The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

by Grady Hendrix

  Beneath him, a young black girl lay sprawled on the floor, long orange T-shirt pushed up to her stomach, legs akimbo, an ugly dark purple mark on the inside of one thigh, oily with fluids.

  James Harris slapped the palm of one hand against the metal side of the van and the vehicle shook from side to side as he hauled himself to his feet. He squinted and Patricia realized her flashlight had blinded him. He took an unsteady, lurching step toward her. She froze, not knowing what to do, and then he took another step, rocking the van more, and she realized there was only three feet between them. The little girl moaned and squirmed like she was asleep, whimpering like Ragtag in his dreams.

  The van rocked as James Harris took another step. There were maybe two feet between them now and she had to do something to get that little girl out of there, and he still squinted into the flashlight beam. He reached for it slowly, fingers outstretched, inches from her face. Patricia ran.

  The second the flashlight beam was off his face she heard his feet clang once on the van’s floor and then hit the sand behind her. She ran into the woods, flashlight on, beam dancing crazily over stumps and trunks and leaves and bushes, and she shoved her way past branches that slapped her face and tree trunks that bruised her shoulders and vines that lashed her ankles. She didn’t hear him behind her but she ran. She didn’t know for how long, but she knew it was long enough for her flashlight’s batteries to dim. She thought these woods would never end, and then the woods spat her out beside a chain-link fence and she knew she was back on one of the roads leading into Six Mile.

  She shined her light around but it only made the shadows loom larger and dance crazily. She searched for something familiar and then everything exploded into bright white light and she saw a car coming her way slowly, jouncing up and down the bumpy road, and she cringed against a fence and it stopped, and a police officer’s voice said, “Ma’am, do you know who called 911?”

  She got in the back and had never been so grateful to hear anything as she was to hear the door slam shut behind her. The air conditioning instantly dried her sweat and left her skin gritty. She saw that the officer had a gun on his hip, and his partner in the passenger seat turned around and asked, “Can you show us the house where the child went missing?” They had a shotgun in a rack between them, and all of it made Patricia feel safe.

  “He’s got her right now,” Patricia said. “He’s doing something to her. I saw them in the woods.”

  The partner said something into a handset and they turned on their flashing lights but not their siren, and the car flew down the narrow road. Patricia saw the Mt. Zion A.M.E. church ahead of them.

  “Where did you see them?” the officer asked.

  “There’s a road,” Patricia said as the police car bounced into Six Mile. “A construction road back in the woods behind here.”

  “Over there,” the officer in the passenger seat said, lowering the radio handset, pointing across the car.

  The driver turned hard, and mobile homes reeled to the right in their headlights. Then the police car surged forward between two small homes and they left Six Mile behind. Trees surrounded them and the officer driving turned the wheel to the right and Patricia felt its tires slide on sand, heavy and slow, and then they were on the road she’d found.

  “This is it,” Patricia said. “He’s in a white van up ahead.”

  They slowed, and the officer in the passenger seat used a handle to steer a spotlight mounted outside the car to shine into the woods on both sides of the road, panning across the trees. It was thousands of times brighter than Patricia’s little flashlight. They rolled down their windows to listen for a little girl’s cries.

  Before they knew it, they’d reached the end of the road, coming to where it ran into the state road.

  “Maybe we missed him?” one of the officers said.

  Patricia didn’t look at her watch but she felt like they drove up and down that soft, sandy road for an hour.

  “Let’s try the house,” the driver said.

  She directed them back to Six Mile and they parked outside Wanda’s trailer. The partner let Patricia out of the back and she ran up the rickety front porch and banged on the door. Wanda practically threw herself outside.

  “She hasn’t come back,” she said. “She’s still out there.”

  “We need to see the child’s room,” one police officer said. “We have to see the last place you saw her.”

  “You don’t need to do that,” Patricia said. “His name is James Harris. He lives near me. He might have taken her back to his house. I can show you.”

  One officer stayed in the living room and wrote what she said on a pad while the other followed Wanda down the short hall to Destiny’s bedroom, then a loud shriek filled the trailer. The officer lowered his pad and ran down the hall. Patricia couldn’t squeeze past the officers so she stayed with Mrs. Greene until Wanda Taylor emerged from between them with Destiny in her arms.

  The little girl looked sleepy and unconcerned about all the fuss. Wanda sat on the sofa, Destiny draped across her lap, limp body cradled in her mother’s arms. The officers didn’t say anything and their faces betrayed no expression.

  “I saw him,” Patricia told them. “His name is James Harris, he lives on Middle Street, his van is a white van with tinted windows. Something’s wrong with his mouth, with his face.”

  “This happens sometimes, ma’am,” one of the officers said. “A kid hides under the bed or sleeps in the closet and the parents call the police saying she’s been abducted. Gets everyone worked up.”

  The enormity of what he was saying was too much. All Patricia could say was, “She doesn’t have a closet.”

  Then she realized what she could do.

  “Check her leg,” she said. “Beneath her panties on the inside part of her thigh, there should be a mark there, like a cut.”

  Everyone looked at each other but no one moved.

