Kitty lived on Seewee Farms, a two-hundred-acre chunk of Boone Hall Plantation that had been parceled off a long time ago as a wedding present to some Lord Proprietor or other. Through misadventure and poor decision making it had come to Kitty’s grandmother-in-law, and when that eminent old lady had declined elegantly into her grave, she’d passed it on to her favorite grandson, Kitty’s husband, Horse.

Way out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by flooded rice fields and tangled pine forest, dotted with broken-backed outbuildings inhabited solely by snakes, it was anchored by a hideously ugly main house painted chocolate brown and wrapped in sagging porches and rotting columns with raccoons in the attic and opossums in the walls. It was exactly the kind of grand home, suspended in a state of gracious decay, Patricia thought all the best Charlestonians owned.

Now she stood before the massive double doors on the sprawling front porch and pressed the bell and nothing happened. She tried again.

“Patricia!” Kitty called.

Patricia looked around, then up. Kitty leaned out the second-floor window.

“Go around to the side,” Kitty hollered. “We haven’t been able to find the key to that door in forever.”

She met Kitty by her kitchen door.

“Come on in,” Kitty said. “Don’t mind the cat.”

Patricia didn’t see a cat anywhere, but she did see something that thrilled her: Kitty’s kitchen was a disaster. Empty pizza boxes, schoolbooks, junk mail, and wet bathing suits crowded every flat surface. Back issues of Southern Living slid off chairs. A disassembled engine covered the kitchen table. By comparison, Patricia’s house looked magazine perfect.

“This is what five kids looks like,” Kitty said over her shoulder. “Stay smart, Patricia. Stop at two.”

The front hall looked like something out of Gone with the Wind except its swooping staircase and oak floor were buried beneath a mudslide of violin cases, balled-up gym socks, taxidermied squirrels, glow-in-the-dark Frisbees, sheaves of parking tickets, collapsible music stands, soccer balls, lacrosse sticks, an umbrella stand full of baseball bats, and a dead, five-foot-tall rubber tree stuck inside a planter made of an amputated elephant’s foot.

Kitty picked her way through the carnage, leading Patricia to a front room where Slick Paley and Maryellen Whatever-Her-Name-Was perched on the lip of a sofa covered with approximately five hundred throw pillows. Across from them, Grace Cavanaugh sat ramrod straight on a piano bench. Patricia didn’t see a piano.

“All right,” Kitty said, pouring wine from a jug. “Let’s talk about axe murder!”

“Don’t we need a name first?” Slick asked. “And to select books for the year?”

“This isn’t a book club,” Grace said.

“What do you mean, this isn’t a book club?” Maryellen asked.

“We’re just getting together to talk about a paperback book we all happened to read,” Grace said. “It’s not like it’s a real book.”

“Whatever you say, Grace,” Kitty said, thrusting mugs of wine into everyone’s hands. “Five children live in this house and it’s eight years before the oldest one moves out. If I don’t get some adult conversation tonight I’m going to blow my brains out.”

“Hear, hear,” Maryellen said. “Three girls: seven, five, and four.”

“Four is such a lovely age,” Slick cooed.

“Is it?” Maryellen asked, eyes narrowing.

“So are we a book club?” Patricia asked. She liked to know where things stood.

“We’re a book club, we’re not a book club, who cares?” Kitty said. “What I want to know is why Betty Gore came at her good friend, Candy Montgomery, with an axe and how the heck she got chopped up instead?”

Patricia looked around to see what the other women thought. Maryellen in her dry-cleaned blue jeans and her hair scrunchie and her harsh Yankee voice; tiny Slick looking like a particularly eager mouse with her pointy teeth and beady eyes; Kitty in her denim blouse with musical notes splayed across the front in gold sequins, slurping down a mug of wine, hair a mess, like a bear just woken up from hibernation; and finally Grace with a ruffled bow at her throat, sitting straight, hands folded perfectly in her lap, eyes blinking slowly from behind her large-framed glasses, studying them all like an owl.

These women were too different from her. Patricia didn’t belong here.

