The Lost Girls of Devon

by Barbara O'Neal

  His eyes rested on my face, as if he had looked through me to the scene I’d sketched. It made me feel a little drunk. “You should see it someday.”

  “I always planned to,” he said, straightening.

  “That’s not fair, Cooper.”

  “Most people call me Sage now.”

  Bricks made of words, making a wall. I shook my head. “I doubt I could make the change.”

  He nodded, rubbed a palm on his leg. The rain began to slow. I took a breath, let it out, remembered why we were there. “When do you want to check out her office?”

  “Sooner the better, I suppose. Tomorrow morning, since your girl wants to sleep in?”

  “I need to talk to Lillian, make sure she’s okay first. Make sure Isabel has something to do. I don’t want to leave her alone too much.”

  “All right. Text me when you’re ready. I have something to do early, but I can meet you around ten.”

  “Okay.”

  He glanced at the clock, which showed five to nine. “Shall we make a run for it?”

  Back home, I didn’t see a strange car in the drive, and the house seemed abed. Poppy seemed to have gone. A note sat on the table. “Everything good,” Isabel had written. “Xoxoxoxoxox.”

  Beneath the note was a neatly lettered page of care instructions from my mother. Her handwriting gave me a pang, opening a wound I really did not care to examine in my weary state, and I shoved it down. The instructions were clear and straightforward, the medicines listed in alphabetical order, with their dosages and uses also listed.

  Like the idea of my mother on the farm, this evidence of her nurturing maturity went against all I knew of her. Maybe she had changed.

  Maybe, I thought, wearily, turning off the lights as I made my way upstairs, I still didn’t care.

  I checked on Isabel and Lillian, finding both asleep. Mósí sprawled the length of his mistress, his belly open to the hand she rested there. It made me smile. Silly cat. In Gran’s room, the lamp was on in the corner, and a plastic bottle of water, the type with a pull top, sat on her nightstand. She was so small now that she barely raised the covers, and my heart flipped. One day, she would no longer be in this world. I didn’t know how I could bear it. She was the one through line in my life.

  I made my way to my own room, at the farthest end of the wing. The corridor was dark, illuminated only by what light could sift through the cloud cover and make it through the windows lining the way. I looked out to the bay, choppy and black on such a grim night, and wondered what all the fishing-party boys were up to if they were stuck in town.

  In my room, I caught up with small bits of email until our erratic Wi-Fi finally shut down completely. Too restless to sleep, I sifted through the notes I’d been collecting on my phone.

  Diana had disappeared two weeks ago. Her boyfriend had been gone ever since. No one in town had seen her. The sweep had turned up no body, thank God, but maybe it would yield some other result. A spot in my heart burned with the idea of her locked away somewhere, which was at least better than imagining her body eaten by fish or tossed in a shallow grave.

  I wished we could find her boyfriend, or get some sense of what she’d been doing. I made a note to see if we could find out what her most recent jobs had been.

  Diana. Where are you? Help me find you.

  I looked forward to taking Isabel to Dartmoor. It was a place of healing, and she’d been so much better since we’d arrived here that I had hope that the moor would take it a few steps further. It would be good for me too. My nerves were wound too tight over both Diana and Isabel, and I needed to get out in nature and breathe a bit. It would help me think of how to best proceed with my grandmother. My mother.

  I really did not want to think about Poppy. Ever. At all. But especially tonight when everything felt so stirred up. My skin still rippled every time I thought of kissing Cooper, in mortification but also in longing. It was embarrassing to still want that so much.

  My sketching notebooks from that time were stored here, all neatly arranged by date on the lower bookshelves. There were two dozen or more, heavyweight linen-covered sketchbooks Lillian had bought to encourage my artistic interests. She’d also bought me a flute at one time, and paid for dance lessons that lasted exactly three weeks before I realized I didn’t really love the discipline as much as flying around in private dance to a waltz.

  But the art turned out to be just right. After gathering a few sketchbooks, I carried them back to my bed and leaned against the wall to leaf through them. I found grasses and flowers sketched in remarkably thorough detail, cowslips and heather and dog violets. In another series, I found the various dogs who’d kept us company, and barn cats and sheep; gnarled lonely trees and windbreaks made of hawthorn. One entire notebook was devoted to glades of ancient trees, magical and green, limbs and rocks and ground covered in moss. I couldn’t remember how far into the park Piles Copse was, but considering how magical Isabel had found the forest by the river, she should see it.

  In some part of my mind, I’d been looking for the sketches of Cooper, and I finally found some of them. Quickly rendered figure drawings, ink and watercolors of his hands or boots. Detailed drawings of his face. Several pages of just his hair, as I tried to capture the look of curls, making hair look like hair, capturing the graded shades of blond to dark contained within a single lock.

  I turned the pages, half smiling. The work was sometimes rough, the early work of an emerging artist, but I was pleased to find that quite a lot of them were very good. Hands were difficult, and the renditions of his were good, especially when I’d used pencil and had taken my time.