  “I’ll look,” Mrs. Greene said.

  “No, ma’am,” the officer said. “If you want us to check the child we need to call the ambulance and take her to the hospital so someone qualified can do it. Otherwise we can’t use it as evidence.”

  “Evidence?” Patricia asked.

  “If you want to bring charges against this man, you have to do it the right way,” the officer said.

  “If you’re alleging that you saw a man molesting this child, it is imperative that a trained medical professional examine her,” the other officer said.

  “I’m a nurse,” Patricia told him.

  “No one’s taking my little girl anywhere,” Wanda said, holding Destiny, her limp head flopping against her mother’s shoulder, eyes half closed, arms hanging down at her sides. “She’s staying with me. She’s not going out of my sight again.”

  “It’s important,” Patricia said.

  “She’s seeing the doctor in the morning,” Wanda Taylor said. “She’s not going anywhere until then.”

  Pounding came from the front door and they looked at each other, frozen. The aluminum door rattled in its frame until Mrs. Greene pushed past everyone. She flung the door open. Carter stood on the porch.

  “Jesus Christ, Patty,” he said. “What the hell is going on?”

  * * *

  —

  “If my wife says she saw this man doing this, then that’s what happened,” Carter told the officers, standing in the middle of the trailer. He looked out of place to Patricia, and then she remembered he’d grown up poor, and if mobile homes had existed in 1948 he would almost certainly have been born in one.

  “We searched everywhere she told us, sir,” the officer repeated with a heavy emphasis on the sir. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t believe her. If they find anything wrong with this little girl tomorrow we’ll have what your wife said tonight in the report.”

  “I’m sleepy,” Destiny said, dreamy
and soft, and Wanda began the process of getting everyone out of her home.

  Outside, Carter made sure the two officers had his information, while Mrs. Greene walked over to Patricia.

  “No point standing around outside when it’s this hot,” she said, and they started back to her house. Then she added, “They’re going to take that little girl away.”

  “Not if there’s nothing wrong with her,” Patricia said.

  “You saw how they looked at Wanda,” Mrs. Greene said. “You saw how they looked at her home. They think she’s trash, and she is, but not the kind of trash they think she is.”

  “She needs to get to the doctor,” Patricia said. “No matter what.”

  “What’d you really see that man doing to her?” Mrs. Greene asked.

  They stepped over the low railing around Mt. Zion A.M.E. and got all the way to its steps before Patricia said anything.

  “It wasn’t natural,” she said.

  It took Patricia two steps to realize Mrs. Greene had stopped walking. She turned around. In the church’s porch light, Mrs. Greene looked very small.

  “Everyone’s hungry for our children,” she said, and her voice cracked. “The whole world wants to gobble up colored children, and no matter how many it takes it just licks its lips and wants more. Help me, Mrs. Campbell. Help me keep that little girl with her mother. Help me stop that man.”

  “Of course,” Patricia said. “I’ll—”

  “I don’t want to hear of course,” Mrs. Greene said. “When I tell someone what’s happening out here they see an old woman living in the country who’s never been to school. When you tell them, they see a doctor’s wife from the Old Village and they pay attention. I don’t like to ask for favors but I need you to make them pay attention to this. You know I did everything I could to save Miss Mary. I gave my blood for her. When you called me on the telephone tonight you said we’re all mothers. Yes, ma’am, we are. Give me your blood. Help me.”

  Reflexively, Patricia almost said of course again, then wiped it from her mind. She didn’t say a thing. She stood across from Mrs. Greene and spoke, soft and firm.

  “We’ll save them,” she said. “We won’t let them take Destiny, and we won’t let that man take any more children. I will do everything in my power to stop him. I promise you.”

  Mrs. Greene didn’t reply, and the two of them stood like that for a moment.

  “Well, that’s that,” Carter said, coming up behind her. “They’ll have her to the doctor tomorrow and if anything’s wrong they have my information in the report.”

  The mood broke and the three of them walked toward Mrs. Greene’s house.

  “Carter,” Patricia said. “You don’t think DSS will do anything to that little girl, do you?”

  “What?” he asked. “Like, take her?”

  “Yes,” Patricia said.

  “No,” he said. “The doctor who sees her is mandated to report signs of abuse, but we don’t just snatch wailing babies out of their mothers’ arms. There’s a whole process. If you’re worried, I’ll ask around and see what kind of doc this guy is tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” Patricia said. “I’m just feeling nervous.”

  “Don’t worry,” Carter said. “I’ll make sure.”

  Mrs. Greene went into her house and Patricia heard her lock the door. Carter opened Patricia’s car door for her. She clicked in her seat belt and rolled down the window.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  “I got your note,” he said. “Too many things have happened for you to be riding around all alone out here in the middle of the night. Why don’t you follow me home and we’ll get some rest and talk in the morning?”

  She nodded, grateful that he wasn’t trying to make her feel like a fool, and then she followed his red taillights all the way out of Six Mile, down Rifle Range Road, and back to the Old Village. When they passed James Harris’s house she saw Carter’s brake lights flare briefly, probably because he also noticed James’s Chevy Corsica parked in front of his house.

