The Last of the Moon Girls

by Barbara Davis

THIRTY-EIGHT

  Lizzy’s first impulse on the drive home was to call Andrew and tell him Dennis Hanley was battering his sister-in-law and should be fired immediately. But did she know that for sure? That Helen was afraid couldn’t be denied. She’d caught the faint tinge of urine on her breath—an ammonia-like odor she’d always registered as fear. And the bruise on her face was real enough. But did the two necessarily add up to assault?

  There was no sign of Andrew’s truck as she pulled up, either in her driveway or his. Inside, she found a pair of shiny silver keys on the kitchen counter, along with a note.

  Mudroom door lock has been replaced. Off to Boston—A.G.

  Lizzy read the note several times. It was hard to ignore the clipped tone, the use of initials—first and last—instead of his name. Cool. Distant. But that was what she wanted, wasn’t it—distance? She considered calling him, running her suspicions about Dennis by him, but if she was serious about closing the door between them, he couldn’t be her first phone call every time something went wrong. If she was determined not to want him, she wasn’t allowed to need him.

  Resolved, she began unpacking her groceries, separating what she would take to Andrew’s, and what would stay. Her stomach rumbled as she pulled out a parcel wrapped in white deli paper and opened it. She rolled a piece of swiss cheese and clamped it between her teeth, then rolled another. She hadn’t eaten since Andrew’s scrambled eggs this morning.

  Had that really been only this morning?

  She pushed the thought aside, focusing on her to-do list instead. It was a little after three. If she played her cards right, she could spend an hour in the barn, then another hour or two scrubbing fingerprint dust, and still make it to Andrew’s by dark. It would feel strange sleeping alone in Andrew’s bed, an uncomfortable reminder of just how careless she’d been with his feelings—and her own. But the truth was, she was still a little jumpy after last night.

  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.”

  “Nice.”

  “Not really, no. But it’s a coping thing. Anyway, when they went back for the note, it had disappeared.”

  “How does a note disappear?”

  “With help. By the time they got back to the house, Dennis was there and Helen had developed a severe case of amnesia. Claimed she never saw the note. When they pressed her, Dennis stepped in. Said Helen had been through enough, and he’d be handling things going forward. There was no suspicion of foul play, so they let it go. People are funny about suicide, squeamish. But the disappearing note rubbed Gaffney wrong. There were a few lines that stuck with him, about how some people deserve what happens to them, while others just get caught in someone else’s nightmare, and how he was going
to hell for what he’d done.”

  “Well, it fits, doesn’t it? He must have seen some awful things in Afghanistan—maybe even did some awful things—and it obviously haunted him. Maybe Dennis knew too, and didn’t want anyone poking around and finding out.”

  “That’s how it reads if you don’t know the whole story. But Gaffney couldn’t let it go. He knows a guy Hollis was stationed with, and the way he tells it, Hollis Hanley never fired his weapon. First mission out, their unit got into a mess. They were pinned down in some shelled-out building, taking heavy fire. Hollis shouldered his weapon, and then . . . nothing. He froze. A couple of guys managed to drag him down before he got himself killed. They found him a noncombat role, but it was no good. Something in him was broken. He wound up getting separated. Sorry, it means discharged.”

  Lizzy digested Roger’s words, laying the pieces end to end. “If Roger didn’t kill anyone in Afghanistan, why did he think he was going to hell?”

  “Now you see where I’m going.”

  The gears turned slowly, eventually clicking into place. “You think he committed suicide because of Heather and Darcy—because he killed them. And Dennis knew.”

  “It was years after the murders. Not likely anyone would have connected the dots back to Heather and Darcy. But now I think it bears looking at. It would explain Dennis getting rid of the note. He was always Hollis’s protector. Maybe that didn’t end when Hollis died. Maybe he wanted to make sure no one would ever ask the kinds of questions we’re asking now. Then you show up and start digging.”