  One book was mostly devoted to the butterflies I so loved. The green hairstreak was my favorite, with its expressive face and iridescent green wings. I drew many others, too; butterflies were a satisfying subject, particularly in colored pencil, which I’d used a lot in those days. It was a medium that required patience and the time to layer, but of course as a teenager I’d had loads of time.

  I turned the page, and caught my breath. Here were more sketches of Cooper, and I remembered exactly when I’d done the series. His mother had gone somewhere, and we’d taken advantage of her absence to spend the afternoon exploring each other. I’d sketched him naked, his long lean form so poetically balanced, while he watched me do it.

  Cooper, naked, in a great amount of detail.

  A frisson of erotic memory ran along the edges of my shoulder blades, whispered over my palms. I looked through the page to the day itself, seeing him sprawled against the sheets, light pouring through the small window in his room.

  In those days, sex had been one of our favorite pursuits. We spent hours and hours kissing, touching, looking, entwining.

  As memories tumbled through my mind, I thought of kissing him tonight, thought of his thumb moving, almost unconsciously, on my thigh, his hand pulling me hard into him.

  Stop it, I thought, shaking it off. I closed the sketchbook and forced myself to go to bed. Nothing was going to be solved if I didn’t get some sleep.

  But as I lay there in the dark, I wished for Diana, the one person who knew everything about me and about the history of Sage and me. The one who could help me sort through my inappropriate pass at him and the yearning that lingered in the hollows of my body. She would have told me what to do.

  Chapter Twenty

  Isabel

  In the middle of the night, I woke up yelling at the top of my lungs. Anywhere else you’d think someone would hear me, but the walls in the manor are thick. In the dream, my arms were covered with letters and words made of fire, and the words burned me, traveled up my body, down my legs and stomach and back and butt.

  I was fighting in my dream, fighting off the words that turned into ropes that tied me up, tied my hands and tried to lace my lips closed, but I managed to scream and flung myself upright. Even Mósí was scared by it.

  My arms were clean and bare, and it was kind of stupid, but I yanked up my shirt and looked
at my stomach, and for one second I flashed on that morning when I woke up and—

  No.

  It took a long time, maybe hours, to get back to a place where I could sleep. I used my earphones and played the soundtrack for writing, and then I went to Wattpad, where I wrote about a girl going through a doorway to the land of the fey, a magical and dangerous land where you have to be sure not to be enchanted or to eat or drink anything but berries and apples, and the most perfect pears cover the bushes and trees, and the girl is offered a golden cup of pomegranate juice, which comes from the story of Persephone, who ate a pomegranate seed from the devil, or a god who is just like the devil.

  It made me hungry, all that writing, but to get to the kitchen you have to go down the back stairs, which are tight and shadowy and feel super creepy, which I didn’t want to do in the middle of the night. But Mósí was still giving me a look like he didn’t trust me, so I used the flashlight on my phone and made myself go through the hallway and down those narrow stairs—

  Put her on the couch.

  —I stopped, heart in my throat, to see if anything else would come. A smell of dust, which was both in the stairs and in memory, and—

  Arms around my shoulders, my knees, a sense of falling. Laughing.

  Actual memory. New memory.

  I stood very still, willing more to come back to me. A face, a voice I recognized, something. Anything.

  But that was all. I stood there waiting until Mósí meowed in his annoyed voice for me to hurry up and come down and give him some tuna.

  Maybe all I have to do to feel better is to remember what happened. Not from the pictures, but for myself. If I can remember, then it will belong to me.

  How do I do that? If I ask my therapist, it will open a big can of bullshit that I don’t want to hear. A visual of a pencil pops into my mind. Write? Maybe I should write what I can remember, and then I’ll remember more.

  But what if I never do?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Poppy

  The third Sunday of the month, I often held workshops and classes in the front half of my barn, a renovated space that could hold a remarkable number of students. I taught all manner of things, from making spell candles to keeping a moon journal to creating rituals of many kinds, all based in the sacred feminine. I’d started them to supplement my thin shop income a couple of years before, and they’d proven to be well worth the time. Everyone wanted to read tarot at a party, or make a spell to bring back a straying lover, or inspire a husband to have more sex.

  But in truth, the gatherings provided a chance for women to come together in ways that were becoming lost to us. Most Western women had no idea that the divine could be female, or they’d been taught that it was secondary to the male. In these workshops, which seemed to be about party tricks, I gave them the possibility that maybe Spirit could be a Mother as well as a Father.

  This morning, I was still carrying the ghosts of my dreams. I’d gone back to India to visit Ravi and then sailed back to the pilgrimage in Glastonbury that had set me upon this path. In my dreams, I pressed my open palms to the Egg, that ancient ritual stone that now sits amid the ruins of Glastonbury Cathedral.

  I was working with that energy today, that Egg, so the dream made sense. And Ravi, Ravi who had been so much on my mind because Zoe was back.

  Zoe. She’d been gone by the time I’d arrived at Woodhurst last night, and I’d found myself absurdly disappointed. Her phone call had made me feel like there might have been a crack in the wall, and in fact, it hadn’t been anything but expedient. Zoe had recognized that she needed help with Lillian, and that was something I could do easily. I’d organized the meds according to a calendar, and written out detailed instructions for what to use if, for example, Lillian became agitated or needed a sedative to sleep. Isabel had given me her full attention, and I extracted a promise from her that she would call at the slightest question or concern.

