“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.”
“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.