Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Harriet—face down in powdery dust—smelled a strong nauseating odor of something dead. All the houses in Alexandria had crawlspaces, for fear of floods, and this one was no more than a foot high and not much less claustrophobic than a grave.

The cobra—who had not enjoyed being jostled downstairs, and tipped on his side—whacked against the box, with horrid dry slashes she could feel through the wood. But worse than the snake or the dead-rat smell was the dust, which tickled her nose unbearably. She turned her head. A reddish pan from the tail-lights slanted under the house, glowing suddenly over squiggled earthworm castings, ant hills, a dirty shard of glass.

Then everything went black. The car door slammed. “—that’s what started that car on fire,” said a growlly voice, not the preacher’s. “ ‘All right,’ I said to him—they had me laying all proned out on the ground—’I’m on be honest with you sir, and you can take me to jail right now, but this one here’s got a warrant on him long as your arm.’ Ha! Well, he took off running.”

“That was all there was to that, I reckon.”

Laughter: not nice. “You got that right.”

The feet were tramping toward her. Harriet—desperately battling a sneeze—held her breath, clamped a hand over her mouth and pinched her nose shut. Over her head and up the stairs the footsteps clomped. A tentative stinger pricked her ankle. Finding no resistance, it settled and sank in deeper, as Harriet trembled head to foot with the urge to slap it.

Another sting, this one on her calf. Fire ants. Great.

“Well, when he come on back home,” said the growlly voice—fainter now, receding—“they all got to seeing who could get the true story out of him….”

Then the voice stopped. Upstairs, everything was quiet, but she hadn’t heard the door open, and she sensed they hadn’t gone inside, but were lingering on the landing, watchfully. Stiffly she lay there, straining to listen with every ounce of her attention.

Minutes passed. The fire ants—energetically and in growing numbers—stung her arms and legs. Her back was still pressed against the box and every now and again, through the wood, the cobra whacked sullenly against her spine. In the stifling quiet, she imagined she heard voices, footsteps—and yet, when she tried to make them out, the noises shimmered and dissolved away into nothingness.

Rigid with terror, she lay on her side, staring out at the pitchdark driveway. How long would she have to lie here? If they came after her, she would have no choice but to crawl further under the house, and never mind the fire ants: wasps built their nests under houses, as did skunks, and spiders, and all manner of rodents and reptiles; sick cats and rabid possums dragged themselves there to die; a black man named Sam Bebus who repaired furnaces for people had recently got on the front page of the newspaper when he found a human skull beneath Marselles, a Greek Revival mansion on Main Street, only a few blocks away.

Suddenly the moon came out from behind a cloud, silvering the straggly grass that grew at the house’s margin. Ignoring the fire ants, she lifted her cheek from the dust and listened. Tall blades of witch-grass—white at the edges with moonlight—shivered at eye level, then blew flat against the ground for a moment before they sprang back, disheveled, all a-jitter. She waited. At last, after a long, breathless silence, she inched forward on her elbows and put her head out from under the house.

“Hely?” she whispered. The yard was deathly still. Weeds shaped like tiny green wheat-stalks pushed up through the sparkling gravel of the driveway. At the end of the driveway the truck—towering up stupendous out of all proportion—stood silent and dark with its back to her.

Harriet whistled; she waited. Finally, after what seemed like a long time, she crawled out and climbed to her feet. Something that felt like a crushed bug-shell was embedded in her cheek; she wiped it away, with gritty hands, dusted the ants from her arms and legs. Wispy brown clouds like gasoline vapors blew raggedly over the moon. Then they blew free entirely, and the yard was bathed in a clear, ashen light.

Quickly Harriet stepped back into the shadows around the house. The treeless lawn was as bright as day. For the first time, it occurred to her that she hadn’t actually heard Hely come down the stairs.

Around the corner she peeped. The yard next door, leaf-shade jangling on the grass, was empty: not a soul. With growing unease, she edged along the side of the house. Through a chainlink fence, she found herself staring into the glassy stillness of the next yard over, where a kiddie pool sat lonely and abandoned on the moonlit grass.

In the shadows, her back to the wall, Harriet circled the house but there was no sign of Hely anywhere. In all likelihood he’d run home and left her. Reluctantly, she stepped out onto the lawn and craned to look at the second story. The landing was empty; the bathroom window—still partially open—was dark. Upstairs were lights: movement, voices, too vague to distinguish.

Harriet worked up her courage, and ran out into the brightly lit street—but when she got to the bush on the median where they’d left the bikes, her heart tripped and skidded and she stopped in mid-step, unable to believe what she saw. Beneath the white-flowering branches, both bicycles lay sprawled on their sides, undisturbed.

For a moment she stood frozen. Then she came to her senses and ducked behind the bush and dropped to her knees. Hely’s bicycle was expensive and new; he was particular about it to a ridiculous degree. Head in hands, she stared at it, trying not to panic, and then she parted the branches and peered across the street, at the lighted second story of the Mormon house.

The calmness of the house, with its silvered windows glinting eerie on the top floor, put her in a great fear, and all at once the weight of the situation crashed in on her. Hely was trapped up there, she was sure of it. And she needed help; but there was no time, and she was alone. For some moments, she sat back on her heels in a daze, looking about, trying to decide what to do. There was the bathroom window, still partially open—but what good did that do her? In “A Scandal in Bohemia” Sherlock Holmes had thrown a smoke bomb in the window to get Irene Adler out of the house—nice idea, but Harriet didn’t have a smoke bomb, or anything else at hand except sticks and gravel.

For a moment more, she sat thinking—and then, in the high, broad moonlight, she ran back across the street, next door, to the yard where they’d hidden under the fig tree. Under a canopy of pecan trees sprawled an untidy bed of shade plants (caladiums, gas-plant) circled by chunks of whitewashed rock.

Harriet dropped to her knees and tried to lift one of the stones, but they were cemented together. Faintly, from inside, beneath an air-conditioner roaring hot air from a side window, a dog yapped sharp and tirelessly. Like a raccoon patting for fish on a stream’s bottom, she plunged her hands into the froth of greenery and felt around blindly in the overgrown tumble until her fingers closed on a smooth chunk of concrete. With both hands, she heaved it up. The dog was still yapping. “Pancho!” shrilled an ugly Yankee voice: an old woman’s voice, rough as sandpaper. She sounded sick. “Hush yer mouth!”

Stooped with the rock’s weight, Harriet ran back into the driveway of the frame house. There were two trucks, she saw, down at the end of the driveway. One was from Mississippi—Alexandria County—but the other had Kentucky plates, and as heavy as the rock was, Harriet stopped where she was and took a moment to fix the numbers in her mind. Nobody had thought to remember any license-plate numbers back when Robin was murdered.