The Last of the Moon Girls(14)

Lizzy forced her feet to move, knowing all at once exactly where she was going—perhaps where she’d always intended to go.



Lizzy slowed as she caught her first glimpse of the pond. The last time she saw it, there were policemen in wet suits and divers’ masks crawling through the cattails and common reed along its banks. But before that—before the Gilman girls and the body bags—her mother had come here to swim during the sticky New England summers. Once, she had even been invited to tag along.

It was one of the rare times—perhaps the only time—Rhanna had invited her anywhere, and for a few brief weeks, Lizzy had been foolish enough to think things between them might change, that at long last Rhanna was ready to actually be her mother, instead of leaving those duties to Althea. But that was the summer Rhanna abruptly stopped swimming, and that had been the end of that. She left a few weeks later.

Not that she’d been surprised. It was always Rhanna’s way, to live her life in fits and starts. She’d never had any real roots to Moon Girl Farm. Staying had merely been the path of least resistance—three meals a day and a roof over her head, and the freedom to come and go as she pleased. She had steered clear of the day-to-day work of the farm, choosing to busk on street corners instead, crooning folk ballads for whatever passersby might toss into her battered guitar case, or to read cards at the downtown market, wearing a head scarf and enormous hoop earrings. It had never earned her much, but it kept her in cheap booze or whatever else she happened to be into, and for Rhanna that had been enough.

Lizzy shrugged off the memories and inched closer to the bank. The ground felt spongy, the damp grass slick under the soles of her boots, and for a moment she imagined herself skidding headlong into the reeds. She dug in her heels, unwilling to go closer, her arms hugged tight to her body as she gazed past the reeds to the shiny-dark water beyond.

It had never been very deep. Just deep enough.

The thought brought a shiver and the sudden chill of memory. Sodden hair dark with mud and a tangle of slimy weeds, a face rendered unrecognizable by weeks in the water. That was the Moons’ legacy now—those girls and that day. And it would continue to be their legacy, as long as there was one person alive who remembered it.

Harm none.

It was their creed, and one her grandmother had taken very seriously. It was why they were vegetarian, because harm none meant animals too. How could anyone think her capable of harming two young girls?

Lizzy squeezed her eyes shut, remembering the moment WKSN news had broken into the season finale of The Good Wife to report that two local girls had gone missing, and that police suspected foul play. No one could have predicted what happened next. How events would unfold to implicate an innocent woman, to rob her of friends, livelihood—and eventually her family. A guilty verdict without a trial.

How had her grandmother lived with it?

Worse still—how had she died with it? Knowing there would always be some who chose to believe the whispers? In her Book of Remembrances, Althea had written of the Moon line, of her fear that it would soon be broken. Couldn’t she see that it was already broken? That there was nothing to salvage, no way to clean up the story Salem Creek had already written?

You’re all that’s left now, the last and best of us.

The words returned to taunt Lizzy. She might be the last, but she certainly wasn’t the best. If she were, she wouldn’t be in such a hurry to be rid of Moon Girl Farm. She’d stay and make things right. Fight to clear Althea’s name. But was that even possible?

As far as she knew, the police had failed to come up with a single viable lead, content in the absence of any real evidence to let the court of public opinion decide. And the public—or most of it at any rate—had been only too happy to oblige. That there’d been no trial, no conviction, no sentence, was immaterial. People knew what they knew, and that was that.

But if it was true that there would always be someone who remembered the day the Gilman girls came out of the water, it might also be true that someone, somewhere, remembered the day they’d gone into it. Perhaps someone who knew something they didn’t realize they knew. And maybe that was reason enough to try.





FIVE

Andrew Greyson stepped over the low stone wall separating his family’s land from the Moons’, determined to finally begin the greenhouse repairs he’d promised to start nearly six months ago. He hated that Althea had died before he could make good on his promise, but winter had gone on forever, and then there’d been a backlog of renovation clients that needed placating. He thought there’d be more time—she’d always been such a tough old bird—but things had gone quickly at the end, which he supposed was a blessing.

And yet here he was, toolbox in hand. Because a promise was a promise, especially one made to a dying woman. And Althea wasn’t just any woman; she’d been part of his life for as long as he could remember, going back to the weekends he’d spent at the farm, helping his father, who, when not running the local hardware store, had enjoyed playing handyman. When Andrew moved back from Chicago four years ago and found his father in failing health, it had seemed natural that he’d step in as Moon Girl Farm’s handyman.

There wasn’t much he hadn’t patched or mended over the years. He knew every inch of the place: every leaky faucet, rickety gate, and tricky fireplace flue, not to mention the groaning furnace and fritzy wiring. He’d done his best over the years to help hold the place together, but two hundred years of damp springs and snowy winters had taken an inevitable toll, meaning long-term repairs needed to happen sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t be cheap, and although Althea had never said so directly, he suspected money was scarce.