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debutantes. No grinning daddys. No homage to the same five last names. Instead, old money had given way to the new elite: businessmen and political leaders. People like the CEOs of nearby research and development firms, flanked by their thin northern wives. They were joined by the well-groomed homegrown politicos and their well-groomed but not always so thin wives. That was one thing I liked about the South. The really rich might still be really thin—especially the nouveau riche—but, face it, when you have homemade pound cake and pork barbecue and mounds of hushpuppies waiting at every fundraiser, who the hell can expect a woman to retain her girlish figure? Not the tubby male veterans of the campaign wars. In North Carolina, it was accepted practice to put on five additional pounds for each year you were in office and if your wife got a little plump too, you didn’t turn her in for a new one like those northern heathens did.
    I found Mary Lee all over the damn place. She was at home in society. And her weight was not an issue. She was neither thin enough to arouse envy nor plump enough to lose the babe vote. She was just right and I suspected her advisors polled the populace each week on how well-fed they liked their lady politicians to be. She had something about her, I had to admit, a shining intelligence that made everyone around her look just a little bit dull, even in photographs. Maybe it was no more real than that bright brittle cheer you find plastered all over beauty pageant contestants, but it looked real and that was what mattered. I spotted her standing next to the governor and his wife at a benefit concert, welcoming the vice president at the airport in another photograph, and opening up a new Sunday school for an acre of small black children somewhere down in eastern North Carolina. She looked at ease in every single setting.
    Thornton Mitchell was a different story. For one thing, he had attended different functions. And he wasn’t at the pinnacle of power like Mary Lee. He was one of those back-room guys, the kind that circles the candidates like lamprey eels searching for a soft spot. He popped up regularly in photographs of conservative fundraisers, his sleek black hair, tanned brown skin, and tailored suits making him look like a well-fed seal rising from a sea of attendees. The archivist had done a good job of bringing the N&O into the twenty-first century. I found shots of Mitchell in the photo library going back thirty years. I suspected he’d had a face lift or two over the years since his chins had a habit of disappearing.
    One thing, however, never changed: the age of the girl hanging on his arm. In every single photograph taken during the last fifteen years, Thornton Mitchell held a drink in one hand and a very young blonde or redhead in the other. Put his repertoire together and you’d have a six- pack of Barbie dolls, all hairsprayed and squeezed into tight short dresses. I could see them now, sitting in front of the mirrors in the powder room of the governor’s mansion, examining minute flaws in their mascara, adjusting their silk sheen control top pantyhose and practicing that blank stare young babes get when they don’t want to say the wrong thing and are a little awed by the company. God, what were they doing with a drooling old geezer like Thornton? The thought of letting him touch me made my skin crawl.
    I tried to find some sympathy for Mitchell, but failed. He was a real estate developer and, in my family’s book, that made him no better than the carpetbaggers that my grandpa hated so much—a hatred passed down from his own father. Carpetbaggers had been the ones to take away our land, leading us down that rutted road to rusty trailers and broken-down trucks. How was Thornton Mitchell any different? He was destroying the South just as surely as opportunists after the big war. Just because he was raised here didn’t excuse him. It only made it worse.
    I noticed a funny thing