The Lost Girls of Devon

by Barbara O'Neal

  I remembered I didn’t have an account anymore.

  A blast of horror and shame rose through my gut, spreading like a darkness that turned my blood the color of ink. It flushed my cheeks and closed my throat, and I was just there again, standing on my porch before I went inside, realizing what my friends had done.

  My “friends.”

  Emotions swamped me. I felt like I was choking, like I would die because I couldn’t breathe. It was tar, sticking to everything, ruining my life.

  Urgently I raised the camera, peered through the lens. That is what a camera can do—narrow the world to one thing. This frame. One shot, then another, then another. The moss on the trunk, a close-up of a bluebell, so crazy intricate and perfect, every single one the same, repeating over the entire forest. Billions of bluebells.

  My heart started to slow down.

  I imagined a fairy door opening in that murky space between trees over there. Shot some leaves and distant shots of blurry flowers. It made me glad I asked for the lens.

  My dad is kinda famous, and very wealthy, but I try to keep my requests to a reasonable level, not like some of the girls at school who leverage the guilt of one parent or the other to get all kinds of material bullshit, and for sure my dad could afford anything I want, and he feels super guilty about having an affair.

  I was mad at him for a while over it, but you’d just have to know my dad to know why I couldn’t stay mad. He’s just nice. He loves me with his whole heart and soul. I know he does. He’s still in my life constantly, almost too much, even if he’s embarrassed about stuff, like his girlfriend’s new baby and all that.

  So I could ask for anything, and he’d figure out a way to get it for me. I just don’t care that much about most of it. I have lots of clothes and things, and anyway it’s bad for the environment to buy stuff all the time. The camera thing has obsessed me since the year between second and third grade, when my mom and I went on tour with my dad for the whole summer. All over America, riding in his bus. My mom and I explored all the towns or stayed on the bus to read all day. My summer project was to make a scrapbook page of every state we visited, which was twenty-seven by the end of the summer, and I spent a lot of time on it. My mom carried a sketchbook and colored pencils and sketched all the trees and butterflies and sometimes birds. I loved to watch her draw.

  She’s very different looking, my mom, with beautiful, shiny, straight hair, not quite black, that she wears plain, parted in the middle and hanging right down her back. She’s thin and lanky, kinda flat chested and boyish, with a face you can look at a thousand times and it looks different all the time. Sometimes her face looks kind of awkward, just depending. Her eyes are dark, dark, dark, and she has a really good mouth, and sharp, clean cheekbones and jaw that she got from my grandpa. I didn’t get them—my face is round. Round eyes, round cheeks, round chin, even round nose. You could draw a bunch of circles and then connect them, and you’d have my face. Also, my hair. More circles, circles upon circles. My mom’s face is angles upon angles. I take a million pictures of her all the time, and there’s never a bad one. Not like me. The angle has to be . . .

  Sprawling . . . hands . . . words . . .

  Ink rushed through my veins again, and my heart sped up so fast I thought I might faint. I bent over and pressed my hands to my knees, fighting the visuals of my belly and arms and thighs . . . and for a minute, I got so sick to my stomach that I thought I might barf.

  I breathed in, like Dr. Kerry said, and then out.

  In. Be right where you are. Out. Only in this very minute.

  In the bluebell woods, I smelled earth and something sweet that I guessed was flowers. The tourists were headed back to the bus. Birds twittered in the branches and sailed around, flashing feathers. A butterfly with blue wings settled on a flower to feed right by my knee.

  I wanted to shoot the photo, but it might have disturbed him, and butterflies are in trouble these days.

  I stayed still. When he moved from one flower to another I slowly, slowly, slowly lifted the camera to shoot him, zooming in on his wings where they glistened. So perfect, like the bluebells. It made me feel calm to watch him. My granddad says that’s why we need nature, to remind us to be still.

