“We made a promise,” Patricia said, and realized her hand was shaking. She put her fork down.
“They did medical experiments in the camps,” Blue said. “They would torture one twin and see if the other one felt anything.”
“If her doctor made a decision to remove her from her home, he had a good reason and I’m not going to second-guess him,” Carter said, picking up his fork. “And frankly, after seeing that trailer, he probably made the right decision.”
Which was when the doorbell rang, and Patricia jumped in her seat. Her heart started beating triple time. She had a sinking feeling she knew who it was. She wanted to say something to Carter, to show him how unfair he was being, but the doorbell rang again. Carter looked up over his forkful of chicken.
“Are you going to get that?” he asked.
“I’ll get it,” Blue said, sliding out of his chair.
Patricia stood up and blocked him.
“Finish your chicken,” she said.
She walked toward the front door like a prisoner approaching the electric chair. She swung it wide and through the screen door she saw James Harris. He smiled. This first encounter would be the hardest, but with her family at her back and her house around her, standing on her private property, Patricia gave him her very best fake hostess smile. She’d had lots of practice.
“What a pleasant surprise,” she said through the screen door.
“Did I catch you during a meal again?” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s no bother.”
“You know,” he said, “I got interrupted during a meal recently. It was very upsetting.”
For a moment, she couldn’t breathe. No, she told herself, it was an innocent comment. He wasn’t testing her.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.
“It made me think about you,” he said. “It made me realize how often I interrupt your family’s meals.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “We enjoy having you.”
She examined his face carefully through the screen. He examined her face right back.
“That’s good to hear,” he said. “Ever since you invited me into your home I just can’t stay away. I almost feel like it’s my house, too.”
“How nice,” she said.
“So when I found myself dealing with an unpleasant situation today I thought of you,” he said. “You were so helpful last time.”
“Oh?” Patricia said.
“The woman who cleaned for my great-aunt disappeared,” he said. “And I heard that someone was spreading the story that the last place she was seen was my house. The insinuation is that I had something to do with it.”
And Patricia knew. The police had been to see him. They hadn’t said her name. He hadn’t seen her last night. But he was suspicious and had come here to test her, to see if he could jolt her into revealing something. Clearly he had never been to a cocktail party in the Old Village before.
“Who would say something like that, I wonder?” Patricia asked.
“I thought you might have heard something.”
“I don’t listen to gossip.”
“Well,” he said. “The way I heard it, she took off with some fella.”
“Then that settles that,” she said.
“It hurts me to think that you or your kids might hear that I did something to her,” he said. “The last thing I want is for anyone to be afraid of me.”
“Don’t you worry about that for a second,” Patricia said, and she made herself meet his eyes. “No one in this house is afraid of you.”
They held each other for a second, and it felt like a challenge. She looked away first.
“It’s just the way you’re talking to me,” he said. “You won’t open the door. You seem distant. Usually you invite me in when I drop by. I feel like something’s changed.”
“Not a thing,” she said, and realized what she had to do. “We were about to have dessert. Won’t you join us?”
She kept her breathing under control, kept a pleasant smile on her face.
“That would be nice,” he said. “Thank you.”
She realized she had to let him in now, and she forced her arm to reach out toward the door, and she felt the bones in her shoulder grating as she took the latch in one hand and twisted it clockwise. The screen door groaned on its spring.
“Come in,” she said. “You’re always welcome.”
She stood to the side as he stepped past her, and she saw his chin covered with blood and that thing retracting into his mouth, and it was only a shadow, and she closed the door behind him.
“Thank you,” he said.
He had gotten into her house the same as if he’d held a gun to her head. She had to stay calm. She wasn’t helpless. How many times had she stood at a party or in the supermarket, talking about someone’s child being slow, or their baby being ugly, and that person appeared out of nowhere and she smiled in their face and said, I was just thinking about you and that cute baby of yours, and they never had a clue.
She could do this.
“…would drain the person of all their blood and then give them someone else’s blood that was the wrong type,” Blue was saying as she led James Harris back into the dining room.
“Mm-hmm,” Carter said, ignoring Blue.
“Are you talking about Himmler and the camps?” James Harris asked.
Blue and Carter stopped and looked up. Patricia saw every detail in the room all at once. Everything felt freighted with importance.
“Look who stopped by.” She smiled. “Just in time for dessert.”
She picked up her napkin and sat down, gesturing to her left for James Harris to be seated.
“Thank you for inviting an old bachelor in for dessert,” he said.
“Blue,” Patricia said. “Why don’t you clear the table and bring in the cookies. Would you like coffee, James?”
“It’ll keep me up,” he said. “I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.”
“Which cookies?” Blue asked.
“All of them,” Patricia said, and Blue scampered from the room, practically skipping.
