The Little Friend

“Everybody thought I was crazy. A man’s black dress hat! Size eight! A Stetson! A nice hat, too, with no sweat on the hatband. And it just appeared there on the foot of my bed in broad daylight.”

“You mean you didn’t see it appear,” said Harriet, bored. Harriet had heard the story about the hat hundreds of times. Nobody thought it was very mysterious except Libby.

“Darling, it was two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon—”

“Somebody came in the house and left it.”

“No, they didn’t, they couldn’t have. We would have seen or heard them. Odean and I were in the house the whole time—I’d just moved here from Tribulation, after Daddy died—and Odean had been in the bedroom to put away some clean linens not two minutes before. There wasn’t any hat there then.”

“Maybe Odean put it there.”

“Odean did not

put that hat there. You go on in and ask her.”

“Well, somebody sneaked in,” Harriet said impatiently. “You and Odean just didn’t hear them.” Odean—normally uncommunicative—was as fond of telling and retelling the Mystery of the Black Hat as Libby was, and their stories were the same (though very different in style, Odean’s being far more cryptic, punctuated by lots of head-shaking and long silences).

“I’ll tell you, sweetheart,” said Libby, sitting forward alertly in her chair, “Odean was walking back and forth throughout this house, putting away clean laundry, and I was in the hall on the telephone to your grandmother, and the door to the bedroom was wide open and within my line of view—no, not a window,” she said over Harriet, “the windows were locked and the storm windows were fastened down tight. Nobody could have got in that bedroom without both Odean and me seeing them.”

“Somebody was playing a joke on you,” said Harriet. This was the consensus of Edie and the aunts; Edie had more than once provoked Libby to tears (and Odean to furious sulks) by mischievously insinuating that Libby and Odean had been nipping at the cooking sherry.

“And what sort of joke was that?” She was getting upset. “To leave a man’s black dress hat on the foot of my bed? It was an expensive hat. And I took it down to the dry goods store and they said nobody sold hats like that in Alexandria or anywhere they knew of closer than Memphis. And lo and behold—three days after I found that hat in my house, little Robin was dead.”

Harriet was silent, pondering this. “But what does that have to do with Robin?”

“Darling, the world is full

of things we don’t understand.”

“But why a hat?” said Harriet, after a baffled pause. “And why should they leave it at your house? I don’t see the connection.”

“Here’s another story for you. When I was living out at Tribulation,” said Libby, folding her hands, “there was a very nice woman named Viola Gibbs who taught kindergarten in town. I suppose she was in her late twenties. Well. One day, Mrs. Gibbs was walking in the back door of her own house, and her husband and children all said she jumped back and started slapping the air like something was after her, and the next thing they knew, she fell over on the kitchen floor. Dead.”

“A spider probably bit her.”

“People don’t die like that from a spider bite.”

“Or she had a heart attack.”

“No, no, she was too young. She’d never been sick a day in her life, and she wasn’t allergic to bee stings, and it wasn’t an aneurism, nothing like that. She just dropped dead for no reason in the world, right there in front of her husband and children.”

“It sounds like poison. I bet her husband did it.”

“He did no such thing. But that’s not the odd part of the story, darling.” Politely Libby blinked, and waited, to make sure she had Harriet’s attention. “You see, Viola Gibbs had a twin sister. The odd part of the story is that a year earlier, a year to the day—” Libby tapped the table with her forefinger—“the twin had been climbing out of a swimming pool in Miami, Florida, when she got a horrified look on her face, that’s what people said, a horrified look. Dozens of people saw it. Then she started screaming and slapping at the air with her hands. And next thing anybody knew she fell over dead on the concrete.”

“Why?” said Harriet, after a confused pause.

“Nobody knows.”

“But I don’t understand.”

“Neither does anybody else.”

“People just don’t get attacked by something invisible.”

“Those two sisters did. Twin sisters. Exactly a year apart.”

“There was a case a lot like that in Sherlock Holmes. The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”

“Yes, I know that story, Harriet, but this is different.”

“Why? You think the Devil was after them?”

“All I’m saying is that there are an awful lot of things in the world we don’t understand, honey, and hidden connections between things that don’t seem related at all.”

“You think it was the Devil killed Robin? Or a ghost?”

“Gracious,” said Libby, reaching, flustered, for her glasses, “what’s all this going on in the back?”