The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,28

Harris locked his front door and leaned against it.

“This looks so much better than yesterday,” she said, making conversation. “Francine did a wonderful job.”

“Who?” he asked.

“I saw her on my way out the other day,” she said. “Your cleaner.”

James Harris stared at her through his large sunglasses, completely blank, and Patricia was about to tell him she needed to leave when his knees buckled and he slid down to the floor.

“Help me,” he said.

His heels pushed uselessly against the floorboards, his hands had no strength. Her nursing instincts kicked in and she stepped close, planted her feet wide, got her hands under his armpits, and lifted. He felt heavy and solid and very cool, and as his massive body rose up in front of her, she felt overwhelmed by his physical presence. Her damp palms tingled all the way up to her forearms.

He slumped forward, dropping his full weight onto her shoulders, and the intense physical contact made Patricia light-headed. She helped him to a pressed-back rocking chair by the wall, and he dropped heavily into it. Her body, freed of his weight, felt suddenly lighter than air. Her feet barely touched the floor.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“I got bitten by a wolf,” he said.

“Here?” she asked.

She saw his thigh muscles clench and relax as he began to unconsciously rock himself back and forth.

“When I was younger,” he said, then flashed his white teeth in a pained smile. “Maybe it was a wild dog and I’ve romanticized it into a wolf.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Did it hurt?”

“They thought I would die,” he said. “I had a fever for several days and when I recovered I had some brain damage—just mild lesions, but they compromised the motor control in my eyes.”

She felt relieved that this was starting to make sense.

“That must be difficult,” she said.

“My irises don’t dilate very well,” he said. “So daylight is extremely painful. It’s thrown my whole body clock out of whack.”

He gestured helplessly around the room at everything piled up against the walls.

“There’s so much to do and I don’t know how to get a handle on any of it,” he said. “I’m lost.”

She looked at the liquor store boxes and bags lining the walls, full of old clothes and notebooks and slippers and medications and embroidery hoops and yellowed issues of TV Guide. Plastic bags of clothes, stacks of wire hangers, dusty framed photographs, piles of afghans, water-damaged books of Greenbax Stamps, stacks of used bingo cards rubber-banded together, glass ashtrays and bowls and spheres with sand dollars suspended in the middle.

“It’s a lot to sort out,” Patricia said. “Do you have anyone to come help? Any family? A brother? Cousins? Your wife?”

He shook his head.

“Do you want me to stay and talk to Francine?”

“She quit,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound like Francine,” Patricia said.

“I’m going to have to leave,” James Harris said, wiping sweat from his forehead. “I thought about staying but my condition makes it too hard. I feel like there’s a train already moving and no matter how fast I run I can never catch up.”

Patricia knew the feeling but she also thought about Grace, who would stay here until she had learned all she could about a good-looking, seemingly normal man who had found himself all alone in the Old Village with no wife or children. Patricia had never met a single man his age who didn’t have some kind of story. It would probably prove to be small and anticlimactic, but she was so starved for excitement she’d take any mystery she could.

“Let’s see if we can figure this out together,” she said. “What’s overwhelming you the most?”

He lifted a sheaf of mail off the cross-stretcher breakfast table next to him like it weighed five hundred pounds.

“What do I do about these?” he asked.

She went through the letters, sweat prickling her back and her upper lip. The air in the house felt stale and close.