The Last of the Moon Girls

Lizzy’s psychic power is an ability to smell people’s emotions, as well as create fragrances. She has “her own brand of quiet magick—the glorious, mysterious alchemy of fragrance” (29). Furthermore, to Lizzy, some people are associated with a specific scent that represents them as a person, rather than what they are feeling at the moment. For instance, Althea’s human and ghostly presence smells like “lavender and bergamot” (43). Rhanna also smells this scent when Althea dies. It is the scent of the perfume Lizzy made for Althea and symbolizes her spirit.

Rhanna’s scent changes over the course of the novel. She chooses to scent herself and her space with patchouli. To Lizzy, she smells like “bonfire and tea leaves, rose petals and rain” (187). The “smell of the cemetery and funeral flowers. The smell of death” comes from Rhanna’s psychic gift of being able to see people’s deaths (250). It also is associated with guilt. After Rhanna confesses her gift to Lizzy, and Lizzy begins to uncover the real murderers, Rhanna smells different: “[T]he unsettling pong of damp earth that used to cling to her was beginning to dissipate, a sign that she’d begun to release the pain and guilt associated with Heather and Darcy” (259).