They drove to Southern Pines together, and signed out her daughter against the advice of her doctors, and brought her home. When Ragtag saw her, he began to bang his tail against the floor where he’d been lying.

Patricia kept her distance while Blue and Korey hung all over Ragtag that weekend, soothing him when he barked at things that weren’t there, driving to the store and getting him wet food when he wouldn’t eat dry, sitting with him in the backyard or on the sofa in the sun. And on Sunday night, when things got bad, and Dr. Grouse’s office was closed, the two of them sat up with Ragtag as he walked around the den in circles, barking and snapping at things they couldn’t see, and they talked to him in low voices, and told him he was a good dog, and a brave dog, and they weren’t going to leave him alone.

When Patricia went to bed around one, both kids were still sitting up with Ragtag, patting him when his wanderings brought him close, speaking to him, showing him patience that Patricia had never seen in them before. Around four in the morning she woke up with a start and crept downstairs. The three of them lay on the den sofa. Korey and Blue were on either end, asleep. Ragtag lay between them, dead.

They buried him together around the side of the house, and Patricia held both of them while they cried. When Carter came by the next evening and the two of them sat down to tell Korey and Blue they were getting a divorce, Carter laid out how it was going to go.

“This is the way things are going to be,” he said. He’d told Patricia that kids liked certainty and he was the better qualified of the two of them to map this new reality for them. “I’ll be keeping the house on Pierates Cruze and the beach house. I’ll pay for your school and college, you don’t have to worry about that. And you can stay here with me for as long as you want. Because this is your mother’s decision, she’ll be looking for a new place to live. And it may not be very big, and it may be in another part of Mt. Pleasant. She’ll only have the one car, so you probably won’t be able to borrow it to go see your friends. Your mother may even need to move to a new city. I’m not saying these things because I’m trying to punish anyone, but I want you to have a realistic idea of how things are going to change.”

Then he asked them who they wanted to live with during the week. They both surprised Patricia by saying, “Mom.”

IN COLD BLOOD

February 1997

CHAPTER 42

Patricia pulled into the cemetery and got out of her car, tote bag swinging. It was one of those sharp winter days when the sky looked like a great blue dome, white around the bottom, darkening to a saturated robin’s-egg blue at the top. She walked along the winding road that ran between the grave markers and stepped onto the grass when she got to the right row. The dry grass crunched beneath her shoes as she walked to Slick’s stone.

Her inner thigh throbbed like it always did when she walked over uneven ground. Korey felt the same kind of pain, too. It was something they shared. But Patricia refused to accept it was permanent for Korey. They’d already started going to see specialists, and one doctor thought a blood transfusion and a series of synthetic erythropoietin would help Korey produce more red blood cells and that might eliminate the pain. They planned to start as soon as school was out. They only had enough money for one of them to try this treatment. That was fine with Patricia.

Everyone was broke. Leland had declared bankruptcy just after the new year and was selling houses for Kevin Hauck on commission. Kitty and Horse had lost almost everything and were chopping Seewee Farms into parcels, selling it off piecemeal to keep the lights on. Patricia didn’t know how much Carter had sunk into Gracious Cay, but judging by how many times her lawyer had to remind him to send the child support checks, it was a lot.

Everyone assumed James Harris had seen the crisis coming, packed up, and skipped town. No one asked too many questions. After all, tracking him down would be a lot of work, and bringing him back would only lead to awkward questions and no one actually wanted to hear the answers. At the end of the day, some rich white people lost their money. Some poor black people lost their homes. That’s just how it goes.

Patricia had driven out to Gracious Cay in January. The construction equipment had been taken away, and now the frames of the houses stood alone, stark and unfinished, like towering skeletons eroding in the weather. She drove the paved road through the center of the development all the way back to Six Mile. Mrs. Greene had moved to Irmo to be near her boys while they finished high school, but some people were moving back. A gaggle of little children bounced an old tennis ball off the wall of Mt. Zion A.M.E. She saw cars parked in a few driveways and smelled wood smoke coming from a handful of chimneys and settling in the streets.

Before she died, Slick had been working on gifts for everyone and Maryellen had driven around distributing them in December. Patricia had unfolded her pink sweatshirt and held it up to her front. It featured a picture of the baby Jesus asleep in the manger which was, for unknown reasons, beneath a sequined Christmas tree with a real bell on top. In cursive script it read, Remember the Reason for the Season.

“She made one of these for Grace?” Patricia asked.

“I got a picture of her wearing it,” Maryellen said. “Do you want to see?”

“I don’t think I could stand the shock,” Patricia said.

She and the children had their Christmas dinner with Grace and Bennett. After they finished the dishes, while Korey and Blue went out to the car, Grace gave Patricia a bag of wrapped leftovers, then reached into the drawer of her front hall table, pulled out a thick envelope, and tucked it inside.

“Merry Christmas,” she said. “I don’t want to argue about this.”

Patricia put the bag on the table and opened the envelope. It was stuffed with a thick sheaf of worn twenty-dollar bills.

“Grace—” she began.

“When I got married,” Grace said, “my mother gave me this and told me that a wife should always have some of her own money set aside, just in case. I want you to have it now.”

“Thank you,” Patricia said. “I’ll pay you back.”

“No,” Grace said. “You absolutely will not.”

She used part of it to give Korey and Blue the Christmas they deserved. The rest she added to the $2,350 in cash she still had from James Harris and put a deposit down on a furnished condo with two bedrooms near the bridge. Where they were living now only had one and Blue slept on the sofa.

Patricia took a copy of In Cold Blood out of her tote bag and laid it in front of Slick’s headstone. She took out a wineglass and a little screw-cap mini bottle of Kendall-Jackson and filled the glass and set it on top of the book. She made sure it wouldn’t tip over and then did what she always did on these visits and walked over to the aboveground niches, where she found C-24 and C-25. They were blank, without even names on them. There never would be names on them.

Patricia wondered who James Harris had been. How long had he been traveling the country? How many dead children did he leave in his wake? How many little towns like Kershaw had he sucked dry? No one would ever know. He’d probably been alive for so long that he didn’t even know anymore. By the time he came to the Old Village, she imagined, his past was probably one long blur and he existed in an eternal present.

He left no one behind, no children, no shared memories, no history, no one told stories about him. All he left to mark his passing was pain, and that would fade over time. The people he’d killed would be mourned but the people who loved them would move on. They would fall in love again, have more children, grow old, and be mourned by their children in turn.

Not James Harris.

If this were a book it would have been called The Mysterious Disappearance of James Harris, but it wouldn’t be a good mystery because Patricia already knew its solution: the mystery of what happened to James Harris was Patricia Campbell.

But she hadn’t solved it alone.

If Maryellen hadn’t worked at Stuhr’s, if Grace and Mrs. Greene hadn’t been superior house cleaners, if Kitty hadn’t had such a good swing, if Slick hadn’t called them all and convinced them to come together again in her hospital room, if Patricia hadn’t read so many true crime books, if Mrs. Greene hadn’t put the pieces together, if Miss Mary hadn’t found the photograph, if Kitty hadn’t called to her in Marjorie Fretwell’s driveway that day.