The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,7
doing.”
That started the conversation, and without thinking, Patricia found herself joining in, and they were still talking about the book two hours later when they walked to their cars.
The following month they read The Michigan Murders: The True Story of the Ypsilanti Ripper’s Reign of Terror, and then A Death in Canaan: A Classic Case of Good and Evil in a Small New England Town, followed by Bitter Blood: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness, and Multiple Murder—all of them Kitty’s recommendations.
They selected next year’s books together, and when all the blurry black-and-white photos of crime scenes and minute-by-minute timelines of the night when it all happened began to blur, Grace came up with the idea of alternating each true crime book with a novel, so they would read The Silence of the Lambs one month, and Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of John Wayne Gacy the next. They read The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O’Brien, followed by Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, with its children baked into a pie and fed to their mother. (“The problem with that,” Grace pointed out, “is you would need extremely large pies to fit two children, even minced.”)
Patricia loved it. She asked Carter if he wanted to read along with her, but he told her he dealt with crazy patients all day, so the last thing he wanted to do was come home and read about crazy people. Patricia didn’t mind. The not-quite-a-book-club, with all its slow poisoners and murderers-for-hire and angels of death, gave her a new outlook on life.
She and Carter had moved to the Old Village last year because they’d wanted to live somewhere with plenty of space, somewhere quiet, and somewhere, most importantly, safe. They wanted more than just a neighborhood, they wanted a community, where your home said you espoused a certain set of values. Somewhere protected from the chaos and the ceaseless change of the outside world. Somewhere the kids could play outside all day, unsupervised, until you called them in for supper.
The Old Village lay just across the Cooper River from downtown Charleston in the suburb of Mt. Pleasant, but while Charleston was formal and sophisticated, and Mt. Pleasant was its country cousin, the Old Village was a way of life. Or at least that was what the people who lived there believed. And Carter had worked long and hard so that they could finally afford not just a house but a way of life.
This way of life was a slice of live oaks and gracious homes lying between Coleman Boulevard and Charleston Harbor, where everyone still waved at cars when they went by and no one drove over twenty-five miles per hour.
It was where Carter taught Korey and Blue to crab off the dock, lowering raw chicken necks tied to long strings into the murky harbor water, and pulling up mean-eyed crabs they scooped up in nets. He took them shrimping at night, lit by the hissing white glare of their Coleman lantern. They went to oyster roasts and Sunday school, wedding receptions at Alhambra Hall and funerals at Stuhr’s. They went to the Pierates Cruze block party every Christmas, and danced the shag at Wild Dunes on New Year’s Eve. Korey and Blue went to Albemarle Academy on the other side of the harbor for school, and made friends, and had sleepovers, and Patricia drove car pool, and no one locked their doors, and everyone knew where you left your spare key when you went out of town, and you could go out all day and leave your windows open and the worst thing that might happen is you’d come home and find someone else’s cat sleeping on your kitchen counter. It was a good place to raise children. It was a wonderful place to be a family. It was quiet, and soft, and peaceful, and safe.
But sometimes Patricia wanted to be challenged. Sometimes she yearned to see what she was made of. Sometimes she remembered being a nurse before she married Carter and wondered if she could still reach into a wound and hold an artery closed with her fingers, or if she still had the courage to pull a fishhook out of a child’s eyelid. Sometimes she craved a little danger. And that was why she had book club.