Lasharon cried out. There was an abrupt disturbance in the bushes behind her. Then, a few moments later, a shadow darted clear of Harriet’s lawn and skittered down the middle of the well-lit street, followed at a good distance by a smaller one which stumbled, unable to run so fast.
Harriet, kneeling on the window seat with head out between the curtains, stared for some moments at the sparkling stretch of empty pavement where the little Odums had vanished. But the night was as still as glass. Not a leaf stirred, not a cat cried; the moon shone in a puddle on the sidewalk. Even the tinkly wind chimes on Mrs. Fountain’s porch were silent.
Presently, bored and irritated, she abandoned her post. She became absorbed in her notebook again and had almost forgotten that she was supposed to be waiting up for Allison, and annoyed, when a car door slammed in front.
She slipped back to the window and, stealthily, drew the curtain. Allison, standing in the street by the driver’s side of the blue Cadillac, toyed vaguely with her charm bracelet and said something indistinct.
Pemberton barked with laughter. His hair glowed Cinderella-yellow in the street lamps, so long that when it fell in his face, with just the sharp little tip of his nose poking out, he looked like a girl. “Don’t you believe it, darling,” he said.
Darling? What was that supposed to mean? Harriet let the curtains fall and shoved the notebook under the bed as Allison started around the back of the car towards the house, her bare knees red in the Cadillac’s lurid tail-lights.
The front door shut. Pem’s car roared away. Allison padded up the stairs—still barefoot, she’d gone riding without her shoes on—and drifted into the bedroom. Without acknowledging Harriet, she walked straight to the bureau mirror and stared gravely at her face, her nose only inches from the glass. Then she sat down on the side of her bed and carefully dusted off the bits of gravel stuck to the yellowy soles of her feet.
“Where were you?” said Harriet.
Allison, elbowing her dress over her head, made an ambiguous noise.
“I saw you drive off. Where did you go?” she asked, when her sister did not respond to this.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know where you went?” said Harriet, staring hard at Allison, who kept glancing distractedly at her reflection in the glass as she stepped into her white pyjama trousers. “Did you have a good time?”
Allison—carefully avoiding Harriet’s eye—buttoned up her pyjama top and got in bed and began to pack her stuffed animals around her. They had to be arranged in a certain way about her body before she could go to sleep. Then she pulled the covers over her head.
“Allison?”
“Yes?” came the muffled answer, after a moment or two.
“Do you remember what we talked about?”
“No.”
“Yes you do. About writing down your dreams?”
When there was no answer, Harriet said, in a louder voice: “I’ve put a sheet of paper by your bed. And a pencil. Did you see them?”
“No.”
“I want you to look. Look, Allison.”
Allison poked her head out from under the covers just enough to see a sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook beneath her bedside lamp. At the top of it was written in Harriet’s hand: Dreams. Allison Dufresnes. June 12.
“Thank you, Harriet,” she said, blurrily; and—before Harriet could get out another word—she pulled the covers up and flounced over with her face to the wall.
Harriet—after gazing steadily for some moments at her sister’s back—reached under the bed and retrieved the notebook. Earlier in the day, she’d taken notes on the account in the local paper, much of which was news to her: the discovery of the body; the efforts at resuscitation (Edie, apparently, had cut him down from the tree with the hedge clippers and worked on his lifeless body until the ambulance came); her mother’s collapse and hospitalization; the sheriff’s comments (“no leads”; “frustrating”) in the weeks that followed. She’d also written down everything that she could remember that Pem had said—important or not. And the more she’d written, the more came back to her, all sorts of random little scraps she’d picked up here and there over the years. That Robin died only a few weeks before school let out for summer vacation. That it had rained that day. That there had been small burglaries in the neighborhood around that time, tools stolen from people’s sheds: related? That when Robin’s body was found in the yard, evening services were just letting out at the Baptist church, and that one of the first people to stop and assist was old Dr. Adair—a retired pediatrician, in his eighties, who’d happened to be driving past with his family on the way home. That her father had been at his hunting camp; and that the preacher had to get in his car and drive down there to find him and break the news.
Even if I don’t find out who killed him, she thought, at least I’ll find out how it happened.
She also had the name of her first suspect. The very act of writing it down made her realize how easy it would be to forget, how important it would be from now on to put everything, everything, down on paper.
Suddenly a thought struck her. Where did he live? She hopped out of bed and went down to the telephone table in the front hall. When she came to his name in the book—Danny Ratliff—a spidery little chill ran down her back.
There was no proper address, only Rt 260. Harriet, after gnawing her lip in indecision, dialed the number and inhaled with sharp surprise when it was caught up on the first ring (ugly television clatter in the background). A man barked: “Yellope!”
With a crash—as if slamming the lid on a devil—Harriet banged down the receiver with both hands.
————
“I saw my brother trying to kiss your sister last night,” said Hely to Harriet as they sat on Edie’s back steps. Hely had come over to fetch her after breakfast.
“Where?”
“By the river. I was fishing.” Hely was always trudging down to the river with his cane pole and his sorrowful bucket of worms. Nobody ever came with him. Nobody ever wanted the little bream and crappies he caught, either, so he almost always let them go. Sitting alone in the dark—he loved night-fishing the best, with the frogs chirruping and a wide white ribbon of moonlight bobbing on the water—his favorite daydream was that he and Harriet lived by themselves like grown-ups in a little shack down by the river. The idea entertained him for hours. Dirty faces and leaves in their hair. Building campfires. Catching frogs and mud turtles. Harriet’s eyes ferocious when they glowed at him suddenly in the dark, like a little feral cat’s.
He shivered. “I wish you’d come last night,” he said. “I saw an owl.”
“What was Allison doing?” said Harriet in disbelief. “Not fishing.”
“Nope. See,” he said, confidentially, scooting closer on his rear end, “I heard Pem’s car on the bank. You know that noise it makes—” expertly, with pursed lips, he imitated it, whap whap whap whap!—“you can hear him coming a mile off, so I know it’s him, and I thought Mama had sent him to get me so I got my stuff and climbed up. But he wasn’t looking for me.” Hely laughed, a short, knowing huff of a laugh that came out sounding so very sophisticated that he repeated it—even more satisfyingly—a beat or two later.
“What’s so funny?”
“Well—” he could not resist the opening she’d given him for yet a third chance to try out the sophisticated new laugh—“there was Allison, way on her side of the car but Pem had his arm on the seat and he was leaning towards her—” (he extended an arm behind Harriet’s shoulders, to demonstrate) “like this.” He made a big wet smacking noise and Harriet, irritably, shifted away.