Free The Little Friend by Donna Tartt Page A

Harriet’s greatest obsession, and the one from which all the others sprang. For what she wanted—more than Tribulation, more than anything—was to have her brother back. Next to that, she wanted to find out who killed him.
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    On a Friday morning in May, twelve years after Robin’s murder, Harriet was sitting at Edie’s kitchen table reading the journals of Captain Scott’s last expedition to the Antarctic. The book was propped open between her elbow and a plate from which she was eating a scrambled egg and some toast. She and Allison often ate their breakfast at Edie’s house on school mornings. Ida Rhew, who did all the cooking, did not arrive at work until eight o’clock and their mother, who seldom ate much of anything anyway, had only a cigarette and occasionally a bottle of Pepsi for breakfast.
    This was not a school morning, however, but a weekday morning early in the summer vacation. Edie stood at the stove with a polka-dot apron over her dress scrambling her own egg. She did not care for this business of Harriet reading at the table but it was easier to just go ahead and let her do it instead of having to correct her every five minutes.
    The egg was done. She turned off the flame and went to the cupboard to fetch a plate. In doing so she was forced to step over the prone form of her other granddaughter, who lay stretched out full length on her stomach across the kitchen linoleum sobbing monotonously.
    Edie, ignoring the sobs, stepped carefully back over Allison’s body and spooned the egg upon a plate. Then she circled to the kitchen table—carefully avoiding Allison as she did so—and sat down across from the oblivious Harriet and began to eat in silence. She was far too old for this sort of thing. She had been up since five o’clock, and she had had it up to here with the children.
    The problem was the children’s cat, which lay on a towel in a cardboard box near Allison’s head. A week ago, it had begun to refuse its food. Then it had started to cry whenever it was picked up. They had then brought it over to Edie’s house for Edie to examine.
    Edie was good with animals, and she often thought that she would have made an excellent veterinarian or even a doctor if girls had done such things in her day. She had nursed all sorts of kittens and puppies to health, raised baby birds fallen from the nest, and cleaned the wounds and set the broken bones of all manner of hurt creatures. The children knew this—not only her grandchildren, but all the children in the neighborhood—and brought to her not only their own sick pets but any pitiful little strays or wild things they happened to find.
    But, fond as she was of animals, Edie was not sentimental about them. Nor, as she reminded the children, was she a miracle worker. After brisk examination of the cat—who indeed appeared listless, but had nothing obviously wrong with it—she had stood up and dusted her hands on her skirt while her granddaughters looked hopefully on.
    “How old is this cat, anyway?” she asked them.
    “Sixteen and a half,” said Harriet.
    Edie bent down to stroke the poor thing, which was leaning against the table leg with a wild, miserable look in its eye. She was fond of the cat herself. It had been Robin’s kitty. He had found it lying on the hot sidewalk in the summertime—half dead, its eyes hardly open—and had brought it to her, gingerly, in his cupped palms. Edie had had a devil of a time saving it. A knot of maggots had eaten a hole in its side and she still remembered how meekly and uncomplainingly the little thing had lain while she washed the wound out, in a shallow basin of lukewarm water, and how pink the water was when she finished.
    “He’ll be all right, won’t he, Edie?” said Allison, who was even then close to tears. The cat was her best friend. After Robin died, it had taken up with her; it followed her around, brought her little presents it had stolen or killed (dead birds; tasty bits of