The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,11

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