Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“Who?”

“That man.”

“He confessed to killing his brother,” said Edie, returning to her crossword, “and they were looking for him on a drugs charge, too. So I would expect that they’ve carried him away to jail.”

“Jail?” Harriet was silent. “Does it say so in the paper?”

“Oh, he’ll be out again soon enough, never you worry,” said Edie crisply. “They hardly catch these people and lock them up before they let them out again. Don’t you want your breakfast?” she said, noting Harriet’s untouched tray.

Harriet made a conspicuous display of returning to her rice. If he’s not dead , she thought, then I’m not a murderer. I haven’t done anything. Or have I ?

“There. That’s better. You’ll want to eat a little something before they run these tests, whatever they are,” said Edie. “If they take blood, it may make you a little dizzy.”

Harriet ate, diligently, with her eyes down, but her mind raced back and forth like an animal in a cage, and suddenly a thought so horrible leapt afresh to her mind that she blurted, aloud: “Is he sick?”

“Who? That boy, you mean?” said Edie crossly, without looking up from her puzzle. “I don’t hold with all this nonsense about criminals being sick .”

Just then, someone knocked loudly on the open door of the room, and Harriet started up from her bed in such alarm that she nearly upset her tray.

“Hello, I’m Dr. Baxter,” said the man, offering Edie his hand. Though he was young-looking—younger than Doctor Breedlove—his hair was thinning at the top; he was carrying an old-fashioned black doctor bag which looked very heavy. “I’m the neurologist.”

“Ah.” Edie looked suspiciously at his shoes—running shoes with fat soles and blue suede trim, like the shoes the track team wore up at the high school.

“I’m surprised y'all aren’t having rain up here,” the doctor said, opening his bag and beginning to fish around in it. “I drove up from Jackson early this morning—”

“Well,” said Edie briskly, “you’ll be the first person that hasn’t made us wait all day around here.” She was still looking at his shoes.

“When I left home,” said the doctor, “at six o’clock, there was a severe thunderstorm warning for Central Mississippi. It was raining down there like you wouldn’t believe.” He unrolled a rectangle of gray flannel on the bedside table; upon it, in a neat line, he placed a light, a silver hammer, a black gadget with dials.

“I drove through some terrible weather to get here,” he said. “For a while I was afraid I was going to have to go back home.”

“Well, I declare,” said Edie politely.

“It’s lucky I made it,” said the doctor. “Around Vaiden, the roads were really bad—”

He turned, and as he did so, observed Harriet’s expression.

“My goodness! Why are you looking at me like that? I’m not going to hurt you.” He looked her over for a moment, and then he closed the bag.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll just start out by asking you some questions.” He got her chart off the foot of the bed and gazed at it steadily, his breaths loud in the stillness.

“How about that?” he said, looking up at Harriet. “You’re not afraid of answering a few questions, are you?”

“No.”

“No sir ,” said Edie, putting the newspaper aside.

“Now, these are going to be some real easy questions,” said the doctor, sitting down on the edge of her bed. “You’re going to be wishing that all the questions on your tests at school were this easy. What’s your name?”

“Harriet Cleve Dufresnes.”

“Good. How old are you, Harriet?”

“Twelve and a half.”

“When’s your birthday?”

He asked Harriet to count backward from ten; he asked her to smile, and frown, and stick out her tongue; he asked her to keep her head still and follow his finger with her eyes. Harriet did as she was told—shrugging her shoulders for him, touching her nose with her finger, bending her knees and then straightening them—while all the time keeping her expression composed and her breath calm.

“Now, this is an ophthalmoscope,” the doctor said to Harriet. He smelled distinctly of alcohol—whether rubbing alcohol, or drinking alcohol, or even a sharp, alcohol-smelling aftershave, Harriet could not tell. “Nothing to worry about, all it’s going to do is flash a real strong light back there on your optic nerve so I can see if you’ve got any pressure on your brain …”

Harriet gazed fixedly ahead. An uneasy thought had just occurred to her: if Danny Ratliff wasn’t dead, how was she going to keep Hely from talking about what had happened? When Hely found out that Danny was alive, he wouldn’t care any more about his fingerprints on the gun; he would feel free to say what he wanted, without fear of the electric chair. And he would want to talk about what had happened; of that, Harriet was sure. She would have to think of a way to keep him quiet …

The doctor was not true to his word, as the tests grew more and more unpleasant as they went along—a stick down Harriet’s throat, to make her gag; wisps of cotton on her eyeball, to make her blink; a hammer rapped on her funny bone and a sharp pin stuck here and there on her body, to see if she could feel it. Edie—arms crossed—stood off to the side, observing him closely.

“You look mighty young to be a doctor,” she said.

The doctor did not answer. He was still busy with the pin. “Feel that?” he said to Harriet.

Harriet—her eyes closed—twitched fretfully as he jabbed her forehead and then her cheek. At least the gun was gone. Hely didn’t have any proof that he had gone down there to get it for her. She must keep telling herself that. As bad as things might seem, it was still his word against hers.

But he would be full of questions. He would want to know all about it—everything that had happened down at the water tower—and now what could she say? That Danny Ratliff had gotten away from her, that she hadn’t actually done what she set out to do? Or, worse: that maybe she’d been mistaken all along; that maybe she didn’t really know who murdered Robin, and maybe she never would?

No , she thought in a sudden panic, that’s not good enough. I have to think of something else .

“What?” said the doctor. “Did I hurt you?”

“A little.”

“That’s a good sign,” said Edie. “If it hurts.”

Maybe, thought Harriet—looking up at the ceiling, pressing her lips together as the doctor dragged something sharp down the sole of her foot—maybe Danny Ratliff really had killed Robin. It would be easier if he had. Certainly it would be the easiest thing to tell Hely: that Danny Ratliff had confessed to her at the end (maybe it was an accident, maybe he hadn’t meant to do it?), maybe that he’d even begged her forgiveness. Rich possibilities of story began to open like poisonous flowers all around her. She could say that she’d spared Danny Ratliff’s life, standing over him in a grand gesture of mercy; she could say that she’d taken pity on him at the last and left him up in the tower to be rescued.

“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” the doctor said, standing up.

Harriet said, rapidly: “Now can I go home?”

The doctor laughed. “Ho!” he said. “Not so fast. I’m just going to go out in the hall and talk to your grandmother for a few minutes, is that all right?”

Edie stood up. Harriet heard her say, as the two of them were walking out of the room, “It’s not meningitis, is it?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Did they tell you about the vomiting and diarrhea? And the fever?”

Quietly, Harriet sat in her bed. She could hear the doctor talking out in the hall, but though she was anxious to know what he was saying about her, the murmur of his voice was remote and mysterious and much too low for her to hear. She stared at her hands on the white coverlet. Danny Ratliff was alive, and though she never would have believed it, even half an hour ago, she was glad. Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she’d wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she’d known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.