  And it was plain my mother was in a state last night. Confused, which often led to her being combative. Once we got Lillian to bed, I explained to Isabel that the memory lapses were episodic—at times she functioned perfectly well, but she needed a lot of supervision.

  “You’ve been caring for her?” she asked.

  “Diana and I together.”

  The final dream last night had been about Isabel. I found myself at Woodhurst, watching over her as she slept.

  Troubled Isabel. The sense of her, yearning and sorrowful, clung to me as I went about my chores, feeding the animals and collecting eggs and preparing myself for the day. Now, I cleared the workshop space with a ritual I’d learned from an old native woman in New Mexico, using sage to banish negative energy of all sorts.

  Sage the man showed up just as I was finishing to help me put the room together. He’d pulled his hair back from his face and tucked it under a hat, and he looked tired. His dog trotted in behind him.

  “Are you all right, love?” I asked.

  He gave a nod. “Just tired. We looked through Diana’s house last night to see if we could find any . . .” His voice cracked a little. “Anything.”

  “We?”

  He looked at me, an unreadable disturbance in his clear eyes. The eyes of a sage. “Zoe.”

  “Mmm. Did you find anything?”

  “No.”

  I touched his upper arm, rubbed it for a moment.

  “What do you think happened to her?” he asked.

  “It’s impossible to say, isn’t it?”

  “Haven’t you read cards or asked the spirits or something?”

  It wasn’t the way I used those tools, and he did know it. “If only that would give us the answers.” I patted his arm. “Let’s get started on these chairs, shall we? I’ve a crowd today.”

  We moved long tables from the sides of the room into the main area and then placed chairs around each one. Soft light filtered down from skylights I’d installed when I’d first done the renovation.

  “What’re you teaching today?” Sage asked.

  “Spell work for the Hare Moon.”

  His lips pursed the way they always did over my subjects. He was a nonbeliever, but he liked pagan ways better than any other spiritual tradition. “What does the Hare Moon signify?”

  “Oh, a good many lovely things. Growth, abundance, rebirth. Fertility.” I shook out a tablecloth made of more of the hand-dyed fabric I loved from Jaipur. Each one was a different color, and I had gathered the spring colors today—soft purple and yellow and green. We spread them out over the tables. I hummed along to the Loreena McKennitt music that played on the speakers. “Perhaps you should stay and make a charm for yourself.”

  He clicked his tongue in mock regret. “Afraid I have to be somewhere.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Isabel

  I ate breakfast with my grandmother and then helped her feed the goats, which I do with my granddad all the time.

  “Tell me about your grandfather,” Poppy asked.

  So I told her about his little adobe house out in the desert beneath a stand of cottonwoods that have grown tall because they have their feet in a creek, and about the rugs he weaves and sells to tourists, and the plot of green chiles and tomatoes he grows.

  “Sounds as if you spend a lot of time with him,” Poppy commented, tossing grain out to the chickens.

  “I do. He lives close by, and he’s always been around a lot, even when I was a tiny baby.”

  “Is he still a sculptor?”

  I looked up, surprised. “No. I’ve never seen him do that kind of art.”

  Poppy paused, grain for the chickens still in her hand. “Never? That’s too bad. He’s very good.”

  “He is?” I tried to fit what I knew of my grandfather into this information, or the other way around. “What did he make?”

  “Animal abstracts, mostly, and he had a way of creating flow with the most difficult materials.”

  “Huh. No, he just weaves now.”

  “That’s art too,” Po
ppy said mildly.

  “Why did you get divorced?”

  “Oh, it’s always complicated, that.”

  “Not always,” I said. “My dad has too many women, and it made my mom sad, so she decided she’d be better off without him.”

  “And I’m sure she is.”

  I shrugged. “She’s not happy, though, not really.”

  “Why do you think that is?” Poppy gestured for me to follow her through a gate into a big garden surrounded by a fence.

  “I dunno.”

  “Children don’t spend time trying to decide why their parents are unhappy, but parents think about their children all the time. Did you know that?”

  “I guess.”

  Poppy picked up a basket from a sheltered bench, along with a pair of scissors from a metal container attached to the wall. We waded into the flowers, and Poppy cut this and that—a lot of one kind of pink flower, and some sprays of white—and layered them in the basket. “I suspect your mother is still looking for her place. She’ll find it.”

  “But we’ve lived in Santa Fe since I was born!”

  “True. I lived here from the time I was born, but I had to escape to find out who I was.”

  “You did? Is that how you met my grandpa?”

  “Yes.” She handed me the scissors and said, “Cut some of the yellow ones.”

  “Like this?” I felt hesitant, but how hard could it be?

  “A little bit lower, below the leaves. Good. I met your grandfather when I was twenty-two. I’d been living in Glastonbury, and a friend wanted to go to the States, so I went with her.”

  “And was it love at first sight?”