  Once the tourists had all disappeared, one by one as if they were zipping through a transporter, I walked down the hill. I didn’t want to crush the flowers, so I found a grassy spot to lie down on my belly and aimed the eye of the lens through a frame of green blades to the flowers.

  Smears of green and blue, with a single bluebell in focus, the edges of the flower frilly like a hat in an old-fashioned story. It was easy to imagine an alternative world here, a world of the fey, dangerous, and magical, a world entered by magic at a certain time of day . . . or night.

  My imagination played with the idea while I shot photos. It was a relief. It was peaceful. I wasn’t thinking about what was wrong with me, but only what was right.

  Chapter Twelve

  Poppy

  The day started off on the wrong foot. I knocked a cup off the counter and it shattered on the wooden floor, scattering tiny bits of glass everywhere, which I, shortsighted as I was these days, could barely see.

  I hadn’t slept well, tossing and turning with all manner of things afoot in the world. I fretted that I had not been to see my mother, and Diana was missing, so she couldn’t check on her either.

  The meeting last night had been deeply unsettling: not only because no one knew anything but also because my daughter had been there, studiously, pointedly ignoring me. Which complicated my urgent need to see Lillian. Zoe would hate to see me at Woodhurst, which had always been her safe space.

  The conflict between the two things I should do for two women I loved was causing me a great deal of restlessness, no matter how much lemon balm and chamomile tea I sipped.

  And Jennie had never replied to my phone call and had never texted me. I didn’t think she’d ghost me, and there was no one to ask about her. I hadn’t seen her boyfriend in weeks.

  The missed sleep weighted the bones of my elbows and ankles and spine. I was limping a little as I headed outside for my chores and muttering under my breath like an old woman, which I supposed I was becoming.

  When I headed out to the chicken coop, I found that something had made off with one of my hens, and the others were squawking and nervous. The marauder had torn a hole in the fence, so it must have been a fox. I mended it as best I could with a square of plywood and a handful of bricks.

  The goats were nervous, too, and I spent a few minutes gentling them, talking to them sweetly.

  On the way back to the house, some whisper of something in the low brightening of the morning made me pause. I looked first to the house, where it sat as it always did, washed pink by the light, the windows shining. The row of trees leading into the forest showed nothing.

  But when I turned toward the bluff, there stood a hare on her hind legs, paws held softly in front of her as if she were about to tell a story.

  My breath caught. Hares once populated the whole of England, and it had been nothing unusual to see them boxing in the spring when I was a girl. Now they’d been chased away by encroaching development and the spread of their cousins, the rabbits—who look so much sweeter, but are not—and the dwindling habitat.

  This one just stood there, extra-long ears moving slightly. I tried, truly, to meld with the air so that I wouldn’t frighten her, but she didn’t seem inclined to run away. Instead she simply stayed where she was, as if to give me a message, as if she were not of this earth at all, but another.

  In the dark of my garden, I touched the silver hare I’d worn around my neck for forty years. I’d bought it after a wild hare had shown up to remind me that I was part of the land, that my father and his family had lived here for centuries, like the trio of hares who formed the symbolic circle of Devonshire, an ancient and sacred symbol.

  The long-eared animal disappeared, as hares will do. I stayed where I was, waiting for th
e sunrise over the eastern hills, watching it spread slowly across the fields, divided by hedgerows as old as anything in England. It was a rare moment of peace, a knowing that whatever I’d sought the world over lived here, in a garden in Devon. In me.

  It had taken such a long, long time to learn.

  As I fingered the silver pendant, I realized that I must do what was mine to do. I needed to see my mother and make sure she was all right.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Zoe

  Gran was clearly exhausted and confused after her long night of writing. I took her upstairs and helped her shower, washing her hair, then combing it out carefully afterward. She sat quietly on a plastic shower chair, wrapped in a thick terry-cloth robe, and watched my actions in the mirror. Her hands in her lap were covered with the purplish bruises and brown marks that signified great age. The bones were prominent, each joint visible, the veins blue beneath tissue-paper skin. How much longer would I have her?

