The Last of the Moon Girls(60)
An hour later, they were all seated around the kitchen table. Lizzy would have been happy to eat in silence, but Andrew seemed determined to draw Rhanna out.
“So I have to ask. What on earth possesses someone to hitchhike from California to New Hampshire?”
Rhanna flashed him a grin. “The same thing that motivates someone to hitchhike anywhere, I guess. Empty pockets. Or nearly empty. I had to sell my van to take care of some people I owed, which left me with exactly eighty-nine dollars, my guitar, and my thumb.”
Andrew looked at her in astonishment, and perhaps the tiniest bit of admiration. “You left California with less than a hundred dollars in your pocket?”
“I’ve always been resourceful.”
Lizzy rolled her eyes. “That’s one word for it.”
Andrew acknowledged the snipe with the barest of glances, then returned his attention to Rhanna. “What did you do in San Francisco? I remember you used to paint.”
“I did, but I had to give it up. Couldn’t afford the supplies. I sang in coffee shops, read cards, told fortunes. I didn’t make much, but it was enough to feed me most of the time, and I had friends who’d let me crash on their couch when things got really tight. It was your basic ‘Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves’ existence, but it suited me.”
Lizzy put down her wineglass with a snort. “And what about now? Does it suit you now?” She was glaring at Rhanna openly, disgusted by the entire performance, as if she were some fascinating bohemian simply marching to the beat of her own drum. Did she honestly believe anyone was going to buy that after the disasters she’d left in her wake?
Rhanna’s smile slipped. “I’ve learned to take life as it comes.”
“Better known as leaving your messes for other people to clean up.”
Andrew caught her eye, as if hoping to stave off the scene he knew was coming. Lizzy met his gaze without apology. After years of not knowing whether Rhanna was alive or dead, she’d been blindsided by her sudden return. She was entitled to a scene.
She pushed back her plate, swiveling her attention back to Rhanna. “Do us all a favor and skip the clever banter. You might have been too stoned to remember how things were—how you were—but my memory’s fine. Shoplifting from the drugstore. Passing out drunk at the Fourth of July parade. Picketing the VFW on Veterans Day. Every time I turned around, you were doing something to embarrass us.”
Rhanna met her gaze, shoulders hunched. “Lizzy, please—”
“Please what? Please don’t shame you like you shamed us?”
“I never meant—”
“Why don’t you tell us what you’re really after, Rhanna? Because we both know you weren’t homesick. You took off and never bothered to let anyone know you were alive. Now, you show up expecting me to roll out the welcome mat. Did you really think that’s how this would go?”
“Of course I didn’t. I know what you think of me—what everyone thinks of me.”
“Then why did you come?”
“I told you . . .”
“I know what you told me. Now I’m telling you—if you schlepped halfway across the country with your guitar on your back because you thought your ship had come in, you wasted your time.”
Rhanna looked as if she’d just been slapped. “That’s what you think? That I came here for money? You know me better than that.”
If Lizzy hadn’t been so furious, she might have laughed out loud. Know her? In what world would such a thing have ever been possible? When she was usually too drunk or high to remember her own name, let alone the name of her daughter?
Lizzy pushed her chair back and stood. “That’s where you’re wrong, Rhanna. I don’t know you at all. I’ve never known you. You made sure of that.”
TWENTY-TWO
Bloody hell.
Andrew stood at the edge of the orchard, his gut knotted like a fist. He had smelled the ash long before reaching the scene, had even imagined what he would find when he arrived, but nothing Evvie said had prepared him for what he was looking at: blackened trees, scorched ground, a heap of charred timber where the shed once stood.
Arson. Evvie had whispered the word out in the garden, explaining that the investigators had discovered a pair of kerosene torches among the rubble. The thought made his blood run cold. It could just as easily have been the house.
He’d touch base with Guy McCardle first thing in the morning. Randall Summers might not take his job seriously, but Guy was a straight arrow. If there was something to know, he’d know it.
He turned and headed east, the setting sun at his back as he walked the perimeter of the orchard, peering down each row as he went. Lizzy was here somewhere. He had known it instinctively when he left the house, ignoring Evvie’s suggestion that he let her have some time to herself. They needed to talk, now, and not just about the fire.
He found her ten minutes later, sitting cross-legged with her back against an old stump, head bent, eyes closed. Was she crying? Praying? Did she pray? He’d wondered a lot of things about her over the years, but never that.
His chest tightened as he approached her. He’d run through a dozen conversations in his head on the way here. Now, suddenly, he didn’t know what to say. She didn’t lift her head, but he could tell she knew he was there. “Lizzy.”