“How’re you enjoying summer?” Carter asked. “Where’d you live before here?”
“Nevada,” James Harris said.
Nevada? Patricia thought.
“That’s a dry heat,” Carter said. “We got up to eighty-five percent humidity today.”
“It’s certainly not what I’m used to,” James said. “It really ruins my appetite.”
Was that what he’d been doing to Destiny Taylor, Patricia wondered? Did he think he was eating blood? She thought about Richard Chase, the Vampire of Sacramento, who killed and partially ate six people in the seventies and literally believed he was an actual vampire. Then she saw that hard, thorny thing retreating into James Harris’s mouth like a cockroach’s leg, and she didn’t know how to explain that. Her pulse sped up as she realized that it lay in his throat, behind a thin layer of skin, so close to her she could reach over and touch it. So close to Blue. She took a breath and forced herself to calm down.
“I have a recipe for gazpacho,” she said. “Have you ever had gazpacho, James?”
“Can’t say I have,” he said.
“It’s a cold soup,” Patricia said. “From Italy.”
“Gross,” Blue said, coming in with four bags of Pepperidge Farm cookies clutched to his chest.
“It’s perfect for warm weather,” Patricia smiled. “I’ll copy the recipe down for you before you go.”
“Look,” Carter said, in his business voice, and Patricia looked at him, trying to convey in the secret language of married couples that they needed to stay absolutely normal because they were in more danger than he knew right this minute.
Carter made eye contact and Patricia flicked her eyes from her husband
to James Harris and put everything inside her heart, everything they shared in their marriage, she put it all into her eyes in a way only he could see, and he got it. Play it safe, her eyes said. Play dumb.
Carter broke eye contact and turned to James Harris.
“We need to clear the air,” he said. “You have to realize that Patty feels terrible about what she said to the police.”
Patricia felt like Carter had cracked open her chest and dumped ice cubes inside. Anything she could say froze in her throat.
“What did Mom do?” Blue asked.
“I think it’s better if you hear it from your mother,” James Harris said.
Patricia saw James Harris and Carter both watching her. James Harris wore a sincere mask but Patricia knew that behind it he was laughing at her. Carter wore his Serious Man face.
“I thought Mr. Harris had done something wrong,” Patricia told Blue, pushing the words through her constricted throat. “But I was confused.”
“It wasn’t much fun having the police stop by my house today,” James Harris said.
“You called the police on him?” Blue asked, astounded.
“I feel awful about all this,” Carter said. “Patty?”
“I’m sorry,” Patricia said, faintly.
“We cleared it all up,” James Harris said. “Mostly it was just embarrassing to have a police car parked in front of my house since I’m new here. You know how these small neighborhoods are.”
“What did you do?” Blue asked James Harris.
“Well, it’s a little adult,” James Harris said. “Your mother should really be the one to tell you.”
Patricia felt trapped by Carter and James Harris, and the unfairness of it all made her feel wild. This was her house, this was her family, she hadn’t done anything wrong. She could ask everyone to leave, right this minute. But she had done something wrong, hadn’t she? Because Destiny Taylor was crying herself to sleep without her mother right this minute.
“I…,” she began, and it died in the dining room air.
“Your mother thought he had done something inappropriate with a child,” Carter said. “But she was absolutely, one hundred percent wrong. I want you to know, son, we would never invite someone into this house who might harm you or your sister in any way. Your mother meant well but she wasn’t thinking clearly.”
James Harris kept staring at Patricia.
“Yes,” she said. “I was mixed up.”
The silence stretched on and Patricia realized what they were waiting for. She looked hard at her plate.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a voice so faint she barely heard it.
James Harris bit noisily into a Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano and chewed. In the silence, she could hear his teeth grinding it to pulp, and then he swallowed and she heard the wad of chewed-up cookie slide down his throat, past that thing.
“Well,” James Harris said, “I have to run but don’t worry—I can’t be too mad at your mom. After all, we’re neighbors. And you’ve been so kind to me since I moved in.”
“I’ll show you out,” Patricia said, because she didn’t know what else to say.
She walked through the dark front hall in front of James Harris and felt him leaning forward to say something. She couldn’t take it. She couldn’t handle one more word. He was so smug.
“Patricia…,” he began, voice low.
She snapped on the hall light. He flinched, squinting and blinking. A teardrop leaked from one eye. It was childish, but it made her feel better.
* * *
—
As they got ready for bed, Carter tried to talk to her.
“Patty,” he said. “Don’t get upset. It was better to get that out in the open.”
“I’m not upset,” she said.
“Whatever you think you saw, he seems like an okay guy.”
“Carter, I saw it,” she said. “He was doing something to that little girl. They took her from her mother today because they found a mark on her inner thigh.”
