“What I remember from the sixties is people being so nasty to Doug Mitchell when he came home from the war,” Slick said. “He tried to go to Princeton on the GI Bill but everyone just spat on him and asked him how many babies he killed, so he wound up back in Due West working at his father’s hardware store. He’d wanted to be an engineer, but the hippies wouldn’t let him.”

“I always thought the hippies were so glamorous,” Patricia said. “In the nurses’ lounge I’d see pictures of those girls in Life magazine with their long dresses and feel, well, life passing me by. But in Helter Skelter it all seemed so squalid. They lived on that ranch with all the flies, and they didn’t wear clothes half the time and were dirty all the time.”

“What good is free love if nobody showers?” Maryellen asked.

“Can you believe how old we are?” Kitty said. “Everyone thinks of the hippies as being a million years ago, but we all could’ve been hippies.”

“Not all of us,” Grace said.

“They’re still around,” Slick said. “Did you see in the newspaper today? In Waco? They followed that cult leader in Texas the same way all those girls followed Manson. These false prophets come wandering into town, take hold of your mind, and lead you down the primrose path. Without faith, people fall for honeyed words.”

“Wouldn’t happen to me,” Maryellen said. “Anyone new moves into our neighborhood and I do what Grace taught me: I bake them a pie and take it over and by the time I leave I know where they’re from, what their husband does for a living, and how many people live in their house.”

“I did not teach you that,” Grace said.

“I learned by example,” Maryellen said.

“I just want people to feel welcome,” Grace said. “And I ask them about themselves because I’m interested.”

“You spy on them,” Maryellen said.

“You have to,” Kitty said. “So many new people are moving here. It used to be you’d only see bumper stickers for the Gamecocks, or Clemson, or the Citadel. Now you’ve got people driving around with Alabama and UVA stickers. Any one of them could be a serial killer for all we know.”

“What I do,” Grace said, “is if I see an unfamiliar car in the neighborhood, I write down their license plate number.”

“Why?” Patricia asked.

“If something happens later,” Grace said, “I have their license plate number and the date and make of the car so it can be used as evidence.”

“So who does that big van belong to in front of Mrs. Savage’s?” Kitty asked. “It’s been there for three months.”

Old Mrs. Savage lived half a mile away down Middle Street, and even though she was a deeply unpleasant woman, Patricia loved her house. The wooden clapboard sides were painted Easter egg yellow with bright white trim, and a glider hung on her front porch. Whenever she drove past, no matter how horrible Miss Mary was being, or how detached she felt from Korey as she got older, Patricia always looked at that perfectly proportioned little house and imagined herself curled up on a chair inside, reading her way through a stack of mysteries. But she hadn’t noticed any van.

“What van?” she asked.

“It’s a white van with tinted windows,” Maryellen said. “It looks like something a child snatcher would drive.”

“I noticed it because of Ragtag,” Grace said. “He adores it.”

“What?” Patricia asked, overcome by a sinking feeling that one of her shortcomings was about to be exposed.

“He was doing his business on Mrs. Savage’s front yard when I drove by tonight,” Kitty said, and started laughing.

“He’s gotten in her garbage cans,” Grace said. “More than once.”

“I saw him raising his leg on that van’s tires once, too,” Maryellen added. “When he’s not sleeping under it.”

Everyone started to laugh and Patricia felt a hot flush creeping up her neck.

“Y’all, that’s not funny,” she said.

“You need to put Ragtag on a leash,” Slick said.

“But we never used to have to,” Patricia said. “No one in the Old Village ever put their dogs on a leash.”

“It’s the nineties,” Maryellen said. “The new people sue you if your dog so much as barks at them. The Van Dorstens had to put Lady to sleep because she barked at that judge.”

“The Old Village is changing, Patricia,” Grace said. “I know of at least three animals Ann Savage called the dogcatcher on.”

“Putting Ragtag on a leash seems”—Patricia looked for the right word—“cruel. He’s used to running free.”

