“He’s on his way,” Patricia said, although she didn’t really know. “Will you answer the phone? I’m going to lock the front door. Your father has his key.”
“Okay,” Blue said, barely looking up from his book.
“I love you,” Patricia said, but Blue didn’t seem to hear.
Patricia hesitated in her bedroom for a moment. She had never lied about where she would be before, and it made her feel nervous. She decided to leave a note for Carter on their dresser telling him where she was and giving him Mrs. Greene’s phone number. On it she wrote, Need to give Mrs. Greene a check. Then she got in her Volvo and hoped Grace was right and this was all just a product of the overactive imagination of a stupid little housewife with too much free time on her hands. If it was, she promised herself, tomorrow she would vacuum her curtains.
CHAPTER 16
There were no other cars on Rifle Range Road and the drive felt lonely. The streetlights stopped at the state road, and the narrow, crumbling one-lane road winding through the trees and chain-link fences felt too narrow. Patricia’s headlights brushed across mobile homes and prefabricated sheds and she worried she might be waking people up. She checked her dashboard clock—9:35 p.m.—but the absolute dark of the country road made it feel much later.
She parked in front of Mrs. Greene’s and, after looking around to make sure no one was on the basketball court, she stepped out of her Volvo and into a buzzing, razzing night, furious with insects. Scattered streetlights glowed orange over the cinder-block houses and trailers, but they were spaced so far apart the darkness felt even more vast and lonely. When Mrs. Greene opened her front door Patricia felt relieved to see a familiar face.
“Would you like something to drink?” Mrs. Greene asked.
“I think it’s best if we see Mrs. Taylor before it’s too late,” Patricia said.
“Jesse?” Mrs. Greene called back into her house. “Look after your brother. I’m going across the way.”
She closed and locked her door behind her, the plastic holly wreath scratching against the aluminum door as it swung from side to side.
“This way,” Mrs. Greene said, leading her down the sandy path in front of her house.
They walked onto the dirt road that circled the little church, then stepped over the ankle-high railing in front of Mt. Zion A.M.E., cutting through the center of Six Mile. They crunched over the sandy soil, their footsteps loud in the night. No one sat outside on their porch, no one called to their friends, no one passed them on the way home. The dirt roads of Six Mile were deserted. Patricia saw curtains drawn over most of the windows. Others had cardboard or bedsheets tacked up over them instead. From behind all of them came the cold, blue shifting light of television.
“No one goes out after dark around here anymore,” Mrs. Greene said.
“What should we say to Mrs. Taylor so we don’t upset her?” Patricia asked.
“Wanda Taylor gets out of bed upset,” Mrs. Greene said.
Patricia wondered how she’d react if someone showed up on her doorstep to tell her Blue was on drugs.
“Do you think she’ll be angry?” she asked.
“Probably,” Mrs. Greene said.
“Maybe this is a bad idea,” Patricia said.
“It is a bad idea,” Mrs. Greene said, turning to face her. “But you told me you were worried about her little girl and now I can’t stop thinking about that. She may not roll out the welcome wagon, but you convinced me we’re doing what’s right. Don’t convince me to come out halfway and then go back in.”
A yellow bulb burned over the door of Wanda Taylor’s trailer, and before Patricia could ask for a moment to gather herself, they had walked up the rotten front porch and Mrs. Greene was knocking on the rattling metal door. The rickety porch swayed back and forth beneath their feet. Moths tapped at the yellow lightbulb. Patricia could feel heat radiating off it, making her scalp and forehead prickle. Just when she couldn’t stand the warmth anymore, the door opened and Wanda Taylor stared out at them. She wore a drug company T-shirt and stonewashed blue jeans and hadn’t done her hair. Behind her, Patricia heard a TV playing.
“Evening, Wanda,” Mrs. Greene said.
“It’s late,” Wanda said, then took in Patricia. “Who’s that?”
She spoke to Mrs. Greene as if Patricia weren’t there.
“Can we come inside?” Mrs. Greene asked.
“No,” Wanda Taylor said. “It’s almost ten o’clock. Some people have to get up in the morning.”
