The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(6)
Now she stood before the massive double doors on the sprawling front porch and pressed the bell and nothing happened. She tried again.
“Patricia!” Kitty called.
Patricia looked around, then up. Kitty leaned out the second-floor window.
“Go around to the side,” Kitty hollered. “We haven’t been able to find the key to that door in forever.”
She met Kitty by her kitchen door.
“Come on in,” Kitty said. “Don’t mind the cat.”
Patricia didn’t see a cat anywhere, but she did see something that thrilled her: Kitty’s kitchen was a disaster. Empty pizza boxes, schoolbooks, junk mail, and wet bathing suits crowded every flat surface. Back issues of Southern Living slid off chairs. A disassembled engine covered the kitchen table. By comparison, Patricia’s house looked magazine perfect.
“This is what five kids looks like,” Kitty said over her shoulder. “Stay smart, Patricia. Stop at two.”
The front hall looked like something out of Gone with the Wind except its swooping staircase and oak floor were buried beneath a mudslide of violin cases, balled-up gym socks, taxidermied squirrels, glow-in-the-dark Frisbees, sheaves of parking tickets, collapsible music stands, soccer balls, lacrosse sticks, an umbrella stand full of baseball bats, and a dead, five-foot-tall rubber tree stuck inside a planter made of an amputated elephant’s foot.
Kitty picked her way through the carnage, leading Patricia to a front room where Slick Paley and Maryellen Whatever-Her-Name-Was perched on the lip of a sofa covered with approximately five hundred throw pillows. Across from them, Grace Cavanaugh sat ramrod straight on a piano bench. Patricia didn’t see a piano.
“All right,” Kitty said, pouring wine from a jug. “Let’s talk about axe murder!”
“Don’t we need a name first?” Slick asked. “And to select books for the year?”
“This isn’t a book club,” Grace said.
“What do you mean, this isn’t a book club?” Maryellen asked.
“We’re just getting together to talk about a paperback book we all happened to read,” Grace said. “It’s not like it’s a real book.”
“Whatever you say, Grace,” Kitty said, thrusting mugs of wine into everyone’s hands. “Five children live in this house and it’s eight years before the oldest one moves out. If I don’t get some adult conversation tonight I’m going to blow my brains out.”
“Hear, hear,” Maryellen said. “Three girls: seven, five, and four.”
“Four is such a lovely age,” Slick cooed.
“Is it?” Maryellen asked, eyes narrowing.
“So are we a book club?” Patricia asked. She liked to know where things stood.
“We’re a book club, we’re not a book club, who cares?” Kitty said. “What I want to know is why Betty Gore came at her good friend, Candy Montgomery, with an axe and how the heck she got chopped up instead?”
Patricia looked around to see what the other women thought. Maryellen in her dry-cleaned blue jeans and her hair scrunchie and her harsh Yankee voice; tiny Slick looking like a particularly eager mouse with her pointy teeth and beady eyes; Kitty in her denim blouse with musical notes splayed across the front in gold sequins, slurping down a mug of wine, hair a mess, like a bear just woken up from hibernation; and finally Grace with a ruffled bow at her throat, sitting straight, hands folded perfectly in her lap, eyes blinking slowly from behind her large-framed glasses, studying them all like an owl.
These women were too different from her. Patricia didn’t belong here.
“I think,” Grace said, and they sat up straighter, “that it shows a remarkable lack of planning on Betty’s part. If you’re going to murder your best friend with an axe, you should make sure you know what you’re doing.”
That started the conversation, and without thinking, Patricia found herself joining in, and they were still talking about the book two hours later when they walked to their cars.
The following month they read The Michigan Murders: The True Story of the Ypsilanti Ripper’s Reign of Terror, and then A Death in Canaan: A Classic Case of Good and Evil in a Small New England Town, followed by Bitter Blood: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness, and Multiple Murder—all of them Kitty’s recommendations.
They selected next year’s books together, and when all the blurry black-and-white photos of crime scenes and minute-by-minute timelines of the night when it all happened began to blur, Grace came up with the idea of alternating each true crime book with a novel, so they would read The Silence of the Lambs one month, and Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of John Wayne Gacy the next. They read The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O’Brien, followed by Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, with its children baked into a pie and fed to their mother. (“The problem with that,” Grace pointed out, “is you would need extremely large pies to fit two children, even minced.”)
Patricia loved it. She asked Carter if he wanted to read along with her, but he told her he dealt with crazy patients all day, so the last thing he wanted to do was come home and read about crazy people. Patricia didn’t mind. The not-quite-a-book-club, with all its slow poisoners and murderers-for-hire and angels of death, gave her a new outlook on life.
She and Carter had moved to the Old Village last year because they’d wanted to live somewhere with plenty of space, somewhere quiet, and somewhere, most importantly, safe. They wanted more than just a neighborhood, they wanted a community, where your home said you espoused a certain set of values. Somewhere protected from the chaos and the ceaseless change of the outside world. Somewhere the kids could play outside all day, unsupervised, until you called them in for supper.