The Lost Girls of Devon

by Barbara O'Neal

  Shame burned me.

  I rocked her daughter, the daughter even all the most passionate protection in the world couldn’t protect. “I love you, sweet girl. I’m so glad you could tell your secret at last.”

  Against my neck, she shuddered. “Me too.”

  Chapter Forty

  Zoe

  I woke up early, coming to awareness slowly. First, a sense of pleasure and peace that had been missing in my life. Next, the sensation of being warm next to a body. A naked body, I realized.

  Sage.

  My eyes popped open, and there was his face right in front of me, asleep on the other pillow on the bed. He was deeply asleep, mouth open slightly, and his breath made a soft whuffling sound as it moved in and out. His hand was wrapped around mine.

  I didn’t move. The moment was too precious, and I wanted to stay in it as long as possible, suspended between the dark errand that had brought me to England and the losses that had plagued my child, and me, and my grandmother, and the reality of whatever this day would bring. In between was Sage asleep and at peace. My body was sated on a level I’d barely known was possible, and yet I wanted to awaken him with kisses, with touches, with exploration.

  An emotion I didn’t want to examine rustled through my veins, ran through my heart, and then back through my limbs, a gilded, glittery sense of possibility.

  To be honest, I’d never loved anyone else but Sage Cooper. I’d loved him when we were three, playing with worms in the garden and sleeping together for our naps. I’d loved him as my best friend when we were six and seven and eight, chasing butterflies and reading animal stories and building forts and tree houses. I’d loved him from afar when I’d had to go back to New Mexico, and we wrote letters every week, sending photos and feathers and stories back and forth. And my romantic love had bloomed entirely when I’d returned to England at last when I was fifteen. Erotic discovery had bonded us, but only because there had been such a groundwork before.

  As if he felt me staring at him, his eyes opened and there we were, staring into each other’s faces on the morning after.

  “I thought it was a dream,” he said, and he touched my face.

  “A good dream?”

  “Yes,” he said simply, and he kissed me. We began again, as if this were all the time we had, as if the life that awaited us on the other side of the door would shatter it all again.

  And with Sage, kisses and touches had always been more than their parts, too, carrying the layers and layers and layers of union we’d known together.

  I let myself fall adrift in it, be lost in it, in the soft green land of Sage and Zoe, where our childhood selves roamed free and our souls were eternally connected. “I missed you so much,” he breathed.

  “Me too.”

  Could we start again? Would it be real, or was this just nostalgia and our shared grief? At the moment, I didn’t care. For once, maybe I could just be where I was and not try to decide the entire course of the future.

  It was slightly awkward when he drove me up to the house. I sat in the truck for a moment, wondering what I should say, or if he would say something. And then neither of us did—we just stared at the house.

  “I’ll need to get the printer from the back,” I said, remembering at the last minute.

  “Of course.” He parked and then politely opened the back door.

  I’d started to get the printer and would just leave everything in its awkward state, but then I stopped. “Sage, what was that? Last night?”

  He looked at the house, then back at me. “Let’s be careful with each other, shall we?”

  “What does that mean?”

  His smile was gentle. “Do you want to go to the festival with me on Friday night?”

  A whoosh of relief moved through me. “Yes. I do.”

  “Good. In the meantime, I’m kissing you with my heart, but I don’t want any eyes to see us and speculate that we were up to more than waiting out the storm.”

  “I’m kissing you with my heart too,” I said.

  I made my way to the house, not realizing there was a car parked in the side garden until I got there and had to shove the heavy wooden doors open. “Let me get that for you,” said a voice.

  My mother’s voice. She stood there in the hall as if she belonged there, in her flowy tunic and leggings. “Why do you always wear white?” I snapped irritably.

  “Long story.”

  I hauled the printer box into the kitchen, where Isabel was sitting with her computer. “Oh, yay! I can’t wait to get started.”

  “I bought photo paper, too, a couple of different sizes, so you can play with the best formats.”

  She flung her arms around me, hugging me very tightly for such a mundane sort of purchase. I hugged her back. “Is everything okay?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “You should sit down, Mom.”

  It was only then that I realized that Gran had come into the room, and my mother hadn’t left, the way I expected her to do, and even Isabel had a grave expression on her young, young face. “What is it?”

  “I’m afraid they’ve found Diana’s body,” Gran said. “She washed ashore in the storm last night.”

  Tears welled up in my eyes, but I protested, “How can they know for sure so fast? They didn’t know who that girl on the beach was for . . . days!”

  My mother spoke. “It was her jewelry, and her phone, which they found in her pocket. I’m so sorry.”

  Rage rocketed through me. “You need to go. Just leave.” I pointed at the door, my hand shaking. “I don’t need your sympathy or your kindness or anything else. Nothing, do you hear me? Go.”

  “Mom!” Isabel cried.

  “Don’t,” I said in a tight, hot voice. “Don’t defend her, and don’t make me forgive her, and don’t get in the middle of this at all. You just don’t know.” Emotion like a tidal wave was coming, and I jumped up to flee the kitchen before it could fling me down. It was my gran who stood in my way.

  “Sit down, my love. Your mother is leaving, but we’re here. Your girl and I are here.”

