The Little Friend

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, maam.”

“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.

————

“Geez,” said Pem, and pushed back from the table, where he was eating a slice of Boston cream pie for breakfast. “Two whole days he was up there. Poor guy. Even if he did kill his brother.”

Hely looked up from his cereal and—with an almost unbearable effort—managed to keep his mouth shut.

Pem shook his head. His hair was still damp from the shower. “He couldn’t even swim. Imagine that. He was in there jumping up and down for two whole days, trying to keep his head above water. It’s like this thing I read, I think it was World War II and this plane went down in the Pacific. These guys were in the water for days, and there were tons of sharks. You couldn’t go to sleep, you had to be swimming around and watching for sharks constantly, or else they’d slip up and bite your leg off.” He looked hard at the picture, and shuddered. “Poor guy. Two whole days stuck up in that nasty thing, like a rat in a bucket. It’s a stupid place to hide, if you couldn’t swim.”

Hely, unable to resist, blurted: “That’s not how it happened.”

“Right,” said Pem, in a bored voice. “Like you know.”

Hely—agitated, swinging his legs—waited for his brother to look up from the newspaper or say something else.

“It was Harriet,” he said at last. “She did it.”

“Hmm?”

“It was her. She was the one pushed him in there.”

Pem looked at him. “Pushed who?” he said. “You mean Danny Ratliff?”

“Yes. Because he killed her brother.”

Pem snorted. “Danny Ratliff didn’t kill Robin, any more than I did,” he said, turning the page of the newspaper. “We were all in the same class in school.”

“He did,” said Hely devoutly. “Harriet has proof.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

“I don’t know—a lot of stuff. But she can prove it.”

“Sure.”

“Anyway,” said Hely, unable to contain himself, “she followed them down there, and chased them with a gun, and she shot Farish Ratliff, and then she made Danny Ratliff climb up the water tower and jump in.”

Pemberton turned to the back of the paper, to the comic strips. “I think Mom’s been letting you drink too much Coke,” he said.

“It’s true! I swear!” said Hely in agitation. “Because—” And then he remembered that he couldn’t say just how he knew, and looked down.