Though Harriet had certainly sensed the resentment that Edie and the aunts had for her father, she had no idea quite how bitter it was. He had never been an attentive husband or father, they murmured, even when Robin was alive. It was a crime how he ignored the girls. It was a crime how he ignored his wife—especially after their son had died. He had just carried on with work, as usual, hadn’t even taken any time off from the bank, and he had gone on a hunting trip to Canada hardly a month after his son was in the ground. It was hardly surprising that Charlotte’s mind wasn’t quite what it used to be, with a sorry husband like that.
“It would be better,” said Edie angrily, “if he just went on and divorced her. Charlotte is still young. And there’s that nice young Willory man who just bought that property out by Glenwild—he’s from the Delta, he’s got some money—”
“Well,” murmured Adelaide, “Dixon is a good provider.”
“What I’m saying is, she could get somebody so much better.”
“What I’m saying, Edith, is that there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. I don’t know what would happen to little Charlotte and those girls if Dix wasn’t earning a good salary.”
“Well, yes,” said Edie, “there is that.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” said Libby tremulously, “if we did the right thing by not urging Charlotte to move to Dallas.”
There had been talk of this not long after Robin died. The bank had offered Dix a promotion if he would relocate to Texas. Several years later, he had tried to get them all to move to some town in Nebraska. So far from not urging Charlotte and the girls to go, the aunts had been panic-stricken on both occasions and Adelaide and Libby and even Ida Rhew had wept for weeks at the very thought.
Harriet blew on her father’s signature, though the ink was dry. Her mother wrote checks on this account all the time—it was how she paid the bills—but, as Harriet had learned, she didn’t keep track of the balance. She would have paid the Country Club bill happily enough if Harriet had asked; but the threat of Camp Lake de Selby grumbled black at the horizon, and Harriet did not wish to risk reminding her, by mention of Country Club and swimming pool, that the registration forms had not arrived.
————
She got on her bicycle and rode over to the Country Club. The office was locked. Everybody was at lunch in the dining room. She walked down the hall to the Pro Shop, where she found Hely’s big brother, Pemberton, smoking a cigarette behind the counter and reading a stereo magazine.
“Can I give this money to you?” she asked him. She liked Pemberton. He was Robin’s age, and had been Robin’s friend. Now he was twenty-one and some people said it was a shame that his mother had talked his father out of sending him to military school back when it might have made a difference. Though Pem had been popular in high school, and his picture was on practically every page of his senior class yearbook, he was a loafer and a little bit of a beatnik, and he hadn’t lasted long at Vanderbilt, or at Ole Miss or even Delta State. Now he lived at home. His hair was a lot longer even than Hely’s; in the summer he was a lifeguard at the Country Club, and in the winter all he did was work on his car and listen to loud music.
“Hey, Harriet,” said Pemberton. He was probably lonesome, Harriet thought, there all by himself in the Pro Shop. He wore a torn T-shirt, madras plaid shorts, and golf shoes with no socks; the remains of a hamburger and french fries, on one of the Country Club’s monogrammed dishes, were near his elbow on the counter. “Come over here and help me pick out a car stereo.”
“I don’t know anything about car stereos. I want to leave this check with you.”
Pem hooked his hair behind his ears with a big-knuckled hand, then took the check and examined it. He was long-boned, easy in his demeanor, and much taller than Hely; his hair was the same tangled, stripey blonde, light on top and darker underneath. His features were like Hely’s, too, but more finely cut, and his teeth were slightly crooked but in a way that was somehow more pleasing than if they were straight.
“Well, you can leave it with me,” he said at last, “but I’m not sure what to do with it. Say, I didn’t know your dad was in town.”
“He’s not.”
Pemberton, cocking a sly eyebrow at her, indicated the date.
“He sent it in the mail,” said Harriet.
“Where is old Dix, anyway? I haven’t seen him around in ages.”
Harriet shrugged. Though she didn’t like her father, she knew she wasn’t supposed to gossip or complain about him, either.
“Well, when you see him, why don’t you ask him if he’ll send me a check, too. I really want these speakers.” He pushed the magazine across the counter and showed them to her.
Harriet studied them. “They all look the same.”
“No way, sweetie. These Blaupunkts are the sexiest thing around. See? All black, with black buttons on the receiver? See how little it is compared to the Pioneers?”
“Well, get that one, then.”
“I will when you get your dad to send me three hundred bucks.” He took a last drag of his cigarette and stubbed it out on his plate with a hiss. “Say, where’s that dingbat brother of mine?”
“I don’t know.”
Pemberton leaned forward, with a confidential shift of the shoulders. “How come you let him hang around with you?”
Harriet stared at the ruins of Pem’s lunch: cold french fries, cigarette crooked and hissing in a puddle of ketchup.
“Doesn’t he get on your nerves?” Pemberton said. “How come you make him dress up like a woman?”
Harriet looked up, startled.
“You know, in Martha’s housecoats.” Martha was Pem and Hely’s mother. “He loves it. Every time I see him he’s running out of the house with some kind of weird pillowcase or towel over his head or something. He says you make him do it.”
“No I don’t.”
“Come on, Harriet.” He pronounced her name as if he found something faintly ridiculous about it. “I drive by your house and you’ve always got about seven or eight little boys in bedsheets hanging around out in your yard. Ricky Ashmore calls yall the baby Ku Klux Klan but I think you just enjoy making them dress up like girls.”
“It’s a game,” said Harriet, stolidly. She was annoyed at his persistence; the Bible pageants were a thing of the past. “Listen. I wanted to talk to you. About my brother.”
Now it was Pemberton’s turn to be uncomfortable. He picked up the stereo magazine and began to leaf through it with studied care.
“Do you know who killed him?”
“Well,” said Pemberton slyly. He put down the stereo magazine. “I’ll tell you something if you promise not to tell a soul. You know old Mrs. Fountain that lives next door to you?”
Harriet was looking at him with such undisguised contempt that he collapsed in laughter.
“What?” he said. “You don’t believe it about Mrs. Fountain and all them people buried up under her house?” Several years ago, Pem had scared Hely stiff by telling him somebody had found human bones poking out of Mrs. Fountain’s flowerbed, also that Mrs. Fountain had stuffed her dead husband and propped him up in a recliner to keep her company at night.
“So you don’t know who did it, then.”
“Nope,” said Pemberton, a bit curtly. He still remembered his mother coming up to his bedroom (he had been putting together a model airplane; weird, the things that stuck in your mind sometimes) and calling him out into the hall to tell him Robin was dead. It was the only time he’d ever seen her cry. Pem hadn’t cried: he was nine years old, didn’t have a clue, he’d just gone back to his room and shut the door and—under a cloud of growing unease—continued work on the Sop-with Camel; and he could still remember how the glue beaded up in the seams, it looked like shit, eventually he’d thrown it away without finishing it.