“You came to me about Destiny and I thought you might have a few minutes to discuss the health of your little girl,” Mrs. Greene said, her voice prickly.
Wanda screwed her face up in disbelief.
“I came to you about Destiny and you told me to go to the doctor if I was so worried,” she said. “That’s what I’m doing, first thing tomorrow morning, we’re going to the clinic.”
“Mrs. Taylor,” Patricia said. “I’m a nurse from the clinic. I thought Destiny’s condition might be urgent so I came to see you tonight. How old is she?”
Wanda and Mrs. Greene stared at Patricia, both for different reasons.
“Nine,” Wanda finally said. “You have some ID?”
“She works at the clinic,” Mrs. Greene said. “She’s not the police. She’s not from DSS. She doesn’t have a badge.”
Wanda studied Patricia, her face shadowed by the yellow light.
“All right,” she finally said, used to doing what people in authority told her. She stepped backward into her trailer. “But she’s sleeping right now, so keep your voices low.”
They followed her inside. It felt crowded and smelled like cooked hamburger meat. A black plastic sofa sat across from a television with a built-in VCR resting on top of a cardboard box. A window-unit air conditioner chuffed out frozen air beneath the venetian blinds. Wanda gestured to a rickety table in the kitchen alcove and Patricia and Mrs. Greene sat down in its padded, thrift-store chairs.
“Do you want some Kool-Aid?” she asked. “Lite beer?”
“No, thank you,” Patricia said.
Wanda turned to her kitchen cabinets, took out two snack packs of Fritos, pulled them open, and poured them into a Styrofoam cereal bowl.
“Help yourselves,” she said, putting it on the table between them.
“We really should see Destiny for a minute,” Patricia said. “I’d like to ask her some questions about her condition.”
“You have to talk to her now?” Wanda asked.
“Wanda,” Mrs. Greene said. “You need to do what the nurse tells you.”
Wanda took three steps down the hall and scratched on a beige, plastic accordion door.
“Dessy,” she whispered in a singsong.
The window-unit air conditioner froze the air. Patricia’s skin prickled with goose bumps. The top of the table felt sticky. She kept her hands in her lap.
“Dessy, wakey wakey,” Wanda sang, sliding open the partition.
She clicked on a lamp in the bedroom.
“Dessy?” Wanda said.
She stepped into the hall and opened another door, this one revealing the bathroom.
“Dessy? Where’re you hiding?” Wanda said, and her voice had an edge to it.
Patricia and Mrs. Greene crowded into the little hall and stood in the door of Destiny’s room.
“She was right here not half an hour ago,” Wanda said, kneeling on the floor.
The bedroom was so tiny Wanda’s legs stuck out into the hall as she leaned her head underneath the sleeping platform. On top lay a foam mattress covered with a My Little Pony fitted sheet and a folded plaid blanket. All the little girl’s toys and clothes were stacked up in clear plastic boxes in the corner. A window over the bed was an uncurtained black rectangle looking out at the night.
“Where’s Dessy?” Wanda said, her vo
ice starting to fray. “What did you do to her?”
“We just got here,” Mrs. Greene said.
Wanda shoved past Patricia and ran into the living room like she was going to catch her invisible daughter at the door.
“Dessy?” she called.
“What do you think?” Mrs. Greene asked Patricia, voice low.
In the kitchen, Wanda yanked open every cabinet and moved every box and bag.
Patricia pulled on the window over Destiny’s bed. Smooth and easy, it slid wide open. There was no screen. A wave of warm air and insect screams rolled into the tiny bedroom. Patricia and Mrs. Greene looked out the open window into the woods just a few feet away. Patricia knelt on the sleeping platform and looked down. Outside the window stood a large wooden spool that telephone cable came on. Someone standing on it could reach right through the window.
They walked back to the living room.
“We need to call the police,” Mrs. Greene said.
“What?” Wanda Taylor asked. “What for?”
“Mrs. Taylor,” Patricia said. “There is a man named James Harris who has been dealing drugs to children. You need to call the police and tell them that your daughter is missing, and you think he’s taken her.”
