The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,6
she’d passed it on to her favorite grandson, Kitty’s husband, Horse.
Way out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by flooded rice fields and tangled pine forest, dotted with broken-backed outbuildings inhabited solely by snakes, it was anchored by a hideously ugly main house painted chocolate brown and wrapped in sagging porches and rotting columns with raccoons in the attic and opossums in the walls. It was exactly the kind of grand home, suspended in a state of gracious decay, Patricia thought all the best Charlestonians owned.
Now she stood before the massive double doors on the sprawling front porch and pressed the bell and nothing happened. She tried again.
“Patricia!” Kitty called.
Patricia looked around, then up. Kitty leaned out the second-floor window.
“Go around to the side,” Kitty hollered. “We haven’t been able to find the key to that door in forever.”
She met Kitty by her kitchen door.
“Come on in,” Kitty said. “Don’t mind the cat.”
Patricia didn’t see a cat anywhere, but she did see something that thrilled her: Kitty’s kitchen was a disaster. Empty pizza boxes, schoolbooks, junk mail, and wet bathing suits crowded every flat surface. Back issues of Southern Living slid off chairs. A disassembled engine covered the kitchen table. By comparison, Patricia’s house looked magazine perfect.
“This is what five kids looks like,” Kitty said over her shoulder. “Stay smart, Patricia. Stop at two.”
The front hall looked like something out of Gone with the Wind except its swooping staircase and oak floor were buried beneath a mudslide of violin cases, balled-up gym socks, taxidermied squirrels, glow-in-the-dark Frisbees, sheaves of parking tickets, collapsible music stands, soccer balls, lacrosse sticks, an umbrella stand full of baseball bats, and a dead, five-foot-tall rubber tree stuck inside a planter made of an amputated elephant’s foot.
Kitty picked her way through the carnage, leading Patricia to a front room where Slick Paley and Maryellen Whatever-Her-Name-Was perched on the lip of a sofa covered with approximately five hundred throw pillows. Across from them, Grace Cavanaugh sat ramrod straight on a piano bench. Patricia didn’t see a piano.
“All right,” Kitty said, pouring wine from a jug. “Let’s talk about axe murder!”
“Don’t we need a name first?” Slick asked. “And to select books for the year?”
“This isn’t a book club,” Grace said.
“What do you mean, this isn’t a book club?” Maryellen asked.
“We’re just getting together to talk about a paperback book we all happened to read,” Grace said. “It’s not like it’s a real book.”
“Whatever you say, Grace,” Kitty said, thrusting mugs of wine into everyone’s hands. “Five children live in this house and it’s eight years before the oldest one moves out. If I don’t get some adult conversation tonight I’m going to blow my brains out.”
“Hear, hear,” Maryellen said. “Three girls: seven, five, and four.”
“Four is such a lovely age,” Slick cooed.
“Is it?” Maryellen asked, eyes narrowing.
“So are we a book club?” Patricia asked. She liked to know where things stood.
“We’re a book club, we’re not a book club, who cares?” Kitty said. “What I want to know is why Betty Gore came at her good friend, Candy Montgomery, with an axe and how the heck she got chopped up instead?”
Patricia looked around to see what the other women thought. Maryellen in her dry-cleaned blue jeans and her hair scrunchie and her harsh Yankee voice; tiny Slick looking like a particularly eager mouse with her pointy teeth and beady eyes; Kitty in her denim blouse with musical notes splayed across the front in gold sequins, slurping down a mug of wine, hair a mess, like a bear just woken up from hibernation; and finally Grace with a ruffled bow at her throat, sitting straight, hands folded perfectly in her lap, eyes blinking slowly from behind her large-framed glasses, studying them all like an owl.
These women were too different from her. Patricia didn’t belong here.
“I think,” Grace said, and they sat up straighter, “that it shows a remarkable lack of planning on Betty’s part. If you’re going to murder your best friend with an axe, you should make sure you know what you’re