Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Danny said nothing. Part of him knew it was bullshit, Farish’s paranoid talk, but another part knew that it meant something. Three times the previous night, an hour apart exactly, the phone had rung; and someone had hung up without talking. Then there was the spent rifle shell Farish had found on the windowsill of the laboratory. What was that about?

And now this: the girl again, the girl. The lush, sprinkled lawn of the Presbyterian church glowed blue-green in the shadows of the ornamental spruce: curvy brick walks, clipped boxwoods, everything as neat and twinkly as a toy train set.

“What I can’t figure out is who the hell she is,” said Farish, scrabbling in his pocket for the crank. “You shouldn’t have let her get away.”

“It was Eugene let her go, not me.” Danny gnawed on the inside of his mouth. No, it wasn’t his imagination: the girl had vanished off the face of the earth in the weeks after Gum’s accident, when he’d driven the town looking for her. But now: think of her, mention her and there she was, glowing at a distance with that black Chinese haircut and those spiteful eyes.

They each had a toot, which steadied them somewhat.

“Somebody,” said Danny, and inhaled, “ some body has put that kid out to spy on us.” High as he was, he was sorry the instant he’d said it.

Farish’s brow darkened. “Say what? If somebody,” he growled, scouring his wet nostrils with the back of his hand, “if somebody put that little dab out to spy on me , I’ll rip her wide open.”

“She knows something,” said Danny. Why? Because she’d looked at him from the window of a hearse. Because she’d invaded his dreams. Because she was haunting him, hunting him, messing with his head .

“Well, I’d sure like to know what she was doing up at Eugene’s. If that little bitch busted out my tail-lights …”

His melodramatic manner made Danny suspicious. “If she busted the tail-lights,” he said, carefully avoiding Farish’s eye, “why you reckon she knocked on the door and told us about it?”

Farish shrugged. He was picking at a crusty patch on his pants leg, had all at once got very preoccupied with it, and Danny—suddenly—was convinced that he knew more about the girl (and about all of it) than he was saying.

No, it didn’t make sense, but all the same there was something to it. Dogs barked in the distance.

“Somebody,” said Farish, suddenly—shifting his weight—“ some body clumb up there and turned them snakes aloose at Eugene’s. The windows is painted shut except for that one in the bathroom. Nobody could have got through that but a kid.”

“I’m on talk to her,” said Danny. Ask her lots of things. Like why I never saw you in my life before, and now I see you everywhere? Like why do you brush and flitter against my windows at night like a death’s-head moth ?

He’d been so long without sleep that when he closed his eyes, he was in a place with weeds and dark lakes, wrecked skiffs awash in scummy water. There she was, with her moth-white face and her crow-black hair, whispering something in the moist cicada-shrieking gloom, something he almost understood but couldn’t quite….

I can’t hear you, he said.

“Can’t hear what?”

Bing : black dashboard, blue Presbyterian spruces, Farish staring from the passenger’s seat. “Can’t hear what?” he repeated.

Danny blinked, wiped his forehead. “Forget it,” he said. He was sweating.

“In Nam, them little sapper girls was tough sons of bitches,” said Farish cheerfully. “Running with live grenades, it was all a game to them. You can get a kid to do shit wouldn’t nobody but a crazy man try.”

“Right,” Danny said. This was one of Farish’s pet theories. During Danny’s childhood, he had used it to justify getting Danny and Eugene and Mike and Ricky Lee to do all his dirty work for him, climbing in windows while he, Farish, sat eating Honey Buns and getting high in the car.

“Kid gets caught? So what? Juvenile Hall? Hell—” Farish laughed—“when y'all was boys, I had y'all trained to it. Ricky was crawling in windows soon as he could stand up on my shoulders. And if a cop come by—”

“God amighty,” said Danny, soberly, and sat up; for in the rear view mirror he’d just seen the girl—alone—walk around the corner.

Harriet—head down, brow clouded with thought—was walking down the sidewalk towards the Presbyterian church (and, three streets over, her desolate home) when the door of a car parked about twenty feet ahead of her suddenly clicked open.

It was the Trans Am. Almost before she had time to think she doubled back, darted into the dank, mossy yard of the Presbyterian church and kept running.

The side yard of the church led through to Mrs. Claiborne’s garden (hydrangea bushes, tiny greenhouse) directly to Edie’s back yard—which was cut off by a board fence, six feet high. Harriet ran through the dark passageway (Edie’s fence on one side; a prickly, inpenetrable row of arborvitae bordering the yard adjacent) and ran smack into another fence: Mrs. Davenport’s, chain-link. In a panic, Harriet scrambled over it; a wire on top caught her shorts and with a twist of her whole body she wrenched free and hopped down, panting.

Behind, in the leafy passage, the burst and crash of footsteps. There was not much cover in Mrs. Davenport’s yard, and she looked about helplessly before she ran across it and unlatched the gate and ran down the driveway. She’d intended to double back to Edie’s house, but when she got out to the sidewalk something stopped her (where were those footsteps coming from?) and, after a split-second pause of deliberation, she ran straight ahead, towards the O’Bryants’ house. To her shock, while she was in the middle of the street, the Trans Am swung around the corner.

So they’d split up. That was smart. Harriet ran—under the tall pines, through the pine needles that carpeted the O’Bryants’ deeply shaded front yard—directly to the little house out back where Mr. O’Bryant kept his pool table. She seized the handle, shook it: locked. Harriet, breathless, stared in at the yellowy pine-panelled walls—at bookshelves, empty except for a few old yearbooks from Alexandria Academy; at the glass lamp that said Coca-Cola dangling from a chain over the dark table—and then darted off to the right.

No good: another fence. The dog in the next yard was barking. If she stayed off the street, the guy in the Trans Am obviously couldn’t catch her, but she had to take care that the one on foot didn’t corner her, or flush her out into the open.

Heart galloping, lungs aching, she swerved to the left. Behind, she heard heavy breaths, the crash of heavy feet. On she zigzagged, through labyrinths of shrubbery, crossing and re-crossing and veering off at right angles when her path closed off in front of her: through strange gardens, over fences and into a perplexity of lawns checkered with patios and flagstones, past swing-sets and clothes-posts and barbecue grills, past a round-eyed baby who gazed at her fearfully and sat down hard in his playpen. Further down—an ugly old man with a bulldog face hoisted himself halfway from his porch chair and bawled “Get away!” when Harriet, in relief (for he was the first grown-up she’d seen), slowed to catch her breath.

His words were like a slap; as frightened as she was, the shock of them stopped her for a heartbeat and she blinked in astonishment at the inflamed eyes, blazing away at her, at the freckled, puffy old fist, raised as if to strike. “That’s right, you !” he cried. “Get away from here!”