her feel better.
* * *
—
As they got ready for bed, Carter tried to talk to her.
“Patty,” he said. “Don’t get upset. It was better to get that out in the open.”
“I’m not upset,” she said.
“Whatever you think you saw, he seems like an okay guy.”
“Carter, I saw it,” she said. “He was doing something to that little girl. They took her from her mother today because they found a mark on her inner thigh.”
“I’m not going to get into that again,” he said. “At some point you have to assume the professionals know what they’re doing.”
“I saw him,” she said.
“Even if you did look in his van that no one could find,” Carter said, “eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. It was dark, the light source was a flashlight, it happened fast.”
“I know what I saw,” Patricia said.
“I can show you studies,” Carter said.
But Patricia knew what she had seen and she knew it was unnatural. From the way Ann Savage attacked her, to Miss Mary being attacked by rats, to the man on the roof that night, to James Harris and all his hints about eating and being interrupted, the way the Old Village no longer felt safe—something was wrong. She’d already removed their spare key from its hiding place outside in the fake rock, and she’d started deadbolting the doors whenever she left the house, even just to run errands. Things were changing too fast, and James Harris was at the center of it.
And something he’d said ate at her. She got up and went downstairs.
“Patty,” Carter called behind her. “Don’t storm off.”
“I’m not storming,” she called over her shoulder, but really didn’t care if he heard her or not.
She found her copy of Dracula in the bookcase in the den. They’d read it for book club in October two years ago.
She flipped through the pages until the phrase she was looking for jumped out at her:
“He may not enter anywhere at the first,” says Van Helsing in his Dutch-tainted English, “unless there be some of the household who bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please.”
She had invited him inside her house months ago. She thought about Richard Chase, the Vampire of Sacramento, again, and then she thought about that thing in his mouth, and the next day after church she drove to The Commons shopping center and went into the Book Bag. She checked to make sure no one she knew was there before she walked over to the register.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Could you tell me where your horror books are?”
“Behind Sci-fi and Fantasy,” the kid grunted without looking up.
“Thank you,” Patricia said.
She picked books by their covers, one after the other, and began piling them up by the cash register.
When she was ready to pay, the clerk rang them up, one cover of a hunky, smooth-shaven young man with spiked hair after another: Vampire Beat, Some of Your Blood, The Delicate Dependency, ’Salem’s Lot, Vampire Junction, Live Girls, Nightblood, No Blood Spilled, The Vampire’s Apprentice, Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, Vampire Tapestry, The Hotel Transylvania. If it had fangs, sharp teeth, or bloody lips on the cover, Patricia bought it. Her final total: $149.96.
“You must be really into vampires,” the clerk said.
“Will you take a check?” she asked.
She hid the books in the back of her closet, and as she read them one by one behind her closed bedroom door she realized that she couldn’t do this alone. She needed help.
CHAPTER 19
On book club night, Grace brought frozen fruit salad, Kitty brought two bottles of white wine, and they all sat in Slick’s crowded living room, surrounded by Slick’s collection of Lenox Garden bird figurines, and Beanie Babies, and wall plaques bearing devotional quotations, and all the things Slick bought off the Home Shopping Network, and Patricia prepared to lie to her friends.
“And so, in conclusion,” Maryellen said, bringing her case against the author of The Stranger Beside Me to a close,