The Little Friend (17 page)

As she stared down at the illumined porch (empty swing,
Ferdinand the Bull
lying on the top step) she heard a rustle in the azaleas that edged the yard. Then, to her surprise, a shape emerged, and she saw Lasharon Odum creeping quietly onto the lawn.

It did not occur to Harriet that she was sneaking back for the book. Something about the cringing set of Lasharon’s shoulders maddened her. Without thinking, she hurled what was left of the pound cake out the window.

Lasharon cried out. There was an abrupt disturbance in the bushes behind her. Then, a few moments later, a shadow darted clear of Harriet’s lawn and skittered down the middle of the well-lit street, followed at a good distance by a smaller one which stumbled, unable to run so fast.

Harriet, kneeling on the window seat with head out between the curtains, stared for some moments at the sparkling stretch of empty pavement where the little Odums had vanished. But the night was as still as glass. Not a leaf stirred, not a cat cried; the moon shone in a puddle on the
sidewalk. Even the tinkly wind chimes on Mrs. Fountain’s porch were silent.

Presently, bored and irritated, she abandoned her post. She became absorbed in her notebook again and had almost forgotten that she was supposed to be waiting up for Allison, and annoyed, when a car door slammed in front.

She slipped back to the window and, stealthily, drew the curtain. Allison, standing in the street by the driver’s side of the blue Cadillac, toyed vaguely with her charm bracelet and said something indistinct.

Pemberton barked with laughter. His hair glowed Cinderella-yellow in the street lamps, so long that when it fell in his face, with just the sharp little tip of his nose poking out, he looked like a girl. “Don’t you believe it, darling,” he said.

Darling?
What was that supposed to mean? Harriet let the curtains fall and shoved the notebook under the bed as Allison started around the back of the car towards the house, her bare knees red in the Cadillac’s lurid tail-lights.

The front door shut. Pem’s car roared away. Allison padded up the stairs—still barefoot, she’d gone riding without her shoes on—and drifted into the bedroom. Without acknowledging Harriet, she walked straight to the bureau mirror and stared gravely at her face, her nose only inches from the glass. Then she sat down on the side of her bed and carefully dusted off the bits of gravel stuck to the yellowy soles of her feet.

“Where were you?” said Harriet.

Allison, elbowing her dress over her head, made an ambiguous noise.

“I saw you drive off. Where did you go?” she asked, when her sister did not respond to this.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know where you went?” said Harriet, staring hard at Allison, who kept glancing distractedly at her reflection in the glass as she stepped into her white pyjama trousers. “Did you have a good time?”

Allison—carefully avoiding Harriet’s eye—buttoned up her pyjama top and got in bed and began to pack her stuffed animals around her. They had to be arranged in a certain way
about her body before she could go to sleep. Then she pulled the covers over her head.

“Allison?”

“Yes?” came the muffled answer, after a moment or two.

“Do you remember what we talked about?”

“No.”

“
Yes
you do. About writing down your dreams?”

When there was no answer, Harriet said, in a louder voice: “I’ve put a sheet of paper by your bed. And a pencil. Did you see them?”

“No.”

“I want you to look.
Look
, Allison.”

Allison poked her head out from under the covers just enough to see a sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook beneath her bedside lamp. At the top of it was written in Harriet’s hand:
Dreams. Allison Dufresnes. June 12
.

“Thank you, Harriet,” she said, blurrily; and—before Harriet could get out another word—she pulled the covers up and flounced over with her face to the wall.

Harriet—after gazing steadily for some moments at her sister’s back—reached under the bed and retrieved the notebook. Earlier in the day, she’d taken notes on the account in the local paper, much of which was news to her: the discovery of the body; the efforts at resuscitation (Edie, apparently, had cut him down from the tree with the hedge clippers and worked on his lifeless body until the ambulance came); her mother’s collapse and hospitalization; the sheriff’s comments (“no leads”; “frustrating”) in the weeks that followed. She’d also written down everything that she could remember that Pem had said—important or not. And the more she’d written, the more came back to her, all sorts of random little scraps she’d picked up here and there over the years. That Robin died only a few weeks before school let out for summer vacation. That it had rained that day. That there had been small burglaries in the neighborhood around that time, tools stolen from people’s sheds: related? That when Robin’s body was found in the yard, evening services were just letting out at the Baptist church, and that one of the first people to stop and assist was old Dr. Adair—a retired pediatrician, in his eighties,
who’d happened to be driving past with his family on the way home. That her father had been at his hunting camp; and that the preacher had to get in his car and drive down there to find him and break the news.

