The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(42)

“She just did,” Mrs. Greene said. “Came right out and said it.”

“I read the paper every day,” Kitty shrugged. “I just haven’t heard anything about children going missing or getting killed.”

“Then I guess I made up a story,” Mrs. Greene said. “I guess those little girls you heard singing out there made up their rhymes, too. They call him the Boo Daddy because that’s what they say’s in the woods. That’s why those boys were so nervous about strangers. We all know someone’s out here sniffing after the children.”

“What about Francine?” Patricia asked.

“She’s gone,” Mrs. Greene said. “No one’s seen her car since May fifteen or so. The police say she’s run off with a man, but I know she wouldn’t leave without her cat.”

“She left her cat?” Patricia asked.

“Had to get someone from the church to sneak open her window and get it out before it starved,” Mrs. Greene said.

Next to her, Patricia felt Kitty turn and look through the curtains again, and she wanted to tell her to stop squirming but she didn’t want to break Mrs. Greene’s concentration.

“And what about the children?” Patricia asked.

“The little Reed boy,” Mrs. Greene said. “He killed himself. Eight years old.”

Kitty stopped wiggling.

“That’s not possible,” she said. “Eight-year-old children don’t commit suicide.”

“This one did,” Mrs. Greene said. “Got hit by a tow truck while he was waiting for the school bus. The police say he was fooling around and stumbled in the road, but the other children in line with him say different. They say Orville Reed stepped right out in front of that truck deliberate. It knocked him clean out of his shoes, threw him fifty feet down the street. When they had his funeral he looked like he was just sleeping there in his coffin. Only thing different was a little tiny bruise on the side of his face.”

“But if the police think it was an accident…,” Patricia began.

“The police think all kind of things,” Mrs. Greene said. “Doesn’t necessarily make them true.”

“I haven’t seen anything in the paper,” Kitty protested.

“The paper doesn’t talk about what happens in Six Mile,” Mrs. Greene said. “We’re not quite Mt. Pleasant, not quite Awendaw, not quite anyplace. Certainly not the Old Village. Besides, one little boy has an accident, an old lady runs away with some man, the police figure it’s just colored people being colored. It’d be like reporting on a fish for being wet. The only one that looks unnatural is what happened to that other boy, Orville Reed’s cousin, Sean.”

Patricia felt caught up in a particularly lurid and unstoppable bedtime story and now it was her turn to prompt the teller.

“What happened to Sean?” she asked.

“Before he died, Orville’s mother and auntie say he got real moody,” Mrs. Greene said. “They say he was irritable and sleepy all the time. His mother says he took long walks out in the woods every day when the sun started to go down, and came back giggling, and then the next day he’d be sick and unhappy again. He wouldn’t take food, would hardly drink water, he’d just stare at the television, whether it was cartoons or commercials, and it was like he was asleep while he was awake. He limped when he walked and cried when she asked him what the matter was. And she couldn’t keep him out of those woods.”

“What was he doing out there?” Kitty asked, leaning forward.

“His cousin tried to find out,” Mrs. Greene said. “Tanya Reed didn’t care for that boy, Sean. She put a padlock on her refrigerator because he kept stealing her groceries. He used to come over when she wasn’t home from work and smoke cigarettes in her house and watch cartoons with Orville. She tolerated it because she thought Orville needed a male role model, even a bad one. She said Sean got worried about Orville going in the woods all the time. Sean told her he thought someone in the woods was doing something to Orville. Tanya wouldn’t listen. Just threw him right out on his behind.

“One of the men who hangs around the basketball court has a few pistols and rents them to people. He says Sean couldn’t afford to rent a gun, so he rented him a hammer for three dollars, and he says Sean told him he was going to follow his little cousin into the woods and scare off whoever was bothering him. But the next time they saw Sean he was dead. The man says he still had his hammer, too, for all the good it did. Says Sean was found by a big live oak back in the deep woods where someone had picked him up and mashed his face against the bark and scraped it right down to the skull. They couldn’t have an open casket at Sean’s funeral.”

Patricia realized she wasn’t breathing. She carefully let out the air in her lungs.

“That had to be in the papers,” she said.

“It was,” Mrs. Greene said. “The police called it ‘drug-related’ because Sean had been in that kind of trouble before. But no one out here thinks it was and that’s why everyone’s real skittish about strangers. Before he stepped in front of that truck, Orville Reed told his mother he was talking to a white man in the woods, but she thought maybe he was talking about one of his cartoons. No one thinks that after what happened to Sean. Sometimes other children say they see a white man standing at the edge of the woods, waving to them. Some people wake up and say they see a pale man staring in through their window screens, but that can’t be true because the last one to say that was Becky Washington and she lives up on the second floor. How’d a man get up there?”