The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

by Grady Hendrix

  In the next sandy driveway over, three little girls skipped rope, double Dutch. Patricia stood for a minute, listening to their rhyme:

  Boo Daddy, Boo Daddy

  In the woods

  Grabbed a little boy

  ’Cause he taste so good

  Boo Daddy, Boo Daddy

  In the sheets

  Sucking all your blood

  ’Cause it taste so sweet

  She wondered where they’d learned something like that. She walked around the hood of the car and headed for Mrs. Greene’s, Kitty falling in beside her, and then she sensed movement behind them. She turned and saw a crowd of people coming their way, walking fast from the basketball courts, and before she or Kitty could move there were boys in front of them, boys behind them, boys leaning on the hood of her car, boys all around them, adopting lounging postures, fencing them in.

  “What are you doing here?” one asked.

  His white T-shirt was covered in random blue stripes and his hair was cut into a big wedge with straight lines shaved into one side.

  “Nothing to say?” he said. “I asked you a question. What, the fuck, are you doing out here? ’Cause I don’t think you live here. I don’t think you got invited here. So what, the fuck?”

  He performed for the boys around him and they made their faces hard, stepped in close, crowded Kitty and Patricia together.

  “Please,” Kitty said. “We’re leaving right now.”

  A few of the boys grinned and Patricia felt a flash of anger. Why was Kitty such a coward?

  “Too late for that,” Wedgehead said.

  “We’re visiting a friend,” Patricia said, clutching her purse tighter.

  “You don’t have any friends out here, bitch!” the boy exploded, pushing his face into hers.

  Patricia saw her pale, frightened face reflected twice in his sunglasses. She looked weak. Kitty was right. They never should have come out here. She’d made a terrible mistake. She pulled her neck into her shoulders and got ready to be stabbed or shoved or whatever came next.

  “Edwin Miles!” a woman’s voice snapped through the sizzling air.

  Everyone turned except Wedgehead, who kept his face so close to Patricia’s she could count the sparse hairs in his mustache.

  “Edwin Miles,” the voice called again. This time he turned. “What are you playing at?”

  Patricia turned and saw Mrs. Greene standing in the door to her house. She wore a red T-shirt and blue jeans and her arms were covered with white gauze pads.

  “Who are these bitches?” the boy, Edwin Miles, called to Mrs. Greene.

  “Don’t you use that language with me,” Mrs. Greene said. “I’ll talk to your mother on Sunday.”

  “She don’t care,” Edwin Miles shouted back.

  “You see if she doesn’t once I’m through talking to her,” Mrs. Greene said, walking toward them.

  The boys faded before her, falling back in the face of her wrath. The last one standing was Edwin Miles.

  “All right, all right,” he said, stepping backward. “I didn’t know they were with you, Mrs. G. You know us, we like to keep an eye on the comings and the goings.”

  “I’ll comings-and-goings you,” Mrs. Greene snapped. She reached them and gave Patricia and Kitty a sudden smile. “It’s cooler in the house.”

  She walked toward her house without a backward glance, and Patricia and Kitty scampered along in her wake. Behind them they heard Edwin Miles’s voice fading as he walked away with his friends.

  “I’ll just leave them here with you, Mrs. G.,” he called. “It’s all good. Didn’t know you knew them, that’s all.”

  The little girls started jumping rope again as they passed:

  Boo Daddy, Boo Daddy

  One, two, three

  Sneaking in my window

  And sucking on me.

  Inside the house, Mrs. Greene closed the door and it took a moment for Patricia’s eyes to adjust to the cool darkness.

  “I am so grateful, Mrs. Greene,” Kitty said. “I thought we were going to die. How do we get to Patricia’s car? Do we need to call someone?”

  “Like who?” Mrs. Greene asked.

  “The police?” Kitty suggested.

  “The police?” Mrs. Greene said. “What would they do? Jesse!” she hollered. A skinny little boy with a serious face appeared in the hall door. “Get some tea for our guests.”

