The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

by Grady Hendrix

  The nods were general, all over the living room.

  “Exactly.” Slick Paley nodded. “Yes.”

  “I feel so strongly about South Africa,” Patricia said, and then remembered that Mary Brasington’s husband was in banking and Joanie Wieter’s husband did something with the stock market and they might have investments there. “But I know there are many sides to the issue, and I wonder if anyone wanted to present another point of view. In the spirit of Mr. Paton’s book, this should be a conversation, not a speech.”

  Everyone was nodding. Her soul settled back into her body. She had done it. She had survived. Marjorie cleared her throat.

  “Patricia,” Marjorie asked. “What did you think about what the book had to say about Nelson Mandela?”

  “So inspirational,” Patricia said. “He simply towers over everything, even though he’s really just mentioned.”

  “I don’t believe he is,” Marjorie said, and Slick Paley stopped nodding. “Where did you see him mentioned? On which page?”

  Patricia’s soul began ascending into the light again. Good-bye, it said. Good-bye, Patricia. You’re on your own now…

  “His spirit of freedom?” Patricia said. “It pervades every page?”

  “When this book was written,” Marjorie said. “Nelson Mandela was still a law student and a minor member of the ANC. I’m not sure how his spirit could be anywhere in this book, let alone pervading every page.”

  Marjorie drilled into Patricia’s face with her ice-pick eyes.

  “Well,” Patricia croaked, because she was dead now and apparently death felt very, very dry. “What he was going to do. You could feel it building. In here. In this book. That we read.”

  “Patricia,” Marjorie said. “You didn’t read the book, did you?”

  Time stopped. No one moved. Patricia wanted to lie, but a lifetime of breeding had made her a lady.

  “Some of it,” Patricia said.

  Marjorie let out a soul-deep sigh that seemed to go on forever.

  “Where did you stop?” she asked.

  “The first page?” Patricia said, then began to babble. “I’m sorry, I know I’ve let you down, but the babysitter had mono, and Carter’s mother is staying with us, and a snake came out of the commode, and everything’s just been so hard this month. I really don’t know what to say except I’m so, so sorry.”

  Black crept in around the edges of her vision. A high-pitched tone shrilled in her right ear.

  “Well,” Marjorie said. “You’re the one who’s lost out, by robbing yourself of what is possibly one of the finest works of world literature. And you’ve robbed all of us of your unique point of view. But what’s done is done. Who else would be willing to lead the discussion?”

  Sadie Funche retracted into her Laura Ashley dress like a turtle, Nancy Fox started shaking her head before Marjorie even reached the end of her sentence, and Cuffy Williams froze like a prey animal confronted by a predator.

  “Did anyone actually read this month’s book?” Marjorie asked.

  Silence.

  “I cannot believe this,” Marjorie said. “We all agreed, eleven months ago, to read the great books of the Western world and now, less than one year later, we’ve come to this. I am deeply disappointed in all of you. I thought we wanted to better ourselves, expose ourselves to thoughts and ideas from outside Mt. Pleasant. The men all say, ‘It’s not too clever for a girl to be clever,’ and they laugh at us and think we only care about our hair. The only books they give us are cookbooks because in their minds we are silly, lightweight know-nothings. And you’ve just proven them right.”

  She stopped to catch her breath. Patricia noticed sweat glistening in her eyebrows. Marjorie continued:

  “I strongly suggest y’all go home and think about whether you want to join us next month to read Jude the Obscure and—”

  Grace Cavanaugh stood, hitching her purse over one shoulder.

  “Grace?” Marjorie asked. “Are you not staying?”

  “I just remembered an appointment,” Grace said. “It entirely slipped my mind.”

  “Well,” Marjorie said, her momentum undermined. “Don’t let me keep you.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Grace said.

  And with that, the tall, elegant, prematurely gray Grace floated out of the room.

  Robbed of its velocity, the meeting dissolved. Marjorie retreated to the kitchen, followed by a concerned Sadie Funche. A dispirited clump of women lingered around the dessert table making chitchat. Patricia lurked in her chair until no one seemed to be watching, then darted out of the house.

