Into the Web by Thomas H. Cook

me, the sort that, if left unanswered, pursues us through the years, becomes a ghostly whisper, a rumor carried by the rain, about something we don’t know and yet suspect must have in secrecy and stealth deranged and finally undone our lives.
    And so I said, “You think I told Archie to let Gloria go? When would I have done that, Dad?”
    “That night.”
    “What makes you think I saw Archie that night?”
    “ ’Cause Porterfield come asking. The next morning. When he come to tell the old lady about the killings and how he had Archie in jail over in Kingdom City.”
    “Where was I when he came here?”
    “You’d already gone to work, like me,” my father answered. “At the drugstore.”
    I recalled that morning, Saturday, the night’s snow long melted away by a warm morning sun, leaving the streets of Kingdom City slick and gleaming.
    “What did the sheriff want to know?” I asked.
    “Where you’d been,” my father answered. “When Archie done it. She told him you was probably up in Waylord. That you’d been out with Lila that night.”
    In my mind I saw Porterfield stride past the window of Clark’s Drugs as he had that morning, his eyes leveled upon me as I stood, wiping glasses, behind the soda fountain.
    “Porterfield saw me that morning,” I said. “In the drugstore. But he didn’t come in. He never asked me anything about where I was that night.”
    I remembered how, two days later, when Porterfield had led me silently down the corridor to Archie’s cell for what turned out to be our last time together, he had wheeled and walked back to his office without so much as a word, the sound of dangling keys the only ones I’d heard.
    “And when I went to visit Archie, he never asked me one question about the murders.”
    My father nodded. “Archie wasn’t a bad boy. Just too much like me, that’s all. Had the same bad luck.”

Chapter Ten
    A s I made his morning coffee, I knew he was awake just beyond his bedroom door, waiting for me to leave so he could enjoy the only thing he seemed really capable of enjoying, his granite solitude.
    I tapped at the closed door, waited, then called, “Your coffee’s ready.” When no answer came, I placed his brown mug on the kitchen table. “It’ll be cold in five minutes,” I added.
    With that I considered my morning obligations done and headed into town, driven by some priggish sense of duty to report to Lonnie.
    Lonnie didn’t appear at all surprised to see me. “Well, I let Lila go like I said I would,” he told me with a friendly wink. “You two hook up later?”
    He saw the expression on my face and laughed acrudely insinuating laugh that reminded me of the sliminess that had always been a part of his character. “You didn’t?” he said. “I figured you’d have cashed in by now. You know, got a little something for that favor you did her.”
    I heard my father’s warning, Blood is blood. Them Porterfields just use people , and considered the dark world they suggested, all of us bound to the stake of our birthright, anchored in the deep sludge of the generations, not at all born into a wide, bright world, but carelessly tossed into the web.
    “The fact is, it wasn’t doing any good to keep her here anyway,” Lonnie added now. “I released Clayton’s body too. No reason to keep it.”
    “Well, I found out that Clayton Spivey was—”
    “Dying?” Lonnie interrupted with a triumphant grin.
    “Yes.”
    “I found out before you did, I bet,” he said. “Doc Poole finished the autopsy just after you left.”
    He looked surprised when I picked up the report from his desk.
    “Natural causes, according to Doc Poole,” he said. “Old Clayton just spit blood and died.”
    “Byssinosis,” I said, then continued to scan the report, noting the basic facts Doc Poole had recorded in it. He’d written “none” in the space provided for next of kin.
    “So that’s it, Roy,” Lonnie said when I handed him back the report. “Case