“Probably not, but your gran set it up before she died. She loved that greenhouse.”
“I know she did,” Lizzy said somberly, opting to let the matter drop. “Thanks for breakfast. I’ll be back in a bit.”
Lizzy stepped out the back door and headed for the greenhouse, as good a place as any to begin her tour. Evvie’s assessment of its condition had been generous at best. Several of the glass panes were cracked; others were missing entirely. Inside, the tables were mostly bare, strewn here and there with rusty tools and stacks of empty clay pots. In one corner, several bags of potting soil had split open, spilling their contents onto the packed earth floor.
She walked the lavender fields next, or what remained of them. Hidcote, Grosso, Folgate, Lavance. They had all grown here once upon a time—Althea’s pride and joy. Now, only stunted patches of green remained, leggy and budless after too many untended winters. The sight made her heart sink. Why hadn’t Althea picked up the phone and asked for help?
The question quickly segued to another. Would she have come? If Althea had in fact picked up the phone, would she have dropped everything and returned to the farm? She wanted to believe the answer was yes, but she couldn’t help wondering. The truth was she’d never considered such a scenario, preferring to pretend Althea would live forever, because anything else was simply unthinkable.
She arrived at the apple orchard a short time later to find that it had fared only slightly better. While the trees themselves seemed not to have suffered, the ground was riddled with last year’s fruit, left to decay where it had fallen, luring swarms of greedy yellow jackets. A small wooden shed stood beyond the last row of the trees, its shingled roof sagging and green with moss. In better days, it had been used to store bushel baskets and picking poles for the locals who would descend each fall to pick their own apples—back before the Gilman girls went missing.
Strangely enough, speculation about Althea’s role in the disappearance had initially been a boon for business, luring curiosity seekers eager to purchase a vial of lavender oil in exchange for a glimpse of the woman suspected of murdering two teenage girls. For nearly three weeks speculation grew and the money had poured in. For those who knew Althea, locals who’d come to trust her remedies and charms over the years, the talk seemed ludicrous. But even they began to doubt when the swollen bodies of Heather and Darcy Gilman were recovered from the pond and zipped into heavy black bags. Overnight, the avalanche of customers slowed to a trickle. Eight years later, the memories were still fresh, a wound that had never quite scarred over. But how could it when the questions continued to fester?
Lizzy turned away from the orchard, heading for the woods and the trail Althea had walked nearly every day. She had made it a point to spend time among the trees every morning. Her prayer time, she’d called it, which made sense. The woods had been her temple, sacred in a way no stone edifice could ever be. But she would never walk here again, never forage for mushrooms and wild herbs, never return from her walk with some feather, or bird’s nest, or bit of horn she’d discovered along the way.
A warm breeze suddenly shivered through the trees. Lizzy lifted her nose, catching the unmistakable scents of lavender and bergamot. It was only a whiff, the kind that clings to scarves and sweaters long after the wearer has shed them, but the sensation was so palpable that it felt like an actual presence, and for an instant she half expected to turn and find her grandmother standing behind her with an old willow trug tucked into the crook of her arm.
It was just wishful thinking, wasn’t it? Sensing a loved one’s presence after they were gone? Believing they were still nearby, watching over those they held dear? She’d heard of such things, everyone had, but she’d always chalked them up to grief. Now she wasn’t so sure. What she’d just experienced—a fleeting but bone-deep certainty that she wasn’t alone—was hard to dismiss. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
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