  I wailed, covering my face with my hands. In all things, since I could remember, Diana had always been there. Beside me, or in a letter, or phone call, or text. I had been so petty, pushing her away this past year, and now I would never see her again.

  And she had just found happiness!

  The wave took me. With a wail, I collapsed to the floor . . .

  Oh, Diana! I’m so sorry! Gran and Isabel did their best to comfort me, but it was only Diana I wanted. I wanted to pour out my stories and tell her about Sage and to have dinner parties with her and Henry. I wanted to go back in time and move back home before Isabel had been wounded and Diana had gotten mixed up in something she shouldn’t have and fall in love with Sage all over again and start fresh. I wanted to apologize for cutting her out of my life.

  But fresh starts never really happened, did they?

  When Sage came over, I was lying on my bed with a cold washcloth over my face, courtesy of the new nurse, who insisted I take a pill she’d produced from somewhere. It didn’t stop the leak of tears—again that river of grief was overflowing its banks—but it made me care less about them.

  He didn’t say anything, but he crawled up on the bed beside me and wrapped his long arms and legs around me, and we wept silently together.

  “We have to do something beautiful,” I said after a long time.

  “Yeah.” He wiped his face with a hand.

  I offered him the towel in my hand. “Isabel brought it to me.”

  He laughed a little and then used it, falling back down beside me. “Jesus, I’m gutted.”

  “Me too. The nurse gave me something, however, and it is kicking in quite nicely.”

  Isabel came into the room, carrying her tablet. “Oh, sorry,” she said, and she started to back out.

  “No, come on in.” I sat up. “What’s up?”

  She shot me a dark look. “Grandad wants to talk to you.”
/>   “Okay.”

  Sage started to get up, but I stopped him with a hand on his arm. “I’m sure he’d love to see you.”

  “See me?”

  Isabel brought the tablet over, and there was my dad, in his house outside Santa Fe. It was an old territorial, with a kiva fireplace and adobe benches built into the walls. He kept the doors and window frames painted turquoise to protect against evil spirits, as was the custom.

  “Hi, Zoe,” he said. Then, “Cooper! You look just the same.”

  “Hi, Ben.” Sage waved. “I’m going to give you guys some privacy.” He headed out, and he touched Isabel’s back to turn her too. She crossed her arms and ducked away, but after throwing some more shade toward me, she flounced out.

  “I’m sorry about Diana,” he said when I looked back to the screen.

  I nodded, feeling more tears leak out of my eyes. I wiped them off with the towel that now had mine and Sage’s tears mingled. It felt like maybe I’d drained enough from the grief river that they might stop for a while. “Thanks. It’s so sad.”

  “It really is. She was a good person.”

  We sat there for a minute. I couldn’t really think of anything to say. “No offense, Dad, but I have nothing.”

  “I know. Isabel called me. I just wanted to be sure you’re okay.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  “You saw your mom, huh?”

  Oh, that’s what this was about. “I don’t want to talk about it. She was here because Gran wanted her, and that’s fine, but that doesn’t change anything for me.”

  “Mmm,” he said, like he was some wise man in a movie. “Isabel really likes her.”

  “Great. Maybe she’ll leave her, too, and we can both be scarred forever.”

  He had the grace to chuckle. “Maybe things are not all black and white, kiddo. People change.”

  “Do they, Dad? I don’t know if that’s really true.”

  “Are you the same person you were twenty years ago?”

  “No, of course not. I was nineteen.”

  He nodded. “I’m not the same as I was then either.”

  The anger river, running side by side with grief, suddenly took over, spilling fire into my body. “You know, Dad, speaking of that. Why the hell didn’t you talk me into going to art school in New Mexico?”

  “I tried,” he said in his calm way. “It was a mistake, you leaving Scotland, but you wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “What? Yes, I would have listened.”

  He shook his head, his mouth turned down at the corners. “You didn’t listen to anybody. You talked yourself out of it. You were afraid. You decided you wanted a ‘more stable life.’” He put the phrase in air quotes.

  And suddenly I remembered the moment of decision. A woman I knew had come into the restaurant where I worked all the time. She was an artist, a painter who had a good reputation. Her studio was in some little hovel near the freeway, and she always had paint under her nails.

  She was poor. Always scrabbling for money, paying with dollar bills and change for a meager breakfast of one egg and toast and coffee, which she would stay and drink for a long time while she sketched.

  I didn’t want that life. No way.

  “Oh, my God,” I said aloud. Even through the haze of Valium, I felt my own shock. “You’re right.”

  “It’s not too late,” he said. “Go now.”

  I closed my eyes. It was many years too late. “I don’t know about anything right now. I have to go, Dad. Thanks for calling.”

  “Anytime. Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  For a long while, I sat on my teenage bed staring out to the sea where Diana had drowned. I’d thought about cutting her out of my life in a fit of—what? Jealousy? Control? Thought about the sabotage I’d employed when Sage hadn’t responded immediately to my freak-out at school. I’d pushed them both away.

  And maybe I’d pushed Martin away, too, just as he’d said I had, afraid that if I didn’t, he’d break my heart.

