The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

by Grady Hendrix

  “Her mother goes to my church,” Mrs. Greene said. “She came to me one day after services and wanted me to see her little girl.”

  “Why?” Patricia asked.

  “People know I’m in the medical field,” Mrs. Greene said. “They’re always trying to get free advice. Now, Wanda Taylor doesn’t work, just takes a government check, and I can’t abide lazy people, but she’s my cousin’s best friend’s sister, so I said I’d look at her little girl. She’s nine years old and sleeping all hours of the day. Not eating, real lethargic, barely drinking water and this weather is hot. I asked Wanda if Destiny’s going into the woods, and she says she doesn’t know, but sometimes she’ll find twigs and leaves in her shoes at night, so she reckons maybe.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Patricia asked.

  “She says about two weeks,” Mrs. Greene said.

  “What did you tell her?” Patricia asked.

  “I told her she needed to get her little girl out of town,” Mrs. Greene said. “Get her someplace else by hook or by crook. Six Mile isn’t safe for children anymore.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Patricia only knew one person who owned a white van. She dropped Kitty off at Seewee Farms and with a heavy sense of dread drove to the Old Village, turned onto Middle Street, and slowed to look at James Harris’s house. Instead of the white van in his front yard, she saw a red Chevy Corsica parked on the grass, glowing like a puddle of fresh blood beneath the angry late-afternoon sun. She drove by at five miles an hour, squinting painfully at the Corsica, willing it to turn back into a white van.

  Of course, Grace knew exactly where to find her notebook.

  “I know it’s probably nothing,” Patricia said, stepping into Grace’s front hall, pulling the door shut behind her. “I hate to even bother you, but I have this terrible thought gnawing at me and I need to check.”

  Grace peeled off her yellow rubber gloves, opened the drawer of her hall table, and pulled out a spiral-bound notebook.

  “Do you want some coffee?” she asked.

  “Please,” Patricia said, taking the notebook and following Grace into her kitchen.

  “Let me just make some room,” Grace said.

  The kitchen table was covered in newspaper and in the middle stood two plastic tubs lined with towels, one filled with soapy water, the other filled with clean. Antique china lay on the table in orderly rows, surrounded by cotton rags and rolls of paper towel.

  “I’m cleaning Grandmother’s wedding china today,” Grace said, carefully moving the fragile teacups to make room for Patricia. “It takes a long time to do it the old-fashioned way, but anything worth doing is worth doing well.”

  Patricia sat down, centered Grace’s notebook in front of her, then flipped it open. Grace set her mug of coffee down, and bitter steam stung Patricia’s nostrils.

  “Milk and sugar?” Grace asked.

  “Both, please,” Patricia said, not looking up.

  Grace put the cream and sugar next to Patricia, then went back to her routine. The only sound was gentle sloshing as she dipped each piece of china into the soapy water, then the clean. Patricia paged through her notebook. Every page was covered in Grace’s meticulous cursive, every entry separated by a blank line. They all started with a date, and then came a description of the vehicle—Black boxy car, Tall red sports vehicle, Unusual truck-type automobile—followed by a license plate number.

  Patricia’s coffee cooled as she read—Irregular green car with large wheels, Perhaps a jeep, Needs washing—and then her heart stopped and blood drained from her brain.

  April 8, 1993, the entry read. Ann Savage’s House—parked on grass—White Dodge Van with drug dealer windows, Texas, TNX 13S.

  A high-pitched whine filled Patricia’s ears.

  “Grace,” she said. “Would you read this, please?”

  She turned the notebook toward Grace.

  “He killed her grass parking on it like that,” Grace said, after she read the entry. “Her lawn is never going to recover.”

  Patricia pulled a sticky note from her pocket and placed it next to the notebook. It read, Mrs. Greene—white van, Texas plate, - - X 13S.

