The Little Friend

Harriet—who had not failed to notice this leap of attention on Allison’s part—carefully recounted her dream of the night before.

“I think it was trying to tell me something,” she said. “I think I’m supposed to try to find out who killed Robin.”

She finished her sandwich. Allison was still looking at her. Edie—Harriet knew—was wrong in believing that Allison was stupid; it was just very difficult to tell what she was thinking and you had to be careful around her in order not to frighten her.

“I want you to help me,” said Harriet. “Weenie would want you to help me, too. He loved Robin. He was Robin’s kitty.”

“I can’t,” said Allison. She pushed back her chair. “I have to go. It’s time for Dark Shadows.”

“No, wait,” said Harriet. “I want you to do something. Will you do something for me?”

“What?”

“Will you try to remember the dreams you have at night, and will you write them down and show me in the morning?”

Blankly, Allison looked at her.

“You sleep all the time. You must have dreams. Sometimes people can remember things in dreams that they can’t remember when they’re awake.”

“Allison,” Ida called from the kitchen. “It’s time for our program.” She and Allison were obsessed with Dark Shadows. In the summertime they watched it together every day.

“Come watch it with us,” said Allison to Harriet. “It’s been really good the last week. They’re back in the past now. It’s explaining how Barnabas got to be a vampire.”

“You can tell me about it when I get home. I’m going to go over to the country club and sign us both up for the pool. Okay? If I sign you up, will you go swimming with me sometime?”

“When does your camp start, anyway? Aren’t you going this summer?”

“Come on,” said Ida Rhew, bursting through the door with her own lunch, a chicken sandwich, on a plate. The summer before, Allison had got her addicted to Dark Shadows—Ida had watched it with her, suspiciously at first—and now during the school year Ida watched it every day and sat down with Allison when she got home and told her everything that had happened.

————

Lying on the cold tile floor of the bathroom with the door locked, and a fountain pen poised above her father’s checkbook, Harriet composed herself for a moment before beginning to write. She was good at forging her mother’s handwriting and even better at her father’s; but with his loping scrawl she couldn’t hesitate for an instant, once the pen touched the paper she had to rush through it, without thinking, or else it looked awkward and wrong. Edie’s hand was more elaborate: erect, old-fashioned, balletic in its extravagance, and her high masterly capitals were difficult to copy with any fluency, so that Harriet had to work slowly, pausing constantly to refer to a sample of Edie’s writing. The result was passable, but though it had fooled other people it did not fool them all the time and it had never fooled Edie.

Harriet’s pen hovered over the blank line. The creepy theme music of Dark Shadows had just begun to waft through the closed bathroom door.

Pay to the Order of: Alexandria Country Club, she dashed out impetuously in her father’s wide, careless hand. One hundred eighty dollars. Then the big banker’s signature, the easiest part. She breathed out, a long sigh, and looked it over: fair enough. These were local checks, drawn on the town bank, so the statements went to Harriet’s house and not to Nashville; when the cancelled check came back, she would slip it out of the envelope and burn it, and no one would be the wiser. So far, since she had first been daring enough to try this trick, Harriet had appropriated over five hundred dollars (in dribs and drabs) from her father’s account. He owed it to her, she felt; were it not for the fear of blowing her system, she would happily have cleaned him out.

“The Dufresnes,” said Aunt Tat, “are cold people. They have always been cold. I’ve never felt they were particularly cultivated, either.”