Get in trouble, I thought. Was I sixteen?
Some part of me was.
Cooper hadn’t moved. “Are you okay?” I asked.
He roused himself, shook his head no.
“Why don’t you check her desk?” I suggested gently. “I’ll look in the bedroom.”
“Yes. All right.” He gathered himself and marched his body into the other room.
The bedroom was up a set of narrow stairs that creaked as I climbed them. I headed down the hall on uneven, ancient boards.
Everything was immaculately tidy—Diana’s reaction to the madness of the communal childhood we’d all shared. Her hair was always freshly cut, her clothes clean and pressed, and here, in her home, everything was in its place.
In the bedroom, I had to halt again. Just as I’d found comfort in the scent of Cooper in the Range Rover, I smelled Diana here. Not perfume, but the smell of her skin and the products she used on her hair and the way she metabolized oxygen and a million other things that added up to the notes that belonged to her alone. Cooper smelled of the outdoors. Diana’s scent was equal parts vanilla and fresh coriander, which wouldn’t seem to go together, but they brought her presence into the room, sharp and fragrant, in a visceral, painful way. I missed her desperately, all at once, and tears sprang to my eyes. Damn it! Why had I let such a stupid thing come between us?
Where are you?
I was suddenly assailed with a vision of her dead body, lying in some wet, dank place, and something in me cracked. I couldn’t do this, couldn’t go through her things. Couldn’t—
No.
I squared my shoulders. Everyone else could give up, but until I had exhausted every possibility, I would keep looking for her. I owed her that much. To that end, I started looking through her things. It was invasive and uncomfortable, but necessary.
I started with her drawers, where everything was folded in what I recognized as Marie Kondo order. It made me smile. I remembered our conversation not too long ago on the wonders of the Kondo method, which had made me run shuddering away but appealed to Diana’s need for order and peace.
Nothing seemed amiss. Cooper was right—the police hadn’t searched here at all, then, not if everything was exactly as she’d left it. I knew there were legalities about when the police could declare a missing person an investigation, but hadn’t we passed that point already?
Clearly not. I opened the wardrobe with its crystal knobs and found dresses and blouses and, at one side, a pair of men’s shirts, one a soft green, the other a similar tone in blue. Henry’s, no doubt. Both were crisply pressed, as if she’d laundered them. I hesitated, then took one out. Henry was a big man, tall and broad, and he could afford good quality. I thought of the blurry image of the man from the boat, and he came a little clearer in my mind.
I hung it up again, hoping he would be back to wear it. Taking Diana to dinner somewhere nice, giving her the attention she deserved.
Or maybe he was the reason she’d disappeared.
Where was he, anyway? Why didn’t anyone know him? Why hadn’t the police talked to him yet? Even if he was in London, someone must surely have his number.
It made me think of Diana’s phone again. Where was the phone? If they couldn’t track it, then the battery was dead, which would make it harder to hope for a happy ending, but it was possible it had been lost. Dumped somewhere.
I continued my search—through the bedroom, peeking in the drawers of the nightstands, afraid to find anything too personal. A box of condoms was all I found.
Condoms. I held the box for a moment, trying to remember the last time I’d used them or needed them. So long that the date was lost in time. After my marriage had broken up, I’d dated a little here and there, but it was hard enough to juggle a full-time job, an adolescent child, and a home without adding men into the equation.
And really, it was all just so exhausting. Getting to know someone, starting at square one, trying to suss out who would be worth the time.
Mostly, they just were not, so I stopped trying.
I put the box back in the drawer, exactly as it had been. Nothing else in the bedroom caught my eye, and I wandered down the hall to the bathroom. It was a cramped room with a giant pink tub and a pedestal sink. The wooden medicine chest was installed in the wall, not behind a mirror, and I had to struggle to open the damp-swollen door.
The usual things—aspirin and paracetamol. Eye drops. A prescription cream for eczema. A can of manly-scented shaving cream and a razor that must have also belonged to Henry. Toiletries implied a certain expectation—of return, of stability, of settling in.
