The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

by Grady Hendrix

  “Mom,” Blue said, talking like she was hard of hearing. “Ragtag is older than me. You got him for Korey’s first Christmas. If he’s sick, he’s going to be scared. He needs her.”

  Patricia wanted to argue. She wanted to point out that they couldn’t interrupt Korey’s program, that the doctors knew best. She wanted to tell him that Ragtag wouldn’t know whether Korey was there or not. She wanted to tell him that Korey mostly ignored Ragtag, anyway. Instead, she realized that she wanted Korey to come home very badly and so she said, “You’re right.”

  They drove to Southern Pines together, and signed out her daughter against the advice of her doctors, and brought her home. When Ragtag saw her, he began to bang his tail against the floor where he’d been lying.

  Patricia kept her distance while Blue and Korey hung all over Ragtag that weekend, soothing him when he barked at things that weren’t there, driving to the store and getting him wet food when he wouldn’t eat dry, sitting with him in the backyard or on the sofa in the sun. And on Sunday night, when things got bad, and Dr. Grouse’s office was closed, the two of them sat up with Ragtag as he walked around the den in circles, barking and snapping at things they couldn’t see, and they talked to him in low voices, and told him he was a good dog, and a brave dog, and they weren’t going to leave him alone.

  When Patricia went to bed around one, both kids were still sitting up with Ragtag, patting him when his wanderings brought him close, speaking to him, showing him patience that Patricia had never seen in them before. Around four in the morning she woke up with a start and crept downstairs. The three of them lay on the den sofa. Korey and Blue were on either end, asleep. Ragtag lay between them, dead.

  They buried him together around the side of the house, and Patricia held both of them while they cried. When Carter came by the next evening and the two of them sat down to tell Korey and Blue they were getting a divorce, Carter laid out how it was going to go.

  “This is the way things are going to be,” he said. He’d told Patricia that kids liked certainty and he was the better qualified of the two of them to map this new reality for them. “I’ll be keeping the house on Pierates Cruze and the beach house. I’ll pay for your school and college, you don’t have to worry about that. And you can stay here with me for as long as you want. Because this is your mother’s decision, she’ll be looking for a new place to live. And it may not be very big, and it may be in another part of Mt. Pleasant. She’ll only have the one car, so you probably won’t be able to borrow it to go see your friends. Your mother may even need to move to a new city. I’m not saying these things because I’m trying to punish anyone, but I want you to have a realistic idea of how things are going to change.”

  Then he asked them who they wanted to live with during the week. They both surprised Patricia by saying, “Mom.”

  IN COLD BLOOD

  February 1997

  CHAPTER 42

  Patricia pulled into the cemetery and got out of her car, tote bag swinging. It was one of those sharp winter days when the sky looked like a great blue dome, white around the bottom, darkening to a saturated robin’s-egg blue at the top. She walked along the winding road that ran between the grave markers and stepped onto the grass when she got to the right row. The dry grass crunched beneath her shoes as she walked to Slick’s stone.

  Her inner thigh throbbed like it always did when she walked over uneven ground. Korey felt the same kind of pain, too. It was something they shared. But Patricia refused to accept it was permanent for Korey. They’d already started going to see specialists, and one doctor thought a blood transfusion and a series of synthetic erythropoietin would help Korey produce more red blood cells and that might eliminate the pain. They planned to start as soon as school was out. They only had enough money for one of them to try this treatment. That was fine with Patricia.

  Everyone was broke. Leland had declared bankruptcy just after the new year and was selling houses for Kevin Hauck on commission. Kitty and Horse had lost almost everything and were chopping Seewee Farms into parcels, selling it off piecemeal to keep the lights on. Patricia didn’t know how much Carter had sunk into Gracious Cay, but judging by how many times her lawyer had to remind him to send the child support checks, it was a lot.

  Everyone assumed James Harris had seen the crisis coming, packed up, and skipped town. No one asked too many questions. After all, tracking him down would be a lot of work, and bringing him back would only lead to awkward questions and no one actually wanted to hear the answers. At the end of the day, some rich white people lost their money. Some poor black people lost their homes. That’s just how it goes.

