The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(56)
She had invited him inside her house months ago. She thought about Richard Chase, the Vampire of Sacramento, again, and then she thought about that thing in his mouth, and the next day after church she drove to The Commons shopping center and went into the Book Bag. She checked to make sure no one she knew was there before she walked over to the register.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Could you tell me where your horror books are?”
“Behind Sci-fi and Fantasy,” the kid grunted without looking up.
“Thank you,” Patricia said.
She picked books by their covers, one after the other, and began piling them up by the cash register.
When she was ready to pay, the clerk rang them up, one cover of a hunky, smooth-shaven young man with spiked hair after another: Vampire Beat, Some of Your Blood, The Delicate Dependency, ’Salem’s Lot, Vampire Junction, Live Girls, Nightblood, No Blood Spilled, The Vampire’s Apprentice, Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, Vampire Tapestry, The Hotel Transylvania. If it had fangs, sharp teeth, or bloody lips on the cover, Patricia bought it. Her final total: $149.96.
“You must be really into vampires,” the clerk said.
“Will you take a check?” she asked.
She hid the books in the back of her closet, and as she read them one by one behind her closed bedroom door she realized that she couldn’t do this alone. She needed help.
CHAPTER 19
On book club night, Grace brought frozen fruit salad, Kitty brought two bottles of white wine, and they all sat in Slick’s crowded living room, surrounded by Slick’s collection of Lenox Garden bird figurines, and Beanie Babies, and wall plaques bearing devotional quotations, and all the things Slick bought off the Home Shopping Network, and Patricia prepared to lie to her friends.
“And so, in conclusion,” Maryellen said, bringing her case against the author of The Stranger Beside Me to a close, “Ann Rule is a world-class dope. She knew Ted Bundy, she worked next to Ted Bundy, she knew the police were looking for a good-looking young man named Ted who drove a VW Bug, and she knew that her good-looking young friend Ted Bundy drove a VW Bug, but even when her buddy is arrested she says she’ll ‘suspend judgment.’ I mean, what does she need? For him to ring her doorbell and say ‘Ann, I’m a serial killer’?”
“It’s worse when it’s someone close to you,” Slick said. “We want the people we know to be who we think they are, and to stay how we know them. But Tiger has a little friend named Eddie Baxley right up the street and we love Eddie but when we found out his parents let him watch R-rated horror movies, we had to tell Tiger that he was no longer allowed to play at their house. It was hard.”
“That’s not the point at all,” Maryellen said. “The point is, if the evidence says your best friend Ted talks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and drives the same car as a duck, then he’s probably a duck.”
Patricia decided she wouldn’t get a better opportunity. She stopped toying with her frozen fruit salad, put her fork on the plate, took a deep breath, and told her lie:
“James Harris deals drugs.”
She’d thought long and hard about what to tell them, because if she told them what she really thought they’d send her to the funny farm. But the one crime guaranteed to mobilize the women of the Old Village, and the Mt. Pleasant police department, was drugs. There was a war on them, after all, and she didn’t care how they got the police poking into James Harris’s business. She just wanted him gone. Now she delivered the second part of her lie:
“He’s selling drugs to children.”
No one said a word for at least twenty seconds.
Kitty downed her entire glass of wine in a single gulp. Slick got very, very still, eyes wide. Maryellen looked confused, as if she couldn’t tell if Patricia was making fun of her or not, and Grace slowly shook her head from side to side.
“Oh, Patricia,” Grace said, in a disappointed voice.
“I saw him with a young girl,” Patricia said, forging ahead. “In the back of his van in the woods at Six Mile. That girl has been taken from her mother by Social Services because of the mark they found on her inner thigh, a bruise with a puncture mark over her femoral artery, like what street drug users call a track mark from injecting. Grace, Bennett said Mrs. Savage had the same kind of mark on her inner thigh when she went to the hospital.”
“That was confidential information,” Grace said.
“You told it to me,” Patricia said.
“Because she had bitten your ear,” Grace said. “I thought you should know she was an IV drug user. I didn’t mean for you to broadcast it all over the Village.”
This wasn’t going the way she wanted. Patricia had spent hours putting this story together, going through all the true crime books they’d read together, practicing how to lay out the facts. She needed to stop bickering with Grace and stick to her notes.
“When James Harris got here he had a bag in his house with eighty-five thousand dollars in it,” Patricia said, talking fast. “The first afternoon I met him I helped him open his bank account because he didn’t have ID. But he must have a driver’s license, so why didn’t he want to show it at the bank? Because maybe he’s wanted for something. Maybe he’s done this somewhere before. Also, Mrs. Greene copied down a partial license plate number of a van in Six Mile that shouldn’t have been there, and it turned out to be his license plate. And I think I was the last person to see Francine before she disappeared, and she was going into his house.”