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, “Ann Rule is a world-class dope. She knew Ted Bundy, she worked next to Ted Bundy, she knew the police were looking for a good-looking young man named Ted who drove a VW Bug, and she knew that her good-looking young friend Ted Bundy drove a VW Bug, but even when her buddy is arrested she says she’ll ‘suspend judgment.’ I mean, what does she need? For him to ring her doorbell and say ‘Ann, I’m a serial killer’?”

“It’s worse when it’s someone close to you,” Slick said. “We want the people we know to be who we think they are, and to stay how we know them. But Tiger has a little friend named Eddie Baxley right up the street and we love Eddie but when we found out his parents let him watch R-rated horror movies, we had to tell Tiger that he was no longer allowed to play at their house. It was hard.”

“That’s not the point at all,” Maryellen said. “The point is, if the evidence says your best friend Ted talks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and drives the same car as a duck, then he’s probably a duck.”

Patricia decided she wouldn’t get a better opportunity. She stopped toying with her frozen fruit salad, put her fork on the plate, took a deep breath, and told her lie:

“James Harris deals drugs.”

She’d thought long and hard about what to tell them, because if she told them what she really thought they’d send her to the funny farm. But the one crime guaranteed to mobilize the women of the Old Village, and the Mt. Pleasant police department, was drugs. There was a war on them, after all, and she didn’t care how they got the police poking into James Harris’s business. She just wanted him gone. Now she delivered the second part of her lie:

“He’s selling drugs to children.”

No one said a word for at least twenty seconds.

Kitty downed her entire glass of wine in a single gulp. Slick got very, very still, eyes wide. Maryellen looked confused, as if she couldn’t tell if Patricia was making fun of her or not, and Grace slowly shook her head from side to side.

“Oh, Patricia,” Grace said, in a disappointed voice.

“I saw him with a young girl,” Patricia said, forging ahead. “In the back of his van in the woods at Six Mile. That girl has been taken from her mother by Social Services because of the mark they found on her inner thigh, a bruise with a puncture mark over her femoral artery, like what street drug users call a track mark from injecting. Grace, Bennett said Mrs. Savage had the same kind of mark on her inner thigh when she went to the hospital.”

“That was confidential information,” Grace said.

“You told it to me,” Patricia said.

“Because she had bitten your ear,” Grace said. “I thought you should know she was an IV drug user. I didn’t mean for you to broadcast it all over the Village.”

This wasn’t going the way she wanted. Patricia had spent hours putting this story together, going through all the true crime books they’d read together, practicing how to lay out the facts. She needed to stop bickering with Grace and stick to her notes.

“When James Harris got here he had a bag in his house with eighty-five thousand dollars in it,” Patricia said, talking fast. “The first afternoon I met him I helped him open his bank account because he didn’t have ID. But he must have a driver’s license, so why didn’t he want to show it at the bank? Because maybe he’s wanted for something. Maybe he’s done this somewhere before. Also, Mrs. Greene copied down a partial license plate number of a van in Six Mile that shouldn’t have been there, and it turned out to be his license plate. And I think I was the last person to see Francine before she disappeared, and she was going into his house.”

None of their expressions had changed and she’d used up all her facts.

“His story changes about where he’s from,” she tried. “Nothing about him adds up.”

She saw her friendships die, right there in front of her. She could see it clearly. They’d say they believed her, and end the book club meeting awkwardly. First, there would be the unreturned phone calls, the excuses to go talk to someone else when they ran into each other at parties, the canceled invitations for Korey or Blue to spend the night. One by one, they’d turn their backs.

“Patricia,” Grace said. “I warned you when you came to see me. I begged you not to make a fool out of yourself.”

“I know what I saw, Grace,” Patricia said, although she felt less and less sure.

Patricia felt herself losing control of the conversation. She tried to find a place to put her frozen fruit salad plate, but the coffee table was crowded with a bowl of marble roses, glass pyramids of various sizes, two brass gamecocks frozen in combat, and a stack of oversize books with titles like Blessings. She decided to just hold it in her hand and focus on the person she thought she could best sway. If one of them would believe her, the rest would follow.

“Maryellen,” she said. “You just called Ann Rule a dope because if the evidence says your best friend talks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and drives the same car as a duck, then he’s probably a duck.”

“There’s a difference between a compelling chain of evidence and accusing someone of a crime based on a bunch of coincidences,” Maryellen said. “So let me get your evidence straight. Mrs. Greene says there may or may not be a man in the woods molesting the children of Six Mile.”

“Giving them drugs,” Patricia corrected.

“Okay, giving them drugs,” Maryellen said. “Mrs. Greene may or may not have seen a van with the license plate number, but not even the full number, of James Harris’s van which no longer belongs to James Harris because he sold it to someone else.”

“I don’t know what happened to it,” Patricia said.

“Putting the van aside,” Maryellen continued, “you want us to believe that the simple fact he went out to Six Mile, even though he wasn’t there at the time anyone died or anything happened, means he’s somehow involved in something?”

“I saw him out there,” Patricia said. “I saw him doing something to a little girl in the back of his van. I. Saw. Him.”

No one said anything.

“What did you see him do?” Slick asked.

“I went out to visit one of the children who seemed sick,” Patricia said. “Mrs. Greene went with me. The little girl was missing from her bedroom. We went looking for her in the woods, and I saw his white van. He was in the back with the child. He was…” She barely hesitated. “…injecting her with something. The doctor said she had a track mark on her leg.”

“Then why don’t you tell the police?” Slick asked.

“I did!” Patricia said, louder than she meant. “They couldn’t find the van, they couldn’t find him, and they think the mother gave her daughter the drugs. Or her boyfriend.”

“So why aren’t they looking at the boyfriend more closely?” Maryellen asked.

“Because she doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Patricia said, trying to keep calm.

Maryellen gave a shrug.

“This just goes to show that the North Charleston police and the Mt. Pleasant police have very different standards.”

“It’s not a joke!” Patricia shouted.

Her voice echoed harshly in the cramped living room. Slick jumped, Grace’s spine stiffened, Maryellen winced.

“Do we have any more wine?” Kitty asked.

“I’m so sorry,” Slick said. “I think it’s all gone.”

“A child is being hurt,” Patricia said. “Don’t any of you care?”

“Of course we care,” Kitty said. “But we’re a book club, not the police. What are we supposed to do?”

“We’re the only ones who’ve noticed something might be wrong,” Patricia said.

“You, not us,” Grace said. “Don’t lump me in with your foolishness.”

“Ed would laugh this right out of court,” Maryellen said.

“The police wrote me off,” Patricia said. “I need your help to go to them again. I need y’all to think through this with me, to help me put it together. Maryellen, you know how the police work. Kitty, you were in Six Mile. You saw how it was. Tell them.”