  As she cut across Marjorie’s front yard, she heard a noise that sounded like Hey. She stopped and looked for the source.

  “Hey,” Kitty Scruggs repeated.

  Kitty lurked behind the line of parked cars in Marjorie’s driveway, a cloud of blue smoke hovering over her head, a long thin cigarette between her fingers. Next to her stood Maryellen something-or-other, also smoking. Kitty waved Patricia over with one hand.

  Patricia knew that Maryellen was a Yankee from Massachusetts who told everyone that she was a feminist. And Kitty was one of those big women who wore the kind of clothes people charitably referred to as “fun”—baggy sweaters with multicolored handprints on them, chunky plastic jewelry. Patricia suspected that getting entangled with women like this was the first step on a slippery slope that ended with her wearing felt reindeer antlers at Christmas, or standing outside Citadel Mall asking people to sign a petition, so she approached them with caution.

  “I liked what you did in there,” Kitty said.

  “I should have found time to read the book,” Patricia told her.

  “Why?” Kitty asked. “It was boring. I couldn’t make it past the first chapter.”

  “I need to write Marjorie a note,” Patricia said. “To apologize.”

  Maryellen squinted against the smoke and sucked on her cigarette.

  “Marjorie got what she deserved,” she said, exhaling.

  “Listen.” Kitty placed her body between the two of them and Marjorie’s front door, just in case Marjorie was watching and could read lips. “I’m having some people read a book and come over to my house next month to talk about it. Maryellen’ll be there.”

  “I couldn’t possibly find the time to belong to two book clubs,” Patricia said.

  “Trust me,” Kitty said. “After today, Marjorie’s book club is done.”

  “What book are you reading?” Patricia asked, groping for reasons to say no.

  Kitty reached into her denim shoulder bag and pulled out the kind of cheap paperback they sold at the drugstore.

  “Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs,” she said.

  It took Patricia aback. This was one of those trashy true crime books. But clearly Kitty was reading it and you couldn’t call someone else’s taste in books trashy, even if it was.

  “I’m not sure that’s my kind of book,” Patricia said.

  “These two women were best friends and they chopped each other up with axes,” Kitty said. “Don’t pretend you don’t want to know what happened.”

  “Jude is obscure for a reason,” Maryellen growled.

  “Is it just the two of you?” Patricia asked.

  A voice piped up behind her.

  “Hey, everyone,” Slick Paley said. “What’re y’all talking about over here?”

  CHAPTER 2

  The last bell of the day rang somewhere deep inside the bowels of Albemarle Academy and the double doors opened and disgorged a mob of small children strapped beneath bulging, spine-bending book bags. They hobbled to the car pool area like elderly gnomes, bent double beneath three-ring binders and social studies books. Patricia saw Korey and pecked at the horn. Korey looked up and broke into a loping run that made Patricia’s heart hurt. Her
daughter slid into the passenger seat, hauling her book bag onto her lap.

  “Seat belts,” Patricia said, and Korey clicked hers in.

  “Why’re you picking me up?” Korey asked.

  “I thought we could stop by the Foot Locker and look at cleats,” Patricia said. “Didn’t you say you needed new ones? Then I was in the mood for TCBY.”

  She felt her daughter begin to glow, and as they drove over the West Ashley Bridge, Korey explained to her mom about all the different kind of cleats the other girls had and why she needed bladed cleats and they had to be hard ground cleats and not soft ground cleats even though they played on grass because hard ground cleats were faster. When she stopped for breath, Patricia said, “I heard about what happened at recess.”

  All the light went out inside Korey, and Patricia immediately regretted saying anything, but she had to say something because isn’t that what mothers did?

  “I don’t know why Chelsea pulled your pants down in front of the class,” Patricia said. “But it was an ugly, mean thing to do. As soon as we get home, I’m calling her mother.”

  “No!” Korey said. “Please, please, please, nothing happened. It wasn’t a big deal. Please, Mom.”

