Thomas H. Cook - Into the Web  

THOMAS H. COOK is the author of eighteen novels, including The Chatham School Affair, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel; Instruments of Night; Breakheart Hill; Mortal Memory; Sacrificial Ground and Blood Innocents, both Edgar Award nominees; and Moon over Manhattan, which he co-authored with Larry King. He has also written two works about true crimes, Early Graves and Blood Echoes, which was also nominated for an Edgar Award. He wrote the novelization of the SCI FI Channel television event, Taken, and has co-edited, with Otto Penzler, two anthologies of American crime writing.

He lives in New York City and Cape Cod.

T here is no older story than the return of the native, and Id always believed that had Adam returned to Eden to walk in middle age the ruined garden once again, he might have felt an odd nostalgia for his fall. And yet I felt no such nostalgia for Kingdom County. In fact, after leaving it, Id never expected to live there again, see the suspicious look in Sheriff Porterfields eyes each time Id met him on the streets of Kingdom City. Hed never said a word to me, but Id guessed his thoughts:

I know you were there.

The old sheriff had been standing on the corner only a few yards away when Id climbed onto a bus headed for California a few days after the murders. Hed had that same accusatory look in his eyes, but hed added a knowing grin as the bus pulled away.

I know what you did.

Id just turned nineteen that year, a boy on his way to college, armed with a scholarship, seeking only to escape a bloody act, build a life far away from Kingdom County and in every way different from the one Id lived there. If Id had one determination as Id taken my seat in the bus that day, it was that I would never again live in Kingdom County, never again endure its poverty and blighted hope, and certainly not the dark suspicions of Sheriff Wallace Porterfield.

But when my father fell ill, I had no choice but move back. With both my mother and my brother Archie gone, there was no one left to care for him. And although I had nothing in common with my father, nor even so much as a tender childhood memory of him, I couldnt let him die alone.

The fact that he was dying was not in doubt. Doc Poole had made that clear as I sat in his office a few days after my return.

I want to know exactly what his condition is, I said.

Doc Poole leaned back in his chair. He wont make it through the summer, Roy.

It was a stifling summer afternoon, and even as Doc Poole spoke, the two of us facing each other across his old wooden desk, I knew that a few miles away my father had already retired to his sweltering bedroom, its door sternly closed, as it always had been, my father secluded not only within that steaming space but within himself as well, a chamber just as airless and overheated as the room in which he lay.

In the last stage of liver cancer theres really nothing to be done, Doc Poole added. So I wouldnt waste any time on false hope.

I never have, I said casually.

What did Jesse tell you about his situation?

Just that he had cancer. He didnt say he was in the last stage of anything. He didnt even ask me to come home.

Well, Im glad you did, Doc Poole told me. You can help him stay comfortable.

Ill do what I can, I said crisply.

Keep him comfortable, that was my sole purpose in coming home, simply to care for my fathers most immediate needs, nothing more. I had not come home to reconcile with him, win his approval, or confess anything. As far as I was concerned my father was a crude and ignorant man who took a bullish pride in his crudity and ignorance, wore them like badges of honor. So much so that he often seemed determined to offend me, forever sprawled in his musty, littered bedroom, wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, his legs spread wide, a cigarette burning down to the nub in his soiled fingers. At dinner he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and noisily gulped the last swallow of iced tea, defiantly staring at me when he set down the glass. Day and night, he watched one mindless TV comedy after another, seemingly as amused by the commercials as by the programs themselves. Even in sleep he seemed bent upon disturbing me, twisting about violently as he muttered my brothers name, Archie, Archie, as if to make it clear that my dead brother was the one he would have preferred beside him in his last days.

I might have attributed all of this spitefulness to the simple fact that my father was dying and, therefore, unhappy. But hed always been unhappy. I couldnt remember a time when a rancorous misery hadnt afflicted him. Nor did it surprise me that in his final weeks on earth this unquiet ghost continued to goad him mercilessly, giving no quarter, determined to pursue him to the grave. There were even times when I thought I could hear it hissing through the air around him, a voice as dry as the sound of wind through fields of long-dead corn.

The origin of my fathers unhappiness remained a mystery, however. Hed never spoken of his life, nor offered me the slightest entry into his shrouded past. And so Id finally concluded that his unhappiness was like my own, something that flowed from the choices Id made. And although our choices had been complete opposites, theyd landed us pretty much in the same boat. My father had made a bad marriage. I had chosen not to marry. He had sired two sons, and in one way or another, lost them both. Id had no children. In both our lives, the dream of family had soured, leaving us tied cheerlessly to each other, my father yearning only for death, I yearning only to escape once again from the very place Id fled so many years before.

But as I realized a few days after returning to Kingdom County, my yearning to escape it was even deeper now, a need, once and for all, to put its gory legacy behind me. For by then Id learned how violence clings to whatever it touches. You can wash the blood away but not the memory of blood, not whose it was or how it had been spilled. Innocence is fragile, and violence shatters it. A simple pair of scissors once tagged Exhibit A can never cut kite string again.

The merest glance into my childhood bedroom, the sight of Archies battered guitar still propped up in the corner, could instantly evoke the sound of gunfire, clouds of blue smoke.

My brother and I had shared that tiny room from earliest boyhood until his last night at home. We had crammed it with big plans, usually of escape, first to Kingdom City and from there to parts unknown. It was in that room Id first determined to go to college, then later filled out the necessary application. Id read the letter of acceptance, one that had been accompanied by the offer of a scholarship, in a kind of wild reverie, leaping onto the bed and jumping up and down while Archie looked on silently.

It was also in that room that Archie had first mentioned Gloria, and where, sometime later, hed told me that he was in love with her. Later still, hed mused about how the two of them would one day get married, move to Nashville, find an apartment, attend the Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night. The little metal box hed used as a bank still rested on the small wooden table by the window. I could hear the soft tinkle of coins as he counted out his savings each night, trying to calculate, in that confused and uncertain way of his, just how much money they would need to get to Nashville and survive there until he made it as a country singer.