  “Are you eating enough?” I asked, smoothing the wrinkles over her fist.

  “Plenty,” she said. “I’m just old, my dear. A breath of wind leaves a bruise.”

  I chuckled through the ache in my chest.

  “I wrote all night,” she said. “I don’t know that I want to be bothered for the rest of the day.”

  “Maybe for dinner?” I met her eyes in the mirror. We looked nothing alike, a fact that had pained me as a girl. “We can all eat together?”

  “Perhaps.”

  I helped her into bed, made sure her phone was charged and in reach, then lowered the blinds in her room. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me,” I said.

  She did not answer.

  I was in the kitchen, making a cup of tea, when a knock sounded on the back door. I wiped my hands and opened it.

  My mother stood there, swaddled in a big camel-colored blanket wrap. Her hair was caught under it. “Hello, Zoe. I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to see my mother.”

  It was so startling to see her face to face that I almost had no reaction. “What?”

  She lifted a hand, palm out, like some kind of saint. “I’ve been here nearly every day. I know you don’t want me here, so I’ve stayed away, but I . . . I’m worried.”

  Still nothing rose in my body. No anger. No disdain. No happiness. No sadness. “She’s fine. I just put her to bed.”

  “Still,” she said, looking over my shoulder as if she could see upstairs to Gran’s bed, “I need to see for myself, if you don’t mind.”

  I stationed myself squarely. “Oh, but I do mind. I’m here now. I’ve got it. I looked after her just fine all those years you were not even in the country.”

  “Fair enough.” She tucked her hands under the wrap but didn’t appreciably move. It was impossible to forget how large and clear her eyes were, the color of a bleached-out sky, almost crystal. “But I have been here the past year, and she is not well, a fact she has been hiding from you so that you will not worry.”

  Discomfort swirled through the frozenness, but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing that. “Well, I know now. And I am perfectly capable of taking care of her, whatever she needs. We don’t need you.”

  For a long moment, Poppy only stood there. “You do,” she said at last. “Both of you do. But I’m not going to knock you down to get inside.”

  I didn’t move.

  “If you would, please tell her that I was here, and that I was asking after her?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  For one more moment my mother paused, as if waiting for me to change my mind. “All right,” she said at last, “I’ll leave you.”

  Before I could watch her walk away, I closed the door and walked away from it, focusing entirely on the tea that awaited me, and the more immediate problems in my life than my old, weary anger at my mother—on Diana, the friend I’d let down so wretchedly, and my daughter, who needed me, even if she didn’t know it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Isabel

  By the time I finished shooting photos in the bluebell woods, I was starving. I took my camera and my growling stomach up the hill and down the other side into the town. It isn’t always easy to eat as a vegetarian, but I found a takeout place that served fried cheese pies that were stupidly good. I bought one, and a can of some drink called Ribena, and carried them to a park on the bluff, where there were swings and slides and a jungle gym for kids. No kids were on them right at the moment, since it was a school day. I sat on a rock and opened the paper-wrapped pie and watched the sea.

  I don’t know if it was the exercise or the forest or just being out in the world again, but I felt good. I like the town, which is like Santa Fe in one way—both are quaint places for tourists. People just want to see things, my grandad says. He holds classes on traditional indigenous methods of dyeing and that kind of thing, and I sometimes help him. I love to watch him stir wool in big metal pots over an open fire. People come from all over to learn it—weavers and artists and a lot of older ladies who always flirt with Grandad, even though he never, ever flirts back.

  The pie was amazing. Greasy, salty, flaky. I’d never had anything like it anywhere, and it probably had about fifty billion calories, but I didn’t care.

  “Hey,” said a girl’s voice. “Can I sit here with you?”

  The girl was slim and dark haired, with thick eyeliner. She looked like Zendaya. Displaying a bag of tobacco, she said, “I’ll share.”

