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.
It would be sold eventually, perhaps as a fixer-upper, though as an architect specializing in the renovation of historic properties, his advice would be to raze it all to the ground and start from scratch. And yet the thought rankled. Something about the place—its history and its secrets—had gotten under his skin as a boy, and had never quite let go of him.
Okay, not something—someone.
Elzibeth Moon.
Lizzy.
She’d been part of his life for years too, though that particular street ran in only one direction. Nearly twenty years later he could still see her, emerging from the woods in a shower of autumn leaves, her dark hair caught on the wind, like something from another world, and so damn beautiful she’d made his throat ache. Until that moment he’d had only a vague awareness of her, the memory of a young girl peeling apples in her grandmother’s kitchen, all knees and elbows and enormous gray eyes. And then that day in the woods, when he realized the skinny little girl had become a young woman of strange and startling beauty.
She’d gone still at the sight of him, eyeing him like a skittish colt. There’d been a flash of something quick and sharp as their eyes locked. Recognition? Defiance? All these years later he still couldn’t say. The encounter hadn’t lasted long—the space of a few heartbeats—but in those few taut moments, without so much as a word or a nod, she had bewitched him. And had then proceeded to treat him as if he were invisible. At school, in town, even at the farm, she’d gone out of her way to steer clear of him. And who could blame her, when he’d stood there staring like a lovesick calf?
It wasn’t until she left for school that he’d finally taken his father’s advice to stop mooning over that girl and go live up to your potential. And so he’d packed his car and headed to grad school. He’d done well for himself too, graduating top of his class with a job waiting at one of the most prestigious architectural firms in Chicago. But the Windy City had quickly lost its shine, and when his father finally came clean about the cancer, returning to Salem Creek had been a no-brainer.
He had assumed Lizzy would do the same when Althea got sick, but she hadn’t. He got it, sort of. She’d never been comfortable in Salem Creek, and the witch hunt that had ensued when the Gilman girls disappeared certainly hadn’t helped. He was a Granite Stater down to his bones, but he wasn’t blind to the sometimes priggish beliefs of small New England towns, or the damage those beliefs could do when turned on an entire family.
The last he heard she was in New York, making perfume. Good for her, if she was happy. God knows she deserved it after all the crap she’d endured.
He’d been walking mindlessly, lost in his memories, but now, as he approached the place where the path forked off to the right, he registered the crunch of footsteps. He halted, turning toward the sound. For one addled moment, he entertained the possibility that he had stumbled through some sort of time warp, that the years had rewound themselves, hurtling him back to that chance meeting so many years ago. His next thought was that he’d lost his grip on reality. It wasn’t until she turned to face him that he realized she was actually there, staring back at him as if no time had passed at all. His breath caught as their gazes locked, as if he’d just been sucker punched. Was it any wonder people believed what they did about the Moon girls?
SIX
Lizzy went still as she approached the fork in the path, startled by what she assumed was a squirrel scurrying about in the underbrush. She peered through the trees, scanning left, then right, as the sound drew closer. She saw him then—Andrew Greyson—coming through the trees, wearing jeans and heavy work boots, carrying a battered red toolbox.
Her breath caught as their eyes locked and an eerie sense of déjà vu crept over her. What was he doing here? Now? Again?
She eyed the toolbox in his right hand. Evvie had said someone would be coming by to repair the greenhouse. That it turned out to be Andrew Greyson shouldn’t really surprise her. He’d been a kind of fixture around the farm when they were kids, and even at school, always turning up at awkward moments, like some jock in shining armor, always bent on rescuing her, whether she wanted him to or not.
There was the time he’d ambushed her at homecoming assembly. She’d been sitting by herself, as usual, when he dropped down beside her, grinning goofily as he held out an open pack of Twizzlers. Every eye in the gym had suddenly fixed on them. At least that’s how it felt at the time. She’d wanted to crawl under her seat. Instead, to the delight of his jock pals, sitting two rows up, she’d bolted. Unfortunately, it hadn’t deterred him. He kept turning up, tagging along with his father when he came to repair a faucet or a bit of fencing, appearing out of nowhere to offer her a ride home when the sky opened up one day and rained pea-size hail all over Salem Creek. And then the night at the fountain, when Rhanna had made a drunken spectacle of herself in front of the whole town, he had turned up again, to rescue her from the hecklers. It still baffled her. He’d been one of the hottest guys in school, honor student, captain of the football team, the clichéd big man on campus. She couldn’t imagine what he’d want with someone like her. Maybe it was pity. Or curiosity. The Moons were nothing if not curious.