The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

by Grady Hendrix

  She made herself climb back up the ladder.

  “I’ve seen attics before,” Kitty called up after her. “Patricia! We don’t have time.”

  Patricia knelt on the attic floor and faced Kitty through the hatch.

  “If you don’t see this, it’s all for nothing,” she said. “You’ll all say I’m crazy again.”

  “No one thinks you’re crazy,” Kitty said.

  Patricia disappeared into the darkness. After a minute, she heard the stairs creaking and Kitty emerged from the trap door.

  “It’s pitch-black,” Kitty said.

  Patricia pulled the penlight from her pocket and used it to light Kitty’s way to the chimney where she heaved out the Samsonite bag and laid it on one side.

  “I’ve seen luggage before,” Kitty said.

  “Hold this.” Patricia handed her the penlight. “Point here and squeeze.”

  Kitty held the light as Patricia twisted the locks open. She opened the suitcase and pulled back the black plastic. Francine’s wide-open eyes and exposed teeth didn’t scare her this time, they just made her sad. She’d been alone up here for a long time.

  “Ah!” Kitty screamed in surprise and the penlight went dark. Patricia heard her dry heave once, twice, and then Kitty burped something thick and meaty. After a moment, the light came back on and played over the contents of the suitcase.

  “It’s Francine,” Patricia said. “Help me get her down.”

  She closed the lid and locked it again.

  “We can’t move evidence,” Kitty said, and immediately Patricia felt stupid. Of course. The police needed to find Francine here.

  “But you saw her, right?” Patricia asked.

  “I saw her,” Kitty said. “I most definitely saw her. I’ll testify to that in court. But we have got to go.”

  They put the suitcase back and Kitty helped Patricia out of the attic. But it wasn’t until they’d closed the attic, made their way through the upstairs hall, and reached the bottom of the front stairs that Patricia had a sudden sinking thought and turned. She was filthy from the attic. The carpeted stairs were white.

  “Oh, no,” she moaned, and the strength went out of her legs and she sank to the floor.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Kitty said. “He’s going to be back any minute.”

  “Look!” Patricia said, and pointed to the carpet.

  It showed the dirt clearly. They weren’t footprints, but they were close. There was one on every step, leading all the way up and, Patricia knew, right back to where the attic door opened.

  “He’s going to know it was me, and that I’ve been in his attic,” she said. “He’ll get rid of the suitcase before we can get back here with the police. It’ll all be for nothing.”

  “We don’t have time,” Kitty said, pulling her toward the kitchen and the back door.

  Patricia imagined hearing a key in the front door, the door swinging open, and the frozen moment while they all looked at each other before James Harris rushed down the hall at them. She imagined the three empty suitcases in the attic next to the one holding Francine, waiting for their broken bodies, and she let Kitty drag her to the back door.

  But what if the police wouldn’t search his attic? What if Kitty was too scared to back up her story? What if breaking into his house violated some technicality and no one could get a search warrant because of that? It happened all the time in true crime books. What if it cost Mrs. Greene her job? There had to be a better way.

  Her mind flipped through one idea after another and then stopped on a pattern that looked familiar. She tested it, quickly, and it held. She knew what they had to do.

  “Wait,” Patricia said, and dug in her heels.

  Kitty kept pulling her arm, but Patricia twisted out of her grip and stood her ground right outside the kitchen.

  “I’m not fooling,” Kitty said. “We got to go.”

  “Get the broom, and the vacuum cleaner,” Patricia said, heading for the stairs. “I think they’re in the closet under the stairs. We need carpet shampoo, too. I’m going back up.”

  “For what???” Kitty asked.

  “If he comes back and sees that someone’s been in his attic he’s going to take that suitcase, drive it out to Francis Marion National Forest, and bury it where it will never be found,” Patricia said. “We need someone to find it in his attic and that means we have to cover our tracks. We have to clean the stairs.”

  “Nuh-uh,” Kitty said, shaking her head furiously, waving her hands back and forth, shaking her bracelets. “No, sir. We are gone.”

  Patricia came back down the hall until she stood in Kitty’s face.

  “We both saw what was in that attic,” she said.

  “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.”

  She stopped and waited.

  “You think that’ll work?” Mrs. Greene asked.

  “They don’t have to get a warrant or anything like that. All they have to do is stop by his house and ask to look inside his wallet. He’ll have no clue it’s in there, so of course he’ll show them. Once they see it, they’ll ask for permission to search his attic, he’ll refuse, they’ll leave someone with him while they go get a warrant, and then they’ll find Francine.”

  “When?” Mrs. Greene asked.

  “The Scruggs are having an oyster roast this coming Saturday out at their farm,” Patricia said. “It’s six days away but it will be crowded, it will be public, people will be drinking. It’s our best chance.”

  Patricia didn’t know how she’d get into his wallet—she didn’t even know if he carried one—but she’d keep her eyes open and stay on her toes. Kitty’s oyster roast started at 1:30. If she got it into his wallet early enough, she could call the police that afternoon; they could even come to the oyster roast and ask to see inside his wallet there, and this could all be over in less than a week.

  “A lot could go wrong,” Mrs. Greene said.

  “We’re running out of time,” Patricia said.

  It was already the end of the month. That night was Halloween.

  * * *

  —

  The doorbell started ringing around four on Halloween evening, and Patricia oohed and ahhed over an endless stream of Aladdins and Jasmines and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and fairies in tutus with wings bouncing up and down on their backs.

