The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,109

Slick chewed her lip.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“The men are all out of town this weekend,” Patricia said. “The cleaning company Mrs. Greene works for cleans his house on Saturday and Mrs. Greene is going to be there and she’s going to let me in, and while she cleans, I’m going to see if I can find some answers.”

“You can’t break into someone’s house,” Slick said, horrified.

“If we don’t find anything,” Patricia said, “then I’ll stop and it’s all over. Help me finish this. We’ll either find something or we won’t, but either way it’ll be over.”

Slick pressed her fingertips to her mouth and studied her bookshelves for a long time, then picked up the photograph and considered it again. Finally, she put it back down.

“Let me pray on this,” she said. “I won’t tell Leland, but let me keep the photograph and the folder and pray on them.”

“Thank you,” Patricia said.

It never occurred to her not to trust Slick.

CHAPTER 29

Slick called on Thursday at 10:25 in the morning.

“I’ll come,” she said. “But I’ll only look. I won’t open anything that’s closed.”

“Thank you,” Patricia said.

“I don’t feel right about this,” Slick said.

“I don’t either,” Patricia said, and then she hung up and called Mrs. Greene to tell her the good news.

“This is a big mistake,” Mrs. Greene said.

“It’ll go faster with three of us,” Patricia said.

“Maybe,” Mrs. Greene said. “But all I’m telling you is that it’s a mistake.”

She kissed Carter good-bye on Friday morning at 7:30, and he left for Tampa on Delta flight 1237 from the Charleston airport, with a layover in Atlanta. On Saturday morning at 9:30 she drove Blue to Saturday school. She told Korey they could work on her list of colleges together, but by noon, when she had to go pick up Blue from Saturday school, Korey had barely glimpsed at the catalogs.

When she pulled up in front of Albemarle at 12:05, the only other car there was Slick’s white Saab. She got out and tapped on the driver’s-side window.

“Hi, Mrs. Campbell,” Greer said, rolling down the window.

“Is your mother all right?” Patricia asked.

“She had to take something over to the church,” Greer said. “She said she might be seeing you later?”

“I’m helping her plan her Reformation Party,” Patricia said.

“Sounds fun,” Greer said.

She and Blue got home at 12:40. Korey had left a note on the counter saying she was going downtown to step aerobics and then to a movie with Laurie Gibson. At 2:15, Patricia knocked on Blue’s bedroom door.

“I’m going out for a little while,” she called.

He didn’t answer. She assumed he’d heard.

She didn’t want anyone to see her car, and it was a warm afternoon anyway, so she walked up Middle Street. She saw Mrs. Greene’s car parked in James Harris’s driveway, next to a green-and-white Greener Cleaners truck. James Harris’s Corsica was gone.

She hated his house. Two years ago, he’d torn down Mrs. Savage’s cottage, split the lot in half, and sold the piece of it closest to the Hendersons to a dentist from up north someplace, then built himself a McMansion that stretched from property line to property line. A massive Southern lump with concrete pineapples at the end of the drive, it stood on stilts with an enclosed ground floor for parking. It was a white monstrosity painted white with all its various tin roofs painted rust red, encircled by a huge porch.

She’d been inside once for his housewarming party last summer, and it was all sisal runners and enormous, heavy, machine-milled furniture, nothing with any personality, everything anonymous and done in beige, and cream, and off-white, and slate. It felt like the embalmed and swollen corpse of a ramshackle Southern beach house, tarted up with cosmetics and central air.

Patricia turned onto McCants then turned again and looped back until she stood on Pitt Street directly behind James Harris’s house. She could see its red roofs looming over the trees at the end of a