The Lost Girls of Devon

by Barbara O'Neal

  PREVIOUS BOOKS BY BARBARA O’NEAL

  When We Believed in Mermaids

  The Art of Inheriting Secrets

  The Lost Recipe for Happiness

  The Secret of Everything

  How to Bake a Perfect Life

  The Garden of Happy Endings

  The All You Can Dream Buffet

  No Place Like Home

  A Piece of Heaven

  The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue

  Lady Luck’s Map of Vegas

  The Scent of Hours

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Barbara Samuel

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542020725

  ISBN-10: 1542020727

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  My life has been blessed by circles of extraordinary women, and yet I’m continually amazed at how powerful circles can be. This book is for the extraordinary group of writers I’ve grown to love through our Fiction from the Heart Facebook group: Jamie Beck, Tracy Brogan, Sonali Dev, Kwana Jackson, Donna Kauffman, Falguni Kothari, Virginia Kantra, Sally Kilpatrick, Priscilla Oliveras, Hope Ramsay, and Liz Talley. You all know why, and you are all amazing. I can’t remember how I got through my writing days without you.

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Life is a shipwreck,

  but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats;

  Life is a desert,

  but we can transform our corner into a garden.

  —Voltaire

  Prologue

  Zoe

  The day my mother left me was an overcast English morning, with drizzle moistening the air and our faces. She’d packed a bag for me that was tucked in the boot of the car, and I held a stuffed dog in my arms, because he traveled with me when I slept at my grandmother’s house.

  I had no sense of disaster, not then. I loved staying with my grandmother and slept there quite often—weekends and long holiday weeks when my gran and I would walk along the cliff path and hunt for shells on the beach and drink hot mugs of tea. I bloomed under the focused attention she lavished on me.

  In the car on the way to Gran’s, we sang along with the radio to “Walk like an Egyptian,” which was one of our favorites. My mother’s bracelets rattled on her arms when she made the gesture of an Egyptian dancer. I laughed and imitated her, pointing my hands like a carving on the tomb of King Tut. She hammed it up, tossing her long back curls around and dancing in her seat. She was draped in all her colors and jewelry—an india cotton skirt and a paisley-print blouse, and a scarf that wrapped twice around her neck and was still long enough to dangle to her waist. Peacock earrings shimmered coyly in her hair.

  At my grandmother’s house, a sprawling stone manor perched on a cliff high over the sea and the village of Axestowe, on the Devon coast, my mother carried my bag around the garden to the kitchen door. We always entered there to avoid the dark-paneled hallway hung with its somber portraits. Gran met us and gleefully swung open the door and cried out, “There’s my girl! I’m so pleased.” Gran was the opposite of my mother in every way—crisp slacks and pressed blouses and short white hair—but I loved her too. I found relief in her sense of order, but more in the sense that I was the center of her world, that nothing would ever take precedence over me and my needs and wishes. At Woodhurst Hall, I felt safe. Secure.

  My mother must have kissed me, hugged me, but those memories vanished long ago. I turned around and saw her floating away, her sleeves fluttering from her arms like the wings of a bird taking flight, and I had the most terrible sense of dread.

  “Mummy!” I cried.

  She turned around and flung me kisses with both hands.

  Then, she was gone.

  Chapter One

  Lillian

  Something was going on in the village.

  Not that anyone would believe her. They would tut-tut and pat her on the head and compliment the imagination that had given her more than a hundred mystery stories over the past fifty years, but once you passed eighty, no one believed you had a single thought worth listening to.

  But she knew something was going on.

  On the nights when she couldn’t sleep, which was more often than not, as her old bones complained and the memories of nearly nine decades paraded themselves through her imagination, Lillian Fairchild made her way to the study she had created in the tower room many years before. In the dark, ensconced in the window seat her granddaughter Zoe had so loved, she sipped a soothing cup of tea and watched the sea. One of the reasons she’d refused to leave the rambling old house, despite the damp and the cold, was this view of the sea. The manor perched on a cliff overlooking the village and offered a full, unobstructed view of the coastline for miles and miles.

  Tonight the waxing moon had not reached its zenith, but the light was nonetheless bright and clear, illuminating the fishing boats and yachts anchored for the night just offshore. It was the moonlight that revealed a small sailboat making its silent way toward a pair of yachts, shadows on the sea.

  So many strangers these days, Lillian thought, taking a sip of tea. In her youth, tourists had been few and mostly hailed from other parts of England, or perhaps France, and the odd loud American. Now when she made her rounds of the village, there were as many tourists as locals, and they were a well-heeled lot, by the look of them. Men who golfed and brought their expensive sailboats to harbor, women in overs
ize sunglasses shopping the art stalls and antique shops, many of them speaking some language other than English.