“I think,” Grace said, and they sat up straighter, “that it shows a remarkable lack of planning on Betty’s part. If you’re going to murder your best friend with an axe, you should make sure you know what you’re doing.”

That started the conversation, and without thinking, Patricia found herself joining in, and they were still talking about the book two hours later when they walked to their cars.

The following month they read The Michigan Murders: The True Story of the Ypsilanti Ripper’s Reign of Terror, and then A Death in Canaan: A Classic Case of Good and Evil in a Small New England Town, followed by Bitter Blood: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness, and Multiple Murder—all of them Kitty’s recommendations.

They selected next year’s books together, and when all the blurry black-and-white photos of crime scenes and minute-by-minute timelines of the night when it all happened began to blur, Grace came up with the idea of alternating each true crime book with a novel, so they would read The Silence of the Lambs one month, and Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of John Wayne Gacy the next. They read The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O’Brien, followed by Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, with its children baked into a pie and fed to their mother. (“The problem with that,” Grace pointed out, “is you would need extremely large pies to fit two children, even minced.”)

Patricia loved it. She asked Carter if he wanted to read along with her, but he told her he dealt with crazy patients all day, so the last thing he wanted to do was come home and read about crazy people. Patricia didn’t mind. The not-quite-a-book-club, with all its slow poisoners and murderers-for-hire and angels of death, gave her a new outlook on life.

She and Carter had moved to the Old Village last year because they’d wanted to live somewhere with plenty of space, somewhere quiet, and somewhere, most importantly, safe. They wanted more than just a neighborhood, they wanted a community, where your home said you espoused a certain set of values. Somewhere protected from the chaos and the ceaseless change of the outside world. Somewhere the kids could play outside all day, unsupervised, until you called them in for supper.

The Old Village lay just across the Cooper River from downtown Charleston in the suburb of Mt. Pleasant, but while Charleston was formal and sophisticated, and Mt. Pleasant was its country cousin, the Old Village was a way of life. Or at least that was what the people who lived there believed. And Carter had worked long and hard so that they could finally afford not just a house but a way of life.

This way of life was a slice of live oaks and gracious homes lying between Coleman Boulevard and Charleston Harbor, where everyone still waved at cars when they went by and no one drove over twenty-five miles per hour.

It was where Carter taught Korey and Blue to crab off the dock, lowering raw chicken necks tied to long strings into the murky harbor water, and pulling up mean-eyed crabs they scooped up in nets. He took them shrimping at night, lit by the hissing white glare of their Coleman lantern. They went to oyster roasts and Sunday school, wedding receptions at Alhambra Hall and funerals at Stuhr’s. They went to the Pierates Cruze block party every Christmas, and danced the shag at Wild Dunes on New Year’s Eve. Korey and Blue went to Albemarle Academy on the other side of the harbor for school, and made friends, and had sleepovers, and Patricia drove car pool, and no one locked their doors, and everyone knew where you left your spare key when you went out of town, and you could go out all day and leave your windows open and the worst thing that might happen is you’d come home and find someone else’s cat sleeping on your kitchen counter. It was a good place to raise children. It was a wonderful place to be a family. It was quiet, and soft, and peaceful, and safe.

But sometimes Patricia wanted to be challenged. Sometimes she yearned to see what she was made of. Sometimes she remembered being a nurse before she married Carter and wondered if she could still reach into a wound and hold an artery closed with her fingers, or if she still had the courage to pull a fishhook out of a child’s eyelid. Sometimes she craved a little danger. And that was why she had book club.

* * *

—

In the fall of ’91, Kitty’s beloved Minnesota Twins made it to the World Series and she got Horse to chain-saw the two pine trees in their front yard and lay out a scaled-down baseball diamond in white lime. She invited all the members of their not-quite-a-book-club over to play a game with their husbands.

“Y’all,” Slick said, at their last meeting before the game. “I need to unburden my conscience.”

“Jesus Christ,” Maryellen said, rolling her eyes. “Here it comes.”

“Don’t talk about who you don’t know,” Slick shot back. “Now, y’all, I don’t like asking people to sin—”