The Last of the Moon Girls(53)
“This is my cell phone number,” she said when she finished scribbling. “If you happen to think of anything—anything at all—please call me.”
She had picked up the yearbook and was preparing to leave when Louise put a hand out to stop her. “Before you go . . . I was wondering if I might beg a favor. Penny Castle told me you brought her some tea for her headaches, and I was wondering if there might be some of that baby soap your grandma used to make lying around—the kind that helps put them to sleep. It worked like magic for my little girl, and now my daughter has a little one of her own. Poor thing. She’s a year old and still doesn’t sleep through the night.”
Lizzy knew the soap Louise meant. It was a blend of chamomile, lavender, and oatmeal Althea had whipped up out of desperation when Rhanna was a baby. She had dubbed it Sleepy Baby Soap, and it had quickly become one of her best sellers. But she’d just searched the shop yesterday, and there hadn’t been a bar of soap anywhere.
“I’m afraid my grandmother left the shelves pretty bare.”
“But you could make more,” Louise suggested hopefully. “You must know how she made it. We’ve tried all the things from the store—the washes and the lotions—but nothing works. My daughter’s exhausted.”
Lizzy sympathized with Louise’s daughter, but making soap wasn’t just a matter of whisking a few ingredients together and then slopping it into molds. Good soap was an art form. There were techniques involved, the kind that required time and practice to master. And even if she did agree, there was the cure time to consider—at least four weeks. She doubted she’d even be here in four weeks.
“Soap has to cure, Mrs. Ryerson. It wouldn’t be ready for at least a month, and I’ll be gone by then.”
“Oh, but it wouldn’t need to be ready. It could—cure, did you call it?—at my house. You could make it, and I’ll just pick it up. I can pay you now if you like. My purse is in my locker.”
Lizzy couldn’t help recalling the look on Penny Castle’s face when she had delivered her migraine tea, and how it felt to know she had helped put it there. “We’ll call it a gift instead. I’ll order the ingredients and let you know when it’s ready.”
“My daughter will be so grateful. You don’t know how much a small kindness can mean when you’re at your wit’s end.”
But Lizzy did know. Louise Ryerson had taught her a long time ago that kindness could come in many forms. Sometimes as cookies, sometimes as soap. “I’m happy to help, Mrs. Ryerson.”
Louise held up a finger. “Don’t run off. I have something for you.”
She disappeared through a set of swinging doors, returning a moment later with something wrapped in a paper napkin. “Oatmeal raisin,” she said, with the same kind smile Lizzy remembered. “They were always your favorite.”
NINETEEN
August 3
Lizzy scrubbed her hands on the seat of her jeans and reached for her water bottle. She’d been working in the shop since breakfast—scrubbing windows, purging shelves, cleaning up mouse droppings—and she was finally starting to see progress.
She had called Althea’s supplier yesterday to order the ingredients for Louise Ryerson’s soap, knowing she would have to clean the shop before any work could begin. She still wasn’t sure why she had agreed to make a batch of soap—she had enough on her plate without adding someone else’s expectations to the mix.
A bead of sweat traced its way down Lizzy’s back. August had arrived with a vengeance, and the shop was sweltering. She’d need to bring a fan down from the attic—for the heat as well as the lye fumes. She ran her eyes around the shop as she drained her water bottle, trying to imagine Althea’s apothecary stripped of its counters and shelves. What would the new owners do with it? A guest cottage with lace curtains in the windows? An artist’s studio littered with half-finished watercolors? Storage?
The question shouldn’t bother her, but it did. Generations of Salem Creek residents had sought healing here. Many had found it. Now, on her watch, that would end.
You’re all that’s left, the last and best of us.
Althea’s words haunted her again. But they weren’t true. At least not all of them. She would be the last, but she had certainly never been the best. For her, Moon was just a name, something she’d inherited along with her black hair and strange gray eyes, like her mother, and her mother before her.
Her mother.
That’s where the Moons’ unraveling had begun. With Rhanna. The drinking and the drugs, the steady parade of men and repeated run-ins with the law—a slow-motion mutiny against the life she’d been expected to live. The life all Moon girls were expected to live. Rhanna had never wanted any of it, not the farm, not the shop, and certainly not her family. The murders had given her just the excuse she’d needed to pull up stakes and disappear for good.
That was the part Lizzy couldn’t forgive. Not the leaving—she’d done that too—but the complete vanishing act. No warning. No note. Just an empty dresser and a vacant corner where her guitar used to sit. It never occurred to her that Althea might be worried sick. But then Rhanna never thought of anyone but Rhanna. She was happy bouncing from one calamity to the next, and to hell with whatever mess she might leave behind—including the daughter she’d never wanted.