  She missed the days when she knew everyone.

  Of course, she still knew the locals. It was her business to stay abreast of the village gossip to lend verisimilitude to her long-running series about Lady Dawood and her good friend Flora, a village baker, who solved crimes around the countryside. The pair of mild-mannered, middle-aged widows had made their creator most comfortable.

  There’s something going on in the village, she thought, and she watched the shadow boat slide stealthily out to the dark sea.

  Suddenly she saw the scene through Lady Dawood’s eyes, viewing it as if from the perch of her castle tower.

  Something is amiss in the village.

  Lillian stood and made her way to the computer. An idea was a terrible thing to waste.

  Chapter Two

  Zoe

  At 7:00 p.m. England time, on the twenty-fourth of April, my friend Diana’s texts ceased.

  I didn’t notice right away. Although we had been friends from childhood, our friendship had been under strain for more than a year; we’d been so aloof with each other that we had barely spoken. She’d sent me a handful of texts over the past couple of months, and I’d either replied curtly or not at all.

  The one last Friday had gone unanswered.

  This Friday night, I stood at the small dining table in my territorial adobe in Santa Fe, shoes off by the door, coat still on, and sorted through the mail. “Isabel?” I called. She didn’t immediately answer, and although she nearly always listened to music on her headphones, I shucked my coat to go check on her.

  I knocked and popped my head into her room. “I’m home. You hungry?”

  Her long, lanky form was stretched out on the bed, one knee cocked over the angle of the other. In her hands was a paperback with an outlandish and gaudy cover that I recognized from her dad’s collection of science fiction. Mósí, her giant ragdoll cat, stretched out beside her.

  She held up a finger for me to wait, an established sign between us. I waited until she’d finished the scene and then tugged off the headphones. “Hi.”

  “How was your day?”

  A shrug. “I had pizza with Dad.”

  I was stung. Even when I told myself that competition between parents was foolish and that being a bad husband didn’t mean a man was a bad father, I hated it when Martin intruded on these rituals. “Pizza is our Friday thing.”

  “He offered, so I went.” She swung her legs down over the side of the bed and smoothed her wild, curly black hair, tugging it away from her face and squeezing it tight in a gesture she’d used since grade school. “You want some eggs?”

  “Sure. That’s fine.” The therapist said Isabel should have things to do around the house and be engaged, so she’d chosen to cook for me when I came in from work. To make sure she wasn’t alone too much, she also had to eat meals with someone—me at breakfast and dinner, Martin at lunch. He’d be going on tour soon, and I’d been fretting about what to do then.

  One step at a time.

  “I’m going to change my clothes,” I said, “and I’ll join you in the kitchen.”

  As I padded down the hall to my own bedroom, my phone gave the old-fashioned dual ring I’d assigned to my grandmother. Ring-ring! Ring-ring!

  With a frown—it was close to midnight in England—I answered. “Hello, Gran. Having trouble sleeping?”

  “Diana has gone missing,” she said without preamble. “I’m afraid she’s gotten mixed up in whatever is going on in the village.”

  It could have been a line from one of her cozy mysteries. Things were always afoot in the village. It was how Lillian’s mind worked.

  “What do you mean, she’s disappeared?” I shed my trousers and blouse. “Did you ring her?”

  “Of course I did, Zoe. She’s not answering. Poppy rang me, too, worried that Diana missed a reading.”

  Poppy would be my mother, who’d taken up residence in an old farmhouse outside Axestowe. She’d been trying to get back into my life, and although I was not the slightest bit interested, clearly Lillian and Diana hadn’t felt the same way.

  I pushed away the needle pricks of their small betrayals. “A reading?” I echoed. “Like tarot or something?”

  “I don’t know,” Lillian snapped. “I just know she hasn’t been here in a week, and she never leaves for that long.”

  “She hasn’t been there in a week?” The first ripple of concern moved through my belly. Diana had been a home nurse for a decade but lately had been building a catering business on the side. It had been going well, but to support the kitchen and employees, she’d kept a few care jobs, Lillian being one. “Hold on, Gran. Let me check my texts.”

  I had my hair done in London. Quite different.

  I had not replied. “I haven’t heard from her since a week ago Friday,” I said to Lillian. “Have you called the police?”

  “Of course! They think I’m a senile old woman with too much time on my hands,” she said with a humph. “They think she’s just gone off with some man.”