  Patricia had driven out to Gracious Cay in January. The construction equipment had been taken away, and now the frames of the houses stood alone, stark and unfinished, like towering skeletons eroding in the weather. She drove the paved road through the center of the development all the way back to Six Mile. Mrs. Greene had moved to Irmo to be near her boys while they finished high school, but some people were moving back. A gaggle of little children bounced an old tennis ball off the wall of Mt. Zion A.M.E. She saw cars parked in a few driveways and smelled wood smoke coming from a handful of chimneys and settling in the streets.

  Before she died, Slick had been working on gifts for everyone and Maryellen had driven around distributing them in December. Patricia had unfolded her pink sweatshirt and held it up to her front. It featured a picture of the baby Jesus asleep in the manger which was, for unknown reasons, beneath a sequined Christmas tree with a real bell on top. In cursive script it read, Remember the Reason for the Season.

  “She made one of these for Grace?” Patricia asked.

  “I got a picture of her wearing it,” Maryellen said. “Do you want to see?”

  “I don’t think I could stand the shock,” Patricia said.

  She and the children had their Christmas dinner with Grace and Bennett. After they finished the dishes, while Korey and Blue went out to the car, Grace gave Patricia a bag of wrapped leftovers, then reached into the drawer of her front hall table, pulled out a thick envelope, and tucked it inside.

  “Merry Christmas,” she said. “I don’t want to argue about this.”

  Patricia put the bag on the table and opened the envelope. It was stuffed with a thick sheaf of worn twenty-dollar bills.

  “Grace—” she began.

  “When I got married,” Grace said, “my mother gave me this and told me that a wife should always have some of her own money set aside, just in case. I want you to have it now.”

  “Thank you,” Patricia said. “I’ll pay you back.”

  “No,” Grace said. “You absolutely will not.”

  She used part of it to give Korey and Blue the Christmas they deserved. The rest she added to the $2,350 in cash she still had from James Harris and put a deposit down on a furnished condo with two bedrooms near the bridge. Where they were living now only had one and Blue slept on the sofa.

  Patricia took a copy of In Cold Blood out of her tote bag and laid it in front of Slick’s headstone. She took out a wineglass and a little screw-cap mini bottle of Kendall-Jackson and filled the glass and set it on top of the book. She made sure it wouldn’t tip over and then did what she always did on these visits and walked over to the aboveground niches, where she found C-24 and C-25. They were blank, without even names on them. There never would be names on them.

  Patricia wondered who James Harris had been. How long had he been traveling the country? How many dead children did he leave in his wake? How many little towns like Kershaw had he sucked dry? No one would ever know. He’d probably been alive for so long that he didn’t even know anymore. By the time he came to the Old Village, she imagined, his past was probably one long blur and he existed in an eternal present.

  He left no one behind, no children, no shared memories, no history, no one told stories about him. All he left to mark his passing was
pain, and that would fade over time. The people he’d killed would be mourned but the people who loved them would move on. They would fall in love again, have more children, grow old, and be mourned by their children in turn.

  Not James Harris.

  If this were a book it would have been called The Mysterious Disappearance of James Harris, but it wouldn’t be a good mystery because Patricia already knew its solution: the mystery of what happened to James Harris was Patricia Campbell.

  But she hadn’t solved it alone.

  If Maryellen hadn’t worked at Stuhr’s, if Grace and Mrs. Greene hadn’t been superior house cleaners, if Kitty hadn’t had such a good swing, if Slick hadn’t called them all and convinced them to come together again in her hospital room, if Patricia hadn’t read so many true crime books, if Mrs. Greene hadn’t put the pieces together, if Miss Mary hadn’t found the photograph, if Kitty hadn’t called to her in Marjorie Fretwell’s driveway that day.

  Sometimes, when she was doing laundry or washing dishes, Patricia would stop, her heart pounding double time, blood swelling in her veins, overwhelmed by the sheer horror of how close they’d come.

  They weren’t stronger than him, they weren’t smarter, they weren’t more prepared. But circumstances had brought them together and allowed them to succeed where so many others had failed. Patricia knew how they looked, a bunch of silly Southern women, yakking about books over white wine. A bunch of carpool drivers, skinned-knee kissers, errand runners, secret Santas and part-time tooth fairies, with their practical jeans and their festive sweaters.