“Oh, Lord Jesus,” Wanda said, and she belched loudly, filling the living room with the stench of her stomach acid.
“He has her in the woods,” Mrs. Greene said. “He’ll still be close by.”
She got Wanda seated on the sofa and helped her light a menthol cigarette to settle her nerves. Wanda looked helplessly for an ashtray and finally just tapped her ashes on the carpet. Patricia stretched the kitchen phone into the room, dialed 911, and handed it to Wanda.
“Hello,” Wanda Taylor said, smoke puffing out of her mouth to the rhythm of her words. “My name is Wanda Taylor and I live at 32 Grill Flame Road. My daughter is not in her bed.” She paused. “No, she is not hiding in the house.” Pause. “Because I looked all over and there isn’t much house for her to hide in. Please send someone, please. Please.”
She didn’t know what else to say so she repeated “Please” until Mrs. Greene took the phone from her hand. Wanda looked helplessly from Patricia to Mrs. Greene like she was seeing them for the first time.
“Would you like Kool-Aid or lite beer?” she asked. “It’s all I’ve got. The water out here smells like eggs.”
“We’re fine, thank you,” Patricia said, kindly.
“We need to sit and wait for the police,” Mrs. Greene said, patting Wanda’s knee. “They’ll be here soon.”
“If you hadn’t come I wouldn’t know she was gone,” Wanda said. “The police will be here soon?”
“Real soon,” Mrs. Greene said, taking her hand.
“I should check her bedroom again,” Wanda said.
They let her go. Patricia thought about the three-minute response time in Mt. Pleasant.
“How long until the police get here?” she asked.
“Could be a while,” Mrs. Greene said. “This is the country.”
Wanda came back into the room and stood in the kitchen.
“She isn’t back,” she said, then noticed them for the first time again. “Would you like something to drink? I have Kool-Aid and lite beer.”
“Wanda,” Mrs. Greene said. “You need to sit down and wait for the police.”
Wanda pulled a chair out from the sticky table and went to take a drag on her cigarette, but it had burned down to the filter. She searched for her pack. Patricia thought about James Harris, somewhere out in the woods with a little girl in his arms, doing something unspeakable to her. She couldn’t picture that part clearly, but she imagined it was Korey. She imagined it was Blue. She imagined the police would be a while.
“Do you have a flashlight?” she asked Wanda.
CHAPTER 17
Patricia went down the shaky front steps with a silver Boy Scout flashlight in one hand. Mrs. Greene stood in the doorway.
“I’m just going to look around the back of the trailer,” Patricia said, but Mrs. Greene had already closed and locked the front door. Patricia heard her slide the chain into place.
All over Six Mile she heard the hum of air conditioners. The woods around her were a tornado of screaming insects. Every breath felt like it came through a towel soaked in warm water. She made her legs move, taking her around the dark corner of the trailer.
She clicked on the flashlight and played it over the big wooden spool, as if she might see an incriminating footprint outlined in black ink on its top. She shined her light down on the sandy soil and saw indentations and shadows and lumps but didn’t know what any of them meant. She straightened and shined her light at the woods.
The pale yellow beam played over pine trees. They were spaced pretty far apart and she realized she could walk along the edge of them and still keep an eye on the trailer. Before she could think better of it she stepped around the first one, then the second, the flashlight beaming a lamplight circle on the ground in front of her, leading her into the woods step by step, as the screaming insects closed in around her.
Something grabbed her foot and yanked and her heart flooded with cold water before she saw that she’d snagged it on a rusty wire stretched along the ground. She looked back behind her, feeling confident, but the lit windows of the houses were farther away than she’d expected. She wondered if the police had arrived but knew she’d see their blue lights if they had.
The smell of warm sap surrounded her, and pine needles were thick underfoot. She knew this was the last moment when she could turn back. If she kept walking forward she wouldn’t be able to see the lit windows at all anymore and then she was going to be out here alone with James Harris.
Hang on, Destiny, she thought as she started walking deeper into the woods. I’m coming.