  Diana had recently been seeing someone, a businessman from London who’d come to Axestowe for the yacht parties that had become all the rage, but despite her bohemian ways, she wouldn’t have just deserted her responsibilities. I said as much to Gran.

  “No,” Lillian agreed. “I suspect they’re just worried about their precious festival. Don’t want the snooping press about, do they?”

  The Axestowe Festival, an arts and folk music gathering that had been a mainstay of the town for more than three decades, had become in recent years an economic boon to the town, drawing tourists from all over England and the world. “Well, let’s not jump to conclusions, Lady Dawood,” I teased.

  “Oh, don’t you dare. I’m cross enough about no one taking me seriously.”

  “I’m sorry, Gran. You’re right.”

  “I would like you to come home for a few weeks and see if you can help me sort it out.”

  I hesitated. I’d had a lot on my mind lately. The small graphic arts studio I worked for was slowly, inexorably going under, and I needed to figure out what to do next—not for the money so much, since my ex was as generous as he’d been unfaithful, but for my own sense of purpose.

  Gran, in her late eighties, had begun to sound a little wan in her phone calls lately too. I hadn’t visited Axestowe for nearly a year, not since my mother had swanned back, and now I fretted that I’d left it too long. Was Gran ill and not telling me? Was that dementia I’d heard in her slight but noticeable mental wanders lately?

  But the biggest worry was my fifteen-year-old daughter, who was not only grieving the divorce of her parents but had also been caught in the middle of a brutal social media storm just over a month ago.

  What that storm entailed, I had no idea. Isabel had deleted all her accounts and refused to talk to me about it. Four times now, she’d sat in a therapist’s office for the full hour without saying a word. She wouldn’t even talk to her father, usually her hero, and Martin’s modest fame as an indie singer meant he’d been the target of social media bullying campaigns more than once. He was as worried as I was, but no matter what we’d thus far tried, she was locked up tight.

  To my shame, I hadn’t even realized anything was going on until Isabel was suspended from school after a fight with a girl I thought was her best friend. When she came home that day, she had simply closed up. She also refused to return to classes and instead enrolled herself in an online school, then begged tearfully for my signature to change.

  I resisted signing the paper for more than a week, attempting to trade a confession for the signature, but she only hid in her room, staring at the ceiling. Fearful as ever that I was ill prepared to be a good mother thanks to my own childhood, I discussed it with her father and her therapist, and we agreed together that she needed some time. Isabel had been an old soul from the day she was born, and there were only two months left in the
term. Sooner or later she’d crack with the therapist.

  At least I hoped so.

  In return for permission to go to school online, she’d agreed to text me every hour while I worked and to have lunch every day with her dad, who lived nearby. I didn’t want her to isolate herself too much or turn to self-harm. Her cat, a gift from her father when we’d divorced, kept her company, but I’d been thinking a lot about letting her help me pick out a puppy. Dogs could wiggle their way into hearts like nothing else, and our old beloved chow mutt, Simba, had died six months before.

  For now, we were taking it day by day. She ate meals and read. Book after book after book, which seemed completely appropriate to me. There’d been many times in my life when a book taking me away from my own miserable world had been the best possible choice. I’d just have to help her feel more comfortable in the real world a little at a time until she felt safe enough to come back into it.

  As Gran talked on the phone about my proposed visit, Isabel’s door opened, and she shuffled into the kitchen in an oversize hoodie and sweatpants, her outfit of choice the past month, as if wearing enough clothes could make her invisible.

  Invisible from who? I wondered. Or what?

  Maybe if I took her away from here, she would let down her guard and tell me what had happened. I lowered the phone. “Want to go to England?” I asked.

  She turned, eyes wide. “Yes.”

  Looking into those velvet-dark eyes, so full of pain I couldn’t reach, I felt my heart twist. “All right,” I said into the phone. “I’ll call you back when I know the details.”

  When I hung up, I sent a text to Diana:

  Hey, is everything okay? Gran is worried about you. Text me back when you get this.

  After a lifetime of shuttling back and forth between Santa Fe and the West Country of England, I should have earned a pass on jet lag. It should have been the plague of others, not a woman with dual citizenship who had half her family in New Mexico and half in England.

  But as I hauled my luggage from the taxi’s boot in the drive of my grandmother’s rambling six-hundred-year-old Devon manor house, my very fingernails ached with weariness. It was well past midnight. Nearly thirteen hours on planes, another two to transfer to the train, three on the train, and we’d arrived beneath the waxing moon, faded to half in a sky scudding with clouds. Isabel, mussed and bleary eyed, unfolded herself and stared dopily at the manor. “Are we here?”