“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.”
“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.
Patricia plodded downstairs to check on Miss Mary. She walked down the three steps from the den to the converted garage room and let her eyes adjust to the orange glow of the night-light. She saw the old woman, thin and deflated under the sheets of her hospital bed, eyes glittering in the dim light, staring at the ceiling.
“Miss Mary?” Patricia said softly to her mother-in-law. “Do you want anything?”
“There’s an owl,” Miss Mary croaked.
“I don’t see any owls,” Patricia said. “You should get some rest.”
Miss Mary stared at the ceiling, her eyes leaking tears that ran down her temples and into her sparse hair.
“Whether you like it or not,” Miss Mary said, “you’ve got owls.”
She acted worse at night, but Patricia had even noticed that during the day she often couldn’t follow the give-and-take of a conversation anymore and covered her confusion with long stories about people from her past that no one knew. Even Carter couldn’t identify two-thirds of them, but to his credit he always listened and never interrupted.
Patricia checked that Miss Mary had water in the sippy cup by her bed, then went to take out the trash. She took the flashlight with her because Blue wasn’t wrong—it was scary around the side of the house.
The humid night air buzzed with insects as Patricia walked across the harsh black slash where the light from the front porch ended. She walked into the thick darkness around the side of the house at a brisk pace, forcing herself to wait three steps before clicking on the flashlight, just to prove she was brave. The first thing she saw was one of Miss Mary’s blue incontinence pads in the dirt. A short length of fence projected from the side of the house, hiding the rolling cans from the street, but even from here Patricia could tell both cans had been tipped over. The nervousness she felt vanished in a flash of irritation. Blue really should be the one cleaning this up.
Behind the fence two mounds of fat white garbage bags spilled from both cans. The oven-hot air smelled thick with the dank, earthy scent of coffee grounds and Miss Mary’s adult diapers. Mosquitoes buzzed in her ears.
Patricia scanned the damage with her flashlight: napkins, coffee filters, apple cores, Toaster Strudel boxes, wadded Kleenex, folded blue incontinence pads. Either raccoons or really big marsh rats had gotten into the trash and torn everything to shreds.
The biggest white bag had been dragged into the narrow alley between the blank brick wall of their house and the stand of bamboo marking the boundary of the Clarks’ house behind them. She heard the slurping sound of someone eating jelly as she flicked her flashlight up to the bag.
It was cloth, actually, and not white but pale pink, and covered in rosebuds. It had dirty bare feet and when the flashlight beam struck it, it turned its face into the light.
“Oh!” Patricia said.
The harsh white beam picked out every detail with unforgiving clarity. The old woman squatted in a pink nightgown, cheeks
smeared with red jam, lips bristling with stiff black hairs, chin quivering with clear slime. She crouched over something dark in her lap. Patricia saw a raccoon’s nearly severed head hanging upside down over the old woman’s knees, tongue sticking out between its bared fangs. The old woman reached one gory hand into its open belly and scooped up a fistful of translucent guts. She raised that hand, shiny with animal grease, to her mouth and gnawed on the pale lavender tube of intestines while squinting into the flashlight beam.
“May I help you?” Patricia asked, because she didn’t know what else to say.
The old woman slowed her gnawing and sniffed the air like an animal. The heavy smell of fresh feces, the suffocating stench of spilled garbage, the iron reek of the raccoon’s blood forced their way up Patricia’s nose. She gagged, stepping backward, and her heel hit something soft. She sat down suddenly in the pile of greasy white bags, struggling to get up, trying to keep the flashlight beam centered on the old woman because she was safe as long as she could see the old woman, but the old woman was halfway to her already, crawling on her hands and knees, coming too fast, plowing through the spilled garbage, dragging the raccoon’s forgotten corpse along by its head.
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” Patricia chanted.
A hand gripped her shin, hot through her pants leg. The other hand released the raccoon and gripped Patricia’s hip. The old woman put all her body weight on Patricia, pressing her down onto something that dug into her right kidney. Patricia tried to thrash backward, or up, or away, but she couldn’t get any leverage and sank deeper into the pile of bags.
The old woman hauled herself up Patricia’s body, mouth open, slaver swinging from it in glistening ribbons, eyes wide and mindless like a bird’s. One of her filthy hands, tacky and rough with raccoon gore, burrowed past Patricia’s collar and clutched the side of her neck, and then she dragged her body, warm and soft like a slug’s, completely over Patricia’s front.
Something about her long white hair pulled back in a ponytail, frail neck, and clunky digital watch worn around one wrist snapped into place.
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires Page 4