“Pardon?” Patricia asked.

“I said,” Mrs. Greene repeated, “that I wish you would go home. I don’t want you here. You abandoned me and my children because your husband told you to.”

“That’s…,” Patricia didn’t know how to respond to the unfairness of the accusation. “That’s dramatic.”

“I haven’t lived with my babies in three years,” Mrs. Greene said. “Jesse comes home from football games hurt, and his mother isn’t there to take care of him. Aaron has a trumpet performance and I’m not there to see it. No one cares about us out here except when they need us to clean up their mess.”

“You don’t understand,” Patricia said. “They were our husbands. Those were our families. I would have lost everything. I didn’t have a choice.”

“You had more choice than me,” Mrs. Greene said.

“I wound up in the hospital.”

“That’s your own fault.”

Patricia choked, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, then pressed her palm over her mouth. She had risked all her certainty, all her comfort, everything they’d carefully rebuilt over the last three years to come out here and all she had found was someone who hated her.

“I’m sorry I came,” she said, standing, blind with tears, grabbing her purse, and then not knowing which way to go because Mrs. Greene’s legs blocked her passage to the front door. “I only came because Miss Mary stood behind my dining room door and told me to come, and I realize now how foolish that sounds, and I’m sorry. Please, I know you hate me but please don’t tell anyone I was here. I couldn’t bear for anyone to know I came out here and said these things. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Mrs. Greene stood up, turned her back on Patricia, and left the room. Patricia couldn’t believe Mrs. Greene hated her so much she wouldn’t even walk her to the door, but of course she did. Patricia and the book club had abandoned her. She stumbled to the door, knocking one hip into Mrs. Greene’s chair, and then she heard the voice behind her.

“I didn’t steal it,” Mrs. Greene said.

Patricia turned and saw Mrs. Greene holding out a glossy square of white paper.

“It was on my coffee table one day,” Mrs. Greene said. “Maybe I brought it back here after Miss Mary passed and forgot I had it, but when I picked it up my hair stood on end. I could feel eyes staring into me from behind. I turned around and for a moment I saw the poor old lady standing behind that door there.”

Their eyes met in the gloomy living room air, and the construction noises got very far away, and Patricia felt like she had taken off a pair of sunglasses after wearing them for a very long time. She took the photograph. It was old and cheaply printed, curling up around the edges. Two men stood in the center. One looked like a male version of Miss Mary but younger. He wore overalls and had his hands buried in his pockets. He wore a hat. Next to him stood James Harris.

It wasn’t someone who looked like James Harris, or an ancestor, or a relative. Even though the haircut was slicked with Brylcreem and had a razor-edge part, it was James Harris. He wore a white three-piece suit and a wide tie.

“Turn it over,” Mrs. Greene said.

Patricia flipped the photograph with shaking fingers. On the back someone had written in fountain pen, 162 Wisteria Lane, Summer, 1928.

“Sixty years,” Patricia said.

James Harris looked exactly the same.

“I didn’t know why Miss Mary gave me this photo,” Mrs. Greene said. “I don’t know why she didn’t give it to you direct. But she wanted you to come here, and that must mean something. If she still cares about you, then maybe I can put up with you, too.”

Patricia felt scared. Miss Mary had come to both of them. James Harris didn’t age. Neither of these things could possibly be true, but they were and that terrified her. Vampires didn’t age, either. She shook her head. She couldn’t start thinking that way again. That kind of thinking could ruin everything. She wanted to live in the same world as Kitty, and Slick, and Carter, and Sadie Funche, not over here on her own with Mrs. Greene. She looked at the photo again. She couldn’t stop looking at it.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

Mrs. Greene went to her bookshelf and took a green folder off the top. It had been used and reused and had different headings written on it and scratched out. She laid it open on the coffee table and she and Patricia sat back down.

“I want my babies to come home,” Mrs. Greene said, showing Patricia what was inside. “But you see what he does.”

