The Lost Girls of Devon

by Barbara O'Neal

  I called my mom.

  She picked up before the first ring was finished. “Isabel. What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. My friend went to the bathroom and texted me that there were some weird guys hanging around, and then she just disappeared, and now I’m really scared and I don’t want to walk in the dark.”

  “Stay right where you are. We’ll come find you.” Her steady, calm voice made me feel calm too. “Do you want to keep talking to me?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “We’re in the truck already, so it’ll only be two minutes. Where are you, exactly?”

  I looked around, over my shoulder. “I’m standing right by a game booth that’s giving away teddy bears and stuff like that. The carousel is to my left.”

  “On the way.”

  I had an idea. “Hang on, Mom. I want to check something.” I opened the Find My Friends app and looked for Molly. My hands were shaking, afraid I’d see that it was just around the corner, and I’d go over there and find the phone on the ground.

  But the dot was moving.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Zoe

  My heart was racing as Sage drove up to the car park by the fair, and I was out of the truck and running toward the carousel before we had even properly stopped. “Isabel!” I cried.

  A figure peeled away from the shadows, dressed in jeans and a top I recognized. “Mom!” she cried.

  I hugged her hard, but she shook me off. “I think somebody took her!” She held out her phone in a hand that was shaking so hard that she could hardly keep it straight. I wrapped my hand around her wrist. “This is her on Find My Friends,” she said, and now tears streamed over her face. “It’s moving. We have to find her!”

  Sage joined us and took the phone. “What the hell?” He scowled. “Come on. Let’s follow.” He gave Isabel a look. “You’re all right?”

  “Yes.”

  We ran back to the truck, and Sage said, “Isabel, you sit in back with Matt and keep him company, all right, and your mom can hold the phone where I can see it.” We climbed in and slammed the doors. “Zoe, call Inspector Hannaford.”

  “Do you know the number?”

  He shook his head. “You’ll have to look it up.”

  “Do you know where to go?”

  “More or less. They’re on the Old Coach Road. Some vacation homes out there, but not many occupied until June.”

  Isabel hugged Matt, who took his job as comforter very seriously. She leaned into him, burying her face in his fur.

  We had to loop around the village and then head out into the extremely dark country lanes that led out to farms and grazing land. The road was approximately two inches wider than the truck, and all I could see was the narrow path between hedgerows below a dark, dark sky. The lane itself was bumpy, tossing us around as he took curves and corners. It felt like we were racing, but when I looked at the speedometer, I saw that it read twenty-five miles per hour.

  I set Isabel’s phone beside me and googled the number for the police in Axestowe. The screen stuck for long minutes, and I had to start again. Now my hands were shaking. The dot on Isabel’s phone still moved, and we followed, all of us locked in the terrifying dark.

  “God, what if it’s just her dad or something?” Isabel suddenly moaned. “I’m an idiot!”

  “No, you’re not,” Sage said. “Trust me.”

  “I have the number.”

  “Dial it and hand it to me.”

  I did, and when it started to ring, he said, “Hello. I need Inspector Hannaford. This is Sage Cooper. It’s urgent.”

  He glanced at us, nodded. “I think we might have found something,” Sage said, and he gave the background and where we were. “Yes, sir. We’ll stay put.”

  “I’m scared,” Isabel said.

  “I know. Me too.” I looked over my shoulder. “You’ve just proven yourself to be a good friend. I’m so proud of you.”

  Isabel wailed. I reached over the seat and took her hand. She let me.

  “They stopped,” Sage said. “We’re about two miles behind them.”

  We drove down one narrow lane after another, twisting this way and that, passing cottages sitting right against the road, and others set a bit of a way off, then plunging back into the inky dark. “Do you know where you are?” I asked.

  “Not far from the Grimsell farm. Just to the east, if that helps.”

  “No. But I trust you.”

  He glanced at the phone and said, “I don’t need that anymore. We’re going to the top of that hill.”

  I couldn’t see a hill, and then I did, a hump of black against the star-bright sky. He drove around the back of it and, near the top, turned off his lights, and we parked near a pile of boulders. “Come on,” he said, opening his door.

  Isabel and I stepped out. In front of us was a vast expanse of blackness broken at intervals by the lights of a house or farm. Just below us was a large house, with many windows lit. A faint sound of music drifted toward us.

  Sage fetched blankets from the truck, spread a few of them on the ground, and then wrapped each of us in one.

  I looped one arm around Isabel, and Sage had one arm around me. Matt settled across all of our feet, as if to make sure we were protected. Overhead the sky held so many stars that they looked painted. A cold wind burned my earlobes.

  Below, at the house with too many lights on, music pulsed, and in the distance, I saw a trail of lights looping through the Devon lanes. The police were on their way.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Zoe

  We met the police back at the station. The raid had yielded eleven girls, all between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, some of whom had been kidnapped over a year ago to provide sex for the yacht parties. Molly was among them, and when she found out Isabel had followed her, she burst into tears and flung her arms around Isabel’s neck. “I am your friend for the rest of my life,” Molly said.

  “I’m good with that,” Isabel said. Her eyes were closed, and I could tell she was trying not to cry.

