“I know. I’m doing some research.”
Mrs. Fawcett looked at Harriet over the tops of her glasses, pleased by this adult-sounding request. “Do you know which ones you want?” she said.
“Oh, just the local papers. Maybe the Memphis and Jackson ones, too. For—” She hesitated; she was afraid of tipping off Mrs. Fawcett by mentioning the date of Robin’s death.
“Well,” said Mrs. Fawcett, “I’m really not supposed to let you back there, but if you’re careful I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
————
Harriet—going the long way, so she wouldn’t have to walk by Hely’s house; he’d asked her to go fishing with him—stopped at home to drop off the books she’d checked out. It was twelve-thirty. Allison—sleepy and flushed looking, still in pyjamas—sat alone at the dining-room table moodily eating a tomato sandwich.
“You want tomato, Harriet?” called Ida Rhew from the kitchen. “Or you wants chicken instead?”
“Tomato, please,” said Harriet. She sat down by her sister.
“I’m going to the Country Club to sign up for swimming this afternoon,” she said. “Do you want to come?”
Allison shook her head.
“Do you want me to sign you up, too?”
“I don’t care.”
“Weenie wouldn’t want you to act like this,” said Harriet. “He would want you to be happy, and get on with life.”
“I’ll never be happy again,” said Allison, putting down her sandwich. Tears began to brim at the rims of her melancholy, chocolate-brown eyes. “I wish I was dead.”
“Allison?” said Harriet.
She didn’t answer.
“Do you know who killed Robin?”
Allison began to pick at the crust of her sandwich. She peeled off a strip; she rolled it into a ball between thumb and forefinger.
“You were in the yard when it happened,” said Harriet, watching her sister closely. “I read it in the newspaper down at the library. They said you were out there the whole time.”
“You were there, too.”
“Yes, but I was a baby. You were four.”
Allison peeled off another layer of crust and ate it carefully, without looking at Harriet.
“Four is pretty old. I remember practically everything that happened to me when I was four.”
At this point, Ida Rhew appeared with Harriet’s plate. Both girls were silent. After she went back into the kitchen, Allison said: “Please leave me alone, Harriet.”
“You must remember something,” said Harriet, her eyes still fixed on Allison. “It’s important. Think.”
Allison speared a tomato slice with her fork and ate it, nibbling delicately around the edges.
“Listen. I had a dream last night.”
Allison looked up at her, startled.
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.”
Harriet concurred with this. Her Dufresnes uncles were all more or less like her father: deer hunters and sportsmen, loud rough talkers with black dye combed through their graying hair, aging variations on the Elvis theme with their potbellies and their elastic-sided boots. They didn’t read books; their jokes were coarse; in their manners and preoccupations, they were about one generation removed from country sorry. Only once had she met her grandmother Dufresnes: an irritable woman in pink plastic beads and stretch pantsuits, who lived in a condominium in Florida that had sliding glass doors and foil giraffes on the wallpaper. Harriet had once gone down to stay with her for a week—and nearly went insane from boredom, since Grandmother Dufresnes had no library card, and owned no books except a biography of a man who had started the Hilton chain of hotels and a paperback entitled A Texan Looks at LBJ. She had been lifted from rural poverty in Tallahatchie County by her sons, who’d bought her the condominium in a Tampa retirement community. She sent a box of grapefruit to Harriet’s house every Christmas. Otherwise they rarely heard from her.