“The van belongs to her nephew,” Grace said. “Apparently Ann is too sick to get out of bed and the family sent him down to look after her.”

“Of course,” Maryellen said. “What’d you take over? Pecan pie? Key lime?”

Grace didn’t dignify that with an answer.

“Should I go down there and say something about Ragtag?” Patricia asked.

Kitty picked up another cheese straw and snapped it in half.

“Don’t sweat it,” she said. “If Ann Savage has a problem, she’ll come to you.”

CHAPTER 4

Two hours later they bubbled out of Grace’s house, still talking about hidden messages in Beatles albums, and whether Joel Pugh’s suicide in London was an unsolved Manson murder, and blood spatter patterns at the Tate crime scene. As the other women walked across the front yard to their cars, Patricia stopped on Grace’s moss-covered brick steps and inhaled the scent of her camellia bushes, lying in perfect rows on either side of the front door.

“It’s so hard to go home and pack tomorrow’s lunches after all that excitement,” Patricia said.

Grace stepped outside, pulling her front door partially closed behind her in a halfhearted attempt to keep the air conditioning in. Which reminded Patricia. She made a mental note to call the air-conditioning man.

“All that chaos and mess,” Grace said, shaking her head sadly. “I can’t wait to return to my housekeeping.”

“But don’t you wish that something exciting would happen around here?” Patricia asked. “Just once?”

Grace raised her eyebrows at Patricia.

“You wish that a gang of unwashed hippies would break into your house and murder your family and write death to pigs in human blood on your walls because you don’t want to pack bag lunches anymore?”

“Well, not when you put it like that,” Patricia said. “Your camellias look wonderful.”

“I spent this week planting my annuals,” Grace said. “Those vincas, and the marigolds, and I have some azalea bushes around the side that are already blooming. When it’s light I’ll show you the noisettes I planted in back. They’ll smell heavenly this summer.”

They said good night and Patricia walked onto Pierates Cruze and Grace’s door clunked softly shut behind her. The Cruze was a dirt horseshoe hanging off Middle Street in the Old Village, and the fourteen families who lived there would rather die than have it paved. The rocks on the road crunched beneath Patricia’s feet, and she felt them through the thin soles of her shoes. The steamy evening air closed around her like a fist. The only sounds were her feet grinding rocks into the dirt and the angry rasp of crickets and katydids crowding around her in the dark.

The book club buzz evaporated from her veins as she left Grace’s perfect yard behind and approached her house, huddled behind overgrown groves of wild bamboo and gnarled trees choked by ivy. She got closer and saw that the garbage cans weren’t at the end of the driveway. Taking out the trash was one of Blue’s chores, but after the sun went down the side of the house where the rolling cans lived got pitch-black and he would do everything in his power to avoid it. She’d suggested that he bring the rolling cans around to the front steps before it got dark. She’d given him a flashlight. She’d offered to stand on the front porch while he went to get them. Instead, he waited until the last possible moment to collect the trash, put all the cans and bags by the front door, and informed her that he was going to take them out in five minutes, just as soon as he finished doing this Wordly Wise crossword puzzle, or this long division worksheet. And then he disappeared.

If she could catch him before he made it to bed, she’d make him get the cans and take them out to the street, but not tonight. Tonight she stood in the doorway to his dark room, the hall light slashing across him where he lay under the covers, eyes squeezed shut, a copy of National Geographic World rising and falling on his stomach.

Pulling his bedroom door halfway closed, she paused outside Korey’s door and listened to the rise and fall of her daughter’s voice on the telephone. Patricia felt a prick of envy. She hadn’t been popular in high school, but Korey captained or co-captained all her teams, and younger girls showed up at games to cheer her on. Inexplicably, girls being sporty had become popular. When Patricia was in high school, the only girls who talked to the sporty girls were other sporty girls, but Korey’s list of friends seemed endless, and they’d finally gotten a second phone line so Carter could make phone calls without call waiting going off every five seconds.