The Last of the Moon Girls(98)

She was rewrapping the cheese when she paused. Something—what was it—had caught her attention. Something she should be noticing or remembering. She looked down at the deli paper she’d been refolding with a sudden flash of clarity. Not art paper. Butcher paper. The kind that might be used at a meatpacking plant.

On impulse, she tore off a small square and held it to the light. Heavy but not expensive. No watermark. She closed her eyes, remembering words scrawled in red crayon.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

The floor seemed to tilt as the pieces shifted and fell together.

Call Andrew. No, not Andrew. Roger.

Voice mail picked up on the fourth ring. Lizzy smothered a groan, praying she wouldn’t have to wait days for a return call. “It’s Lizzy. Call me the minute you get this. I need to run something by you.”

She waited, staring at the phone, willing it to ring while her brain continued to tie itself in knots. Was she grasping at straws? Seeing bogeymen where none existed?

When ten minutes stretched to thirty and Roger still hadn’t called, she slid the phone into her pocket, and headed for the barn. She needed to get out of her head, to do something productive instead of standing around, dwelling on her runaway thoughts.

The barn was cool and dark as she stepped inside. She flipped on the lights, then rolled up her sleeves, eager to see how the oil blend had aged. She unscrewed the cap from the small amber bottle, dabbed a bit on her wrist, and inhaled, slow and deep. Next, she held her wrist about an inch from her mouth, closed her eyes, and inhaled through her parted lips, allowing the scent to pass over her tongue and into her throat, a kind of back door to the nasal passages.

Dark, woody, moist, and green.

Not a perfect re-creation of the original, but as close as possible with nothing but memory and her nose to guide her. It was time to begin the dilution phase. Then two weeks to rest, and she’d be ready to bottle.

She pulled her phone from her pocket and laid it on the workbench, then scared up a pen and set to work on her calculations. She was thinking an eau de toilette at an 85 percent dilution. Not only would it lighten the overall fragrance; it would also increase her yield. She made a mental note to calculate how many bottles she’d need to order.

She had just finished her calculations and was unscrewing the cap from a bottle of perfumer’s alcohol when her cell rang. She pounced on it. “Roger. Thanks for calling me back.”

“I just got off a call. Heard you had a visitor last night. Are you okay?”

“Andrew called?”

“No. A friend at SCPD. I asked if you were okay.”

“Yeah. I came down the stairs, saw him, and bolted. But never mind that. What do you know about Dennis Hanley?”

There was a pause while Roger shifted gears. “Why?”

“Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I had an odd moment at the market today. Helen Hanley rang up my groceries. As I was leaving, she bumped into me—hard—then told me I should be careful, that she’d hate to see me get hurt. I thought she was just being rude. But the more I thought about it, the more it felt like something else. When I went back to talk to her, I saw that she had a bruise on her cheek. She’d tried covering it with makeup, but I could still see it. And then Dennis showed up. She was terrified of him, Roger. And I don’t blame her. He was wearing a white coat smeared with dried blood. He must have just left his shift at the meatpacking plant. I didn’t put it together until I got home and unwrapped a package of cheese from the deli.”

“Cheese?”

“It was wrapped in white paper. Butcher paper—like they’d use at a meatpacking plant.”

There was another pause while he connected the dots. “The note,” he said finally. “You think Dennis wrote the note.”

“I’m crazy, right? Putting two and two together and coming up with five?”

“Maybe not. In fact . . .”

Lizzy waited for him to finish. When he didn’t, she prodded him. “In fact what?”

“It’s something I heard from a buddy right after Hollis died. New guy got the call—Steve Gaffney. He was a good guy, but he bungled it a little bit.”

Lizzy’s pulse ticked up. “Bungled how?”

“He claimed there was a note at the house, a suicide note essentially. Hollis’s wife found it tacked up on the refrigerator, and gave it to Gaffney when he showed up to tell her about the wreck. He said she was crying, but didn’t seem that surprised by the news.”

“What was in the note?”

“The kind of stuff a man writes when he’s on the edge. According to Helen, he came back from Afghanistan pretty wrecked. She begged him to get help, to join a support group, but Dennis put a stop to that. Said the Hanleys deal with their own problems.”

“Spoken like a true expert on PTSD,” Lizzy muttered.

“That’s the thing. Hollis was never actually diagnosed with PTSD.”

“Maybe not officially, but something must’ve happened over there. A year after he comes back he commits suicide? What did the note say?”

“Nobody knows. Gaffney screwed up and left the note behind. Rookie mistake, I guess. Your first DRT can shake you up pretty bad, especially if it’s messy, which this one was.”

“DRT?”

“Sorry, it’s police slang for dead right there.”