  “Oh,” Patricia said, almost forgetting. “I brought you something.”

  She held out the pecan pie.

  “Jesse, put this in the refrigerator,” Mrs. Greene said.

  She passed it to him and he disappeared back down the hall and Mrs. Greene gestured to the sofa. This close, Patricia could see that her knuckles bristled with stitches.

  Mrs. Greene limped stiffly to a La-Z-Boy recliner that bore the imprint of her body. Patricia’s eyes had finally adjusted to the dim room and she realized it was full of Christmas. Red, green, and yellow Christmas tree lights ran around the ceiling. A large, artificial tree dominated one corner. Every lamp was made of an oversized nutcracker or a ceramic Christmas tree, and every lampshade sported a smiling Santa or a snowman. On the wall next to Patricia was a framed cross-stitch of Santa Claus holding the baby Jesus.

  Patricia perched on the edge of the sofa, closest to Mrs. Greene. The bright white sterile dressings on Mrs. Greene’s arms glowed in the dim room.

  “You have to forgive those boys,” Mrs. Greene said, settling into her chair. “Everyone out here has their nerves up about strangers.”

  “Because of super-predators,” Kitty said, sitting gingerly on the other end of the sofa.

  “No, ma’am,” Mrs. Greene said. “Because of the children.”

  “Are they on drugs?” Kitty asked.

  “No one out here’s on drugs as far as I know,” Mrs. Greene said. “Unless you count brown liquor or a little bit of rabbit tobacco.”

  Patricia felt like it was important to change the subject.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “They gave me pills,” Mrs. Greene said. “But I don’t like the way they make me do, so I stick with Tylenol.”

  “We are so grateful that you were there, and I know—and Dr. Campbell knows—that no one could have done more,” Patricia said. “We feel responsible for leaving those windows open in the first place, so we wanted you to have this.”

  She put a check, folded in half, on the arm of Mrs. Greene’s La-Z-Boy. Mrs. Greene picked up the check and opened it. Patricia was proud of the amount. It was almost twice what Carter had wanted to write. She felt disappointed when Mrs. Greene’s expression didn’t change. Instead she folded the check back up and tucked it into her breast pocket.

  “Mrs. Campbell,” she said, “I don’t need charity from you. I need work.”

  Patricia saw the situation in a flash. With Mrs. Greene unable to do anything physical she had probably lost her other clients. Suddenly the amount of the check seemed woefully small.

  “But you’ll still work for us,” Patricia said. “As soon as you’re feeling better.”

  “I can’t do much for another week,” Mrs. Greene said.

  “That’s what the check is supposed to cover,” Patricia said, happy to suddenly have a plan. “But after that I can use your help getting the house back together, and maybe cooking supper, too.”

  Mrs. Greene nodded once and closed her eyes, head leaned back against the chair.

  “God provides for those who believe,” she said.

  “He does,” Patricia said.

  They sat silently in the glow of the Christmas tree lights, the colors changing quietly against the walls until Jesse entered the living room, walking slowly, holding a pressed-tin NFL tray in front of him bearing two glasses of iced tea. The ice chimed against the glasses as
he walked across the room and lowered the tray to the coffee table.

  “Go on, useless,” Mrs. Greene said, and the boy looked at her.

  She smiled at him; he smiled back and slipped out of the room.

  Mrs. Greene watched Patricia and Kitty sip their iced tea. When she spoke again, her voice was low.

  “I need to make that money fast,” she said. “I’m sending my boys up to live with my sister in Irmo for the summer.”

  “On vacation?” Patricia asked.

  “To keep them alive,” Mrs. Greene said. “You heard those Nancy girls chanting out there. There’s something in the wood’s been taking our babies.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “We really should get going,” Kitty said, putting her iced tea back on the coffee table.

  “Just a minute,” Patricia said. “What’s happening to the children?”

  Kitty twisted around on the sofa and cracked the curtains, letting a slash of harsh sunlight into the living room.