  Lizzy sat with that last part. The note. The fire. The silhouette in the kitchen. “Helen was trying to warn me. She knew Dennis was behind everything that was going on.”

  “It’s just a theory, but it fits.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We don’t do anything,” Roger told her pointedly. “If we’re right, and there’s a good chance we are, Dennis Hanley is a dangerous man. Summers can’t bury it this time. Where’s Andrew?”

  “In Boston. On a job.”

  “You might want to give him a call. Let him know what’s happening. I’ve got a few calls of my own to make. Stay near your phone.”

  Lizzy put down her cell and splayed both hands on the workbench. Andrew had enough on his plate in Boston. She’d call him tonight, after she heard back from Roger. In the meantime, she’d get some work done, and try to wrap her head around the possibility that Heather and Darcy Gilman’s killer might actually be brought to light, if not to justice, that at long last Althea’s name might be cleared.

  Things were beginning to tie up, the pieces of what she’d come here to do all nearly in place. The loan had come through. Once she lined up the repair work, and signed with Rhanna’s real estate friend, there’d be nothing keeping her here. Rhanna and Evvie could stay until the farm sold, and see to the contents of the house when the time came. It was time to call Luc and commit to a return date. And finish the Earth Song for Rhanna. She’d make it a going-away present.

  The thought brought an unexpected heaviness as she reached for a glass beaker and began filling it with alcohol. She had one eye on her phone, the other on the pad she’d used to jot down her calculations, when she suddenly stopped pouring. There’d been no sound, no movement caught out of the corner of her eye, just a subtle shift in the air around her, alerting her that she was no longer alone.

  THIRTY-NINE

  She recognized Dennis’s silhouette the instant she turned.

  He stood motionless in the doorway, arms hanging slack at his sides. Her heart thudded against her ribs as she waited for him to speak, but he just stood there, eyes flat, and yet strangely riveted. Finally, he pulled the door closed and began moving toward her, his steps slow but deliberate.

  Lizzy’s mind whirred as she calculated the odds of escape. There was zero chance that she’d get past him this time, and consequently no hope of reaching the door.

  “You’ve got no business here,” she said, fighting to keep the panic from her voice as she edged toward the end of the workbench and her cell phone. “Leave. Now.”

  Dennis continued to advance. She could see his face now, ruddy and sweating, his lower jaw shot forward like a bulldog’s. He had swapped the blood-smeared coat for a bulky camouflage jacket that seemed all wrong for a sticky August afternoon.

  She caught a whiff of him, the now-familiar mud-and-blood stench, mingled with alcohol. He’d been drinking since she’d last seen him, heavily if she was any judge, though she wasn’t sure whether that worked in her favor or against it. The alcohol might have slowed him by a step. Or it might have just stoked his temper. Her money was on the latter.

  “You,” he slurred, as he continued to close the distance between them. “You think you’re so smart. Coming back here after all these years, poking around in things that are none of your business. Like you’re goddamn Columbo or something.”

  “Heather and Darcy Gilman are my business.”

  “And my sister-in-law—she your business too? And my brother?”

  Lizzy sidled to her left, another step closer to her phone. “I never really knew Hollis—”

  “Don’t you say his name to me! Don’t you ever say his name!” He dropped his head as if suddenly exhausted. “You should have stayed gone.”

  “Is that what you came to tell me last night? That I should have stayed gone?”

  Dennis lifted his head, eyes glittering. “I didn’t come to tell you anything.”

  “I know,” Lizzy said quietly, unnerved by the admission. He’d said it without blinking. Like a man with nothing to lose. “The police found your knife.”

  “I gave you three chances!” he bellowed at her. “Three chances to leave it alone. That stupid doll and the note. Burning down the shed. When none of that worked, I showed up with a knife. But you just kept poking, asking your questions. That stops now.” He was sweating heavily, and paused long enough to drag a sleeve across his face. “A man protects his family. My old man taught me that. Took a while, but I get it now. A man does what he has to.”

