“We wouldn’t stay long, Patricia told her.

“It’s Parish’s birthday next week,” Kitty said. “I’ve been run ragged.”

Patricia tried guilt.

“What with Ann Savage, and now Miss Mary,” Patricia said. “I don’t feel comfortable driving so far alone.”

It turned out that guilt worked. The next day Patricia drove down Rifle Range Road toward Six Mile with Kitty in the passenger seat, a pecan pie on her lap.

“I’m sure there are some very nice people who live out here,” Kitty said. “But have you heard of super-predators? They’re gangs who drive real slow at night and flash their headlights and if you flash back they follow you to your house and shoot you in the head.”

“Doesn’t Marjorie Fretwell live around here?” Patricia asked.

“Marjorie Fretwell once sucked a copperhead up in her vacuum cleaner because she didn’t know what to do with it and then she had to throw the whole vacuum away,” Kitty said. “Don’t talk to me about Marjorie Fretwell.”

They turned off Rifle Range Road onto the state road that led back into the woods around Six Mile. The houses got smaller and the yards got bigger—wide fields of dead weeds and yellowed finger-grass surrounding trailer homes mounted on cinder blocks and brick shoeboxes with crooked mailboxes out front. Electrical lines drooped across front yards crowded with too many cars that had too few tires.

Narrow roads, no wider than driveways, branched off the state road, plunging past chain-link fences, disappearing into groves of scrub oak and palmettos. Patricia saw the green-and-white reflective street sign for Grill Flame Road at the head of one of them, and she turned.

“At least lock your doors,” Kitty said, and Patricia hit the door lock button, making a comforting clunk.

She drove slow. The road was potholed and its asphalt edges crumbled off into sand. Houses crowded around it at odd angles. A lot of them had been torn up during Hurricane Hugo and rebuilt by carpetbagging contractors who’d left before their work was complete. Some had heavy plastic stapled over their window frames instead of glass; others had framed rooms left unfinished and exposed to the weather.

No one’s yards were landscaped. All the trees were encrusted in vines. A skinny black man in shorts with no shirt sat on the front steps of his trailer drinking water out of a plastic one-gallon jug. Some little children in diapers stopped running through a sprinkler and pressed up against a chain-link fence to watch them drive by.

“Look for number sixteen,” Patricia said, concentrating on the potholed road.

They nosed forward beneath a scrub oak whose branches scraped the roof, then emerged into a big, sandy clearing. The road made a loop around a small, unpainted cinder-block church shaped like a shoebox. A sign out front proclaimed it to be Mt. Zion A.M.E. Neat little white and blue houses surrounded it. Down at the far end, some boys ran around a basketball court in the shade where the trees started, but here in front of the houses there was no shelter from the sun.

“Sixteen,” Kitty said, and Patricia saw a clean white house with black shutters and white, pressed-tin porch columns. A sun-faded cardboard cutout of Santa’s face sat inside a plastic holly wreath on the front door. Patricia parked at the end of the drive.

“I’ll wait in the car,” Kitty said.

“I’m taking the keys so you won’t be able to run the air conditioner,” Patricia said.

Kitty gathered her courage for a moment, then heaved herself up and followed Patricia outside. Instantly, the hot sun pierced the crown of Patricia’s head like a nail and bounced off the Volvo, blinding her.

In the next sandy driveway over, three little girls skipped rope, double Dutch. Patricia stood for a minute, listening to their rhyme:

Boo Daddy, Boo Daddy

In the woods

Grabbed a little boy

’Cause he taste so good

Boo Daddy, Boo Daddy

In the sheets

Sucking all your blood

’Cause it taste so sweet

She wondered where they’d learned something like that. She walked around the hood of the car and headed for Mrs. Greene’s, Kitty falling in beside her, and then she sensed movement behind them. She turned and saw a crowd of people coming their way, walking fast from the basketball courts, and before she or Kitty could move there were boys in front of them, boys behind them, boys leaning on the hood of her car, boys all around them, adopting lounging postures, fencing them in.

“What are you doing here?” one asked.

His white T-shirt was covered in random blue stripes and his hair was cut into a big wedge with straight lines shaved into one side.

