Louise pulled off her glasses and gave them a wipe, then returned them to her nose and bent her head to the open yearbook. Lizzy sat with her hands pressed between her knees, silent but alert for even the faintest flicker of recognition.

It took nearly twenty minutes, but Louise finally reached the last page. She closed the book with a shake of her head. “I’m sorry. No.”

“No?” Lizzy did her best to hide her disappointment. “No one looks familiar?”

“There’s not a face that jumps out at me, except that Gilman girl’s. And yours, of course. You were always such a pretty thing. Still are. But that’s not why you came, is it, to hear me go on about you being pretty?”

Lizzy shook her head.

Louise met her gaze squarely, her expression one of genuine sympathy. “I know how badly you must want to get at the truth, and I wish I could help. Truly, I do. But after so many years, the faces blend together. The only reason I recognize that poor girl now is because her face was all over the news, along with her sister’s. As for names, I was never any good with those.”

“But you always remembered my name,” Lizzy protested. “You remembered it today.”

“Ahh . . .” Louise smiled, leaning in as if to share a great secret. “But you were never one to blend in. Even then, you were your own girl.”

Lizzy wasn’t sure how to respond. Louise had meant the words kindly, but to someone who’d spent her entire scholastic career trying to blend into the scenery, the news that she had failed so completely wasn’t exactly welcome. She managed a smile as she reached into her purse for pen and paper.

“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.

Lizzy had been five or six when she realized her relationship with Rhanna wasn’t normal, when she started school and saw how other mothers—real mothers—looked and dressed and acted. Rhanna had never been the healthy-snack, Purell-packing kind of mom. She’d been too busy partying to bother with things like checking homework or shopping for backpacks. Althea had done those things.

In third grade, her teacher had invited all the moms to come in and help the kids decorate Christmas cookies. Rhanna had been the only no-show, leaving Lizzy with a dozen gingerbread men to decorate on her own. Mrs. Gleason had taken pity on her and stepped in, assuring her as they piped frosting onto the crispy brown men that something must have come up to keep her mother from being there.

What Mrs. Gleason didn’t know was that two weeks earlier, Lizzy had dropped the take-home flyer into the first trash can she passed on the walk home. She couldn’t bear the thought of Rhanna showing up in her tie-dyed T-shirt and stringy bell-bottoms, standing next to moms in pastel twinsets and neatly pressed khakis. Being teased for being stood up seemed infinitely better than being teased for having a hippie mom who reeked of pot and patchouli.

But that was water under the bridge. She was here, and Rhanna was somewhere else. Or maybe she wasn’t anywhere. She’d probably never know, and it didn’t matter. Not really.

A shadow suddenly darkened the doorway. Lizzy turned to find Evvie behind her, a grin on her face and a glass of lemonade in her hand. “As my mama would say, you look like you could use a good scrub.”

Lizzy peered at her grime-streaked hands, then wiped them on the front of her T-shirt. “I’m afraid I’d have to agree with her.”

Evvie stepped inside, running her eyes around the shop. “You’ve been busy, I see. Wish your gran was here to see it.”

“Me too,” Lizzy sighed, recalling the days when the shelves had been lined with an assortment of tonics and remedies, each bottle and jar hand-labeled in Althea’s careful script. Now the shelves stood empty, and those days seemed a lifetime ago. She accepted the lemonade from Evvie, downing half of it in one go, then wiped her mouth, leaving a fresh smear of grit on her chin. “What am I doing, Evvie?”