  Think of us what you will, she thought, we made mistakes, and probably scarred our children for life, and we froze sandwiches, and forgot car pool, and got divorced. But when the time came, we went the distance.

  She leaned as close to the lid of the niche as she dared and listened. She heard cars passing on the distant highway, and closer by she heard birds in the trees, and the wind rustling branches, but behind all those she heard something quiet and relentless. She knew it was impossible, but behind the sounds of the outside world she thought she could hear the sound of something wrapped in plastic, writhing, crawling, blindly searching for a way out, squirming eternally in the darkness, relentlessly looking for the weakness that would set it free again.

  Everything had changed. She was divorced. Her friend had died. Her daughter and son had a shadow on them and she didn’t know how long it would last or how far it reached. Seewee Farms was being sold to developers. Six Mile had been scattered to the winds. Her mother-in-law had died. She had had some kind of communion with a man who wasn’t her husband, and then killed him.

  She didn’t regret any of it. What had been destroyed made what remained that much more precious. That much more solid. That much more important.

  She stepped back from the crypt, turned her back on the remains of James Harris, and walked to her car. She didn’t stop by Slick’s marker. She’d come back in the morning and pick up the wineglass and the book. But for now they could wait.

  She needed to get to her book club.

  Happy Holidays, Book Clubbers!

  What a wonderful year for the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant, y’all!

  As we get ready to head into the new millennium, I think we can all look back and say that our 12th year was truly the best one yet for our book club. Who knows what the future will bring, but as you spend time with your loved ones this holiday season I hope you enjoy reflecting on all the great books we read in 1999. And if you don’t mind, and have the time, may this little poem help you rewind!

  We learned a lot this past year

  About horror, terror, murder, fear.

  We learned about Theresa Knorr, a real bad mother,

  And also we learned a lot about each other.

  Jhanteigh Kupihea turned out to be a good talker

  On Philip Carlo’s book, The Night Stalker.

  We had a wonderful discussion of And Never Let Her Go

  Conducted by our own Nicole De Jackmo.

  Using diagrams and pictures, artist Andie Reid

  Made us wonder whose child was the real Bad Seed.

  And after two years of asking by Kate McGuire

  We’re all glad we finally read Interview with the Vampire,

  Although we will admit Moneka Hewlett caused us all angina

  By insisting we read Bastard out of Carolina.

  Rick Chillot summed up our October book best,

  When he said, “Nobody’s perfect, but at least we aren’t Fred or Rosemary West.”

  Then Julia, Kat, and Ann Hendrix, our sisters three,

  Had a lot to say about The Killer Inside Me.

  As the last century scurries away,

  We really musn’t forget to say

  Thank you, also, to Amy J. Schneider, our favorite grammarian,

  And let’s not forget Becky Spratford, number one librarian.

  Of course, behind every woman there’s a man, usually somewhere parking the car or asking why there isn’t any rice on the table, and several in particular went above and beyond this year, so big hugs to Joshua Bilmes, Adam Goldworm, Jason Rekulak, Brett Cohen, and Doogie Horner for all their support, and for staying out of the way when book club descended on their houses like a barbarian horde. We couldn’t have finished all these books without you, fellas!

  Let’s also not forget some of the wonderful people who provided special snacks this year like David Borgenicht, John McGurk, Mary Ellen Wilson, Jane Morley, Mandy Dunn Sampson, Christina Schillaci, Megan DiPasquale, Kate Brown, and Molly Murphy.

  And finally, a big thank you to the Literary Guild of Greater Charleston, who have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember: Suzy Barr, Helen Cooke, Eva Fitzgerald, Kitty Howell, Croft Lane, Lucille Keller, Cathy Holmes, Valerie Papadopoulos, Stephanie Hunt, Nancy Fox, Ellen Gower, and, of course, Shirley Hendrix. May you all keep on reading for many years to come!

  See you on the other side of Y2K!

  Marjorie Fretwell

  GRADY HENDRIX is a novelist and screenwriter based in New York City. He is the Bram Stoker Award winning author of Paperbacks from Hell, and the Shirley Jackson and Locus Award nominated author of Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and We Sold Our Souls, which have received critical praise from outlets like NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, the A.V. Club, Paste, Buzzfeed, and more. He has contributed to Playboy, The Village Voice, and Variety.

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