Somebody was trying to hand her something. It’s up to you, my dear.…
Harriet sat bolt upright on the sofa downstairs.
————
“Well, Harriet,” said Edie briskly, when Harriet turned up, late, at her back door for breakfast. “Where have you been? We missed you at church yesterday.”
She untied her apron, without taking notice of Harriet’s silence or even of the rumpled daisy dress. She was in an unusually chipper mood, for Edie, and she was all dressed up, in a navy-blue summer suit and spectator pumps to match.
“I was about to start without you,” she said, as she sat down to her toast and coffee. “Is Allison coming? I’m going to a meeting.”
“Meeting of what?”
“At the church. Your aunts and I are going on a trip.”
This was news, even in Harriet’s dazed state. Edie and the aunts never went anywhere. Libby had scarcely even been outside Mississippi; and she and the other aunts were gloomy and terrified for days if they had to venture more than a few miles from home. The water tasted funny, they murmured; they couldn’t sleep in a strange bed; they were worried that they’d left the coffee on, worried about their houseplants and their cats, worried that there would be a fire or someone would break into their houses or that the End of the World would happen while they were away. They would have to use commodes in filling stations—commodes which were filthy, with no telling what diseases on them. People in strange restaurants didn’t care about Libby’s saltfree diet. And what if the car broke down? What if somebody got sick?
“We’re going in August,” said Edie. “To Charleston. On a tour of historic homes.”
“You’re driving?” Though Edie refused to admit it, her eyesight was not what it had been and she sailed through red lights, turning left against traffic and jerking to dead stops as she leaned over the back seat to chat with her sisters—who, hunting through their pocketbooks for tissues and peppermints, were as sweetly oblivious as Edie herself to the exhausted, hollow-eyed guardian angel who hovered with lowered wings above the Oldsmobile, averting fireball collisions at every turn.
“All the ladies from our church circle are going,” Edie said, crunching busily on her toast. “Roy Dial, from the Chevrolet dealership, is lending us a bus. And a driver. I wouldn’t mind taking my car if people out on the highway didn’t act so nutty these days.”
“And Libby said she would go?”
“Certainly. Why shouldn’t she? Mrs. Hatfield Keene and Mrs. Nelson McLemore and all her friends are going.”
“Addie, too? And Tat?”
“Certainly.”
“And they want to go? Nobody’s making them?”
“Your aunts and I aren’t getting any younger.”
“Listen, Edie,” said Harriet abruptly, swallowing a mouthful of biscuit. “Will you give me ninety dollars?”
“Ninety dollars?” said Edie, suddenly ferocious. “Certainly not. What in the world do you want ninety dollars for?”
“Mother let our membership at the Country Club lapse.”
“What can you possibly want over at the Country Club?”
“I want to go swimming this summer.”
“Make that little Hull boy take you as his guest.”
“He can’t. He’s only allowed to bring a guest five times. I’m going to want to go more than that.”
“I don’t see the point in giving the Country Club ninety dollars just to use the pool,” said Edie. “You can swim in Lake de Selby all you like.”
Harriet said nothing.
“It’s funny. Camp’s late starting up this year. I would have thought the first session had already started.”
“I guess not.”
“Remind me,” said Edie, “to make a note to call down there this afternoon. I don’t know what’s wrong with those people. I wonder when the little Hull boy is going?”
“May I be excused?”
“You never did tell me what you’re doing today.”
“I’m going down to the library to sign up for the reading program. I want to win it again.” Now, she thought, was not the time to explain her true goal for the summer, not with Camp de Selby hovering over the conversation.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll do fine,” Edie said, standing to take her coffee cup to the sink.
“Do you mind if I ask you something, Edie?”
“Depends what it is.”
“My brother was murdered, wasn’t he?”
Edie’s eyes slid out of focus. She set the cup down.
“Who do you think did it?”
Edie’s gaze wavered for a moment and then—all at once—sharpened angrily on Harriet. After an uncomfortable instant (during which Harriet practically felt the smoke rising off her, as if she was a pile of dry wood chips smoldering in a beam of light) she turned and put the cup in the sink. Her waist looked very narrow and her shoulders very angular and military in the navy blue suit.
“Get your things,” she said, crisply, her back still turned.
Harriet didn’t know what to say. She didn’t have any things.
————
After the excruciating silence of the car ride (staring at the stitching on the upholstery, fiddling with a piece of loose foam on the armrest) Harriet didn’t especially feel like going to the library. But Edie waited stonily at the curb, and Harriet had no choice but to walk up the stairs (stiffly, conscious of being watched) and push open the glass doors.
The library looked empty. Mrs. Fawcett was alone at the front desk going through the night’s returns and drinking a cup of coffee. She was a tiny, bird-boned woman, with short pepper-and-salt hair, veiny white arms (she wore copper bracelets, for her arthritis) and eyes that were a little too sharp and closely set, especially since her nose was on the beaky side. Most kids were afraid of her: not Harriet, who loved the library and everything about it.
“Hi, Harriet!” said Mrs. Fawcett. “Have you come in to sign up for the reading program?” She reached under her desk for a poster. “You know how this works, right?”
She handed Harriet a map of the United States, which Harriet studied more intently than she needed to. I must not be all that upset really, she told herself, if Mrs. Fawcett can’t tell. Harriet’s feelings were not easily hurt—not by Edie, anyway, who was always flying off the handle about something—but the silent treatment in the car had unnerved her.
“They’re doing it with an American map this year,” Mrs. Fawcett said. “For every four books you check out, you get a sticker shaped like a state to paste on your map. Would you like me to tack this up for you?”
“Thank you, I can do it myself,” said Harriet.
She went to the bulletin board on the back wall. The reading program had started Saturday, only day before yesterday. Seven or eight maps were up already; most were blank but one of the maps had three stamps. How could someone have read twelve books since Saturday?
“Who,” she asked Mrs. Fawcett, returning to the desk with the four books she’d selected, “is Lasharon Odum?”
Mrs. Fawcett leaned out from the desk and—pointing silently to the children’s room—nodded at a tiny figure with matted hair, dressed in a grubby T-shirt and pants that were too small for her. She was scrunched up in a chair, reading, her eyes wide and her breath rasping through her parched lips.
“There she sits,” whispered Mrs. Fawcett. “Poor little thing. Every morning for the past week, she’s been waiting on the front steps when I come to open up, and she stays there quiet as a mouse until I close at six. If she’s really reading those books, and not just sitting there pretending, she reads right well for her age group.”
“Mrs. Fawcett,” said Harriet, “will you let me back in the newspaper stacks today?”
Mrs. Fawcett looked startled. “You can’t take those out of the library.”