I missed that, too, the sense of coupledom and intimacy. The fact of Diana’s relationship had played into the distance between us too. She’d accused me of keeping parts of myself aloof always, keeping everyone at arm’s length. I was furious, wounded, and at a loss over how to overcome the distance. Martin had accused me, too, of never really allowing him true intimacy, soul intimacy.
But how did you let people in if you knew they’d always leave you?
Staring at the neat contents of the medicine chest, I blinked back more tears. Now Diana had left, too, but I’d left her first, maybe hoping it wouldn’t hurt as much.
It still did.
I closed the door, aching, and went back downstairs. It was silent. Cooper sat by the desk, head in his hands. Lamplight glazed his form, edging the strong, long back, his tumble of hair, the edge of his chin. A memory of longing, or maybe something new, shimmered up my inner arms, across my throat.
I must have made a sound because he straightened, dashing tears off his face. “Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “It’s just so bloody sad, doing this.”
My throat tight, I came to stand beside him, hesitated, then laid a hand on his shoulder. For a moment, I didn’t say anything, just let my hand convey my own sorrow and my sympathy for his. It seemed strangely normal, and I found myself tempted to smooth down his hair.
Swallowing, I said, “I know. Henry’s shirts are hanging in her closet, and his razor is in her bathroom. She was so happy with him, for the first time ever. Did you ever meet him?”
He shook his head. “We tried a couple of times, but he was only here on the weekends, setting up whatever it was he was doing. Fishing trips, I think.”
“Yeah.” I spied something on the desk and reached for it, moving away from Cooper. The paper was a business card, very simple, from an estate agent in Exeter. I wondered what she’d been doing in Exeter. I held it, frowning, and ran a finger down the numbers running down one side of the ledger. “Did you find anything here?”
“It’s strange. Why would anyone use a paper ledger when you have computers? Do you see that she doesn’t have a computer in here?”
I frowned. “Laptop, maybe?”
“If she had one, it’s not here.”
“Will you stop using past tense?” I snapped.
His jaw tightened. “You always do make up your own reality.”
Stung, I glared at him, then shook my head. “How does it help to imagine she’s dead, Cooper? What does that help?”
“It helps me. You saw her once a year! I saw her nearly every bloody day.”
Both true and untrue. “She’s still my friend.”
“Not the same.”
Again, the sting of truth. “I know.” I shook my head, looking around the room, remembering times we’d sat in this room and talked about life, about love, about hope. I’d poured out my despair over my divorce here, and she’d shared her plan for a catering business, the millionth conversation of our lives. “I don’t have many friends. Losing her is a big loss.”
He took my hand.
“Until I see her body, she’s alive in my mind. I want her to be happy: enjoying a relationship and having sex and going on great trips.” Tears filled my eyes. “Just let me have that for a little while longer.”
He softened. “I’m sorry.”
I ducked my head, blinking. “What’s in the le
dger?”
“Accounting. Nothing seems amiss.”
In Diana’s square printing were categories down one side—Picnics, Baskets, Lunches, Cold Suppers, À la Carte. Dates ran across the top of the page. She had entered the number of each, some numbers in purple. “Why would she keep this here? And why on paper?” I frowned. “It’s not like she was a technophobe.”
“Not at all.”
I flipped a few pages, but there were only the first two pages, dates from last summer to now. “We should check out her office and the computer there.”
He smiled, albeit wanly. “Look who’s getting into the spirit of it!”
“I want to find her.”
“All right. I’ll talk to Cora, her assistant. I’m sure she has keys.”
I nodded, frowning at the page. My intuition insisted something was here. Why the paper?
“C’mon. Let’s have a cup of tea. You know that’s what she’d want us to do.”
What I really wanted was a hug. A place to rest my head and let go of some of the tension I felt. But I followed him to the kitchen.
An array of photos was stuck to the fridge with magnets. One was of Poppy and Cooper standing in front of the bay. “You two are great friends these days,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. “We are, actually. Are you going to cut me off the way you did Diana?”