Even if I don’t find out who killed him
, she thought,
at least I’ll find out how it happened
.

She also had the name of her first suspect. The very act of writing it down made her realize how easy it would be to forget, how important it would be from now on to put everything, everything, down on paper.

Suddenly a thought struck her. Where did he live? She hopped out of bed and went down to the telephone table in the front hall. When she came to his name in the book—
Danny Ratliff
—a spidery little chill ran down her back.

There was no proper address, only
Rt 260
. Harriet, after gnawing her lip in indecision, dialed the number and inhaled with sharp surprise when it was caught up on the first ring (ugly television clatter in the background). A man barked: “Yellope!”

With a crash—as if slamming the lid on a devil—Harriet banged down the receiver with both hands.

————

“I saw my brother trying to kiss your sister last night,” said Hely to Harriet as they sat on Edie’s back steps. Hely had come over to fetch her after breakfast.

“Where?”

“By the river. I was fishing.” Hely was always trudging down to the river with his cane pole and his sorrowful bucket of worms. Nobody ever came with him. Nobody ever wanted the little bream and crappies he caught, either, so he almost always let them go. Sitting alone in the dark—he loved night-fishing the best, with the frogs chirruping and a wide white ribbon of moonlight bobbing on the water—his favorite daydream was that he and Harriet lived by themselves like grown-ups in a little shack down by the river. The idea entertained him for hours. Dirty faces and leaves in their hair. Building campfires. Catching frogs and mud turtles. Harriet’s
eyes ferocious when they glowed at him suddenly in the dark, like a little feral cat’s.

He shivered. “I wish you’d come last night,” he said. “I saw an owl.”

“What was Allison doing?” said Harriet in disbelief. “Not
fishing.
”

“Nope. See,” he said, confidentially, scooting closer on his rear end, “I heard Pem’s car on the bank. You know that noise it makes—” expertly, with pursed lips, he imitated it,
whap whap whap whap!
—“you can hear him coming a mile off, so I know it’s him, and I thought Mama had sent him to get me so I got my stuff and climbed up. But he wasn’t looking for
me.
” Hely laughed, a short, knowing huff of a laugh that came out sounding so very sophisticated that he repeated it—even more satisfyingly—a beat or two later.

“What’s so funny?”

“Well—”
he could not resist the opening she’d given him for yet a third chance to try out the sophisticated new laugh—“there was Allison, way on her side of the car but Pem had his arm on the seat and he was leaning towards her—” (he extended an arm behind Harriet’s shoulders, to demonstrate) “like this.” He made a big wet smacking noise and Harriet, irritably, shifted away.

“Did she kiss him back?”

“She didn’t look like she cared one way or another. I’d sneaked
way
up on them,” he said brightly. “I started to throw a night crawler in the car but Pem would’ve beat the shit out of me.”

He offered Harriet a boiled peanut from his pocket, which she refused.

“What’s the matter? It’s not
poison.
”

“I don’t like peanuts.”

“Good, more for me,” he said, popping the peanut into his own mouth. “Come on, go fishing with me today.”

“No thanks.”

“I found a sandbar hidden in the reeds. There’s a path that goes right down to it. You’ll love this place. It’s white sand, like Florida.”

“No.”
Harriet’s father often took the same irritating tone, assuring her with confidence that she would “love” this or that thing (football, square dance music, church cookouts) she knew full well she detested.

“What’s your problem, Harriet?” It grieved Hely that she never did what he wanted to do. He wanted to walk through the narrow path in the tall grass with her, holding hands and smoking cigarettes like grown people, their bare legs all scratched and muddy. Fine rain and a fine white froth blown up around the edge of the reeds.

