Three weeks later, Patricia sat on a green plaid blanket at Middleton Place, listening to the Charleston Symphony Orchestra play Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks.” Overhead, the first firework unfolded until it filled the sky like a burning green dandelion. Fireworks always moved Patricia. It took so much time and effort to get them right and they were over so quickly and could only be enjoyed by such a small number of people.

By the light of the fireworks she looked at the women sitting around her: Grace in a lawn chair, eyes closed, listening to the music; Kitty, asleep on her back, plastic wineglass tipping dangerously in one hand; Maryellen in her overalls, legs stretched out in front of her, taking in Charleston’s finest; and Slick, legs tucked beneath her, head cocked, listening to the music like it was homework.

Patricia realized that for four years, these were the women she’d seen every month. She’d talked to them about her marriage, and her children, and gotten frustrated with them, and argued with them, and seen all of them cry at some point, and somewhere along the line, among all the slaughtered coeds, and shocking small-town secrets, and missing children, and true accounts of the cases that changed America forever, she’d learned two things: they were all in this together, and if their husbands ever took out a life insurance policy on them they were in trouble.

HELTER SKELTER

May 1993

CHAPTER 3

“But if I can’t get Blue to come to the table for supper when Carter’s mother eats with us,” Patricia said to her book club, “then Korey will stop coming, too. She’s already picky about food. I’m worried it’s a teenager thing.”

“Already?” Kitty asked.

“She’s fourteen,” Patricia said.

“Being a teenager isn’t a number,” Maryellen said. “It’s the age when you stop liking them.”

“You don’t like the girls?” Patricia asked.

“No one likes their children,” Maryellen said. “We love them to death, but we don’t like them.”

“My children are a constant blessing,” Slick said.

“Get a life, Slick,” Kitty said, biting into a cheese straw, showering crumbs into her lap, brushing them off onto Grace’s carpet.

Patricia saw Grace flinch.

“No one thinks you don’t adore your children, Slick,” Grace said. “I love Ben Jr. but it will be a happy day when he leaves for college and we can finally have some peace in this house.”

“I think they don’t eat because of what they see in magazines,” Slick said. “They call it ‘heroin chic,’ can you imagine? I cut out the ads before I’ll let Greer have a magazine.”

“Are you kidding me?” Maryellen asked.

“How do you find the time?” Kitty asked, snapping a cheese straw in half and sending more crumbs to Grace’s carpet.

Grace couldn’t contain herself. She got Kitty a plate.

“Oh, no thank you,” Kitty said, waving it away. “I’m fine.”

The nameless not-quite-a-book-club had settled into Grace’s sitting room with its deep carpets and soothing lamplight. A framed Audubon print hung over the fireplace, reflecting the room’s pale colonial colors—Raleigh peach and Bruton white—and the piano in the corner gleamed darkly to itself. Everything in Grace’s house looked perfect. Every early American Windsor chair, every chestnut end table, every Chinese porcelain lamp, it all looked to Patricia as if it had always been here and the house had grown up around it.

“Teenagers are boring,” Kitty said. “And it only gets worse. Breakfast, laundry, clean the house, dinner, homework, the same thing, every day, day after day. If anything changes even the slightest bit, they have a cow. Honestly, Patricia, relax. Pick your battles. No one’s going to die if they don’t eat every meal at the table or if they don’t have clean underwear one day.”

“And what if that’s the day they get hit by a car?” Grace asked.

“If Ben Jr. got hit by a car I think you’d have bigger problems than the condition of his underpants,” Maryellen said.

“Not necessarily,” Grace said.

“I freeze sandwiches,” Slick blurted out.

“You what?” Kitty asked.

“To save time,” Slick said in a rush. “I make all the sandwiches for the children’s lunches, three per day, five days a week. That’s sixty sandwiches. I make them all on the first Monday of the month, freeze them, and every morning I pull one out of the freezer and pop it in their bag. By lunchtime it’s thawed.”

