The Lost Girls of Devon

by Barbara O'Neal

  But it didn’t matter. Strong arms dragged me into a boat and held on to me as they rowed out to sea. They tied my hands and feet, then muttered more damning things over me about witchcraft and sorcery. Even in my dream I knew this was about my ancestor, Hannah, who was drowned as a witch, but it was also about me. I tried to wake up, but I couldn’t move.

  The moon was full, letting me see everything, even when they threw me overboard, and I sank, struggling to move my body in some way so that I could swim, could surface, could breathe, but I sank and sank and sank, the moon growing more and more watery the farther I fell.

  I bolted awake, gasping for breath and sitting up in my bed. Mósí, disturbed by my movement, resettled with a little grumpy meow. I was surprised to find that his hair was not wet.

  It was the worst nightmare yet, and I was so scared I couldn’t even move for a while. When I got my courage up, I grabbed Mósí and dashed down the hall to my mother’s room. For a second, I was afraid that Sage might be in there, and that would be so weird, but I had to try. I flung open the door, and there was my mom, fast asleep, her long hair woven into a braid that snaked over her pillow. I dove in beside her, finding warmth and comfort and a wall against fear.

  “Isabel!” she said sleepily. “Are you okay?”

  “Now I am,” I said, and with Mósí and my mom, I could fall asleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Zoe

  Gran was back to her normal self on Tuesday morning. She slept straight through, and it was as if the sleep had scrubbed her brain clean. When she came down for breakfast, she was her usual self—hair done, dressed in crisp blouse and polyester slacks with a crease, and shoes with a little heel. Her lipstick was perfect, the berry color following the curve of her lip exactly.

  It was as if the incident yesterday had never happened. “Good morning,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  “I am very well, thank you.” She plucked at the napkin in front of her. “I miss Diana.”

  “I know. The service is sending out some women to interview.” I stood. “I’ll make some scrambled eggs, shall I? And toast?”

  “That would be nice.” But she looked into the distance—sadly, I thought. “Zoe, I can’t really be alone.”

  “Oh, Gran, I know! I’m here, and Isabel is here, and we’ll get a nurse who knows the ropes.” I didn’t say that we were working on long-term plans, but we were.

  “I need Poppy.”

  My heart dropped. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I broke a couple of eggs into a bowl and scrambled them with a fork.

  “She doesn’t have to stay here all the time. She won’t sleep here.”

  I watched the butter melt in the pan.

  “She’s been doing a lot for me, my love.”

  What could I say? “Whatever you need, Gran.”

  “I’ll call her, then. Perhaps she can come over later today and help me sort things out. If you like, you can go for a walk or—whatever you need.”

  I nodded, but there was a buzzing in my head, a sense of doom or endings or something. I wanted to weep, but I’d done quite enough of that last night.

  Isabel burst into the kitchen. Her hair was wild. She’d slept with me last night after a bad dream, and I’d left her asleep in my bed. “I had the worst nightmare!”

  I leaned my head into hers. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “No.” She nuzzled her face into my neck. “I want a different room.”

  “What does the room have to do with it?”

  “That’s the haunted room. Poppy even told me it was.”

  I rolled my eyes. “There’s no such thing as hauntings, but whatever.” I lifted the pan off the stove, and she let her arms drop. “Gran, what would be best?”

  “Take your pick,” she said. “Anything but Rowan, which does have a problem. We’ve got to get someone in here to look at that.”

  The place was crumbling. It needed a caretaker and at least a handful of servants. There was money enough. “Why don’t you have anyone to clean more often?” I asked Gran, bringing her plate over. “Tea is brewing. Do you want something, Isabel?”

  “Yeah, that looks good.”

  Gran said, “The last girl quit, and I haven’t had time to replace her. The interviews, the conversations.” She waved a hand. “Too much trouble.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” I picked up my phone and made notes as I talked. “You have a gardener, is that right?”

  She ate with gusto, smearing her toast with jam. “I do need a cook. I simply forget to eat if there’s not someone to make my meals.”

  “Got it. Cook, someone to clean, and a nurse to stay twenty-four seven.”

  “And Poppy, don’t forget.”

  Isabel’s eyes widened.

  “And Poppy,” I repeated. “I’ll deal with the others. She’s all yours.”

  After breakfast, Lillian went upstairs to work, and I sat down with Isabel. “Another nightmare, huh?”

  “Don’t read all kinds of stuff into it, Mom. It was just that witch stuff. Poppy and I were talking about her, and that girl washed up on the beach, and my brain just made a movie.”

  I examined her face but found only calm. “Nothing happened at the party?”

  She lowered her eyelids. “No.”

  “Isabel.”

  “Okay, I met this guy and he kissed me, but that’s it, and there was nothing bad about it, just normal, okay?”

  I took a breath, feeling impotence and a sense of urgency. “I really need to know what happened to you, Isabel. I’m getting to the point that I can’t relax, and I can’t trust you if you don’t trust me.”

  “I do trust you!”

  “Then what?”

  She bowed her head, and I saw the depression descend on her, weighting her shoulders, her long neck. “I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to leave it behind.”