  “I don’t smoke,” I said, “but go ahead. You roll your own?”

  “Yeah, rollies are the way to go, don’t you know?” The girl sat down. “God, don’t you love that pie?”

  “It’s amazing. I feel like I could eat, like, five hundred of them, and never be too full for the next one.”

  “You’re American!”

  “Yeah. But my mom is from here.”

  “You’re not a tourist, then?”

  “No. We’re here because this lady disappeared, and they want to find her. My mom knew her.”

  The girl nodded while expertly rolling a cigarette. I’ve never smoked, not even vaped, because my dad is so anticigarette. “What’s your name?” I asked.

  The girl had eyes like glass, very light. Mixed, like me. “Molly.”

  “Isabel.”

  Molly lit the cigarette. Took a drag and blew it out.

  “Are you homeschooled or something?” I asked.

  “Nah. I just don’t go anymore. My mom’s never around, so she don’t care.”

  “My mom would kill me if I didn’t go to school.”

  “You’re not there now.”

  I shrugged. “Long story.”

  “I have time.”

  I shook my head and pointed across the roofs of the village, some thatched, some tile, to the big rambling house standing on the bluff opposite. “My great-gran lives there.”

  Molly turned her whole face toward me, eyes wide. “The mystery writer is your great-grandmother?”

  I nodded. “We’re staying with her. Where do you live?”

  She pointed over her shoulder with a thumb. “In the council flats behind the Tesco. Want to walk over and have a snack?”

  I’d been pretty much alone for nearly six weeks, but it was one thing to sit here on the playground and another to go to the girl’s house. You just don’t know with people. Who they are. What they could do. “Maybe another time,” I said.

  “It’s all good,” the girl said, standing and brushing off her rear end. She pinched the tip of her cigarette and carefully stowed the butt in her pocket. I grimaced. The smell would be awful in about six seconds, but it was none of my business. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So if you’re the mystery lady’s granddaughter, you must be related to the good witch.”

  “Witch?”

  “Yeah. She has a shop on the high street. Reads cards and sells amulets and potions and things.”

  “She’s a witch?”

  “You don’t know
her?”

  I hesitated, then shook my head. “My mom doesn’t speak to her.”

  “Too bad. It’s the best shop in the village.”

  For a long time after Molly left, I just sat there. Then I gathered up all my things, walked back to the trail, and headed into town.

  To meet my grandmother.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Poppy

  After the encounter with Zoe, I drove to my shop.

  Where the windows had been egged.

  It didn’t escape me that the chickens had been targeted, and maybe these were the eggs I hadn’t found. Not everyone understood me or even liked me, and mostly I didn’t mind.

  I minded now. Probably because I was tired. Because it felt as if the veil between worlds had grown thin and I was feeling too much of everything. Too much sorrow, too much sin, too many things gone wrong. A whisper across my ear made me turn. A pair of overly skinny European boys crossed the street toward the harbor. They had that air of hunger about them, hunger for something they didn’t even know how to name. They’d come here from all over Europe—Romania and Poland and the Czech Republic, seeking a life that might offer some joy, some hope. Jennie’s boyfriend, Andrei, was one of them. Maybe these two knew him.

  “Hello, lads,” I called. “A moment of your time?”

  One looked at the other, and a signal passed between them. “Sure, all right,” the first one said. He had eyes so blue they looked lit from within.

  “Do you know a fellow named Andrei? Tall boy, big eyes.”

  “Sure, he works with us at the Harbour Inn.”

  “Have you seen him recently?”

  The second one, slightly hunched, as if he’d been waiting for a blow his entire life, frowned. “Eh. Maybe he went off with his friend a few days ago? London? Brighton?”

  “Exeter?” Despite her avowals, maybe Jennie had gone somewhere with the lad.

  Blue Eyes shook his head. “No, that was Karl. I haven’t seen Andrei.”