  Most of the girls had been kidnapped from London or Romania, but two had been captured locally, including Jennie, who’d left her baby with an aunt and then deliberately set out to get herself kidnapped to see if she could find Diana. She’d fallen in way over her head. They were in poor physical shape, most of them high, and they were taken into Exeter to a hospital for observation while their families were contacted.

  Jennie was the one who’d solved the mystery of the Exeter house. Diana had planned to open the Exeter place as a safe house for girls to escape the sex trafficking, and the money would help them start new lives.

  It wasn’t clear exactly where the money had come from, though it did seem to be profits from gambling that she’d shared with Henry, or rather, he’d shared with her.

  Inspector Hannaford allowed me to talk to Henry when we returned, for just five minutes. He would be charged with racketeering in exchange for revealing the head of the trafficking ring, the commodore of the yacht club, who would be charged with a list of crimes as long as my arm.

  I met him in a holding cell, where we had to talk through the bars. Blue hollows ringed his eyes, and his entire face seemed to have sagged a mile over the past few days. “What was she doing, Henry, with the money?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t even know. I thought we were getting ready to get out of the whole mess, move up north to Scotland and retire. That was what I was doing in the Hebrides—finding us a place. We’d live there in the summers and travel in the winters.” He broke down, hanging his head. “I was never involved in the girls, but she found out about them and wanted to do something to rescue them.”

  A part of me was relieved that at least the relationship had been true, that Henry had honestly loved her. I couldn’t have borne knowing he’d played her.

  “When I heard she’d gone missing, I knew it had to be about that. That she’d done something and been found out. That’s not a lot you want to cross
, and she did it.” He let go of a sob. “Oh, my poor girl!”

  “I’m sorry, Henry. I do know you made her happy.”

  “Never as she made me,” he said.

  Sage drove us home and promised to bring Lillian’s car back the next day. Isabel and I, exhausted but wired, sat down in the kitchen for tea and apple cake. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I’m glad Molly is safe.” She buried her face. “That scared me so much!”

  “You were so brave, Isabel. I’m so proud of you. You saved a lot of girls tonight.”

  “I helped, anyway.” She raised her eyes and took a breath. “I’m ready to tell you what happened. I want to tell you what happened, Mom.”

  I swallowed, and my heart started thudding. “I’m listening.”

  She poured it out to me, and although I wanted to howl, to scream invectives, I just listened. At the end, I said, “Come here.”

  She flung herself into my arms, all legs and elbows and hair, and buried her face in my shoulder. “I wanted to tell you, but I had to work it out in my head first.”

  “It’s all right.” I could feel tears on my neck, and as much as I wanted to be a different sort of mother, I found tears streaming down my own face. I thought of her horror and her humiliation, and I wanted to shield her from everything, all of it. Anything in life that would hurt her.

  And I couldn’t.

  “I’m so, so sorry this happened to you, Isabel. It’s awful and mean and petty. Together, we’ll make sure you find whatever you need.”

  She nodded against me and wept harder. I held her and held her and held her while she let go of months of sorrow and fear and shame. When the tears were finished, we simply clung to each other.

  At last, she raised her head, using her fingers to wipe tears away. “I’ve thought so much about what I would have done if I didn’t have you through all this, and I can’t even stand to think about it.” She swallowed, her big eyes luminescent. “I don’t ever want to be in a world where I don’t have you. I’m strong and I’m going to get through this, because you made me strong.”

  I let her see my tears as I took her hand and twined our fingers together. “I believe in you one hundred percent. But you never have to pretend to be strong, either, right?”

  “I know.” She sniffed. “I want to press charges against them, the whole group.”

  Yes! “I’d like to pluck their toenails out one by one, but charges will probably be better.”

  She smiled.

  I knew that she had miles to go, that we would both need counseling to get through the layers of pain she had endured, and I would have my own set of horrors when I left her and the reality of what she’d endured would come back to me, but for now, it had been a long enough night that I said, “We need ice cream.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  The next morning, after we’d all had a long, long sleep, Isabel, Gran, and I sat at the table in the kitchen.

  “I really don’t want to go back to Santa Fe, Mom,” Isabel said. “I don’t think you do either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know how when you’re out somewhere and you see a couple and they’re just with each other? Like they’re a couple in some way you can’t even see? That’s how it is with you and Sage. You’re a couple, period.”

  It startled me that she’d noticed us at all. “Well, we’ve been friends since we were born—”

  “Not like that,” she said. “You love each other.”

  “Yes,” Gran said, spreading marmalade over her toast. “You’ve always been that way.”

  “I don’t—”

  My mother swanned in through the back door carrying a basket of what looked to be muffins. Smelled like chocolate chip muffins, not that I would eat something she’d baked. “I brought breakfast,” she said. “Since the festival is canceled, we may as well enjoy ourselves.” After taking a plate from the cupboard, she arranged seven or eight muffins in circles and placed it on the table.

  “Zoe,” Poppy said, “will you give me one hour to talk?”

  If Isabel had not been in the room, I might have said no. No matter how much help she’d been through everything with Diana, no matter how much my daughter and my mother loved her, she had deserted me, and I really didn’t care what she had to say. It couldn’t be fixed.

