The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,140

ever had this kind of problem.”

No, Patricia thought. They just murdered a man and buried his body in the backyard.

She prayed for forgiveness. She prayed hard. Then they took Korey to Southern Pines, the local psychiatric and substance abuse treatment center.

“You’ll make sure she’s monitored twenty-four hours a day?” Patricia asked the intake administrator.

Her nightmare was that Korey would do what the other children had done. She thought of Destiny Taylor and the dental floss, Orville Reed stepping in front of the car, Latasha Burns and the knife. They had the money to weigh the odds in their favor, but she didn’t want odds when it came to her daughter. She wanted a guarantee.

She tried to talk to Korey, she tried to say she was sorry, she tried to explain things, she tried hard, but whether it was because of James Harris or because of what they were doing to her, Korey didn’t even acknowledge she was in the room.

“Some of them do this,” the intake administrator said. “I saw one kid break his mother’s nose during intake. Others just shut down.”

When they got home the quiet in the house ate at Patricia, reminding her of the damage she had done to her family. She felt a sense of urgency. She had to finish this. She had to get her family back and glue the pieces together before it got any worse. It was only a matter of time before they hit a point beyond which nothing could be fixed.

That night, Carter left to bury himself in work at his office. Half an hour later, the phone rang. She answered.

“Where’s Korey?” James Harris asked.

“She’s sick,” Patricia said.

“She wouldn’t be sick if she were still with me,” he said. “I can make her better.”

“I need time,” she said. “I need time to figure things out.”

“What am I supposed to do while you dither?” he asked.

“You have to be patient,” she said. “This is hard for me. It’s my entire life. My family. It’s everything I know.”

“Think fast,” he said.

“Until the end of the month,” she said, trying to buy time.

“I’ll give you ten days,” he said, and hung up.

She tried to be around Blue as much as possible. She and Carter asked if he had any questions, they told him it wasn’t his fault, they said that he could see Korey in a week or two, whenever her doctors said it was all right, but Blue barely spoke. She sat next to him while he played games on the computer in the little study. He clattered away on the keyboard, moving colored shapes and lines onscreen.

“What does this one do?” she asked about a button, and then pointed to a number at the top of the monitor. “Does that mean you’re winning? Look at your score, it’s so high.”

“That’s the amount of damage I’ve taken,” he said.

She wanted to tell him she was sorry she hadn’t protected him and his sister better. But whenever she began, it sounded like a farewell speech and she stopped. Let him have one more untroubled week.

Before she was ready, Saturday arrived and Patricia woke up scared. She cleaned Korey’s room to keep herself busy, stripped her bed, collected all her clothes off the floor and washed them, folded them, put them back into drawers in neat stacks, ironed her dresses and hung them up, stacked her magazines, found the cases for all her CDs. She recovered $8.63 in change from the carpet and put it in a jar for when Korey came home.

Around four, Carter stood in the door and watched her work.

“We have to go soon if we want to see the pregame,” he said.

They had made plans to watch the Clemson-Carolina game downtown near the hospital with Leland and Slick’s children.

“You go on,” Patricia said. “I have things to do.”

“You sure you don’t want to come?” he asked. “It’ll be good to do something normal. It’s morbid to sit around the house alone.”

“I need to be morbid,” she said,