  That night, for the first time in months, Carter held Patricia while she slept. She knew because she kept waking up from nightmares about a bloody red mouth chasing her through the woods and each time she felt his arms around her, and went back to sleep, reassured.

  CHAPTER 18

  Patricia woke up feeling like she’d fallen down the stairs. Her joints popped when she got out of bed, and her shoulders groaned like they were stuffed with broken glass when she reached for the coffee filters. When she undressed for her shower she noticed bruises on both hips from sliding back and forth across the back seat of the police car.

  Carter had to go in to the hospital even though it was Saturday, and Patricia let Blue do whatever he wanted because it was light out.

  “But be back before it starts to get dark,” she said. “We’re having early supper.”

  It wasn’t safe to have Blue out of her sight after dark. She didn’t know what James Harris was, she didn’t care, she couldn’t think straight, but she knew he wouldn’t go out in the sun. She wanted to call Grace, to tell her what she’d seen, but when Grace didn’t understand something she refused to believe it existed. She forced herself to calm down.

  She couldn’t bring herself to vacuum her curtains, so she did laundry. She ironed shirts and slacks. She ironed socks. She kept seeing James Harris with that thing on his face, his beard of blood, that little girl on the floor of his van, kept trying to figure out how to explain this to someone. She cleaned the bathrooms. She watched the sun slide across the sky. She felt grateful that Korey was still away at soccer camp.

  The phone rang while she was throwing out expired condiments.

  “Campbell residence,” Patricia said.

  “They took her daughter,” Mrs. Greene told her.

  “What? Who did?” Patricia asked, trying to catch up.

  “This morning when Wanda Taylor took her to the doctor,” Mrs. Greene said, “he found a mark on her leg, like you said, and he made Wanda wait outside while he talked to Destiny.”

  “What did she say?” Patricia asked.

  “Wanda doesn’t know, but then the DSS showed up and a policeman stood at the door,” Mrs. Greene said. “They told her Destiny was on drugs and had marks where someone injected her. They asked her who the man was that Destiny referred to as ‘Boo Daddy.’ Wanda told them she wasn’t seeing any man, but they didn’t believe her.”

  “I’ll call those officers from last night,” Patricia said, frantic. “I’ll call them and they can talk to DSS. And Carter can call her doctor. What was his name?”

  “You promised this wouldn’t happen,” Mrs. Greene said. “Both of you promised.”

  “Carter will call,” Patricia said. “He’ll straighten this out. Should I come out to talk to Wanda?”

  “I think it’s best if you don’t see Wanda Taylor right now,” Mrs. Greene said. “She’s not in a receptive frame of mind.”

  Patricia disconnected the call but held onto the receiver as the kitchen spun around her. She had seen Destiny. She’d been in her bedroom. She’d sat with her mother. She’d seen her tiny, limp body underneath James Harris, while he stood over her, his face covered in her blood.

  “I’m bored,” Blue said, coming into the den.

  “Only boring people get bored,” Patricia said, automatically.

  “Everyone’s at camp,” Blue said. “There’s no one to play with.”

  How had this happened? What had she done?

  “Go read a book,” she said.

  She picked up the phone and dialed Carter’s office.

  “I’ve read all my books,” he said.

  “We’ll go to the library later,” she said.

  The phone rang, Carter picked up, and she told him what had happened.

  “I’m in the middle of a million t
hings right now,” he said.

  “We promised her, Carter. We made a promise. That woman is covered in stitches from trying to help your mother.”

  “Okay, okay, Patty, I’ll make some calls.”

  * * *

  —

  “Everyone thinks Hitler was bad,” Blue said to the dinner table. “But Himmler was worse.”

  “Okay,” Carter said, trying to wind him down. “Can you pass the salt, Patty?”

  Patricia picked up the saltshaker but didn’t hand it to Blue just yet.

  “Did you call that doctor about Destiny Taylor today?” she asked.

  Carter had been deflecting her ever since he got home.

  “Can I get the salt before I’m interrogated?” he asked.

  She made herself smile and passed it to Blue.

  “He was the head of the SS,” Blue said. “Which stands for Schutzstaffel. They were the secret police in Germany.”

  “That sounds pretty bad, buddy,” Carter said, taking the salt from him.

  “I’m not sure that’s appropriate conversation for the dinner table,” Patricia said.

  “The Holocaust was all his idea,” Blue continued.

  Patricia waited until Carter had salted everything on his plate for what Patricia thought was a very long time.

  “Carter?” she asked the second the saltshaker touched the table. “Did you call?” He put down his fork and gathered his thoughts before looking up at her, and Patricia knew this was a bad sign. “We promised, Carter.”

  “The second they form a search committee, any chance I have of becoming department head is over,” Carter said. “And they are so close to a decision that everything I do is scrutinized under a microscope. How do you think it would look if the candidate for chief of psych, who’s a state employee, started calling up other state employees and telling them how to do their jobs? Do you know how bad that would look for me? The Medical University is a state institution. Things have to get done a certain way. I can’t just run around asking questions and casting aspersions.”