The Lost Girls of Devon

by Barbara O'Neal

  As the sun broke over that very sea, shimmering long fingers through my windows, I washed up and made myself ready for the day ahead. I’d hired a young woman to help me in the shop for the season, but there was much to be done before the festival. I needed every minute to prepare for the crowds who would soon descend on the summer village.

  Chapter Four

  Isabel

  One of the big problems I keep having is that I go to sleep, but then I wake up and my heart is racing, or I’m all sweaty and have to take a shower, or I’m kind of awake but have just had a very bad dream. Most of the dreams are the same—I’m in the middle of a vortex that’s spinning through the Milky Way, trying to grab a star or something, and I can’t get a grip.

  Dr. Kerry lost her shit when my mom said she was taking me to England. I thought we weren’t doing anything much in those sessions, but she clearly thinks something else. The adults all came up with a deal that I keep meeting with her twice a week online, and I also have to fill out these stupid daily worksheets, and my mom has some too.

  It’s claustrophobic, but I’m just glad to get out of Santa Fe. I’ll fill out the sheets. Journal on these dumb questions that don’t have anything to do with what happened. Gigi says all writing is good practice, and she should know. My great-grandmother has written over a hundred books.

  Today’s prompt was an easy one: What is your favorite subject at school? Which one is hard, and why?

  My favorite is English. It is always my favorite, because I love to read and I love words and I love writing. I love everything about it, even the things a lot of people complain about, like poetry and Shakespeare. It’s the only class I really miss, and I loved my teacher, Mrs. Willow, who keeps sending me emails with poetry she thinks I’ll like. She’s the person who made me stay online. Mrs. Willow and Wattpad, which is my secret thing and I’ve never told a single other person about it. It’s a writing site where I can post a chapter a week of my book, and readers comment on it.

  My least favorite subject is math, which is dead boring except for Eric Healy, who sits in front of me and is one of the hottest guys in school. He doesn’t talk to me. He doesn’t pay me any attention at all, actually, but I sit behind him, and he smells so good it makes me dizzy.

  Or, really, I sat behind him, because I left school. Now my classes are online and they’re fine, but it’s not like being in school. I kind of hate not being there, but it was too hard to even just walk down the hall and wonder who had seen . . . everything. It felt like I was wearing my skin inside out, and everything hurt. Which isn’t even getting to the people who actually know what happened and didn’t stop their shit even after . . . all of it.

  That’s what I’d write on Dr. Kerry’s stupid journal sheet if I wanted to tell her what happened, but I don’t. Why does anybody think they get to be inside my head? I can’t stand to have anybody else digging around my life, in my soul, and that’s dramatic, I know, but I hate it.

  A bunch of people know what happened to me, and I hate them and hate myself for being so stupid, but the one thing I control is who else knows. I choose. Not my mom. It’s breaking her heart, but I’m trying to get myself together so she’ll stop worrying. I might have told my dad, but his girlfriend is pregnant and she’s acting all step-smothery with me already, so no.

  I’m not choosing Dr. Thinks She Knows Everything, either, because why should she get to know anything about me at all? And why does anybody think telling the story to more people will make it better anyway? I just want to forget about it. That’s what I’m going to do here. Forget it. Reboot.

  But I have to do those dumb worksheets. So what I actually wrote for Dr. Kerry is this: My favorite subject at school is English because I love poetry and I love to write. I hate math because it’s boring.

  And then I got on Wattpad and wrote another chapter on my story under the only name I’ve never shared with anybody. No one knows who I am there. It’s the only place I’m free.

  Chapter Five

  Zoe

  We woke up in England on Wednesday morning. After breakfast, Lillian wanted to go talk to the constables about Diana, and she wanted my support. In the past we usually walked to the village, but this morning it was spitting rain, and for all that she’d been a champion walker her entire life, the steep grade down to the high street—and even worse, on the way back up—had become too much for her the past couple of years. This new frailty pierced me.