  The only person I hadn’t pushed away was Isabel.

  Or, well, I suppose I hadn’t pushed Gran away either. I trusted them both to love me as me.

  What a mess.

  There was nothing left in my body, no emotion, nothing. Soon, I would try to sort out what I thought of all this. Figure out, maybe, what I actually wanted.

  I needed to check on my gran and bring Isabel back her tablet. Maybe we all needed to get some food. With some effort, I washed my face and carried the tablet downstairs.

  Gran, Isabel, and Sage were grouped around the table. Isabel had plugged in the printer, and it whirred away, printing photos. “What’s this?”

  “We’re going to solve a murder,” Gran said calmly, looking over a piece of paper. “Why don’t you make a cup of tea and come help?”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Poppy

  Because she asked me to, I accompanied Diana’s mother to make the official identification. Joan had never been made of anything more than putty, and she smoked three cigarettes between her flat and the coroner’s office. When we went downstairs to view the remains, she stopped cold. “I can’t,” she said. “Will you do it, Poppy?” Her eyes filled with tears. “I want to remember her the way she was.”

  Who could say no to such a request? “Of course.”

  It was an unpleasant task, but not as terrible as I’d feared. Because the sea was so cold, a certain lack of decomposition had made her identity plain, though if she’d been in the water much longer, it would have been much more difficult.

  I recognized her coat first of all: that leather coat she’d been so proud of buying for herself once her business had begun to prosper. She’d bought it on a trip to Bristol, and it had been very nice indeed—black leather with zippers and buckles that had survived a week at sea perfectly well. Her hair, so proudly clipped into a mod asymmetrical style, was tangled.

  But in the end, I’d had to look at her face. Not terribly decomposed, only bloated and discolored. Unmistakably Diana, poor child. My heart ached with sorrow, with all the things she would never do, or know. I would miss her terribly.

  I gave them a nod, and they led me away. Her mother had gone outside to smoke, and the inspector walked up the stairs with me.

  “She was the prettiest baby,” I said, blotting my eyes. “Fat and happy.”

  “I liked her,” he said. “She was a kind woman.”

  “When will they know the cause of death?” I asked.

  “We already know, more or less. She was shot.”

  “Shot?” It was not at all what I’d expected. I’d only seen a drowned body.

  His expression was grim. “She must have found something. I’m going to London to talk to that boyfriend of hers again.”

  I squeezed his arm. “Be careful.”

  “You too.”

  The rest of the afternoon I accompanied Joan on the many errands required when someone died—to the funeral home to choose a casket and the chapel to arrange a funeral and then to find out about flowers. “I wish she could cater her funeral,” Joan said, lighting another cigarette, then coughing out the smoke.

  I finally dropped her off at dinnertime and made my way home to the goats and the empty house.

  Please, I petitioned the heavens, no more.

  I made a simple supper of bread and cheese and carried it out to the bench in the garden. The sun had broken through the clouds at last, and it stretched gold fingers out to caress flower heads and the tips of the grasses. The goats munched hay happily. The air smelled of humus and rich earth, and I let the scent and the silence settle me.

  Into the softness tumbled images of the girl Diana had been, a chubby toddler who grew into a sturdy girl who liked reading and cooking but never anything outside. When I had returned seven years ago, it was easy to recognize her—still plump and rosy and cheerful. I’d hungrily pumped her for news of Zoe, who was then married and a mother, living near her father in Santa Fe. In a way, I suppo
se Diana had been a surrogate daughter.

  Zoe. What have I done?

  I had so often imagined how my daughter and I might finally come face to face again. I had treasured the idea that she might simply just love me after so long a time, that she would see things in my face that would erase the grudge she held against me.

  I’d come home to make things right, carrying with me decades of spiritual study. And in many ways, that study had made me a better woman. I’d learned to help heal those in pain, to listen to their stories, to absorb the sorrow they carried, help relieve their burdens.

  But I had never faced the fact that I’d delivered a terrible pain to my own daughter. I had left her, and then I had not cared enough to take the time to fetch her from my mother and bring her to live with me.

  I had wronged her.

  And I’d wronged Ravi’s family too. Taken their husband and father away for my own selfish desires.

  The knot of wrongs sat against my heart day and night, and I didn’t know yet how to dislodge it. How to atone and begin to perhaps make things right.

  Her disdain this morning had been painful enough, but the hatred in her eyes had nearly shattered me. I could see that it had shocked Isa. Not my mother, who stood on the sidelines with no opinion. For the first time, I understood that I deserved it.

  The churning of my emotions and thoughts would do no good for anyone or any situation. I carried my dishes with me to the workshop, where I’d dropped the material for the festival herbal packets. I thought I might as well work on those.

  But in the work space, I found my thoughts still so chaotic that I dared not put together spells for other people. We had one more day until the festival began on Friday. I could finish them tomorrow.

  Or not finish them at all. Mia said she’d completed all the spell bottles, and we’d already stocked a great many crystals and earrings and bracelets. We would offer readings all day both days, and Mia had invited a friend of hers to come in and do henna tattoos. We’d split the profits in half. It would be a prosperous weekend, no matter what. Maybe I could let the rest go.