The Little Friend полностью

Edie, ignoring the slight, had made the necessary introductions and slipped away, leaving Charlotte to the punch bowl. All Charlotte needed was to be told what to do, and she was fine, so long as there wasn’t independent thought or decision of any sort. Robin’s death had really been a double loss, for she’d lost Charlotte, too—her busy bright daughter, altered so tragically; ruined, really. Certainly one never got over such a blow, but it had been more than ten years. People pulled themselves together somehow, moved along. Ruefully, Edie thought back to Charlotte’s girlhood, when Charlotte had announced she wanted to be a fashion buyer for a large department store.

Mrs. Chaffin placed her punch cup in the saucer, which was balanced in the palm of her left hand. “You know,” she was saying to Charlotte, “poinsettias can be lovely at a Christmas funeral. The church can be so dark that time of year.”

Edie stood with her arms across her chest and watched them. As soon as she found the right moment, she meant to have a little word with Mrs. Chaffin herself. Though Dix was unable—on such short notice, so Charlotte had said—to drive down from Nashville for the funeral, the arrangement of mock-orange and Iceberg roses he’d sent (too decorative, too tasteful, feminine somehow) had caught Edie’s attention. Certainly it was more sophisticated than Mrs. Chaffin’s usual arrangements. Then, at the funeral home, she’d walked into a room where Mrs. Hatfield Keene was giving Mrs. Chaffin a hand with the flowers, only to hear Mrs. Keene say—stiffly, as if in reply to an inappropriate confidence: “Well, she might have been Dixon’s secretary.”

Adjusting a spray of gladiolus, Mrs. Chaffin sniffed, and cocked her head shrewdly to one side. “Well. I answered the telephone, and took the order myself,” she said—stepping back to observe her handiwork—“and she sure didn’t sound like a secretary to me.”

————

Hely did not go home, but merely turned the corner and circled around to the side gate of Edie’s yard, where he found Harriet sitting in Edie’s back yard glider swing. Without preamble he marched up and said: “Hey, when’d you get home?”

He had expected his presence to cheer her immediately, and when it didn’t he was annoyed. “Did you get my letter?” he said.

“I got it,” said Harriet. She had eaten herself half-sick on candied almonds from the buffet, and their taste lingered disagreeably in her mouth. “You shouldn’t have sent it.”

Hely sat down in the swing beside her. “I was freaked out. I—”

With a curt nod, Harriet indicated Edie’s porch, twenty feet away, where four or five adults with punch cups stood behind the dim screen, chatting.

Hely took a deep breath. In a quieter voice, he said: “It’s been scary here. He drives all over town. Real slow. Like he’s looking for us. I’ve been in the car with my mother, and there he is, parked by the underpass like he’s staking it out.”

The two of them, though they were sitting side by side, were looking straight ahead, at the grown-ups on the porch, and not at each other. Harriet said: “You didn’t go back up there to get the wagon, did you?”

“No!” said Hely, shocked. “Do you think I’m nuts? For a while, he was there every day. Lately he’s been going down to the freight yards, by the railroad tracks.”

“Why?”

“How should I know? A couple of days ago I got bored and went down to the warehouse, to hit some tennis balls. Then I heard a car, and it’s lucky I hid, because it was him. I’ve never been so scared. He parked his car and he sat for a while. Then he got up and walked around. Maybe he followed me, I don’t know.”

Harriet rubbed her eyes and said: “I saw him driving that way a little while ago. Today.”

“Towards the train tracks?”

“Maybe. I wondered where he was going.”

“I’m just glad he didn’t see me,” said Hely. “When he got out of his car I nearly had a heart attack. I was hiding in the bushes for about an hour.”

“We should go over on a Special Op and see what he’s doing down there.”

She had thought the phrase special op would be irresistible to Hely, and she was surprised by how firmly and swiftly he said: “Not me. I’m not going down there again. You don’t understand—”

His voice had risen sharply. A grown-up on the porch turned a bland face in their direction. Harriet nudged him in the ribs.

He looked at her, aggrieved. “But you don’t understand,” he said, in a quieter voice. “You had to see it. He would have killed me if he saw me, you could tell by the way he was looking around.” Hely imitated the expression: face distorted, eyes roving wildly over the ground.

“Looking for what?”

“I don’t know. I mean it, I’m not messing with him any more, Harriet, and you’d better not, either. If him or any of his brothers figure out it’s us that threw that snake, we’re dead. Didn’t you read that thing from the newspaper I sent you?”

“I didn’t get the chance.”

“Well, it was his grandma,” said Hely austerely. “She nearly died.”