  Isabel was still in her room, and I poked my head in. She was cloaked in a blanket and her omnipresent hoodie, laptop open, earphones blocking the world. Mósí, as ever, sat tucked between her arm and her hip, blissfully happy. The fact that Isabel loved that cat so madly was one of the things that gave me comfort. He was her anchor, a living, breathing link to the world.

  Dr. Kerry didn’t think Isabel was suicidal, but definitely depressed. Every time I thought about it, which was approximately seven thousand times per day, I reviewed one or three or ten of the ideas I’d had that might help her. I imagined her being heckled, pinched, bullied. A prickling pain ran around my lower ribs, electric blue.

  Kerry had prescribed a mild antidepressant, which Isabel had resisted until her dad confessed that he, too, had suffered from depression. I hoped it was episodic in her case, that talk therapy and escaping to another country would bring it to an end, but if it turned out to be more, she needed to know there was nothing wrong with treating it medically.

  I waved my hand to get her attention. She pulled off her earphones, but I could see she was somewhere distant—I’d seen the expression on my grandmother’s face a million times. Present but not exactly. Lost in another world.

  “We’re going to go down to the village. Do you want to come?”

  She shook her head. “I have to talk to Dr. Kerry in twenty minutes.”

  “Do you want us to wait for you?”

  “OMG. No.” She rolled her eyes. “Are we seriously going to keep doing this forever?”

  Even irritable, unbrushed, and draped in twenty tons of fabric, she was beautiful, equal parts her dashing father and my dazzling mother. My favorite face on the planet. I hated that she was so lost right now, and also holding me so steadfastly at arm’s length. “Doing what forever?” I asked, but I knew.

  “The mom hover. You’re making me claustrophobic!”

  “I have reason to be concerned, Isabel. It’s my job to make sure you’re okay.”

  She huffed. “I’m doing everything you wanted. Every single thing. I’m going to talk to Dr. Kerry, and we’ll be online for an hour. You can check in by text every fifteen minutes. I just don’t want to go to the village in the pouring rain and turn my hair into Jupiter.”

  In Santa Fe, she wore her hair in loose ringlets smoothed with various products, but it frizzed in the English damp. “Okay, sorry. I’m backing off now.”

  She flashed me a wry half smile.

  “We might stop and get scones, if I know Gigi. Do you want me to bring you some back?”

  “Yes, please. Those cranberry ones, if they have them.”

  “Got it.” I wanted to go in the room and kiss her on the forehead, but I only lifted a hand. “You know how to reach me.”

  “I do.” She wiggled her fingers. “Bye.”

  Still, it was hard to turn around, pretend that there wasn’t a cord linking us together forever, and leave her in peace.

  Just as the door was nearly closed, she said, “Thanks, Mom. I love you.”

  I smiled and called over my shoulder, as if it were casual, “Love you.”

  Outside it was quite wet, and it had been a while since I’d driven on the left. I gripped the wheel tightly as we made our way down the zigzagging road from the house to the top of the village and parked there.

  I hurried around the car with an open umbrella and held it over Gran’s head. She wore a warm cardigan beneath her raincoat, and we both clopped along in our wellies. The umbrella could have protected a small island, so I tucked Lillian’s hand into
my arm, and we headed into the village proper, her cane providing punctuation.

  The view from the top of the high street was one of the best in the whole of Devon, so quintessentially English that Axestowe had three times been named the prettiest village in the country. Thatched buildings tumbled down the cobblestone street to the beach and the sea. Cliffs loomed on either side, the flat tops green and blown free of trees by the harsh winds that blustered through at all times of the year. Fishing boats and rowboats and yachts bobbed in the harbor. Nothing had gone out in this weather.

  The tourist trade hadn’t yet begun in earnest, but at high summer every parking spot for miles would be filled, the pavement packed with people shopping the quaint and the antique, eating scones and good Devon clotted cream, and getting sunburned in the supposedly mild climate.

  Today Lillian was on a mission. The constable’s office was tucked away in a little kink of road that dead-ended against a chalky cliff. A stream, filled to the brim, rushed by noisily on its way to the sea. We crossed a tiny bridge and went inside.