  “That boy is still hanging around your car,” she informed Patricia, letting go of the curtains.

  “It’s nothing you ought to trouble yourself about,” Mrs. Greene said. “I would just feel a whole lot safer with my babies away.”

  For two months, ever since she’d been bitten, Patricia had felt useless and scared. The Old Village she’d lived in for six years had always been someplace safe, where children left their bicycles in their front yards, and only a few people ever locked their front doors, and no one ever locked their back doors. It didn’t feel safe now. She needed an explanation, something she could solve that would make everything go back to the way it was.

  The check had been poorly judged and not nearly enough. She’d come out here to help and gotten into trouble with those boys and Mrs. Greene had had to help her out instead. But if there was some trouble with her children, she could maybe do something about that. Here was something tangible. Patricia felt victory at hand.

  “Mrs. Greene,” Patricia said. “Tell me what’s wrong with Jesse and Aaron. I want to help.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with them,” Mrs. Greene said, pulling herself to the edge of her recliner, as close as she could get to Patricia so she could talk low. “But I don’t want to have happen to them what happened to the Reed boy, or the others.”

  “What happened to them?” Patricia asked.

  “Since May,” Mrs. Greene said, “we’ve had two little boys turn up dead and Francine has gone missing.”

  The room stayed silent as the Christmas tree lights cycled through their colors.

  “I haven’t read anything about it in the newspaper,” Kitty said.

  “I’m a liar?” Mrs. Greene asked, and Patricia saw her eyes get hard.

  “No one says you’re lying,” Patricia reassured her.

  “She just did,” Mrs. Greene said. “Came right out and said it.”

  “I read the paper every day,” Kitty shrugged. “I just haven’t heard anything about children going missing or getting killed.”

  “Then I guess I made up a story,” Mrs. Greene said. “I guess those little girls you heard singing out there made up their rhymes, too. They call him the Boo Daddy because that’s what they say’s in the woods. That’s why those boys were so nervous about strangers. We all know someone’s out here sniffing after the children.”

  “What about Francine?” Patricia asked.

  “She’s gone,” Mrs. Greene said. “No one’s seen her car since May fifteen or so. The police say she’s run off with a man, but I know she wouldn’t leave without her cat.”

  “She left her cat?” Patricia asked.

  “Had to get someone from the church to sneak open her window and get it out before it starved,” Mrs. Greene said.

  Next to her, Patricia felt Kitty turn and look through the curtains again, and she wanted to tell her to stop squirming but she didn’t want to break Mrs. Greene’s concentration.

  “And what about the children?” Patricia asked.

  “The little Reed boy,” Mrs. Greene said. “He killed himself. Eight years old.”

  Kitty stopped wiggling.

  “That’s not possible,” she said. “Eight-year-old children don’t commit suicide.”

  “This one did,” Mrs. Greene said. “Got hit by a tow truck while he was waiting for the school bus. The police say he was fooling around and stumbled in the road, but the other children in line with him say different. They say Orville Reed stepped right out in front of that truck deliberate. It knocked him clean out of his shoes, threw him fifty feet down the street. When they had his funeral he looked like he was just sleeping there in his coffin. Only thing different was a little tiny bruise on the side of his face.”

  “But if the police think it was an accident…,” Patricia began.

  “The police think all kind of things,” Mrs. Greene said. “Doesn’t necessarily make them true.”

  “I haven’t seen anything in the paper,” Kitty protested.

  “The paper doesn’t talk about what happens in Six Mile,” Mrs. Greene said. “We’re not quite Mt. Pleasant, not quite Awendaw, not quite anyplace. Certainly not the Old Village. Besides, one little boy has an accident, an old lady runs away with some man, the police figure it’s just colored people being colored. It’d be like reporting on a fish for being wet. The only one that looks unnatural is what happened to that other boy, Orville Reed’s cousin, Sean.”