  “Mrs. Greene wrote down this partial license plate number from a car she saw in Six Mile last week,” Patricia said. “Kitty went with me to take her a pie and she scorched our ears with this story. One of the children at Six Mile committed suicide after he was sick for a long time.”

  “How tragic,” Grace said.

  “His cousin was murdered, too,” Patricia said. “At the same time, they saw a white van driving around with this license plate number. It niggled at the back of my mind, thinking where else I’d seen a white van, and then I remembered James Harris had one. He’s got a red car now, but these plates match his van.”

  “I don’t know what you’re implying,” Grace said.

  “I don’t either,” Patricia said.

  James Harris had told her his ID was being mailed to him. She wondered if it had ever arrived, but it must have, otherwise how had he bought a car? Was he driving around without a license? Or had he lied to her about not having any ID? She wondered why someone wouldn’t use their identification to open a bank or a utility account. She thought about that bag of cash. The only reason she thought it belonged to Ann Savage was because he said so.

  They had read too many books about mafia hit men moving to the suburbs under assumed names and drug dealers living quietly among their unsuspecting neighbors for Patricia not to start connecting dots. You kept your name off public records if you were wanted for something by the government. You had a bag of money because that was how you had been paid, and people who got paid in cash were either hit men, drug dealers, bank robbers—or waiters, she supposed. But James Harris didn’t seem like a waiter.

  Then again, he was their friend and neighbor. He talked about Nazis with Blue and drew her son out of his shell. He ate with them when Carter wasn’t home and made her feel safe. He had come around the house to check on them that night someone got on the roof.

  “I don’t know what to think,” she repeated to Grace, who dipped a serving platter in the soapy water and tilted it from side to side. “Mrs. Greene told us that a Caucasian male is coming into Six Mile and doing something to the children that makes them sick. She thinks he might be driving a white van. And it’s only been happening since May. That’s right after James Harris moved here.”

  “You’re under the influence of this month’s book,” Grace said, lifting the platter out of the soapy water and rinsing it in the tub of clean. “James Harris is our neighbor. He is Ann Savage’s grandnephew. He is not driving out to Six Mile and doing something to their children.”

  “Of course not,” Patricia said. “But you read about drug dealers living around normal people, or sex abusers bothering children and getting away with it for so long, and you start to wonder what we really know about anyone. I mean, James Harris says he grew up all around, but then says he grew up in South Dakota. He says he lived in Vermont, but his van had Texas plates.”

  “You have suffered two terrible blows this summer,” Grace said, lifting the platter and gently drying it. “Your ear has barely healed. You are still grieving for Miss Mary. This man is not a criminal based on when he moved here and the license plate of a passing car.”

  “Isn’t that how every serial killer gets away with it for so long?” Patricia asked. “Everyone ignores the little things and Ted Bundy keeps killing women until finally someone does what they should have done in the first place and connects the little things that didn’t add up, but by then it’s too late.”

  Grace set the gleaming platter on the table. Creamy white, it featured brightly colored butterflies and a pair of birds on a branch, all picked out in delicate, near-invisible brushstrokes.

  “This is real,” Grace said, running one finger along its rim. “I
t’s solid, and it’s whole, and my grandmother received it as a wedding gift, and she gave it to my mother, and she passed it down to me, and when the time comes, if I deem her appropriate, I’ll hand it down to whomever Ben marries. Focus on the real things in your life and I promise you’ll feel better.”

  “I didn’t tell you this,” Patricia said, “but when I met him he showed me a bag of money. Grace, he had over eighty thousand dollars in there. In cash. Who has that just lying around?”

  “What did he say?” Grace asked, dipping a tureen lid in the soapy water.

  “He told me he’d found it in the crawl space. That it was Ann Savage’s nest egg.”

  “She never struck me as the kind of woman who’d trust a bank,” Grace said, rinsing the tureen lid in clean water.

  “Grace, it doesn’t add up!” Patricia said. “Stop cleaning and listen to me. At what point do we get concerned?”