  Two sides of me warred—the part that wanted to restrict her until she talked, but wouldn’t that feel as if I was punishing her? And the part that wanted to let her figure out how to heal herself. It was a powerful skill.

  And the problem was, I hadn’t had a mother to show me how to mother, so how would I know what was right and wrong? I’d felt my way through every moment of her childhood, and I would trust my gut through this too. “When do you talk to Dr. Kerry again?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” I reached out and held her wrist. “Maybe you can’t tell me, for whatever reason. But I want you to really think about who you might be able to tell. Your counselor. Your dad. Whoever.”

  Isabel took a breath and tossed her hair out of her eyes. “Okay. I promise I’ll think about it.”

  When she’d gone upstairs, I called Sage. “When are you going to Exeter?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Why?”

  “I’d like to come with you, if you don’t mind. My mother is coming over to help sort things out with Gran, and I don’t want to be here.”

  A soft silence. “Is that wise?”

  “What do you mean? What does wise have to do with it?”

  “Well, it would seem you need to know what’s going on with Lillian, and your mother has that information.”

  The closer she came, the more panicky I felt. “I just . . . I . . . no.” I pressed a palm to the pain in my gut. I felt myself reverting to the child I had been in all manner of ways, but I couldn’t seem to halt it. “I can’t. Unless you want to go alone.”

  “Not at all, Zoe. I’ll text you when I’m on my way. I’ll pick you up.”

  “Thank you.”

  I spent the morning engaging a nurse, a woman by the name of Margaret. She had kind eyes, like Mary Poppins, and when I coaxed Gran out of her office, Margaret took both of her hands into her own and said the magic words. “I am such a fan of your work, Ms. Fairchild. You give the genre such a refreshing feminist bent.”

  With so many things settled, I found time to do some work of my own, sketching out my illustrat
ion ideas for the dog story that was due in a few weeks—a series of poignant and sweet and funny dogs of various sizes. I drew Simba three ways, his beautiful head and floppy ears and that gorgeous red-gold fur. I missed that dog like a limb.

  Martin and I had found him at a garage sale, of all places. We’d only been married six or eight months, and everything felt golden. I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life, traveling with him and his band on the weekends when I could, working at my graphic arts job the rest of the time. We had a sweet little cottage near the Plaza, and I loved the courtyard bound by adobe walls. It was my first garden, and it was a hard learning curve to discover that what had worked in my grandmother’s garden did not work in the high-desert sun. Simba grew up trotting beside me, garden to kitchen to bed. When Isabel was born, he adopted her as his very own child, sleeping by her crib, growling when flies buzzed around her head.

  The ache returned, that ache of longing and loss all mingled together. Every loss brought back all the others, Sage had said.

  Maybe I needed to stop fighting it. Fighting the terror I felt over Diana, fighting the fury I felt over my mother, fighting to fix Isabel’s loss, whatever it was, and just feel my grief.

  My phone buzzed.

  Pick you up in five, Sage texted.

  I grabbed my sweater and my bag. Isabel was reading in the sunroom. “Poppy will be here in twenty minutes. Gigi is upstairs. If you go anywhere, text me.”

  “I will. You don’t have to worry.”

  “I’ll see if I can find a color printer in Exeter,” I said. “Unless you just wanted to be there.”

  “No. I’m reading this book I found in the Whitethorn Room.” She flashed the cover, a very thick paperback from the nineties, fantasy of a sort I’d loved as a teen.

  “You’ll have to let me know what you think.”

  “Yep.” She opened the book again. “I’ll text you specs for the printer.”

  “I’m leaving, Gran!” I called up the stairs. “Call my evil mother as you wish.”

  “Yes, dear,” was all she said.

  As I left through the front door to meet Sage on the road, I noticed the beach was quite empty for such a bright day. A handful of boats was out on the bay, but most were gloomily moored, and only a scattered number of people sat or strolled along the sand. Superstition? Respect for the dead? With the festival coming up in just a few days, I hoped whatever it was would pass.

  The Range Rover pulled up alongside me. Sage tugged the hand brake for safety so I could climb in. “Hi,” I said, settling. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. I don’t mind the company.”

  He wore a soft cotton shirt, many years old, that was the exact color of his pale-green irises. “Did Alice buy you that shirt?”

  “Huh.” He opened his palm over the fabric, looking down with a frown. “I can’t remember. Perhaps. It’s the right era. Why?”

  For one second, I hesitated, realizing too late that my observation would give away how closely I watched him. “It matches your eyes. That’s something a wife would notice.”

  “Maybe it was an accident.” He looked at me directly, as if to give me time to admire those peepers. “Or maybe I did it myself.”

  I shook my head. “No. You’ve never been vain in the slightest.”

  “That you know of.”

  “I seem to recall you hating girls chasing you.”

  “I did.” He dropped the brake as soon as I fastened the seat belt and pulled in a circle to head back to the main road up to Exeter. “We’ll need to get out of there by four or so if we want to avoid the commuter traffic.”

  “So early!”

  “Better safe than sorry.” He checked behind him, pulled into traffic. “I didn’t like the girls because they were silly. They wanted something shallow. Dates. Prince Charming.”

  “Such wretched longings!”