With the flashlight beam bouncing before her, she concentrated on each tree trunk, not the entire dark mass of them crowding around and behind her. She went carefully, not wanting to step in a hole, conscious of the loud crashing sounds her body made as she brushed through the branches, bushes, and vines.
Something that wasn’t her rustled to the right. She froze and clicked off her flashlight so it wouldn’t give her away. The night rushed in around her. She strained to listen over the sound of blood throbbing in her ears. Her pulse thumped in her wrists. Her breath rasped in her nose. Then she realized: the insects had stopped screaming.
Blobs of dark color flashed across her vision. She heard something scurry through the trees, and suddenly the thought of standing still panicked her, and she needed to move, but without the flashlight she couldn’t see her way forward so she clicked it back on and the trees and pine needles on the ground materialized in front of her again.
She moved fast, flashlight pointed down, looking for a little girl’s leg clad in denim sticking out from behind a pine tree. Mixed in with the sound of her breath and her heartbeat and her pulse she heard things groaning in the trees all around her; any minute a big hand would settle on the back of her neck. Her pounding heart pulled her forward.
She should turn around and go home. She was nothing but a tiny speck in the forest. She was a fool to think she’d somehow stumble across Destiny Taylor this way, and what was she going to say when she saw James Harris? Was she going to knock him over the head with her little flashlight? She needed to go back.
Then the trees stopped and she stepped onto a dirt road. It wasn’t very wide but the sandy soil was loose and she realized someone must be building something nearby because of the big tread marks pressed into its surface. She flashed the light in one direction and saw the little road disappearing into a dark tunnel of trees. She flashed the light in the other direction and saw the chrome grille of James Harris’s white van.
She snapped off her light and stepped back into the pines, stumbling over a stump. He could’ve seen her. She’d sna
pped her light off in time, but she realized that he could’ve seen her beam bobbing through the trees as she approached, and then she’d stood there like a dummy looking the other way before shining her light at the van. She wanted to run but made herself hold still instead. The van didn’t move.
It wasn’t fifty feet away. She could walk over and touch it. She needed to walk over and touch it. She needed to know if he was inside.
She walked toward it, her shoes sinking into the sand, making no sound, her stomach churning. She waited for the headlights to scream on and pin her down, the engine to roar to life and run her over. The van’s grille and windshield swam from side to side in her vision, bouncing up and down, getting closer, and then she was there. She realized that inside was darker than outside so she ducked down, knees popping, to make sure he didn’t see her head outlined through his windshield against the night sky.
She put out one hand to steady herself. The curve of the hood felt cool. She wondered if the police were at Wanda’s trailer yet. She wanted to go back. Didn’t drug dealers have guns, and knives, and all kinds of weapons? She imagined Blue in the back of the van and knew she had to look. Destiny Taylor wasn’t her child but she was still a child.
Patricia slowly rose, knees cracking, and leaned forward until the edges of her hands touched the cold windshield, and she cupped them around her eyes and peered inside. Beyond the thin crescent rim of the steering wheel it was pitch-dark. She narrowed her eyes until the muscles in them ached, but she couldn’t see a thing.
Then she realized he wasn’t in the van. He was still in the woods with Destiny, or he’d finished with her and was on his way back. Before he got there she could look inside quickly and see if there were any clues, any clothes from that other child, anything that belonged to Francine. She had seconds.
She walked to the back of the van, wrapped her hand around the door handle, and pulled. Then she raised her flashlight and turned it on.
A man’s back bent over something on the floor, his rear end and the soles of his work boots turned toward her, and then his back reared up, and he turned into the flashlight’s beam and she saw James Harris. But there was something wrong with the lower half of his face. Something black, shiny, and chitinous like a cockroach’s leg, stuck several inches out of his mouth. His jaws hung open, stupefied, as he blinked blearily in the light, but otherwise his body didn’t move as this long insectoid appendage slowly withdrew into his mouth, and when it had retreated fully, he closed his lips and she saw that his chin and cheeks and the tip of his nose were coated in slick, wet blood.
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires Page 15
