The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(39)

As one old face from Carter’s past after another brought him over to their children, told stories about him, made him smile, Patricia saw him coming back to life, assuming his natural place as the center of attention. After all, he was the small-town boy who’d worked hard and become a famous doctor in Charleston—that was his real identity, not the little boy whose mother died in his garage room in a way that made people do double takes when they were told.

Monday morning, Patricia drove Korey to the airport and was touched at how hard she clung to her for a moment before dashing out of the car, her huge red, white, and blue duffel bag knocking against her legs. Then she drove to the beach house, packed their bags, and moved them back into Pierates Cruze. The house smelled of bleach, and the downstairs looked empty and sounded hard. Anything with upholstery had been thrown out and would have to be replaced. But they were home. And the air conditioning finally worked.

Now Patricia had to do what she’d been dreading: she needed to check in on Mrs. Greene. She’d been hurt badly and hadn’t attended the funeral, and Patricia felt guilty she hadn’t gone to see her earlier.

The problem was getting someone to go with her.

“I couldn’t possibly,” Grace said. “I have to clean from the funeral party, and Ben needs me to drive up to Columbia with him for a meeting. I’m overwhelmed.”

Next she tried Slick.

“We all love Mrs. Greene,” Slick said. “She’s such a wonderful cook, and she’s strong in her faith, but Patricia, you would not believe how frantic we are with this new deal of Leland’s. Did I tell you about it? Gracious Cay? He’s been talking to investors and all those money people and things are just wild. Did I tell you…”

Finally, she tried Kitty.

“I’m just so busy…,” Kitty began.

“We wouldn’t stay long, Patricia told her.

“It’s Parish’s birthday next week,” Kitty said. “I’ve been run ragged.”

Patricia tried guilt.

“What with Ann Savage, and now Miss Mary,” Patricia said. “I don’t feel comfortable driving so far alone.”

It turned out that guilt worked. The next day Patricia drove down Rifle Range Road toward Six Mile with Kitty in the passenger seat, a pecan pie on her lap.

“I’m sure there are some very nice people who live out here,” Kitty said. “But have you heard of super-predators? They’re gangs who drive real slow at night and flash their headlights and if you flash back they follow you to your house and shoot you in the head.”

“Doesn’t Marjorie Fretwell live around here?” Patricia asked.

“Marjorie Fretwell once sucked a copperhead up in her vacuum cleaner because she didn’t know what to do with it and then she had to throw the whole vacuum away,” Kitty said. “Don’t talk to me about Marjorie Fretwell.”

They turned off Rifle Range Road onto the state road that led back into the woods around Six Mile. The houses got smaller and the yards got bigger—wide fields of dead weeds and yellowed finger-grass surrounding trailer homes mounted on cinder blocks and brick shoeboxes with crooked mailboxes out front. Electrical lines drooped across front yards crowded with too many cars that had too few tires.

Narrow roads, no wider than driveways, branched off the state road, plunging past chain-link fences, disappearing into groves of scrub oak and palmettos. Patricia saw the green-and-white reflective street sign for Grill Flame Road at the head of one of them, and she turned.

“At least lock your doors,” Kitty said, and Patricia hit the door lock button, making a comforting clunk.

She drove slow. The road was potholed and its asphalt edges crumbled off into sand. Houses crowded around it at odd angles. A lot of them had been torn up during Hurricane Hugo and rebuilt by carpetbagging contractors who’d left before their work was complete. Some had heavy plastic stapled over their window frames instead of glass; others had framed rooms left unfinished and exposed to the weather.

No one’s yards were landscaped. All the trees were encrusted in vines. A skinny black man in shorts with no shirt sat on the front steps of his trailer drinking water out of a plastic one-gallon jug. Some little children in diapers stopped running through a sprinkler and pressed up against a chain-link fence to watch them drive by.

“Look for number sixteen,” Patricia said, concentrating on the potholed road.

They nosed forward beneath a scrub oak whose branches scraped the roof, then emerged into a big, sandy clearing. The road made a loop around a small, unpainted cinder-block church shaped like a shoebox. A sign out front proclaimed it to be Mt. Zion A.M.E. Neat little white and blue houses surrounded it. Down at the far end, some boys ran around a basketball court in the shade where the trees started, but here in front of the houses there was no shelter from the sun.

“Sixteen,” Kitty said, and Patricia saw a clean white house with black shutters and white, pressed-tin porch columns. A sun-faded cardboard cutout of Santa’s face sat inside a plastic holly wreath on the front door. Patricia parked at the end of the drive.

“I’ll wait in the car,” Kitty said.

“I’m taking the keys so you won’t be able to run the air conditioner,” Patricia said.

Kitty gathered her courage for a moment, then heaved herself up and followed Patricia outside. Instantly, the hot sun pierced the crown of Patricia’s head like a nail and bounced off the Volvo, blinding her.