Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

And then there was Hely. She’d told him almost nothing of the real story—and that was good—but she hoped he wouldn’t think too much about the fingerprints. Would he realize eventually that nothing prevented him from telling on her? By the time he understood that it was her word against his—by then, maybe enough time would have passed.

People didn’t pay attention. They didn’t care; they would forget. Soon whatever trail she had left would be quite cold. That was what had happened with Robin, hadn’t it? The trail had got cold. And the ugly thought dawned on Harriet that Robin’s killer—whoever he was—must have at some point sat thinking some of these very same thoughts.

But I didn’t kill anybody , she told herself, staring at the coverlet. He drowned. I couldn’t help it .

“What, hun?” said the nurse who had come in to check her IV bottle. “Need something?”

Harriet sat very still, with her knuckles in her mouth, staring at the white coverlet until the nurse had departed.

No: she hadn’t killed anybody. But it was her fault he was dead. And maybe he had never hurt Robin at all.

Thoughts like these made Harriet feel sick, and she tried—willfully—to think of something else. She had done what she had to; it was silly to start doubting herself and her methods at this stage. She thought of the pirate Israel Hands, floating in the blood-warm waters off the Hispaniola , and there was something nightmarish and gorgeous in those heroic shallows: horror, false skies, vast delirium. The ship was lost; she had tried to recapture it all on her own. She had almost been a hero. But now, she feared, she wasn’t a hero at all, but something else entirely.

At the end—at the very end, as the winds billowed and beat in the walls of the tent, as a single candle flame guttered in a lost continent—Captain Scott had written with numbed fingers in a small notebook of his failure. Yes, he’d struck out bravely for the impossible, reached the dead untraveled center of the world—but for nothing. All the daydreams had failed him. And she realized how sad he must have been out there on the ice fields, in the Antarctic night, with Evans and Titus Oates lost already, under immense snows, and Birdie and Dr. Wilson still and silent in the sleeping bags, drifting away, dreaming of green fields.

Bleakly, Harriet gazed out into the antiseptic gloom. A weight lay upon her, and a darkness. She’d learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.

Harriet woke late, after a troubled sleep, to a depressing breakfast tray: fruit gelatin, apple juice, and—mysteriously—a small dish of boiled white rice. All night long, she’d had bad dreams about her father standing oppressively around her bed, walking back and forth and scolding her about something she’d broken, something that belonged to him.

Then she realized where she was, and her stomach contracted with fear. Rubbing her eyes in confusion she sat up to take the tray—and saw Edie in the armchair by her bed. She was drinking coffee—not coffee from the hospital cafeteria, but coffee she’d brought from home, in the plaid thermos—and reading the morning newspaper.

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” she said. “Your mother is coming out soon.”

Her manner was crisp and perfectly normal. Harriet tried to force her uneasiness out of her mind. Nothing had changed overnight, had it?

“You need to eat your breakfast,” said Edie. “Today is a big day for you, Harriet. After the neurologist checks you out, they may even discharge you this afternoon.”

Harriet made an effort to compose herself. She must try to pretend that everything was all right; she must try to convince the neurologist—even if it meant lying to him—that she was perfectly well. It was vital that she be allowed to go home; she must concentrate all her energies on escaping the hospital before the preacher came back to her room or somebody figured out what was going on. Dr. Breedlove had said something about unwashed lettuce. She must hold on to that, fix it in her mind, bring it up if she was questioned; she must keep them at all costs from making the connection between her illness and the water tower.

With a violent exertion of will, she turned her attention away from her thoughts and to her breakfast tray. She would eat the rice; it would be like eating breakfast in China. Here I am, she told herself, I’m Marco Polo, I’m having breakfast with the Kublai Khan. But I don’t know how to eat with chopsticks, so I’m eating with this fork instead.

Edie had gone back to her newspaper. Harriet glanced at the front of it—and stopped with the fork halfway to her mouth. MURDER SUSPECT FOUND, read the headline. In the picture, two men were lifting a limp, sagging body by the armpits. The face was ghastly white, with long hair plastered down at the sides, and so distorted that it looked less like an actual face than a sculpture of melted wax: a twisted black hole for a mouth and big black eyeholes like a skull. But—distorted as it was—there was no question that it was Danny Ratliff.

Harriet sat up straight in bed, and tilted her head sideways, trying to read the article from where she sat. Edie turned the page and—noticing Harriet’s stare, and the odd angle of her head—put down the paper and said sharply: “Are you sick? Do you need me to fetch the basin?”

“May I see the paper?”

“Certainly.” Edie reached into the back section, pulled out the funnies, handed them to Harriet, and then, tranquilly, returned to her reading.

“They’re raising our city taxes again,” she said. “I don’t know what they do with all this money they ask for. They’ll build some more roads they never finish, that’s what they’ll do with it.”

Furiously, Harriet stared down at the Comics page without actually seeing it. MURDER SUSPECT FOUND. If Danny Ratliff was a suspect—if suspect was the word they’d used—that meant he was alive, didn’t it?

She stole another glance at the paper. Edie had now folded it in half, so the front page was invisible, and had started work on the crossword puzzle.

“I hear Dixon paid you a visit last night,” she said, with the coolness that crept into her voice whenever she mentioned Harriet’s father. “And how was that?”

“Fine.” Harriet—her breakfast forgotten—sat upright in bed and tried to conceal her agitation, but she felt that if she didn’t see the front page, and find out what had happened, she would die.

He doesn’t even know my name , she told herself. At least she didn’t think he knew it. If her own name was mentioned in the paper, Edie would not be sitting so calmly in front of her at the moment, working the crossword puzzle.

He tried to drown me , she thought. He would hardly want to go around telling people about that.

At length, she worked up the courage and said: “Edie, who is that man on the front page of the paper?”

Edie looked blank; she turned the newspaper over. “Oh, that,” she said. “He killed somebody. He was hiding from the police up in that old water tower and got trapped up there and nearly drowned. I expect he was pretty glad when somebody showed up to get him.” She looked at the paper for a moment. “There are a bunch of people named Ratliff who live out past the river,” she said. “I seem to remember an old Ratliff man that worked out at Tribulation for a while. Tatty and I were scared to death of him because he didn’t have his front teeth.”

“What did they do with him?” said Harriet.