The Little Friend by Donna Tartt Page B

footfall in the creakings of the floorboards, sensed him in the playing of a blown curtain or the arc of a door that swung open by itself. Occasionally, he was mischievous—hiding her book or her candy bar, replacing it on the seat of her chair when she wasn’t looking. Harriet enjoyed his company. Somehow she imagined that wherever he lived it was always night, and that when she wasn’t there, he was all by himself: fidgeting, lonely, swinging his legs, in a waiting room with ticking clocks.
    Here I am
, she said to herself,
on guard
. For she felt the glow of his presence quite warmly when she sat at the window with the gun. Twelve years had passed since her brother’s death and much had altered or fallen away but the view from the living-room window had not changed. Even the tree was still there.
    Harriet’s arms ached. Carefully, she laid the rifle down at the foot of her armchair and went into the kitchen for a Popsicle. Back in the living room, she ate it by the window, in the dark, without hurrying. Then she put the stick on top of a stack of newspaper and resumed her position with the rifle. The Popsicles were grape, her favorite. There were more in the freezer, and nobody to stop her from eating the whole box, but it was hard to eat Popsicles and keep the rifle propped up at the same time.
    She moved the gun across the dark sky, following some night bird across the moonlit clouds. A car door slammed. Quickly, she swivelled toward the sound and zeroed in on Mrs. Fountain—returning late from choir practice, tottering up her front walk in the haze of the street lamps—oblivious,entirely unaware that one sparkly earring shone dead in the center of Harriet’s crosshairs. Porch lights off, kitchen lights on. Mrs. Fountain’s slope-shouldered, goat-faced silhouette gliding past the window shade, like a puppet in a shadow play.
    “Bang,” Harriet whispered. One twitch, one squeeze of the knuckle, that’s all it took and Mrs. Fountain would be where she belonged—down with the Devil. She would fit right in—horns curling out of her permanent and an arrow-tipped tail poking from the back of her dress. Ramming that grocery cart around through Hell.
    A car was approaching. She swung from Mrs. Fountain and followed it, magnified and bouncing, in her scope—teenagers, windows down, going too fast—until the red tail-lights swept around the corner and vanished.
    On her way back to Mrs. Fountain, she saw a lighted window blur over the lens and then, to her delight, she was smack in the Godfreys’ dining room, across the road. The Godfreys were rosy and cheerful and well into their forties—childless, sociable, active in the Baptist church—and to see the two of them up and moving around was comforting. Mrs. Godfrey stood scooping yellow ice cream from a carton into a dish. Mr. Godfrey sat at the table with his back to Harriet. The two of them were alone, lace tablecloth, pink-shaded lamp burning low in the corner; everything sharp and intimate, down to the grape-leaf patterns on the Godfreys’ ice-cream dishes and the bobby pins in Mrs. Godfrey’s hair.
    The Winchester was a pair of binoculars, a camera, a way of seeing things. She laid her cheek against the stock, which was smooth and very cool.
    Robin, she was certain, watched over her on these nights much the way she watched over him. She could feel him breathing at her back: quiet, sociable, glad for her company. But the creaks and shadows of the dark house still frightened her sometimes.
    Restless, her arms aching from the gun’s weight, Harriet shifted in the armchair. Occasionally, on nights like this, she smoked her mother’s cigarettes. On the worst nights she was unable even to read, and the letters of her books—even
Treasure
Island, Kidnapped
, books she loved and never tired of—changed into some kind of savage Chinese: illegible, vicious, an itch she couldn’t scratch. Once, out of sheer frustration, she had smashed a china figurine of a