  “Never,” Grace said, drying the tureen lid. “Because you are spinning a fantasy out of coincidences to distract yourself from reality. I understand that sometimes reality can be overwhelming, but it must be faced.”

  “I’m the one facing it,” Patricia said.

  “No,” Grace said. “You stood right there on my front porch after book club two months ago and said you wished that a crime or something exciting would happen here because you couldn’t stand your routine. And now you’ve convinced yourself something dangerous is happening so you can act like a detective.”

  Grace picked up a stack of saucers and began placing them in the soapy water.

  “Can’t you stop cleaning china for a second and admit that maybe I’m right about this?” Patricia asked.

  “No,” Grace said. “I can’t. Because I need to be finished by 5:30 so I can clear off the table and set it for supper. Bennett’s coming home at six.”

  “There are more important things than cleaning,” Patricia said.

  Grace stopped, holding the last two saucers in her hand, and turned on Patricia, eyes blazing.

  “Why do you pretend what we do is nothing?” she asked. “Every day, all the chaos and messiness of life happens and every day we clean it all up. Without us, they would just wallow in filth and disorder and nothing of any consequence would ever get done. Who taught you to sneer at that? I’ll tell you who. Someone who took their mother for granted.”

  Grace glared at Patricia, nostrils flaring.

  “I’m sorry,” Patricia said. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m just worried about James Harris.”

  Grace put the last two saucers in the soapy water bin.

  “I’ll tell you everything you need to know about James Harris,” she said. “He lives in the Old Village. With us. There isn’t anything wrong with him because people who have something wrong with them don’t live here.”

  Patricia hated that she couldn’t put into words this feeling gnawing at her guts. She felt foolish that she couldn’t shift Grace’s certainty even for a moment.

  “Thank you for putting up with me,” she said. “I need to start supper.”

  “Vacuum your curtains,” Grace said. “No one ever does it enough. I promise it’ll make you feel better.”

  Patricia wanted that to be true very badly.

  * * *

  —

  “Mom,” Blue said from the living room door. “What’s for supper?”

  “Food,” Patricia said from the sofa.

  “Is it chicken again?” he asked.

  “Is chicken food?” Patricia replied, not looking up from her book.

  “We had chicken last night,” Blue said. “And the night before. And the night before that.”

  “Maybe tonight will be different,” Patricia said.

  She heard Blue’s footsteps retreat to the hall, walk into the den, go into the kitchen. Ten seconds later he reappeared at the living room door.

  “There’s chicken defrosting in the sink,” he said in an accusatory tone.

  “What?” Patricia asked, looking up from her book.

  “We’re having chicken again,” he said.

  A pang of guilt twisted through Patricia. He was right—she’d made nothing but chicken all week. They’d order pizza. It was just the two of them and it was a Friday night.

  “I promise,” she said. “We’re not having chicken.”

  He gave her a sideways look, then went back upstairs and slammed his bedroom door. Patricia went back to her book: The Stranger Beside Me: The Shocking Inside Story of Serial Killer Ted Bundy. The more she read, the more uncertain she felt about everything in her life, but she couldn’t stop.

  Not-quite-book-club loved Ann Rule, of course, and her Small Sacrifices had long been one of their favorites, but they’d never read the book that made her famous, and Kitty was shocked when she found out.

  “Y’all,” Kitty had said. “She was just a housewife who wrote about murders for crummy detective magazines, and then she got a deal to write about these coed murders happening all over Seattle. Well, she winds up finding out that the main suspect is her best friend at a suicide hotline where she works—Ted Bundy.”

  He wasn’t Ann Rule’s best friend, just a good friend, Patricia learned as she read, but otherwise everything Kitty said was true.

  That just goes to show, Grace had pronounced, whenever you call one of those so-called hotlines, you have no clue who’s on the other end of that phone. It could be anyone.

