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with this last remnant of my family, and with him the bloody act with which our name had so long been joined.

Chapter Two
    I had no particular destination in mind when I backed my car out of the driveway that morning. Very little had changed in the look and feel of Kingdom County since I’d left it. It was still crisscrossed by narrow, unpaved roads, dotted with small placid ponds, a rural world where only the occasional tipple of a coal mine gave any suggestion of modern industry. The woods were lush and green, and sunlight sparkled on the slender creeks that twisted through them. The air smelled of mountain laurel and honeysuckle, and children still picked blackberries as Archie and I had done as boys, lugging them back to our mother in a metal bucket lined with burlap.
    Don’t say nothing, Roy.
A quick wink.
I’ll see you in the blackberry patch.
Those had been Archie’s last words to me, uttered as I’d reached the door of his prison cell.
    Since that night I’d added other details I may or may not actually have noticed at the time, the play of Archie’s fingers in his lap, the shadow of the bars across his face, the plain white T-shirt beneath the orange jailhouse jumpsuit. Still, more than anything, it was his voice I remembered, quiet, calm, assuring me that somehow, in some other world, all the murderous terror of that snowy night on County Road would be put behind us.
    He’s like a little puppy, Roy, so you have to keep an eye on him
, my mother used to say.
So he don’t run in front of a car or just trot off with a stranger.
    Even as a boy I’d recognized Archie’s guileless nature and lack of foresight. I’d been so much the leader of our small pack that at times he’d seemed paralyzed without me. My father had stated the fact of the matter with his typical brutality:
Murder was the only thing that boy ever done without you, Roy
, a line that burned into my mind each time my father said it, made me see again the headlights of my old Chevy mount the hill at 1411 County Road, glint on the rear bumper of Archie’s black Ford as it rested beside the high green hedge, Archie hunched behind the wheel, tense, baffled, poised to act, but unable to do so, his question whispering always in my mind,
Will you come with me, Roy?
    I still knew a great many people in the area around Cantwell, of course, but the first person I recognized as I drove around that morning was Lonnie Porterfield, the son of the old sheriff who’d presided over Kingdom County like a medieval lord.
    We’d been acquaintances in high school, Lonnie andI, then gone our separate ways, he for a tour in Vietnam, where he’d been wounded seriously enough to win a Purple Heart, then returned home the county’s conquering hero.
    A few years after his return, Wallace Porterfield had retired as sheriff of Kingdom County with the clear understanding that Lonnie, who’d worked as his deputy until then, would take over the job. Even so, an election was necessary, and during the campaign Lonnie had used his military service to good advantage, run for the office as much on his war record as on whatever experience he’d gained working for the old sheriff. He’d been elected by a wide margin and had held the job ever since.
    Normally, I wouldn’t have stopped at Lonnie’s house, but after three dreary weeks back in Kingdom County, the prospect of talking to someone other than my father-if our tense exchanges could be called talk at all-was too enticing to resist.
    Lonnie was leaning back in a lawn chair in his front yard, when I pulled into his driveway. His black-and-white cruiser sat in the front yard, gleaming in the sunlight. A golden five-pointed star adorned the side doors.
    “Roy Slater, well, I’ll be damned,” Lonnie said as I got out of my car. “I heard you were back in town.”
    I noticed a red plastic bucket beside his chair, suds boiling up over the rim, a wet rag hung over the side.
    “Washing the car on Sunday,” I scolded.