Free The Bad Seed by William March Page A

little girl alone.You hear me, Leroy? You going to get yourself in trouble if you don’t quit messing around with those rich folks and their children. I’m telling you, you going to get yourself in a mess of trouble.”
    “I don’t do nothing to her,” said Leroy, “except maybe plague her and tease her a little.”
    “I’m telling you,” said Thelma. “I’m telling you right now.”
    She got up from her chair, called her children, and went into the kitchen to start supper, but Leroy remained on the steps for a time, smoking his pipe and thinking of the little Penmark girl. He would have been surprised to know that, in a sense, he was in love with the little girl, and that his persecution of her, his nagging concern with everything she did, was part of a perverse and frightened courtship.
    That night after dinner Christine went to the Daigle home on Willow Street, her purpose still not clear in her mind. It was not quite dark when she came up the steps. The sky was soft, dark blue, with only the early stars against the horizon. Mr. Daigle answered the bell. He was a larger image of his son; there was the same pale, blue-veined forehead, the same outthrust jaw and small, puckered underlip. The hand he offered Christine was cold and damp. She gave her name and explained her mission; she wanted to offer her sympathy, and to ask if there were anything she could do; and he said in a voice that trembled in spite of himself, “Anyone who knew our son is welcome in this house.” Then, opening the door wider, he added, “You are the first to call. We are not people who entertain a great deal, and we have not made many friends.”
    The living-room had that depressing look of expensive bad taste. There were beads and bows of ribbon everywhere. Everything was wrong, she thought, the furniture, the colors, thepaintings; even the big Oriental rug somehow offended. Mr. Daigle said, “You must excuse the looks of the place. We have just returned from the funeral home where they’ve taken him. Everything is a little disarranged and lacks Mrs. Daigle’s touch.”
    Then, standing there beside his visitor in the hall, he said, “You must go in and speak to my wife. Perhaps something you say will—perhaps, in some way you can—” He knocked on his wife’s door, whispering, “Hortense! Here’s a visitor. It’s someone who knew Claude. Her little girl was his classmate, and was with him at the picnic.”
    He went away silently, and Mrs. Daigle sat up on the sofa where she had been resting. Her hair was disarranged, her eyes red and swollen, her mind still a little drugged from the sedatives she had been given. She said, “It’s not true that Claude was timid and lacked confidence in himself, as some people have said. I’m not saying he was a pushing, aggressive boy, because that wouldn’t be true, either. What I mean is, he was a sensitive boy, an artistic child, really. I’d like to show you some of the flower drawings he did so beautifully, but I can’t bear to look at them again so soon.”
    She broke off and pressed her face into her pillow. Christine sat beside her and took Mrs. Daigle’s plump, ringed hand in her own, pressing it in sympathy. “We were so close to each other,” Claude’s mother said. “He said I was his sweetheart, and he would put his little arms about my neck and tell me every thought he had.”
    She paused, unable to go on, and then said, “I don’t see why they couldn’t find the medal. I’m sure the men didn’t look hard enough. It was the only thing he’d ever won in his life, and he valued it so much.” Then, as though the loss of the medal were more terrible to her than the loss of her son, she wept without constraint, her face pale and bloated, her hair falling limply over her eyes. When she could speak again, she continued. “Somebodysaid the medal must have fallen off his shirt and sunk down into the sand, but as I told my husband, I don’t think so. I don’t see how the