The Little Friend

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?”