————

Harriet’s great-aunt Adelaide was an indefatigable housekeeper. Unlike her sisters—whose small houses were crammed to the rafters with books, curio cabinets and bric-a-brac, dress patterns and trays of nasturtiums started from seed and maidenhair ferns clawed to tatters by cats—Adelaide kept no garden, no animals, hated to cook, and had a mortal dread of what she called “clutter.” She complained that she was unable to afford a housekeeper, which infuriated Tat and Edie as Adelaide’s three monthly Social Security checks (courtesy of three dead husbands) kept Adelaide far better fixed for money than they were, but the truth was that she enjoyed cleaning (her childhood in decayed Tribulation had given her a horror of disorder) and she rarely felt happier than when she was washing curtains, ironing linens, or bustling around her bare, disinfectant-smelling little house with a dust rag and a spray can of lemon furniture polish.

Usually, when Harriet dropped by, she found Adelaide vacuuming the carpets or cleaning out her kitchen cabinets, but Adelaide was on the sofa in the living room: pearl ear-clips, her hair—rinsed tasteful ash-blond—freshly permed, her nyloned legs crossed at the ankle. She had always been the prettiest of the sisters and at sixty-five, she was the youngest, too. Unlike timid Libby, Valkyrie Edith, or nervous, scatterbrained Tat, there was an undertow of flirtatiousness about Adelaide, a roguish sparkle of the Merry Widow, and a fourth husband was not out of the question should the right man (some natty balding gent in a sports jacket, with oil
wells, perhaps, or horse farms) unexpectedly present himself in Alexandria and take a shine to her.

Adelaide was poring over the June issue of
Town and Country
magazine, which had just arrived. She was looking now at the Weddings. “Which of
these
two do you reckon has the money?” she asked Harriet, showing her a photograph of a dark-haired young man with frosty, haunted eyes standing alongside a shiny-faced blonde in a bustled hoopskirt that made her look like a baby dinosaur.

“The man looks like he’s about to throw up.”

“I don’t understand what is all this business about
blondes
. Blondes have more fun and all that. I think that’s something people dreamed up on the television. Most
natural
blondes have weak features and they look washed-out and rabbity unless they take a lot of pains to fix themselves up. Look at this poor girl. Look at
that
one. She has a face like a sheep.”

“I wanted to talk to you about Robin,” said Harriet, who saw no use in edging gracefully up to the subject.

“What’s that you’re saying, sweet?” said Adelaide, eyeing a photograph of a charity ball. A slender young man in black tie—clear, confident, unspoilt face—was rocking back on his heels with laughter, one hand at the back of a sleek little brunette in sugar-pink ballgown and elbow gloves to match.

“
Robin
, Addie.”

“Oh, darling,” said Adelaide wistfully, glancing up from the handsome boy in the photograph. “If Robin was with us now he’d be knocking the girls over like skittles. Even when he was just a tiny thing … so full of
fun
, he’d tip over backwards sometimes with laughing so hard. He liked to sneak up behind me and throw his arms around my neck and nibble on my ear. Adorable. Like a parakeet named Billy Boy that Edith used to have when we were children.…”

Adelaide trailed away as the smile of the triumphant young Yankee caught her eye again.
College sophomore
, the caption said. Robin, if he was alive, would be about the same age now. She felt a flutter of indignation. What right did this F. Dudley Willard, whoever he was, have to be alive and laughing in the Plaza Hotel with an orchestra playing in the
Palm Court and his glossy girl in the satin gown laughing back at him? Adelaide’s own husbands had fallen respectively to World War II, an accidentally fired bullet during hunting season, and massive coronary; she had borne two stillborn boys by the first and her daughter, with the second, had died at eighteen months, of smoke inhalation, when the chimney of the old West Third Street apartment caught fire in the middle of the night—savage blows, knee-buckling, cruel. Yet (moment by painful moment, breath by painful breath) one got through things. Now, when she thought of the stillborn twins, she remembered only their delicate and perfectly formed features, their eyes closed peacefully, as if sleeping. Of all the tragedies in her life (and she had suffered more than her share) nothing lingered and festered with quite the rankness of little Robin’s murder, a wound that never quite healed but gnawed and sickened and grew ever more corroding with time.