  But there were Gran and Isabel staring at me. The little girl who’d watched her mother dance away ached to hear what that mother had to say, but my adolescent self was still furious. “Fine,” I said. “One hour, no more.”

  Poppy nodded, crossed her hands over her heart. “I have to get something from the car. Will you meet me in the hearth room?”

  Without looking at either of them, I headed for the hearth room. On such a bright day, sunlight splashed in through the giant window, making squares of light over an ancient rug that must have cost thousands of pounds when it was purchased.

  I had hardly been in here this trip, though Isabel had discovered it as her reading nook. Paperbacks and empty cups were stacked on the floor by the window seat. I picked up the cups and set them on the table so I wouldn’t forget them. The table, too, deserved more attention, I thought. It could seat a banquet, though the chair seats were dusty and worn. I tested them, wondering—

  It was all distraction from my pounding heart. My long-held walls had grown crumbly, and without those defenses, I didn’t know how to keep myself safe from her.

  My mother breezed into the room. I wondered how she did that, breezed, when she was not terribly tall and was so very busty, but she did. Light on her feet, I supposed.

  Nerves made me fold my hands in front of me. She carried a large bag with her and put it on the table.

  “Well,” she said. “Shall we sit down?” She gestured to the end of the table, and I moved down there, pulled out a chair. Sat.

  “This is an illustrated journey,” she said, “and I set most of it up, but I might need a minute now and then.”

  “Do we have to do some big dramatic thing? Can’t you just say what you need to say and be done?”

  “I could,” she said, sitting down, “but this will be better.”

  “For who?” I asked, weary already.

  “For you.” She reached into the bag and brought out a postcard. An arrow stabbed me, and I reached for it without even knowing I would. It was colored green, with crayon, and I’d ironed it to make the crayon smooth, then dripped melted crayon dots, red and yellow and blue, on the green to make flowers. On the back, I’d written, “Today, Gran and I cut daisies. We miss you! Come back soon! Love, Zoe.” I’d made the Z a decorated vine.

  I remembered making it. Sitting at the kitchen table under the supervision of my grandmother using a candle and the iron to make my postcard. I must have been ten or so, still hopeful the alchemy of love and art would bring her back to me.

  My throat tightened. “I don’t think I can do this.” I started to stand, and she covered my hand with hers, holding me in place with the most gentle of touches. Brittle bits of wall shattered within me, and I trembled from head to toe, unable to stop it.

  “I left you, Zoe,” she said. “I didn’t mean to. I was only going to be gone for a month. It was still reckless to leave you like that, when I knew you’d be lonely up here without Sage and Diana, but—” She took a breath, cleared her throat, met my gaze.

  “When I was a girl, one of the things that appalled me was the way the cycle of life just repeated and repeated and repeated in this boring way. A child is born, has dreams and talents, grows up and gets married and has a child who has dreams and talents, et cetera.” She moved her shoulders. “Endlessly.”

  I made a choked noise. “Sorry to get in your way.”

  “Not you. Your dad. I didn’t want to be married. I had to shake it up, somehow.”

  “So you left me.”

  “I know it doesn’t help, but it really was only going to be a month. And then—” She reached into the bag and brought out a photograph. It
was faded the way old color photos always fade, of a man with a severe expression and thick black hair. “I met Ravi.” She added another photo, this one of the two of them, he much taller, she as tiny as a little princess with yards of hair. They looked happy, laughing at the camera, but it didn’t move me. My trembling ceased.

  “Oh, my God!” I yanked my hand out from beneath hers. “So you only planned to go for a month, and then you met a man and stayed for twenty years, and it didn’t matter that you left your child?”

  “It still wasn’t like that,” she said.

  “It was, actually.”

  “I got malaria and I couldn’t travel, and then your grandmother wouldn’t send you to me, and then—” She bowed her head. “I stayed.”

  “Okay.” I stood up. “So you fell in love and got malaria and then my gran wouldn’t send me, so you just gave up on being a mother. Got it.”

  “Zoe!”

  “No. Do you know that the day I decided never to talk to you again, I got my period? And Gran is lovely, but she was old, and I was embarrassed and I wanted to tell you.”

  She closed her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s too late.” I started to leave and shoved the chair into the side of the table, lost in a whirl of emotions I really did not want to experience.

  “Zoe,” she said in a reasonable voice. “Sit down. You gave me an hour. Let me tell the story, will you?”

  I yanked the chair back out and sat, arms crossed in the sulky manner of a seven-year-old.

  “All these years, I’ve been telling myself that I made the only choice I could make,” she said. “I fell so deeply in love that it seemed like the only thing in the world, and I stayed to help him die, which is still one of the most influential experiences of my life. It made me who I am, loving him and then helping him die. I told myself that justified everything I did.

  “Even when you first came back this time, I wondered how I could reach you to change your mind about me, never once thinking that perhaps you were right.”

  She paused. “I dug out all of these cards and letters the night they found Diana’s body, and as I read them, I was horrified by the breathtakingly selfish actions of a woman I have to claim as myself.”