Into the Web Read Online Free PDF Page A

Cutler that ever finished school, don’t you guess, Roy?”
    She smiled brightly, the face now poised triumphant beneath the mortarboard as she flicked its gold tassel to the right.
    “The very first,” I told him.
    Lonnie stood up, slapped forest debris from the knees of his trousers. “Lila Cutler. Fine-looking girl.” He looked at Ezra.
    “There’s an old mining road not too far from here, right, Ezra?”
    Ezra’s eyes were on Clayton Spivey. “Yeah, there is,” he answered. “It used to come all the way from the Waylord mine.”
    “My guess is Clayton came right down that road.” Lonnie thought a moment, then added, “Probably walked right through the pasture behind the Cutler place. Unless he had a car. Did Clayton have a car, Ezra?”
    “I think his car was broke down, Sheriff.”
    “Why you think that?”
    “ ’Cause I seen him walking back and forth a few times. On foot, I mean. Going down the mountain.”
    Lonnie shrugged. “Well, I’ll go check his place soon as I finish up here,” he said, the professional lawman plotting the course of his investigation. He glanced down at the corpse. “Clayton Spivey lived like a hermit, didn’t he? No wife or kids.”
    “Far as I know he lived alone.”
    Lonnie laughed. “Just like old Roy here, living the bachelor’s life. Hell, I can’t even remember not being married, can you, Ezra? Not having a wife and kids?”
    I felt a curious emptiness settle upon me as Lonnieand Ezra chuckled together, married men, men with children.
    “Did Lila ever get married?” I asked quietly.
    Lonnie looked surprised by the question. “Man, you really haven’t kept in touch with the old home place, have you, Roy?”
    “No, I haven’t.”
    “Well, no, Lila never got married,” Lonnie answered. “She’s still living with her mother in that same old house they lived in when Lila was a girl.”
    For a moment, the girl Lila had once been seemed to rise into Lonnie’s mind. Then, no less suddenly, it vanished, and he glanced down again at Clayton Spivey’s body.
    “Well, now I got to find out what happened to this poor bastard,” he said.
    It was midday by the time an ambulance from the county hospital arrived at Ezra Loggins’s farmhouse. I didn’t go back into the woods, felt no need to see Clayton’s body again. And so I stayed behind while Lonnie and Ezra led the ambulance attendants back up into the hills. Two hours passed before they showed up again, clumsily bearing a stretcher from the edge of the woods to the back of the ambulance.
    “Walked over to Clayton’s place,” Lonnie said as he trudged toward me. “Nothing but a shack. Just a little table and a chair. An old woodstove.” He shook his head disdainfully. “Living like an animal.”
    “He was poor,” I said.
    Lonnie appeared hardly to have heard me. “Still can’ttell what happened to him. Rifle didn’t have any blood on it, but somebody could have wiped it clean.”
    “You think he was shot?”
    “Can’t tell that either,” Lonnie answered. “At least not without a real close look. With that little old peashooter he had, he could have got shot and you wouldn’t even find the hole without shaving his head. Happened to a guy in Welch. Got shot twice in the head, and nobody found the holes till the doctor took a look at him in the emergency room.”
    “What about suicide?” I asked.
    Lonnie shrugged. “Same story. If Clayton put that gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, you wouldn’t see no hole on the other side.”
    “But you’d see blood on the barrel, wouldn’t you?”
    Lonnie grinned, pleased. “You’re a regular detective.”
    “I’ve read a few detective stories,” I said.
    “Well, the answer’s no, you wouldn’t necessarily see any blood. Depends on how long that old rifle was out in the open. Could have been washed by rain, something like that. Fact is, we won’t know anything for sure until the coroner takes a look at the body.” He glanced toward the