“So what do we do?” Kitty asked.

“Miss Mary gave me an idea how we kill him,” Patricia said. “But the hard part’s going to be getting to the point where we can do it.”

“I don’t mean to sound difficult,” Maryellen said. “But if he’s everything Patricia says he is—suspicious, sharp senses, fast, strong—how do we even get close enough to do anything?”

Fear made Patricia’s voice strong and clear, “I have to give him what he wants,” she said. “I have to give him me.”

CHAPTER 37

Patricia told Carter that Korey was on drugs. Korey was so sick and confused from James Harris that Carter believed her immediately. It helped that this was one of his biggest nightmares.

“This is from your side,” he said as they threw Korey’s clothes into an overnight bag. “No one on my side of the family has ever had this kind of problem.”

No, Patricia thought. They just murdered a man and buried his body in the backyard.

She prayed for forgiveness. She prayed hard. Then they took Korey to Southern Pines, the local psychiatric and substance abuse treatment center.

“You’ll make sure she’s monitored twenty-four hours a day?” Patricia asked the intake administrator.

Her nightmare was that Korey would do what the other children had done. She thought of Destiny Taylor and the dental floss, Orville Reed stepping in front of the car, Latasha Burns and the knife. They had the money to weigh the odds in their favor, but she didn’t want odds when it came to her daughter. She wanted a guarantee.

She tried to talk to Korey, she tried to say she was sorry, she tried to explain things, she tried hard, but whether it was because of James Harris or because of what they were doing to her, Korey didn’t even acknowledge she was in the room.

“Some of them do this,” the intake administrator said. “I saw one kid break his mother’s nose during intake. Others just shut down.”

When they got home the quiet in the house ate at Patricia, reminding her of the damage she had done to her family. She felt a sense of urgency. She had to finish this. She had to get her family back and glue the pieces together before it got any worse. It was only a matter of time before they hit a point beyond which nothing could be fixed.

That night, Carter left to bury himself in work at his office. Half an hour later, the phone rang. She answered.

“Where’s Korey?” James Harris asked.

“She’s sick,” Patricia said.

“She wouldn’t be sick if she were still with me,” he said. “I can make her better.”

“I need time,” she said. “I need time to figure things out.”

“What am I supposed to do while you dither?” he asked.

“You have to be patient,” she said. “This is hard for me. It’s my entire life. My family. It’s everything I know.”

“Think fast,” he said.

“Until the end of the month,” she said, trying to buy time.

“I’ll give you ten days,” he said, and hung up.

She tried to be around Blue as much as possible. She and Carter asked if he had any questions, they told him it wasn’t his fault, they said that he could see Korey in a week or two, whenever her doctors said it was all right, but Blue barely spoke. She sat next to him while he played games on the computer in the little study. He clattered away on the keyboard, moving colored shapes and lines onscreen.

“What does this one do?” she asked about a button, and then pointed to a number at the top of the monitor. “Does that mean you’re winning? Look at your score, it’s so high.”

“That’s the amount of damage I’ve taken,” he said.

She wanted to tell him she was sorry she hadn’t protected him and his sister better. But whenever she began, it sounded like a farewell speech and she stopped. Let him have one more untroubled week.

Before she was ready, Saturday arrived and Patricia woke up scared. She cleaned Korey’s room to keep herself busy, stripped her bed, collected all her clothes off the floor and washed them, folded them, put them back into drawers in neat stacks, ironed her dresses and hung them up, stacked her magazines, found the cases for all her CDs. She recovered $8.63 in change from the carpet and put it in a jar for when Korey came home.

Around four, Carter stood in the door and watched her work.

“We have to go soon if we want to see the pregame,” he said.

They had made plans to watch the Clemson-Carolina game downtown near the hospital with Leland and Slick’s children.

“You go on,” Patricia said. “I have things to do.”

“You sure you don’t want to come?” he asked. “It’ll be good to do something normal. It’s morbid to sit around the house alone.”

“I need to be morbid,” she said, and gave him her “brave soldier” smile. “Have a nice time.”

“I love you,” he said.

It took her by surprise and she faltered for a moment, thinking of everything James Harris had told her about Carter’s out-of-town trips and wondering how much of it was true.

“I love you, too,” she made herself say back.

He left and she waited until she heard his car back out of the driveway, and then she got ready to die.

Patricia’s stomach felt empty. Her whole body felt drained. She felt sick, light-headed, fluttery. Everything felt hollow, like it was all about to float away.

In her bathroom, she put on her new black velvet dress. It felt tight and awful and hugged her in all the wrong places and made her self-conscious of her new curves, and then she adjusted it and pulled it down and cinched and strapped and smoothed. It clung to her like a black cat’s skin. She felt more naked with it on than off.

The phone rang. She answered it.

“Finally,” he said.

“I want to see you,” she said. “I made my decision.”

There was a long pause.

“And,” he prompted.

“I decided that I want someone who values me,” she said. “I’ll be at your place by 6:30.”

Eyeliner, a bit of eyebrow pencil, mascara, some blush. She blotted her lipstick with Kleenex and dropped red balls of tissue into the trash. She brushed her hair, curled it just a touch to give it body, then sprayed it with Miss Brecks. She opened her eyes and they stung from the falling mist of hairspray droplets. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw a woman she didn’t know. She didn’t wear earrings or jewelry. She took off her wedding ring. She fed Ragtag, left a note for Carter saying she’d had to run downtown to see Slick in the hospital and she might spend the night, and left home.

Outside, a cold wind thrashed the trees. Cars lined the block, all of them there to watch the Clemson-Carolina game at Grace’s. Bennett was a hardcore Clemson alum, and he hosted the big get-together for the game every year. Patricia wondered how he would deal with everyone drinking. She wondered if he’d start again.

The wind came black and bleak off the harbor, tossing the waves into whitecaps. She passed Alhambra Hall and looked at the far end of the parking lot, close to the water, and saw the minivan parked there. She could just see a few huddled shapes inside. They looked pathetically small.

Friends, Patricia thought. Be with me now.

James Harris’s house was dark. His porch lights were off and only a single lamp shone from his living room window. She realized he’d done it so no one would see her come to his front door. Cars filled every single driveway, and as she walked, a swelling of cheers erupted from all the houses. Kickoff. The game had begun.

She knocked on the front door, and James Harris opened it, lit from behind by the dim glow of the living room lamp, the only light in the house. The radio purred classical music, a piano riding gentle orchestral surges. Her heart danced inside her rib cage as he locked the door behind her.

Neither moved, they just stood in the hall, facing each other in the soft spill of light from the living room.

“You’ve hurt me,” she said. “You’ve scared me. You’ve hurt my daughter. You’ve made my son a liar. You’ve hurt the people I know. But the three years you’ve been here feel more real than the entire twenty-five years of my marriage.”

He raised his hand and traced the side of her jaw with his fingers. She didn’t flinch. She tried not to remember him screaming in her face, spattering it with her daughter’s blood, her daughter who would hurt forever because of his hunger.

“You said you made up your mind,” he said. “So. What do you want, Patricia?”

She walked past him into the living room. She left a trace of perfume in the air. It was a bottle of Opium she’d found while cleaning Korey’s room. She almost never wore perfume. She stopped in front of the mantel and turned to face him.

“I’m tired of my world being so small,” she said. “Laundry, cooking, cleaning, silly women talking about trashy books. It’s not enough for me anymore.”

He sat in the armchair across from her, legs spread, hands on its arms, watching her.