Tears of shame and loss rose again, and I blinked them back, shaking my head. “No. Lillian needs her.”
He touched my shoulder, squeezed, and let go. “I know it’s not easy.”
I shrugged. “How did you two become friends again? I didn’t think you were the type for tarot readings.”
“No.” He filled the kettle with water while I opened the cupboards until I found mugs. “She’s doing some conservation work, counting hares, birds, and some butterflies on her farm.”
“She has a farm?” In a second cupboard, I found a glass jar full of tea bags and took one out for each of the cups. “Like an actual farm, with animals?” A memory of her scattering feed for a flock of chickens rose in my mind, and with it, a sense of longing. I crushed it down. If I wanted to function at all, I couldn’t let my mother in. Not right now. Not with everything else: Isabel and Diana and what to do about my grandmother. Too much.
He turned the burner on beneath the kettle and leaned against the counter, arms folded across his chest. I found myself noticing the hollow of his throat and remembered the smell of him there, the heat. “Goats, I believe,” he said, “and chickens, maybe a couple of cats. She grows most of her own herbs for the shop, and flowers. You all seem to be gardeners.”
“So industrious.” I always imagined my mother dancing around barefoot to a Celtic fiddle, flowers in her hair, being completely impractical. “I guess it fits, in a way. Back to the land like a proper hippie.”
“Perhaps it’s time to let the past go, Zoe. It’s been a long time since she left you. It’s not too late to have a relationship with her.”
I straightened, feeling chastised by the one person who should have understood. A part of me wanted to present my arguments, my very good reasons for keeping my distance, but even the thought of it made me feel winded. If I let my mother in now, I would fall to pieces. I couldn’t chance another betrayal.
“Honestly,” I said wearily, “I have no desire. What would we even say to each other?”
“I suspect you’d find something.”
I opened and closed a couple of drawers, looking for pencil and paper. In one, I discovered a neat collection of white packets, tea or herbal cures of some sort. Each one had The Kitchen Witch stamped on it, and I recoiled, shoving the door closed.
In a “junk” drawer that held a tidy stack of envelopes, I found a roll of stamps with a rubber band around it, notepaper, and a pen. I shook my head. “She’s so tidy.”
“Doesn’t take after her mother, does she?” Cooper agreed.
I sat at the table. “Let’s see if we can figure anything out about the past few months. Diana was working a lot, from the sound of things, catering to the fishing parties.”
He nodded.
“Do you know if she stayed on the boats and worked the parties, or did she just drop off the food?”
“She didn’t go out with the boats, no. She made picnics and sandwiches, cold chicken, things of that sort. Things they’d reheat or eat as finger food.”
“Wonder why.”
“The parties last a few days, out to sea. Not a lot of pleasure for a woman in that environment.”
“Makes sense.”
The kettle whistled, and Cooper grabbed it, poured water into our mugs. “I reckon the milk is spoiled, but there’s sugar.”
Her fridge. I looked at it, thinking of the food rotting within. “Do you think we should clean it out so it’s not awful when—” The words stuck in my throat. When she comes home.
He covered my hand. “Let’s not, shall we?” He nudged the sugar bowl in my direction.
“I hate to think it was Henry,” I said. “But who else could it really be?”
“Honestly, it’s bothered me that none of her friends had met him.”
I frowned, handing him the spoon I’d used to stir my tea. “Gran thinks there’s something going on in the village. Maybe Henry—and Diana—are part of whatever that is.”
“Go on.” The spoon looked like a toy in his big hand. He’d always been the tallest, leanest boy in our class, and he never really looked like he fit in an ordinary chair. I suddenly remembered sitting on his lap, winding my arms around him, leaning in to kiss his neck and jaw, tickling him on purpose.
I looked away. “She’s getting confused sometimes, so it’s hard to tell if she really means something now, or something in one of her books, or something from the war.”
