The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(38)

Patricia gave up and drove home a couple of hours before dawn. When she pulled into the driveway her headlights swept across the yard and the shadows seethed and scattered, fading back into the dark bushes: hundreds and hundreds of rats. Patricia sat in her car for a minute, lights on bright, then got out and ran for the front door.



* * *



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Dead rats littered the den. There were even more in the garage room. She didn’t know what to do. Bury them? Put them in the trash? Call Animal Control? She knew what to do if too many people showed up for supper, or if someone arrived early for a party, but what did you do when rats attacked your mother-in-law? Who told you how to cope with that?

She decided to start with the garage room. Her heart contracted painfully when she saw Ragtag’s limp corpse stretched in the middle of the carpet. Poor dog, she thought as she bent over to pick him up.

He opened one eye and his tail thumped feebly against the carpet.

Patricia wrapped him in an old beach towel and drove to the vet’s office at twenty-six miles per hour. She was waiting when he showed up to unlock his office door.

“He’ll live,” Dr. Grouse said. “But it won’t be inexpensive.”

“Whatever it takes,” Patricia told him. “He’s a good dog. You’re a good dog, Ragtag.”

She couldn’t find an unlacerated part of him to pet, so she settled on thinking good thoughts about him as hard as she could all the way back home. When she got out of the car she heard the phone ringing inside the house. She took it in the kitchen.

“Mom died,” Carter said, biting down hard on each word.

“Carter, I am so sorry. What can I do?”

“I don’t know, Patty,” he said. “What do people do? I was ten when Daddy died.”

“I’ll call Stuhr’s,” she said. “How’s Mrs. Greene?”

“Who?” he asked.

“Mrs. Greene,” she repeated, not sure how to better describe the woman who’d tried to save his mother’s life.

“Oh,” he said. “They put in some stitches and she’ll have to get a rabies series, but she went home.”

“Carter,” she repeated. “I’m so sorry.”

“Okay,” he said, dazed. “You too.”

He hung up. Patricia stood in the kitchen, not knowing what happened next. Who did she call? Where did she begin? Overwhelmed, she dialed Grace.

“How unusual,” Grace said, after Patricia explained what had happened. “At the risk of sounding insensitive, we should get started.”

Relief flooded Patricia as Grace took over. She called Maryellen, who arranged for Stuhr’s to pick up Miss Mary’s body from the hospital, and then she told Patricia what to do with the children.

“Korey will have to start soccer camp a few days late,” Grace said. “I’ll call Delta and change her ticket. As for Blue, he’ll need to stay with friends. You don’t want him seeing the house like this.”

Grace and Maryellen searched for someone to clean the house, which was now crawling with fleas and reeking of rats, but they couldn’t find anyone to take the job.

“So much for the professionals,” Grace said. “I called Kitty and Slick and we’re coming tomorrow. It’ll take us a few days but we’ll make sure it’s done right.”

“That’s too much,” Patricia said.

“Nonsense,” Grace said. “The most important thing right now is to clean that house until it’s safe. I’ll make a list of furniture and drapes and carpets and all the things you’ll need to replace. And of course you’ll stay at the beach house with Carter and the children until we’re finished.”

On the other end of things, Maryellen organized the visitation, helped with Miss Mary’s burial insurance, and got Miss Mary’s obituary written and placed in the Charleston paper and in the Kershaw News-Era. The only thing she couldn’t do was promise an open casket.

“I’m so sorry,” she told Patricia, sitting in Johnny Stuhr’s office. “Kenny does our makeup and he doesn’t think there’s enough left to work with.”

Miss Mary’s service followed upstate rules: no jokes, no laughter, and all the scripture from the King James Bible. Her coffin sat at the front of the church with no flowers on it, lid screwed down tight. They had to go back three hymnals to find the hymn Carter said was Miss Mary’s favorite, “Come Thou Disconsolate.”

Packed into the hard pews of Mt. Pleasant Presbyterian, Carter sat next to Patricia, hunched and miserable. She took his hand and squeezed, and he gave a limp squeeze back. For years, his mother had told him he was the smartest and most special boy in the world and he’d believed her. Having her die like this, in his house, in a way he couldn’t even really explain to people, was a kind of failure he’d never experienced before.

Korey took things harder than Patricia expected, and tears ran down her cheeks throughout the service. Blue kept standing up to see the coffin, but at least he’d brought A Bridge Too Far to read and not a book with a swastika on the cover.

After the graveside service, Grace opened her home and took all the quiches, and ham biscuits, and Kitty’s casseroles, and Slick’s ambrosia, and all the cold-cut platters people had brought by and laid them out on her dining room table. There was no bar because that wasn’t what you did for a funeral, and they made the children go down to Alhambra to play because having them horsing around in the front yard didn’t look right.