“I’ll have to try that,” Patricia started to say because it sounded like a fantastic idea, but her comment got lost beneath Kitty and Maryellen’s laughter.

“It saves time,” Slick said, defensively.

“You can’t freeze sandwiches,” Kitty said. “What happens to the condiments?”

“They don’t complain,” Slick said.

“Because they don’t eat them,” Maryellen told her. “They either throw them in the trash or trade them to the dummies. I bet you money they’ve never eaten a single one of your freezer-burn specials.”

“My children love my lunches,” Slick said. “They wouldn’t lie to me.”

“Are those new earrings, Patricia?” Grace asked, changing the subject.

“They are,” Patricia said, turning her head to catch the light.

“How much did they cost?” Slick asked, and Patricia saw everyone recoil slightly. The only thing tackier than bragging about God was asking about money.

“Carter gave them to me for my birthday,” Patricia said.

“They look expensive,” Slick said, doubling down. “I’d love to know where he got them.”

Carter usually gave Patricia something he bought at the drugstore for her birthday, but this year he’d given her these pearl studs. Patricia had worn them tonight because she was proud he’d gotten her a real gift. Now she worried she was being a show-off, so she changed the subject.

“Are you having a problem with marsh rats?” she asked Grace. “I had two on my back patio this week.”

“Bennett keeps his pellet gun with him when he sits outside and I don’t get involved,” Grace said. “We need to start talking about the book if we’re going to get out of here at a decent hour. Slick, I believe you wanted to start?”

Slick sat up straighter, shuffled her notes, and cleared her throat.

“Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi was this month’s book,” she said. “And I think it’s a perfect indictment of the so-called Summer of Love as being the decade when America lost its way.”

This year, the not-quite-a-book-club was reading the classics: Helter Skelter, In Cold Blood, Zodiac, Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me, and a new edition of Fatal Vision with yet another epilogue updating the reader on the feud between the author and his subject. Only Kitty had read much true crime before 1988, so they’d missed a lot of the essentials, and this year they were determined to fill those gaps.

“Bugliosi tried the case all wrong,” Maryellen said. Because Ed worked for the North Charleston police she always had an opinion about how a case should have been handled. “If they hadn’t been so sloppy with the evidence they could have built a case based on physical evidence and not gotten stuck with Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter strategy. They’re lucky the judge found in his favor.”

“How else would they have brought charges against Manson?” Slick asked. “He wasn’t at any of the crime scenes when people were killed. He didn’t personally stab anyone.”

“Except Gary Hinman and the LaBiancas,” Maryellen said.

“He never would have gotten a life sentence for those,” Slick said. “The conspiracy strategy worked. Manson is the one I want off the streets. Beware false prophets.”

“The Bible is hardly the best source for legal strategy,” Maryellen said.

Kitty leaned forward, grabbed another cheese straw, fumbled it, then picked it up off the carpet and crunched into it. Grace looked away.

“That first chapter, y’all,” Kitty said, chewing. “They stabbed Rosemary LaBianca forty-one times. What do you think that feels like? I mean, I think you feel every single one of them, don’t you?”

“You all need to get alarms,” Maryellen said. “Ours connects directly to the police, and the Mt. Pleasant police department has a three-minute response time.”

“I think you could still get stabbed forty-one times in three minutes,” Kitty said.

“I won’t have those ugly stickers all over my windows,” Grace said.

“You’d rather get stabbed forty-one times than ruin the curb appeal of your home?” Maryellen asked.

“Yes,” Grace said.

“I thought it was fascinating to see into so many different lifestyles,” Patricia said, expertly changing the subject yet again. “I was in nursing school so I always felt like I missed out on the hippie movement.”

“It was a bunch of baloney,” Kitty said. “I was in college in ’69 and, trust me, the Summer of Love skipped South Carolina completely. All that free love was out in California.”

“My summer of love was working in the live specimens lab at Princeton,” Maryellen said. “Some of us had to pay our way through school, thank you very much.”