“Perhaps something is crossing wires, something from now reminding her of the past.” He shifted, and his knee bumped mine. He immediately reached out a hand, touched my leg lightly. “Sorry.”
Our eyes met fully for the first time, really, since I’d been back. Met and caught, and I was captured, a lost hunger rising in my chest. He was still as handsome as a prince from some old fairy tale, a thing he’d rejected from youngest childhood. Not only the biggest boy, but the most beautiful. Girls chased him around the playgrounds. Followed him when we all went to Exeter to shop. Left trinkets for him on his bike or car.
He hated it. It was an accident of genes, nothing to do with himself, he said, and he was a loner who preferred the company of his dogs to girls who had nothing in their minds but some fantasy.
As a woman who had known that face my entire life, it was still startling sometimes to see it objectively anew. It was the balance and clarity of his features, the exact measurements of what the human eye finds appealing—eyes spaced just so, with a strong, straight nose between, and cheekbones giving it shape, and his mouth, wide and full lipped. A shimmer of tears lingered in his lower lashes. A glaze of sparse beard on his chin caught the light.
His hand rested on my leg. Something filled the room, yearning then and yearning now, and without even thinking I bent close and kissed him.
For a long, long electric moment, he returned it, his free hand flying up to the back of my neck to hold me there. My hand fell on his leg, and I was leaning forward, half risen out of my chair so that I had to brace myself against him.
He pulled away, abruptly and with some vigor, turning his head. “No, not this time,” he said.
Embarrassed, I flung my body out of my chair, heading for the door, imagining I would flee by diving out into the night and the pouring rain. I struggled with my wellies.
“Stay,” Cooper said behind me. He stood two feet away, carefully not touching me, but one hand extended. “It’s terrible out there.”
I covered my mouth with my hand, my ears burning with humiliation. “I’m sorry,” I said, and even as I said it, I didn’t mean it. I could taste him on my lips still, could feel the silky slide of his tongue against mine. “I don�
�t know why I did that.”
He shook his head. “Forget it.”
I thought of his hand on the back of my neck, felt a fluttering at the base of my throat. Stayed frozen by the door.
“Come sit down, Zoe.” He gestured toward the table. “It’s not fit for woman nor beast out there.”
I didn’t see how I could sit down in front of him with my cheeks flaming in humiliation. “I can’t,” I whispered.
He waited, calm and quiet.
The rain pounded overhead, splattering in bursts against the windows. I wondered just how soaked I would get if I ran back up the hill to the Tesco.
Very.
I sat. Picked up my mug to give myself something to do, a chance to let my mortification subside a little. But even in my humiliation, I felt starved and aroused. The imprint of his body and mouth, the sound of his breath against me, lingered, leaving my skin buzzing and alive.
I closed my eyes, willing myself to calm down. I thought of the way watercolor paint slides over a heavy cotton page, the depth of oil in the same color. After a minute, I could look at him.
He stirred his tea, even if it had been stirred three times. I recognized the nervousness in the gesture. “Will you bring your daughter out to the moor tomorrow?”
I grabbed the lifeline, relieved that he could return things to the new normal, that I hadn’t ruined everything. “She was not interested in waking up at five, but she said dusk would be fine.”
He smiled softly. “Good. We’ll see what we can spot. I’ve been hearing a pair of tawny owls of late.”
“I would love that.”
“Still an owl lover?”
“Of course. You should see the great horned owls that come calling in my backyard.”
“Tell me.”
It gave me an easy thing to cling to, which I knew he’d given me out of kindness.
“They’re enormous.” I held out my hand to illustrate the height from the floor. “And they have a beautiful call.” I paused and summoned the voice I used for owls, low and breathy. “Whoo . . . whoo hoo.” I had his attention fully, and continued. “Whoo . . . whoo hoo. My father doesn’t like them. He thinks they’re unlucky, but I know you would be enchanted, as I am. In the summertime, at night, when the crickets are whirring, and there is no traffic, and the big New Mexico sky is clear, that sound is like the gods.”
The Lost Girls of Devon Page 13