This was Harriet’s greatest obsession, and the one from which all the others sprang. For what she wanted—more than Tribulation, more than anything—was to have her brother back. Next to that, she wanted to find out who killed him.
————
On a Friday morning in May, twelve years after Robin’s murder, Harriet was sitting at Edie’s kitchen table reading the journals of Captain Scott’s last expedition to the Antarctic. The book was propped open between her elbow and a plate from which she was eating a scrambled egg and some toast. She and Allison often ate their breakfast at Edie’s house on school mornings. Ida Rhew, who did all the cooking, did not arrive at work until eight o’clock and their mother, who seldom ate much of anything anyway, had only a cigarette and occasionally a bottle of Pepsi for breakfast.
This was not a school morning, however, but a weekday morning early in the summer vacation. Edie stood at the stove with a polka-dot apron over her dress scrambling her own egg. She did not care for this business of Harriet reading at the table but it was easier to just go ahead and let her do it instead of having to correct her every five minutes.
The egg was done. She turned off the flame and went to the cupboard to fetch a plate. In doing so she was forced to step over the prone form of her other granddaughter, who lay stretched out full length on her stomach across the kitchen linoleum sobbing monotonously.
Edie, ignoring the sobs, stepped carefully back over Allison’s body and spooned the egg upon a plate. Then she circled to the kitchen table—carefully avoiding Allison as she did so—and sat down across from the oblivious Harriet and began to eat in silence. She was far too old for this sort of thing. She had been up since five o’clock, and she had had it up to here with the children.
The problem was the children’s cat, which lay on a towel in a cardboard box near Allison’s head. A week ago, it had begun to refuse its food. Then it had started to cry whenever it was picked up. They had then brought it over to Edie’s house for Edie to examine.
Edie was good with animals, and she often thought that she would have made an excellent veterinarian or even a doctor if girls had done such things in her day. She had nursed all sorts of kittens and puppies to health, raised baby birds fallen from the nest, and cleaned the wounds and set the broken bones of all manner of hurt creatures. The children knew this—not only her grandchildren, but all the children in the neighborhood—and brought to her not only their own sick pets but any pitiful little strays or wild things they happened to find.
But, fond as she was of animals, Edie was not sentimental about them. Nor, as she reminded the children, was she a miracle worker. After brisk examination of the cat—who indeed appeared listless, but had nothing obviously wrong with it—she had stood up and dusted her hands on her skirt while her granddaughters looked hopefully on.
“How old is this cat, anyway?” she asked them.
“Sixteen and a half,” said Harriet.
Edie bent down to stroke the poor thing, which was leaning against the table leg with a wild, miserable look in its eye. She was fond of the cat herself. It had been Robin’s kitty. He had found it lying on the hot sidewalk in the summertime—half dead, its eyes hardly open—and had brought it to her, gingerly, in his cupped palms. Edie had had a devil of a time saving it. A knot of maggots had eaten a hole in its side and she still remembered how meekly and uncomplainingly the little thing had lain while she washed the wound out, in a shallow basin of lukewarm water, and how pink the water was when she finished.
“He’ll be all right, won’t he, Edie?” said Allison, who was even then close to tears. The cat was her best friend. After Robin died, it had taken up with her; it followed her around, brought her little presents it had stolen or killed (dead birds; tasty bits of garbage; once—mysteriously—an unopened package of oatmeal cookies); and ever since Allison started school, it had scratched on the back door every afternoon at two-forty-five asking to be let out so that it could walk down to the corner to meet her.
Allison, in turn, lavished more affection on the cat than on any other living creature, including the members of her own family. She talked to it constantly, fed it pinches of chicken and ham from her own plate, and allowed it to sleep with its stomach draped over her throat at night.
“Probably he ate something that didn’t agree with him,” said Harriet.
“We’ll see,” Edie said.
But the following days confirmed her suspicion. There was nothing wrong with the cat. It was just old. She offered it tuna fish, and milk from an eyedropper, but the cat only closed its eyes and spat out the milk in an ugly froth between its teeth. The morning before, while the children were at school, she had come into the kitchen to find it twitching in a kind of fit, and she had wrapped it in a towel and taken it to the vet.
When the girls stopped by her house that afternoon she told them: “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. I took the cat to Dr. Clark this morning. He says we’ll have to put him to sleep.”
Harriet—surprisingly, for she was quite capable of flying off the handle when she felt like it—had taken the news with relative equanimity. “Poor old Weenie,” she had said, kneeling by the cat’s box. “Poor kitty.” And she laid her hand on the cat’s heaving flank. She loved the cat nearly as much as Allison did, though it paid little attention to her.
But Allison had turned pale. “What do you mean, put him to sleep?”
“I mean what I say.”
“You can’t do that. I won’t let you.”
“There’s nothing more we can do for him,” said Edie sharply. “The vet knows best.”
“I won’t let you kill him.”
“What do you want to do? Prolong the poor thing’s suffering?”
Allison, lip trembling, dropped to her knees by the cat’s box and burst into hysterical tears.
That had been yesterday afternoon at three o’clock. Since then, Allison had not moved from the cat’s side. She had eaten no supper; she had refused pillow and blanket; she had simply lain all night on the cold floor wailing and crying. Edie, for about half an hour, had sat in the kitchen with her and attempted to deliver a brisk little talk about how everything in the world died and how Allison must learn to accept this. But Allison had only cried harder; and finally Edie had given it up and gone in her bedroom and shut the door and started an Agatha Christie novel.
At last—about midnight, by Edie’s bedside clock—the crying had stopped. Now she was at it again. Edie took a sip of her tea. Harriet was deeply absorbed in Captain Scott. Across the table, Allison’s breakfast stood untouched.
“Allison,” Edie said.
Allison, shoulders shaking, did not respond.
“Allison. Get over here and eat your breakfast.” It was the third time she had said it.
“I’m not hungry,” came the muffled reply.
“Look here,” Edie snapped. “I’ve had just about enough. You’re too old to be acting this way. I want you to stop wallowing on the floor this instant and get up and eat your breakfast. Come on, now. It’s getting cold.”
This rebuke was greeted only by a howl of anguish.
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” said Edie, turning back to her breakfast. “Do as you please. I wonder what your teachers at school would say if they could see you rolling on the floor like a big baby.”
“Listen to this,” Harriet said suddenly. She began to read from her book in a pedantic voice:
“ ‘Titus Oates is very near the end, one feels. What he or we will do, God only knows. We discussed the matter after breakfast; he is a brave fine fellow and understands the situation, but—’ ”
“Harriet, we are none of us very interested right now in Captain Scott,” said Edie. She felt very nearly at the end of her own rope.