  The Victorian building felt like a train station, with the same windows and a waiting area, and a big door that presumably led to offices. A woman sat at a desk in a black uniform, her russet-colored hair tightly pinned back. “Good morning, Mrs. Fairchild.”

  “I would like to see Inspector Hannaford,” Lillian said.

  “What a surprise,” the woman said without any surprise whatsoever. She was middle aged and mild looking, as if she’d faded over time, her lips no longer rosy but not covered by lipstick. “He’s not in this morning, I’m afraid.” She tucked a manila file into a wire grid. “When’s that next book coming out?”

  “This is not my imagination, Mary,” Lillian snapped. “Diana would not just run off with some man.”

  “I agree with you. So does the inspector, although you do not seem to be listening. We have all hands on deck for this one—not that it’s turning up much of help.”

  “Oh. Well, then.” Lillian folded her hands over her midsection. “Have you met my granddaughter, Zoe? She’s Diana’s best friend.”

  “We’ve met once or twice,” Mary said, extending a hand I shook. Her grip was firm and confident. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Thanks, you too. What have you been able to find out?” I asked.

  “Very little, unfortunately. Her mother hasn’t heard from her, nor any of her friends or the girls at the business.”

  “Who was the last person to see her?”

  Mary pointed with a pen. “Lillian, here. She left her house at four p.m., and no one saw her after that.”

  “She brought me some meals for the weekend,” Lillian said, patting down the already-sharp collar points of her lavender blouse. “A pie and some fresh rolls and butter.”

  I frowned. “I didn’t know she was bringing you meals.”

  “Oh, yes, for quite some time. Not every meal, but mostly for the weekend.”

  Again, I felt the hollowness of missing information—both about my grandmother, who needed meals brought to her, and about Diana. Guilt plucked my belly. I should have known more about everything in Diana’s life. She was my oldest friend. We had been estranged the past year, it was true, but I had never believed it would be a permanent condition. I assumed we’d have it out at some point, have a big fight over my mother, and one or the other of us—probably her, honestly—would give in, and we’d go on the way we’d always been. Her face flashed across my imagination, her big white teeth, her clear, perfect skin. She had the best laugh of anyone I’d ever known—hearty and whole body.

  That I hadn’t realized that she’d been making meals for Gran shamed me. At the very least, she should have been paid for the meals. She’d been pouring her heart and soul into her catering business.

  “Do you remember if she had a catering job that night?” I asked. “Or maybe a date? She had a new boyfriend, last I heard.”

  “Last you heard?” Gran echoed. “He was all she talked about for months.”

  I looked away from her penetrating gaze. “We’ve been fighting.”

  “I see.” And of all the people in the world, she probably knew exactly what—or rather who—we’d fought about. My mother. “Henry is his name. He’s been taking her on the loveliest trips,” Gran said. “But he didn’t take her out that night. He had a business trip.”

  “Did she tell you that?” I felt a tiny twist of jealousy that she should know more about my friend than I did. Ridiculous, but there it was.

  “How else would I know?” Her tone was a bit sharp. She spoke so directly sometimes that it could wound me, and the sharpness grew more and more pointed the older she got.

  To cover my embarrassment, I asked Mary, “Have the police talked to him?”

  “We haven’t found him, in all honesty. No one seems to have any contact information. Don’t suppose you’ve got a last name?”

  I shook my head.

  Mary licked a finger and took a paper from a stack. “We’re having a gathering at the pub tonight to see if we can turn up any new information.” She pressed the flyer on the counter between us.

  MISSING: Diana Brooking, the flyer said in bold letters. Information-gathering meeting at the Rose and Crown, 7 p.m. Wednesday night.

  Her picture, taken from a Facebook post, filled the middle of the page. I missed her acutely, all at once. It was a sunny photo, with her curly hair blowing in some unseen breeze, and she was laughing, showing off her beautiful smile.