“Nothing to say?” he said. “I asked you a question. What, the fuck, are you doing out here? ’Cause I don’t think you live here. I don’t think you got invited here. So what, the fuck?”

He performed for the boys around him and they made their faces hard, stepped in close, crowded Kitty and Patricia together.

“Please,” Kitty said. “We’re leaving right now.”

A few of the boys grinned and Patricia felt a flash of anger. Why was Kitty such a coward?

“Too late for that,” Wedgehead said.

“We’re visiting a friend,” Patricia said, clutching her purse tighter.

“You don’t have any friends out here, bitch!” the boy exploded, pushing his face into hers.

Patricia saw her pale, frightened face reflected twice in his sunglasses. She looked weak. Kitty was right. They never should have come out here. She’d made a terrible mistake. She pulled her neck into her shoulders and got ready to be stabbed or shoved or whatever came next.

“Edwin Miles!” a woman’s voice snapped through the sizzling air.

Everyone turned except Wedgehead, who kept his face so close to Patricia’s she could count the sparse hairs in his mustache.

“Edwin Miles,” the voice called again. This time he turned. “What are you playing at?”

Patricia turned and saw Mrs. Greene standing in the door to her house. She wore a red T-shirt and blue jeans and her arms were covered with white gauze pads.

“Who are these bitches?” the boy, Edwin Miles, called to Mrs. Greene.

“Don’t you use that language with me,” Mrs. Greene said. “I’ll talk to your mother on Sunday.”

“She don’t care,” Edwin Miles shouted back.

“You see if she doesn’t once I’m through talking to her,” Mrs. Greene said, walking toward them.

The boys faded before her, falling back in the face of her wrath. The last one standing was Edwin Miles.

“All right, all right,” he said, stepping backward. “I didn’t know they were with you, Mrs. G. You know us, we like to keep an eye on the comings and the goings.”

“I’ll comings-and-goings you,” Mrs. Greene snapped. She reached them and gave Patricia and Kitty a sudden smile. “It’s cooler in the house.”

She walked toward her house without a backward glance, and Patricia and Kitty scampered along in her wake. Behind them they heard Edwin Miles’s voice fading as he walked away with his friends.

“I’ll just leave them here with you, Mrs. G.,” he called. “It’s all good. Didn’t know you knew them, that’s all.”

The little girls started jumping rope again as they passed:

Boo Daddy, Boo Daddy

One, two, three

Sneaking in my window

And sucking on me.

Inside the house, Mrs. Greene closed the door and it took a moment for Patricia’s eyes to adjust to the cool darkness.

“I am so grateful, Mrs. Greene,” Kitty said. “I thought we were going to die. How do we get to Patricia’s car? Do we need to call someone?”

“Like who?” Mrs. Greene asked.

“The police?” Kitty suggested.

“The police?” Mrs. Greene said. “What would they do? Jesse!” she hollered. A skinny little boy with a serious face appeared in the hall door. “Get some tea for our guests.”

“Oh,” Patricia said, almost forgetting. “I brought you something.”

She held out the pecan pie.

“Jesse, put this in the refrigerator,” Mrs. Greene said.

She passed it to him and he disappeared back down the hall and Mrs. Greene gestured to the sofa. This close, Patricia could see that her knuckles bristled with stitches.

Mrs. Greene limped stiffly to a La-Z-Boy recliner that bore the imprint of her body. Patricia’s eyes had finally adjusted to the dim room and she realized it was full of Christmas. Red, green, and yellow Christmas tree lights ran around the ceiling. A large, artificial tree dominated one corner. Every lamp was made of an oversized nutcracker or a ceramic Christmas tree, and every lampshade sported a smiling Santa or a snowman. On the wall next to Patricia was a framed cross-stitch of Santa Claus holding the baby Jesus.

Patricia perched on the edge of the sofa, closest to Mrs. Greene. The bright white sterile dressings on Mrs. Greene’s arms glowed in the dim room.

“You have to forgive those boys,” Mrs. Greene said, settling into her chair. “Everyone out here has their nerves up about strangers.”

“Because of super-predators,” Kitty said, sitting gingerly on the other end of the sofa.

“No, ma’am,” Mrs. Greene said. “Because of the children.”