old Ford.
    “Anyway, the sheriff never asked me about Betty after that. Just let her be, didn’t come asking no more.”
    “He never came again after the murders?”
    “Not to me, he didn’t,” Juanita said. “Guess he got what he was after. Or figured he never would.”

Chapter Eight
    I t was only midday when I reached the outskirts of Kingdom City, my mind now focused on the abruptly foreshortened lives that my conversation with Juanita Her-Many-Horses had conjured up again. Archie’s, of course, but also the two people who’d been murdered on that catastrophic night, a man and woman who’d seemed old to me then, already halfway to the grave despite the fact that at the time of their deaths Horace and Lavenia Kellogg had been scarcely older than I was now.
    I knew that Mrs. Kellogg had had no time to consider her death as the bullet pierced the back of her skull. Only her husband, shot repeatedly, might have glimpsed the years that were being blasted from him as the bullets struck his arm, his leg, the small of his back.
    There were hours to kill before sunset, and I had no idea how to kill them. I might stroll through town, ofcourse, chat with the few people who still recognized me from the old days. But those chance meetings had always left me with a lingering unease. Even in the warmest smiles, or couched within the most casual exchanges, I saw and heard a question that went unasked, the one about Archie: Why did he do it, Roy?
    And so I didn’t go back to Kingdom City that afternoon. Instead, I revisited the old fishing spots and swimming holes to which Archie and I had so often gone.
    At Calvin Pond I remembered Archie in his blond innocence, able to pluck dragonflies from the air as if they floated on it languidly, like feathers. He would hold them by the wings, turn them slowly, studying the shifting iridescent colors of their bodies in the sunlight, See how they go rainbow.
    On Fulton Creek, I recalled him with a cane pole, a cork bobbing in the water. He’d always claimed that a “big one” lurked along the shadowy embankment, named the trout Cecil, and sworn that one day he’d yank it from the water, then hunker down and eat it raw, “like bobcats do.”
    Late in the afternoon, I stood alone on Saddle Rock, the huge granite slab where Archie and I had made camp on the night we’d finally run away. By sundown we’d gotten no more than five miles from home. As darkness fell, we climbed onto the rock, then plopped down on the single blanket we called our “bedroll,” and prepared to wait out the night.
    Our father had found us two hours later. He’d spotted Scooter on the road, the faithful dog who’d followed us from home. We’d not thought to keep Scooter at ourside for the night, and so he’d wandered down the rock and was sitting quietly at its base when our father’s truck came rattling up the road. The old man had stormed up the side of the rock