  Lizzy squared her shoulders, refusing to be cowed. “So does a woman.”

  Dennis’s mouth curled unpleasantly. “I wonder if you’ll think it was worth it.”

  The glint in his pale eyes turned Lizzy’s blood cold. She wasn’t sure what the remark meant, but she wasn’t sticking around to find out. She darted to her left, grabbing blindly for her phone, then wheeled back to her right, ducking as he lunged for her.

  She was almost in the clear, her eyes on the door, when Dennis caught her arm and jerked her back. Terrified, she flailed at him with both arms, managing to land a solid blow to his chest, another to his left cheek.

  In the end she was no match for his size and strength. Her head snapped back as his fist connected with her jaw, the white-hot crack of pain all but blinding her as she went down. She lay sprawled on her back, her jaw throbbing like a pulse, the taste of blood metallic on her tongue. Black spots danced at the edges of her vision as she attempted to get up. At some point during the struggle she’d lost her phone.

  Dennis stood nearby, his face sheened with sweat, a welt already forming on his left cheek. He looked on dispassionately as Lizzy struggled to get to her knees. He craned his neck, running his eyes around the barn, finally coming to rest on the workbench. He stepped closer, picking things up, putting them down again.

  “Some setup you’ve got here,” he said with a lazy smile. “Some flammables, I see.” The smile widened as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a lighter. He flicked it briefly for effect. “Be a shame if there was an accident.”

  Panic fizzed through Lizzy’s limbs, the hot-and-cold prickle of adrenaline surging through her arms and legs. The room spun as she dragged herself to her feet. There seemed to be two of everything, like binoculars out of focus. For a moment she thought she might be sick, but the sensation vanished when she saw Dennis unzip his jacket and reach inside.

  Her throat convulsed when she
spotted the bottle of red liquid, a rag stuffed into its neck. The investigators had found one just like it among the ashes of the shed. He inverted the bottle several times, soaking the rag. Lizzy caught the oily reek of kerosene as some of the liquid trickled through his fingers, down his sleeve, and onto the floor.

  “Dennis, please.” The pain in her jaw was so excruciating she thought she might black out. She grabbed the edge of the workbench to steady herself, willing herself to stay conscious, to keep him talking. “You don’t want to do this.”

  He looked at her with a twisted smile, then took a step back. “Don’t I?”

  “The police know everything,” she blurted, scanning the bench for something, anything, she might use as a weapon. “They know why Hollis killed himself. They know about the doll and the note, and that you burned the orchard. They have one of the torches you used to start the fire. If you do this, they’ll know it was you. They’ll put it together, and they’ll come for you.”

  “It won’t matter by then.” Lizzy was stunned to see tears in his eyes. He blinked hard, but they spilled anyway. He smeared them away with the heel of his hand. “We paid enough, Hollis and me. Hollis most of all. It was supposed to be over. Paid in full. Now here you are, wanting us to pay all over again. Only that ain’t how this is going to go.” He paused, staring through her suddenly, his eyes dull and far away. “They say the only way to kill a witch is to burn her.” He paused again, taking another step back, then gave the lighter a flick. “A man does what he has to.”

  “Noooo!”

  Lizzy watched in horror as Dennis brought the kerosene-soaked rag toward the flame, aware in some terrified corner of her mind that she had slipped into one of those fractured moments when nothing seems real, when everything speeds up, and at the same time slows down, flickering one horrifying frame at a time.

  The beaker felt cool as her fingers closed around it. An instant’s hesitation, a ribbon of fear, and then it was airborne. She watched, transfixed, as it arced cleanly toward its target, a tail of alcohol in its wake, then erupted in a rush of blue flame as it connected with the lighter in Dennis’s hand. His sleeve caught first, quick tongues licking up the spilled kerosene. He stared at it, eyes wide and blank, as if he were stunned to find himself on fire. Eventually, he began to flail, beating wildly at his jacket as the flames spread, blue-orange and hungry.