The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(91)
“Don’t make me do this,” Kitty begged. “Please, please, please.”
Patricia squeezed her eyes shut. She felt a headache try to claw its way out through her forehead.
“He murdered her,” she said. “We need to stop him. This is the only way.”
Without giving Kitty a chance to protest, she turned and went back upstairs.
“Patricia,” Kitty whined from the downstairs hall.
“The cleaning closet is under the stairs,” Patricia called over the banister.
She pulled the attic steps down again and went up. The more she did this the more it didn’t bother her when she opened the suitcase. She rustled around in the sticky plastic, occasionally feeling the back of her hand brush against something light, or her fingers grip an emaciated leg or forearm, but after a minute she found what she was looking for: Francine’s pocketbook. She worked it out of the plastic, smelling cinnamon and old leather.
She took out Francine’s wallet, removed her driver’s license, and carefully packed everything back into the suitcase.
“We’ll be back for you,” she whispered to Francine, and snapped the latches closed again.
Downstairs, she found Kitty with the broom, vacuum cleaner, and carpet shampoo. She’d also taken out a roll of paper towels and some Lysol counter spray.
“If we’re going to do this, let’s go,” Kitty said.
They swept the loose dirt off the carpet and sprayed it with foaming shampoo all the way back up the stairs, through the hall, to the trapdoor. They let the shampoo sit for five minutes, while Kitty muttered, “Come on…come on…” then vacuumed it up. Running the vacuum cleaner was the hardest part because it covered up the sound of a car pulling into the drive, the front door opening, James Harris coming into the house. She made Kitty stand by the front door as a lookout while she roared up and down the steps.
Finally, she shut off the vacuum cleaner, made sure the marks from the trapdoor’s ladder weren’t visible in the carpet pile, and lugged the vacuum back downstairs. She had just started wrapping the vacuum cleaner cord when Kitty hissed: “Car!”
They froze.
“It’s pulling in,” Kitty said, racing back to Patricia. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”
Headlights swept the front hall, and Patricia wrapped faster, wrists aching. They got the broom and vacuum cleaner into the hall closet and closed the door. Outside, they heard a car door slam.
They bumped into each other going through the kitchen door, making for the back door, lit by the kitchen’s under-the-cabinet lights. Footsteps clunked up the front porch steps.
“Paper towels!” Patricia said, and froze.
She looked back down the hall and saw the roll of paper towels sitting out at the end of the banisters on the newel post. They looked very, very far away. Footsteps came across the front porch. Patricia didn’t think, she just ran for them. Down the hall, hearing footsteps stop on the other side of the door, keys rattling, she grabbed the paper towels, a clinking thump as James Harris dropped his keys, Patricia running back down the hall, hearing the keys slide into the front door, replacing the towels on their holder, Kitty holding the back door open, racing through it as they both heard the front door open, then closing the back door softly behind them and going down the back steps as quietly as they could.
Behind them, lights began to turn on all over the house.
Once they reached his backyard, they ran, racing down the path by the drainage ditch, so dark that Patricia almost fell in, reaching Kitty’s Cadillac parked on Pitt Street. They slid into the front seats, and the roar of the engine sparking to life made Patricia jump. She reassured herself there was no way for James Harris to hear it.
Coming down from the adrenaline high, sticky, shaky, and feeling sick, she burrowed her hand into her front pocket and pulled out Francine’s driver’s license. She held it in front of her.
“We won,” she said. “We finally won.”
CHAPTER 32
“He’d been overserved,” Patricia said breathlessly into the telephone receiver, eyes wide, voice full of astonished innocence. “And he was doing how men do at a party, talking big, showing off. I didn’t mean to get so far away from my husband, but he just kept sort of pushing me farther and farther away.”
Patricia stopped and swallowed, caught up in her own performance. She pulled Francine’s driver’s license out of her pocket and turned it over in her hand. She heard Mrs. Greene listening hard on the other end of the line.
“When he kind of got me over in a corner,” she continued, “he told me, real low so no one else could hear, that years ago he’d gotten angry at the woman who did for him. She’d stolen some money, I think, I wasn’t real clear on that point, Detective. But he said he ‘fixed her.’ I definitely remember that. Well, I didn’t understand what he meant at first and I said I’d have to ask her about it when I saw her again, and he said I wouldn’t be seeing her again, unless I went up in his attic and looked inside his suitcases. Well, I couldn’t help it, it just sounded so absurd, and I laughed. I don’t need to tell you how men get when you laugh at them. His face turned red, and he reached into his wallet and pulled out something and stuck it in my face and said if he was lying then how did I explain that. And, Detective, that’s when I got scared. Because it was Francine’s driver’s license. I mean, who carries around a thing like that? If he hadn’t hurt her, then where did he get it?” She paused, as if listening. “Oh, yes, sir. He put it right back in there. He’d had so much to drink he might not even remember showing it to me.”