“I’m not going to get into that again,” he said. “At some point you have to assume the professionals know what they’re doing.”
“I saw him,” she said.
“Even if you did look in his van that no one could find,” Carter said, “eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. It was dark, the light source was a flashlight, it happened fast.”
“I know what I saw,” Patricia said.
“I can show you studies,” Carter said.
But Patricia knew what she had seen and she knew it was unnatural. From the way Ann Savage attacked her, to Miss Mary being attacked by rats, to the man on the roof that night, to James Harris and all his hints about eating and being interrupted, the way the Old Village no longer felt safe—something was wrong. She’d already removed their spare key from its hiding place outside in the fake rock, and she’d started deadbolting the doors whenever she left the house, even just to run errands. Things were changing too fast, and James Harris was at the center of it.
And something he’d said ate at her. She got up and went downstairs.
“Patty,” Carter called behind her. “Don’t storm off.”
“I’m not storming,” she called over her shoulder, but really didn’t care if he heard her or not.
She found her copy of Dracula in the bookcase in the den. They’d read it for book club in October two years ago.
She flipped through the pages until the phrase she was looking for jumped out at her:
“He may not enter anywhere at the first,” says Van Helsing in his Dutch-tainted English, “unless there be some of the household who bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please.”
She had invited him inside her house months ago. She thought about Richard Chase, the Vampire of Sacramento, again, and then she thought about that thing in his mouth, and the next day after church she drove to The Commons shopping center and went into the Book Bag. She checked to make sure no one she knew was there before she walked over to the register.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Could you tell me where your horror books are?”
“Behind Sci-fi and Fantasy,” the kid grunted without looking up.
“Thank you,” Patricia said.
She picked books by their covers, one after the other, and began piling them up by the cash register.
When she was ready to pay, the clerk rang them up, one cover of a hunky, smooth-shaven young man with spiked hair after another: Vampire Beat, Some of Your Blood, The Delicate Dependency, ’Salem’s Lot, Vampire Junction, Live Girls, Nightblood, No Blood Spilled, The Vampire’s Apprentice, Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, Vampire Tapestry, The Hotel Transylvania. If it had fangs, sharp teeth, or bloody lips on the cover, Patricia bought it. Her final total: $149.96.
“You must be really into vampires,” the clerk said.
“Will you take a check?” she asked.
She hid the books in the back of her closet, and as she read them one by one behind her closed bedroom door she realized that she couldn’t do this alone. She needed help.
CHAPTER 19
On book club night, Grace brought frozen fruit salad, Kitty brought two bottles of white wine, and they all sat in Slick’s crowded living room, surrounded by Slick’s collection of Lenox Garden bird figurines, and Beanie Babies, and wall plaques bearing devotional quotations, and all the things Slick bought off the Home Shopping Network, and Patricia prepared to lie to her friends.
“And so, in conclusion,” Maryellen said, bringing her case against the author of The Stranger Beside Me to a close, “Ann Rule is a world-class dope. She knew Ted Bundy, she worked next to Ted Bundy, she knew the police were looking for a good-looking young man named Ted who drove a VW Bug, and she knew that her good-looking young friend Ted Bundy drove a VW Bug, but even when her buddy is arrested sh
e says she’ll ‘suspend judgment.’ I mean, what does she need? For him to ring her doorbell and say ‘Ann, I’m a serial killer’?”
“It’s worse when it’s someone close to you,” Slick said. “We want the people we know to be who we think they are, and to stay how we know them. But Tiger has a little friend named Eddie Baxley right up the street and we love Eddie but when we found out his parents let him watch R-rated horror movies, we had to tell Tiger that he was no longer allowed to play at their house. It was hard.”
“That’s not the point at all,” Maryellen said. “The point is, if the evidence says your best friend Ted talks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and drives the same car as a duck, then he’s probably a duck.”
Patricia decided she wouldn’t get a better opportunity. She stopped toying with her frozen fruit salad, put her fork on the plate, took a deep breath, and told her lie:
“James Harris deals drugs.”
She’d thought long and hard about what to tell them, because if she told them what she really thought they’d send her to the funny farm. But the one crime guaranteed to mobilize the women of the Old Village, and the Mt. Pleasant police department, was drugs. There was a war on them, after all, and she didn’t care how they got the police poking into James Harris’s business. She just wanted him gone. Now she delivered the second part of her lie:
“He’s selling drugs to children.”
No one said a word for at least twenty seconds.
Kitty downed her entire glass of wine in a single gulp. Slick got very, very still, eyes wide. Maryellen looked confused, as if she couldn’t tell if Patricia was making fun of her or not, and Grace slowly shook her head from side to side.
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires Page 17