  I touched the photo, and it was all suddenly real that Diana was not here, as she’d always been before, every minute I’d ever been in England. A new layer of fear and guilt rose in my throat. “Any leads at all?”

  Mary shook her head. “Not a thing. That’s why we’re all gathering. Maybe together we’ll make some sense of it.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, my love,” Gran said. “I know you’ve been best friends since childhood.”

  We hadn’t been “best” friends for a while, but that’s how things were in a village. What once had been persisted, and she meant it kindly. I nodded, steadied myself, and held out my arm to Gran. “Shall we find a cup of tea?”

  “Oh, yes. I could do with a scone.”

  The rain had stopped, leaving behind wet streets and leaden skies and the kind of light that made every hue of green vibrate at a higher level. I caught my breath at the rolling fields, patchworked between the hedgerows that ran in unstraight lines. Pastures of green and yellow, pale fields of newly planted green, lush deep emerald along the top of the cliffs. Gorse bushes blazed yellow in clumps dotting the landscape as far as the eye could see. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “Yes,” Gran replied. Her pace was steady but slow, and I consciously matched my steps to hers without making it obvious. She clung to my elbow with confidence. I liked that I made her feel secure.

  She paused to look in the window of a shop. The Kitchen Witch was painted a pale, pleasing green between thick, age-dark beams, and the artful window displays invited passersby to step closer.

  Which I did. Bottles and jars made of blue or green or turquoise glass held displays of herbs, with dried petals and leaves in thick piles around them. I could identify spears of lavender, spearmint, and perhaps rue, along with fronds of chamomile and snapdragon, rosemary and great blowsy roses in dark-blue jars.

  I wanted urgently to paint it: such a surprising and loud demand that I was startled. “Hang on, Gran. I want to take a picture.” I pulled out my phone and shot the display from several directions. “This place is new,” I commented.

  “Less than a year,” Lillian said.

  “I see.” I moved to the second window. This one had stacks of old wooden boxes and bags of tea with whimsical animals—hares and owls and foxes peeking out from beneath a pile of faux grass—and a row of various natural cosmetics. It was as artful and lovely as the other window display, and I shot a few photos of this one too. “Have you been in?”


  Her face was blank. “Not really my sort of place, is it?”

  I smiled. “I suppose not.” But I made a mental note to bring Isabel back here. She would like it—all the crystals and fairies. It was exactly her sort of place.

  Just as I was holding out my arm for my grandmother, a woman came into view behind the counter of the shop.

  An ancient sense of loss howled somewhere in the far reaches of my brain, paralyzing me.

  She wore a white tunic embroidered in white, over loose trousers, and long strings of uneven amber beads around her neck. Thick dark hair fell in tumbles of curls down her back and framed a smooth white oval of a face dominated by enormous eyes. The hair was lustrous as ever, the face unlined, and I knew the eyes were palest blue. She stood there, waiting, completely still.

  For a moment I stared at her. My mother.

  She was older, so much older. It wasn’t that her skin was wrinkled or her hair turning white, though I could see it was salt and pepper, but her body had softened from voluptuous to generous, and her jawline was not so sharp. That faraway howling took long moments to fade, and then it took another long moment to cloak myself with indifference, but I managed, pulling the tatters of fury and loss and invisibility around me.

  Then I tucked my grandmother’s hand—the hand of my true mother—into my elbow, and we walked on.

  “You’re going to have to forgive her someday,” Lillian said matter-of-factly.

  “Will I?”

  “You’re as stubborn as your father.”

  “Mmm.”

  “It hasn’t brought him any joy.”

  That was true enough. He lived alone on the outskirts of Santa Fe, tending a small flock of sheep and goats the same way his family had done for centuries, and drove into town daily to work his joyless but solid construction job. He loved Isabel, and they spent a lot of time together, but she was the only thing in his life that gave him genuine pleasure. Once, he’d been a gifted sculptor, but he’d given it up in the storm that followed my mother leaving him and returned home to New Mexico and the world he understood. He, too, had wounded the child I was, but at least he hadn’t left me.