One Summer Read Free Page A

Harris. He was home at last, and now it was time to finish what had been started eleven years ago.
    The watcher smiled with anticipation.

3

    “D id you hear? Idell says her boy saw Rachel Grant meeting somebody at the bus depot this afternoon, and you’ll never for the life of you guess who!”
    “Who?”
    “Johnny Harris.”
    “Johnny Harris! Why, he’s in prison! Idell must’ve got it wrong.”
    “No, she swears that’s what Jeff told her. He must’ve got out on parole or something.”
    “Do they do that, for murder?”
    “I guess. Anyhow, Idell says Jeff saw him, big as life, with Rachel Grant. Can you believe it?”
    “No!”
    “It’s true, Mrs. Ashton.” Rachel interrupted the conversation. “Johnny Harris is out on parole, and he’s going to be working at Grant Hardware.” Still shaken from her encounter with the aforesaid Johnny Harris, Rachel had a hard time summoning up a serene smile to show to her neighbors, though in the end she managed it. This was, at one and the same time, both the best and worst thing about Tylerville: there was no escaping being the recipient of other folks’ views about what was going on in your life. The two chatting women were in the checkout lane at the Kroger’s, so busy with their gossip that they hadn’t noticedher in the next lane over. Mrs. Ashton was sixtyish, a friend of Rachel’s mother, and the recipient of the news. Pam Collier was younger, perhaps forty-five, with a terror of a sixteen-year-old son who would, in all likelihood, be in Rachel’s class the coming fall. Rachel would have thought that with such a hellion of her own, Pam might be slightly sympathetic to Johnny’s plight, but apparently she was not.
    “Oh, Rachel, what about the Edwardses? They’ll just die when they hear.” Mrs. Ashton’s distress for the slain girl’s family was plain in her eyes.
    “I’m sorry for them, you know I am,” Rachel said, “but I never did think Johnny Harris killed Marybeth Edwards, and I still don’t. I taught him in high school, remember, and he wasn’t a bad boy. At least, not that bad.” Conscience forced her to amend that last sentence. Johnny Harris had been bad, in a lip-curling, back-talking, black-leather-jacket kind of way guaranteed to set up the backs of the decent folks of Tylerville. He got drunk, he got in fights, he smashed lights and windows, he cursed people out, and he rode a motorcycle. The kids he had associated with were mostly trash like himself, and if talk were believed, he and his crowd had done some wild partying the likes of which had not been seen in Tylerville before or since. He’d been in almost constant trouble in school and out, and his smart mouth had not helped his reputation any. But his saving grace, in Rachel’s eyes, was that he had liked to read. In fact, that was what had first caused her to think he might be different from what he seemed.
    She’d been hall monitor one day in the fall of her first semester of teaching, when she was just about to turn twenty-two, and she’d seen sixteen-year-old Johnny Harris swagger out the side door of the school as if he had every right in the world to do so. She followed him, suspecting he meant to sneak a cigarette or worse, and discovered him finally in the parking lot, stretched out in the back seat of some other student’s car. Alone, his high-topsneakers with the hole in the left sole sticking out the window, his long legs crossed at the ankles, one arm bent behind his head for a pillow. An open book had been propped on his sweatshirted chest.
    Her astonishment had nearly matched his belligerence upon being discovered.
    “All those Harrises are bad—every last one! Why, you remember when Buck Harris claimed to have got religion and started calling himself a minister, then set up his own church and collected no telling how much in donations for it, saying as how the money was going to go to feed starving children in Appalachia? And he went and spent that money