  But the further she got into the book, the more Patricia wondered not how Ann Rule could have missed the clues that her good friend was a serial killer, but how well she herself actually knew the men around her. Slick had called Patricia last week, breathless, because Kitty had sold her a set of her Grandmother Roberts’s silver but asked her not to mention it to anyone. It was William Hutton and Slick couldn’t help herself—she needed someone to know that she’d gotten it for a song. She’d chosen Patricia.

  Kitty told me she needed extra money to send the children to summer camp, Slick had said over the phone. Do you think they’re in trouble? Seewee Farms is expensive, and it’s not like Horse works.

  Horse seemed so solid and dependable, but apparently he was spending all his family’s money on treasure-hunting expeditions while Kitty snuck around selling off family heirlooms to pay camp fees. Blue would grow up to go to college and play sports and meet a nice girl one day who would never know he was once so obsessed with Nazis he couldn’t talk about anything else.

  She knew that Carter spent so much time at the hospital because he wanted to be head of psychiatry, but she wondered what else he did there. She was relatively sure he wasn’t seeing a woman, but she also knew that since his mother had died he was spending fewer and fewer hours at home. Was he at the hospital every time he said he was? It shocked her to realize how little she knew about what he did between leaving the house in the morning and coming home at night.

  What about Bennett, and Leland, and Ed, who all seemed so normal? She was starting to wonder if anyone really knew what people were like on the inside.

  She ordered pizza and let Blue watch The Sound of Music after supper. He only liked the scenes with the Nazis and knew exactly when and where to fast-forward so the three-hour movie flew by in fifty-five minutes. Then he went upstairs to his room and closed the door, and did whatever it was he did in there these days, and Patricia’s mood darkened while she washed the dishes. It was too late to run the vacuum cleaner and vacuum her curtains, so she decided to take a quick walk. Without meaning to, her feet took her right past James Harris’s house. His car wasn’t out front. Had he driven up to Six Mile? Was he seeing Destiny Taylor right this minute?

  Her head felt dirty. She didn’t like thinking these thoughts. She tried to remember what Grace had said. James Harris had moved here to take care of his sick great-aunt. He had decided to stay. He wasn’t a drug dealer, or a child molester, or a mafia hit
man in hiding, or a serial killer. She knew that. But when she got home she went upstairs, took out her day planner, and counted the days. She had taken the casserole to James Harris’s house and seen Francine on May 15, the day Mrs. Greene said she went missing.

  Everything felt wrong. Carter was never home. Mrs. Savage had bitten off a piece of her ear. Miss Mary had died terribly. Francine had run away with a man. An eight-year-old boy had killed himself. A little girl might do the same. This wasn’t any of her business. But who looked out for the children? Even the ones who weren’t their own?

  She called Mrs. Greene and part of her hoped she wouldn’t pick up. But she did.

  “I’m sorry to call after nine,” she apologized. “But how well do you know Destiny Taylor’s mother?”

  “Wanda Taylor isn’t someone I spend a lot of time thinking about,” Mrs. Greene said.

  “Do you think we could talk to her about her daughter?” Patricia asked. “That license plate you saw, I think it belongs to a man who lives here. James Harris. Francine worked for him and I saw her at his house on May 15. And there are some funny things with him. I wonder if we could talk to Destiny, maybe she could tell us if she’d seen him out at Six Mile.”

  “People don’t like strangers asking after their children,” Mrs. Greene said.

  “We’re all mothers,” Patricia said. “If something were happening to one of ours and someone thought they knew something, wouldn’t you want to know? And if it turns out to be nothing, all we’ve done is bother her on a Friday night. It’s not even ten.”

  There was a long pause, and then:

  “Her light’s still on,” Mrs. Greene said. “Get out here quick and let’s get this over with.”

  Patricia found Blue in his room, sitting on his beanbag chair, reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

  “I need to run out for a little while,” Patricia said. “Just to the church. There’s a meeting of the deacons I forgot. Will you be okay?”

  “Is Dad home?” Blue asked.