Patricia paged through the folder, clipping after clipping, and she got cold.

“It’s all him?” she asked.

“Who else?” Mrs. Greene said. “My service cleans his house twice a month. One of his regular girls is gone. I volunteered to fill in this week.”

Patricia’s heart slowed to a crawl.

“Why?” she asked.

“Mrs. Cavanaugh gave me a box of those murder books y’all read. She said she didn’t want them in her house anymore. Whatever Mr. Harris is, he’s not natural, but I think he’s got something in common with those evil men from your books. They always take a souvenir. They like to hold on to a little something when they hurt someone. I only met the man a few times but I could tell he was real full of himself. I bet he keeps something from each of them in his house so he can pull them out and feel like a bigshot all over again.”

“What if we’re wrong?” Patricia said. “I thought I saw him doing something to Destiny Taylor years ago, but it was dark. What if I was wrong? What if her mother did have a boyfriend and lied about it? We both think we saw Miss Mary, we both believe this is a picture of James Harris, but what if it’s just someone who looks like him?”

Mrs. Greene pulled the picture over to her with two fingers and looked at it again.

“A no-good man will tell you he’s going to change,” she said. “He’ll tell you whatever you want to hear, but you’re the fool if you don’t believe what you see. That’s him in this picture. That was Miss Mary who whispered to us. Everybody may be telling me different, but I know what I know.”

“What if he doesn’t keep trophies?” Patricia asked, trying to slow things down.

“Then there’s nothing there to find,” Mrs. Greene said.

“You’ll get arrested,” Patricia said.

“It’d go faster with two of us,” Mrs. Greene said.

“It’s against the law,” Patricia said.

“You turned your back on me once before,” Mrs. Greene said, and her eyes blazed. Patricia wanted to look anywhere else but she couldn’t move. “You turned your back on me and now he’s come for your children. You’re out of time. It’s too late to find excuses.”

“I’m sorry,” Patricia said.

“I don’t want your sorry,” Mrs. Greene said. “I want to know if you’ll come in his house and help me look.”

Patricia couldn’t say yes. She had never broken a law in her life. It went against everything in her body. It went against everything she’d lived for forty years. If she got caught she would never be able to look Carter in the eye again, she’d lose Blue, and she’d lose Korey. How could she raise the children and tell them to obey the law if she didn’t?

“When?” she asked.

“This coming weekend he’s going to Tampa,” Mrs. Greene said. “I need to know if you’re serious or not.”

“I’m sorry,” Patricia said.

Mrs. Greene’s face screwed itself shut.

“I need to get my sleep,” she said, starting to stand up.

“No, wait, I’ll go,” Patricia said.

“I don’t have time for you to play,” Mrs. Greene said.

“I’ll go,” Patricia said.

Mrs. Greene walked her to the front door. At the door, Patricia stopped.

“How could we have seen Miss Mary?” she asked.

“She’s burning in Hell,” Mrs. Greene said. “I asked my minister and he says that’s where ghosts come from. They burn in Hell and they can’t go into the cool, healing waters of the River Jordan until they let go of this world. Miss Mary suffers the torments of Hell because she wants to warn you. She burns because she loves her grandchildren.”

Patricia’s blood felt heavy in her veins..

“I think it’s her, too,” Patricia said, and she tried one last time to stop all this talk of ghosts, and men who didn’t age, and to erase the image of James Harris in the back of the van, that inhuman thing coming out of his mouth, hunched over Destiny Taylor. “Maybe we’re making this too difficult. Maybe if we go and ask him to stop…tell him what we know…”

“Three things are never satisfied,” Mrs. Greene said, and Patricia recognized the quotation from somewhere. “And four is never enough. He’ll eat up everyone in the world and keep on eating. The leech has two daughters and their names are Give and Give.”

Patricia had an idea.

“If two of us make it go faster,” she said, “it’ll go even faster with three.”

CHAPTER 28

“Patricia!” Slick cried. “Thank goodness!”