  Patricia felt caught up in a particularly lurid and unstoppable bedtime story and now it was her turn to prompt the teller.

  “What happened to Sean?” she asked.

  “Before he died, Orville’s mother and auntie say he got real moody,” Mrs. Greene said. “They say he was irritable and sleepy all the time. His mother says he took long walks out in the woods every day when the sun started to go down, and came back giggling, and then the next day he’d be sick and unhappy again. He wouldn’t take food, would hardly drink water, he’d just stare at the television, whether it was cartoons or commercials, and it was like he was asleep while he was awake. He limped when he walked and cried when she asked him what the matter was. And she couldn’t keep him out of those woods.”

  “What was he doing out there?” Kitty asked, leaning forward.

  “His cousin tried to find out,” Mrs. Greene said. “Tanya Reed didn’t care for that boy, Sean. She put a padlock on her refrigerator because he kept stealing her groceries. He used to come over when she wasn’t home from work and smoke cigarettes in her house and watch cartoons with Orville. She tolerated it because she thought Orville needed a male role model, even a bad one. She said Sean got worried about Orville going in the woods all the time. Sean told her he thought someone in the woods was doing something to Orville. Tanya wouldn’t listen. Just threw him right out on his behind.

  “One of the men who hangs around the basketball court has a few pistols and rents them to people. He says Sean couldn’t afford to rent a gun, so he rented him a hammer for three dollars, and he says Sean told him he was going to follow his little cousin into the woods and scare off whoever was bothering him. But the next time they saw Sean he was dead. The man says he still had his hammer, too, for all the good it did. Says Sean was found by a big live oak back in the deep woods where someone had picked him up and mashed his face against the bark and scraped it right down to the skull. They couldn’t have an open casket at Sean’s funeral.”

  Patricia realized she wasn’t breathing. She carefully let out the air in her lungs.

  “That had to be in the papers,” she said.

  “It was,” Mrs. Greene said. “The police called it ‘drug-related’ because Sean had been in that kind of trouble before. But no one out here thinks it was and that’s why everyone’s real skittish about strangers. Before he stepped in front of that truck, Orville Reed told his mother he was talking to a white man in the woods, but she thought m
aybe he was talking about one of his cartoons. No one thinks that after what happened to Sean. Sometimes other children say they see a white man standing at the edge of the woods, waving to them. Some people wake up and say they see a pale man staring in through their window screens, but that can’t be true because the last one to say that was Becky Washington and she lives up on the second floor. How’d a man get up there?”

  Patricia thought about the hand vanishing over the edge of the sun porch overhang, the footsteps on the roof over Blue’s room, and she felt her stomach contract.

  “What do you think it is?” she asked.

  Mrs. Greene settled back in her chair.

  “I say it’s a man. One who drives a van and used to live in Texas. I even got his license plate number.”

  Kitty and Patricia looked at each other and then at her.

  “You got his license plate number?” Kitty asked.

  “I keep a pad by the front window,” Mrs. Greene said. “If I see a car driving around I don’t know, I write down the license plate number in case something happens and the police need it later for evidence. Well, last week, I heard an engine buzzing late one night. I got up and saw it turning, leaving Six Mile, heading back for the state road, but it was a white van and before it turned off I got most of its license plate number.”

  She put her hands on the arms of her chair, pulled herself up, and limped to a little table by the front door. She picked up a spiral notebook and opened it, scanning the pages, then she limped back to Patricia, turned the notebook around, and presented it to her.

  Texas, it read. - - X 13S.

  “That’s all I had time to write,” Mrs. Greene said. “It was turning when I caught it. But I know it was a Texas plate.”

  “Did you tell the police?” Patricia asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Mrs. Greene said. “And they said thank you very much and we’ll call if we have any further questions but I guess they didn’t because I never got a call. So you can understand why people out here don’t have much patience with strangers. Especially white ones. Especially now with Destiny Taylor.”

  “Who’s Destiny Taylor?” Kitty asked before Patricia could.