The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(121)

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.