  She had fun-sized Butterfingers and small boxes of Sun-Maid raisins for the children, and Jack Daniel’s for their fathers, who stood behind them, red Solo cups in hand. It was an Old Village tradition: moms stayed home and gave out candy on Halloween while dads took the kids trick-or-treating. Everyone kept a bottle of something behind their front door to top off whatever the dads were drinking. The dads got progressively louder and happier as the shadows got longer and the sun went down on the Old Village.

  Carter wasn’t among them. When Patricia had asked Korey if she wanted to go trick-or-treating she’d been treated to a withering glare and a single contemptuous snort. Blue said trick-or-treating was for babies so, Carter said, if neither of his children wanted him to take them, he’d go right from the airport to his office and get ahead on some work for Monday.

  Around seven, Blue came downstairs, opened the dog food cabinet, and took out a paper shopping bag.

  “Are you going trick-or-treating?” Patricia asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Where’s your costume?” she asked, trying to reach him.

  “I’m a serial killer,” he said.

  “Don’t you want to be something more fun?” she asked. “We could put something together in just a few minutes.”

  He turned and walked out of the den.

  “Be back by ten,” she called as the front door slammed.

  She had just run out of Butterfingers and given the first box of raisins to a deeply disappointed Beavis and Butthead when the phone rang.

  “Campbell residence,” she said.

  No one answered. She figured it was a prank call and was about to hang up when someone inhaled, wet and sticky, and a ruined voice said:

  “…I didn’t…”

  “Hello?” Patricia said. “This is the Campbell residence?”

  “I didn’t…,” the voice said again, dazed, and Patricia realized it was a woman.

  “If you don’t tell me who this is, I’m going to hang up,” she said.

  “I didn’t…” the woman repeated. “…I didn’t make a sound…”

  “Slick?” Patricia asked.

  “I didn’t make a sound…I didn’t make a sound…I didn’t make a sound,” Slick babbled.

  “What’s going on?” Patricia asked.

  Slick hadn’t called—not to apologize for abandoning her, not to see if she was all right—and that was all the evidence Patricia needed to know that Slick had told James Harris she was breaking into his house. Slick was why he had come home early. As far as she was concerned, Slick could go hang.

  Then Slick began to cry.

  “Slick?” Patricia asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “…I didn’t make a sound…” Slick whispered over and over, and gooseflesh crawled up Patricia’s arms.

  “Stop it,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”

  “I didn’t,” Slick moaned. “I didn’t…”

  “Where are you?” Patricia asked. “Are you at home? Do you need help?”

  Patricia couldn’t hear Slick wheezing into the earpiece anymore. She hung up and dialed her back and got a busy signal. She thought about not doing anything, but she couldn’t. Slick’s voice had scared her, and something dark stirred in her gut. She grabbed her purse and found Korey on the sun porch, eyes glued to the TV, which was showing a commercial for Bounce Gentle Breeze dryer sheets.

  “I have to run out to Kitty’s,” Patricia said, and realized that lies came easier the more she told them. “Can you get the door?”

  “Mm,” Korey said, not turning around.

  Patricia supposed that was yes in seventeen-year-old language.

  The Old Village streets were packed with a parade of kids and parents, and Patricia wove through them too slowly. The fathers looked pleasantly loaded, their steps getting heavier, their dips into the candy bag
s becoming more frequent. She couldn’t imagine what had happened to Slick. She needed to get to her house. She crawled through the crowds at fifteen miles per hour, passing James Harris’s house with its two jack-o’-lanterns flickering on the front porch, then turned up McCants and hit the brakes.

  The Cantwells lived on the corner of Pitt and McCants, and every Halloween they filled their front yard with fake corpses hanging from the trees, Styrofoam headstones, and skeletons wired to their shrubberies. Every half hour, Mr. Cantwell emerged from the coffin on the front porch dressed as Dracula, and the family performed a ten-minute show. The Wolfman grabbed at the kids in front; the Mummy stumbled toward little girls who ran away shrieking; Mrs. Cantwell, wearing a fake warty nose, stirred her cauldron full of dry ice and offered people ladles of edible green slime and gummy worms. It ended with all of them dancing to “The Monster Mash” followed by mass candy distribution.

  The crowd around their house spilled off the sidewalk and blocked the street. Patricia’s face twitched. Was it just Slick? What about the rest of Slick’s family? Something was wrong. She needed to go. She took her foot off the brake and rolled onto the edge of the Simmonses’ front yard on the far side of McCants, flashing her lights to make people clear the way. It took her five minutes to get through the intersection, and then she picked up speed as she headed to Coleman Boulevard, and hit fifty on Johnnie Dodds. Even that wasn’t fast enough.

  She pulled into Creekside and wove around trick-or-treaters as fast as she dared. Both cars were parked in the Paleys’ driveway. Whatever had happened had happened to the entire family. A flickering white candle sat on a kitchen stool on the front porch. Next to it sat a bowl of pamphlets emblazoned with orange type reading: Trick? Yes. Treat? Only Through the Grace of God!

  Patricia reached for the doorbell and stopped. What if it was James Harris? What if he was still inside?

  She tried the handle and the latch popped and the door swung silently open. Patricia took a breath and stepped inside. She closed the door behind her and stood, eyes and ears straining, listening for any sign of life, looking for a single telltale detail: a drop of blood on the hardwood floor, a picture knocked askew, a crack in one of the display cabinets. Nothing. She crept down the front hall’s thick runner and pushed open the door to the back addition. People started screaming.