  Patricia’s own mother had never taken her side in anything, and Patricia wanted Korey to understand that this wasn’t a punishment, this was a good thing, but Korey refused to go into Foot Locker, and mumbled that she didn’t want any frozen yogurt, and Patricia felt like it was deeply unfair when all she’d tried to do was be a good mother and somehow that made her the Wicked Witch of the West. By the time she pulled into their driveway, steering wheel clenched in a death grip, she was not in the mood to see a white Cadillac the size of a small boat blocking her drive and Kitty Scruggs standing on her front steps.

  “Hellooooo,” Kitty called in a way that immediately set Patricia’s teeth on edge.

  “Korey, this is Mrs. Scruggs,” Patricia said, smiling too hard.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Korey mumbled.

  “You’re Korey?” Kitty asked. “Listen, I heard what Donna Phelps’s little girl did to you today at school.”

  Korey looked at the ground, hair hanging over her face. Patricia wanted to tell Kitty she was only making it worse.

  “The next time Chelsea Phelps does something like that,” Kitty said, barreling ahead, “you tell everyone at the top of your lungs, ‘Chelsea Phelps spent the night at Merit Scruggs’s house last month and she wet her sleeping bag and blamed it on the dog.’”

  Patricia couldn’t believe it. Parents didn’t say things like that about other people’s children. She turned to tell Korey not to listen but saw her daughter staring at Kitty in awe, eyes round, mouth open.

  “Really?” Korey asked.

  “She tooted at the table, too,” Kitty said. “And tried to blame that on my four-year-old.”

  For a long, frozen moment, Patricia didn’t know what to say, and then Korey burst into giggles. She laughed so hard she sat down on the front steps, fell over sideways, and gasped until she started to hiccup.

  “Go inside and say hello to your grandmother,” Patricia said, feeling suddenly grateful to Kitty.

  “Aren’t they such little pills at that age?” Kitty said, watching Korey go.

  “They are peculiar,” Patricia said.

  “They’re pills,” Kitty said. “Bitter little pills who ought to be tied up in a sack and let out when they’re eighteen. Here, I brought you this.”

  She handed Patricia a glossy new paperback copy of Evidence of Love.

  “I know you think it’s trash,” Kitty said. “But it has passion, love, hate, romance, violence, excitement. It’s just like Thomas Hardy, only in paperback and with eight pages of photos in the middle.”

  “I don’t know,” Patricia said. “I don’t have a lot of time…”

  But Kitty was already retreating to her car. Patricia decided that this mystery should be called Patricia Campbell and the Inability to Say No.

  To her surprise, she tore through the book in three days.

  * * *

  —

  Patricia almost didn’t make the meeting. Right before she left, Korey washed her face in lemon juice to get rid of her freckles and wound up getting it in both eyes, sending her shrieking into the hall, where she ran face-first into a doorknob. Patricia flushed her eyes with water, put a bag of frozen peas on her goose egg, told Korey she’d had just as many, if not more, freckles when she was her age, and got her settled on the sofa with Miss Mary to watch The Cosby Show. She made it to the meeting ten minutes late.

  Kitty lived on Seewee Farms, a two-hundred-acre chunk of Boone Hall Plantation that had been parceled off a long time ago as a wedding present to some Lord Proprietor or other. Through misadventure and poor decision making it had come to Kitty’s grandmother-in-law, and when that eminent old lady had declined elegantly into her grave, she’d passed it on to her favorite grandson, Kitty’s husband, Horse.

  Way out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by flooded rice fields and tangled pine forest, dotted with broken-backed outbuildings inhabited solely by snakes, it was anchored by a hideously ugly main house painted chocolate brown and wrapped in sagging porches and rotting columns with raccoons in the attic and opossums in the walls. It was exactly the kind of grand home, suspended in a state of gracious decay, Patricia thought all the best Charlestonians owned.

  Now she stood before the massive double doors on the sprawling front porch and pressed the bell and nothing happened. She tried again.

  “Patricia!” Kitty called.

  Patricia looked around, then up. Kitty leaned out the second-floor window.

  “Go around to the side,” Kitty hollered. “We haven’t been able to find the key to that door in forever.”

  She met Kitty by her kitchen door.