  He gave me a reluctant smile. “You were never like that.”

  “Chasing you for your beauty?”

  “You’re deliberately misunderstanding me.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was only teasing.” I looked at him, with the green countryside rushing by his side of the window. “Did you wear it on purpose?”

  His mouth turned up the slightest bit.

  I looked at his hands on the steering wheel, strong and sinewy with all the work he did, and at the careful way he’d rolled the long sleeves up his forearm, not yet brown with summer sunshine, but they would be. A rustling stirred in my heart, feeling suspiciously like hope.

  He glanced at me. “A woman told me once that I should play up my eyes more.”

  “She was right.”

  A blanket of quiet settled between us. The radio played an alternative station. Little of it was familiar to me, but I knew the odd song and hummed along. I wished I could talk to Diana about what was happening here in the car. What would I say?

  I think something is happening between Cooper and me.

  What????

  I kissed him. And then he kissed me last night, and it was . . . it was the way it always was, D.

  Which is?

  I paused, looking out the window toward the sea. What was it?

  Like . . . I found something I lost. No, that’s not it. Like I found something someone else was holding.

  A tear welled up in the corner of my eye. She wasn’t here to listen or offer advice or laugh at me. “God, I miss Diana so much!” I said.

  He reached for my hand. “I was just texting her in my head.”

  “Me too!”

  “What were you telling her?”

  “Oh, no. You first.”

  He squeezed my fingers. Shook his head.

  It was always much farther to Exeter in my mind than it was in real life, and we were there within twenty minutes. Sage asked me to navigate with my phone to the address he’d copied from Diana’s papers. The payments had been substantial, thousands of pounds each, but there’d been nothing to point to what they might have been or been for.

  “Did you talk to Henry about this?” I asked. “Turn right at the next intersection.”

  “He hasn’t answered my calls.”

  “Is he still at the hotel?”

  “No.” He turned where I’d indicated. It was a neighborhood of terraced houses, all a little weary looking, too close to the street for much of a front garden, not that anyone seemed to bother. A pot of petunias bloomed on one front step, and a small fruit tree had blossomed, but there was little else.

  “Surely the police want him close by,” I said. “Henry, that is.”

  “I would think so, but that doesn’t change the fact that I haven’t reached him.”

  It made the anxiety in my chest grow three times its size. “Damn.” I looked at the address. “One more right, and it should be about halfway down the block.”

  More of the same brick-terraced houses. A little nicer here, as if the invalid had begun to respond to treatment. Grass grew in clumps, and a cat wandered lazily down the pavement.

  The address we sought had nothing to set it apart. A few tulips grew by the door. We went to the step and knocked, but from there I could see straight into the big front window, and the place was empty.

  “What the hell?” I said. “Surely she wasn’t going to move to Exeter. She hates it here.” I thought about correcting myself to hated, but I didn’t.

  “Maybe it was meant for someone else? Or a rental, maybe?”

  “But why buy a rental here?” I peered into the front room. “A holiday rental in Axestowe would make a fortune.”

  He nodded. Looked at the piece of paper in his hand, as if to double-check. “I don’t know.”

  We stood there, flummoxed. “Now what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe we just follow the string wherever it goes and keep doing that until we get answers that take us farther.”

  “You’re right. Sorry.”

  “Not necessary. Let’s get some lunch somewhere with Wi-Fi, and I’ll s
ee what I can track down on my phone.”

  “I haven’t had fish and chips since I’ve been here.”

  His smile was easy. “Well, let’s find you some, then.”

  First I had to find a shop to pick up a color printer for Isabel, which we accomplished without a lot of drama. I texted to be sure it was powerful enough but would also work with her laptop, and I got a thumbs-up.

  Which left us free to find a fish and chips shop just a block from the Exe. We carried our lunches down to a bench overlooking the river. The sun played hide-and-seek with clouds, and a fairly stiff breeze blew off the water, making it too chilly for most to sit and picnic. Aside from a few walkers out on a weekday afternoon with their dogs, we had the spot to ourselves. Rows of houses crouched behind us, and across the river were blocks of apartment houses. Everything was red brick, sturdy, unlovely, although the trees and water added some beauty.

  But on our bench, the world was good. The fish was fresh haddock, cooked crisply, and I splashed it with vinegar and salt. “This is heaven,” I said, licking my fingers. “You just can’t get this kind of fish and chips in America.”

  “Especially in New Mexico, I would imagine. It’s pretty far inland, isn’t it?”

  I shrugged, taking another bite and savoring it completely as I watched a stick bob along on the current. “These days, they fly things in same day from the coast, so everyone has fresh fish.”

  “Still. This was probably taken off a boat this morning over in Brixham and filleted in his back room.”

  “Mmm.”

  We sat relatively close together, partly for warmth. Partly because there was something brewing between us, something that had been there from the first day, there in the grocery store. I wasn’t sure what it would be, exactly, or even what I wanted, except that I wanted, very badly, to touch him. As we ate, I found myself admiring his thumbs with their square, well-tended nails, and the turn of his knee, and the length of his thigh. I was aware, in turn, of my body. Of my waist and my ankles and my lips.