  “Come on in,” Kitty said. “Don’t mind the cat.”

  Patricia didn’t see a cat anywhere, but she did see something that thrilled her: Kitty’s kitchen was a disaster. Empty pizza boxes, schoolbooks, junk mail, and wet bathing suits crowded every flat surface. Back issues of Southern Living slid off chairs. A disassembled engine covered the kitchen table. By comparison, Patricia’s house looked magazine perfect.

  “This is what five kids looks like,” Kitty said over her shoulder. “Stay smart, Patricia. Stop at two.”

  The front hall looked like something out of Gone with the Wind except its swooping staircase and oak floor were buried beneath a mudslide of violin cases, balled-up gym socks, taxidermied squirrels, glow-in-the-dark Frisbees, sheaves of parking tickets, collapsible music stands, soccer balls, lacrosse sticks, an umbrella stand full of baseball bats, and a dead, five-foot-tall rubber tree stuck inside a planter made of an amputated elephant’s foot.

  Kitty picked her way through the carnage, leading Patricia to a front room where Slick Paley and Maryellen Whatever-Her-Name-Was perched on the lip of a sofa covered with approximately five hundred throw pillows. Across from them, Grace Cavanaugh sat ramrod straight on a piano bench. Patricia didn’t see a piano.

  “All right,” Kitty said, pouring wine from a jug. “Let’s talk about axe murder!”

  “Don’t we need a name first?” Slick asked. “And to select books for the year?”

  “This isn’t a book club,” Grace said.

  “What do you mean, this isn’t a book club?” Maryellen asked.

  “We’re just getting together to talk about a paperback book we all happened to read,” Grace said. “It’s not like it’s a real book.”

  “Whatever you say, Grace,” Kitty said, thrusting mugs of wine into everyone’s hands. “Five children live in this house and it’s eight years before the oldest one moves out. If I don’t get some adult conversation tonight I’m going to blow my brains out.”

  “Hear, hear,” Maryellen said. “Three girls: seven, f
ive, and four.”

  “Four is such a lovely age,” Slick cooed.

  “Is it?” Maryellen asked, eyes narrowing.

  “So are we a book club?” Patricia asked. She liked to know where things stood.

  “We’re a book club, we’re not a book club, who cares?” Kitty said. “What I want to know is why Betty Gore came at her good friend, Candy Montgomery, with an axe and how the heck she got chopped up instead?”

  Patricia looked around to see what the other women thought. Maryellen in her dry-cleaned blue jeans and her hair scrunchie and her harsh Yankee voice; tiny Slick looking like a particularly eager mouse with her pointy teeth and beady eyes; Kitty in her denim blouse with musical notes splayed across the front in gold sequins, slurping down a mug of wine, hair a mess, like a bear just woken up from hibernation; and finally Grace with a ruffled bow at her throat, sitting straight, hands folded perfectly in her lap, eyes blinking slowly from behind her large-framed glasses, studying them all like an owl.

  These women were too different from her. Patricia didn’t belong here.

  “I think,” Grace said, and they sat up straighter, “that it shows a remarkable lack of planning on Betty’s part. If you’re going to murder your best friend with an axe, you should make sure you know what you’re doing.”

  That started the conversation, and without thinking, Patricia found herself joining in, and they were still talking about the book two hours later when they walked to their cars.

  The following month they read The Michigan Murders: The True Story of the Ypsilanti Ripper’s Reign of Terror, and then A Death in Canaan: A Classic Case of Good and Evil in a Small New England Town, followed by Bitter Blood: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness, and Multiple Murder—all of them Kitty’s recommendations.

  They selected next year’s books together, and when all the blurry black-and-white photos of crime scenes and minute-by-minute timelines of the night when it all happened began to blur, Grace came up with the idea of alternating each true crime book with a novel, so they would read The Silence of the Lambs one month, and Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of John Wayne Gacy the next. They read The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O’Brien, followed by Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, with its children baked into a pie and fed to their mother. (“The problem with that,” Grace pointed out, “is you would need extremely large pies to fit two children, even minced.”)