The Lost Girls of Devon Read online

  It was the weekend, and people were loading up their yachts and fishing boats for a good sail. I thought of Lillian’s theory that there was smuggling going on and wondered if it had anything to do with Diana. Did she find something out? Did she go afoul of someone?

  Smuggling would be inordinately easy. Caves and passageways riddled the coastline, and Axestowe had been a scandalously profitable smuggling site in the eighteenth century.

  The people milling around the harbor were a well-kept lot, with the kind of tans bought with long hours of leisure in sunny climes. The women kept their hair short to easily dry after sailing and swimming, and they boasted the lean legs of tennis players.

  These people had no need of smuggling anything. Everything they could possibly wish for was right at their fingertips. They were masters of the universe and the women of well-to-do families who’d married advantageously to provide more sons and daughters to rule the world.

  If smuggling had been going on, what could such a group want that they couldn’t have? I toyed with the possibilities as I climbed the stairs on the other side of the beach, trying not to think about Diana and where she might be and what I was about to do.

  One of Lady Dawood’s truisms was that it was human nature to always wish for more. It explained why men hunted big game and posed with dead lions and rare rhinos—the thrill of the chase. I wondered what kind of thrill seeking those rich locals could be engaged in.

  Drugs? It just didn’t fit.

  High-stakes gambling? It was a possibility, I supposed.

  I followed a dusty beaten trail from the stairs around the edge of a car park that provided space for summer visitors and headed for the edge of the forest. A group had gathered, probably fifteen people or so, all standing soberly in a knot. This was not the same forest with its hill fort that Isabel had found, but a more urbanized waste area where teenagers gathered to drink beer and have sex. The South West Coast Path wove around the high end of it, but mostly it was just a patch of trees between town and farms and the sea.

  Cooper stood toward one side, looking properly dressed in an outdoor hat and canvas pants with a dozen pockets and sturdy army-colored wellies that had seen a few seasons. I thought of us at ten, striding over the moor in our hats and boots, looking for plovers and emperor moths with their feathered antennae. I’d had a passion for caterpillars and butterflies, while Cooper loved birds of all sorts, and we’d wandered everywhere to find our precious creatures. Never to capture them, only to spy them in the wild. I drew pictures; he jotted down notes in his little notebook with a pencil no larger than a pinkie finger. In those days I only wanted to be outside, all day, every day. The memory softened something in me, and I went to stand beside him.

  He gave me a nod that suited the somberness of the occasion. “Hello.”

  “I hope we don’t find a single thing,” I said.

  His mouth lifted on one side. “Me too.”

  Maybe because I’d been thinking of our childhood forays, I looked at him longer than I had been doing. More directly. He looked back, and his mouth quirked ever so slightly. Sadly. An eddy of loss swam through me.

  The inspector started talking, giving us directions on what to do, how to look for clues. I’d seen the process on television, of course: a line of people side by side, walking through a forest or a field after the disappearance of someone. In horror, I suddenly imagined coming across the dead body of my lifelong friend, and all the air left my lungs. I pressed my hand over my heart, afraid I might faint if I didn’t breathe.

  Cooper laid a big hand on my shoulder. “It’s only panic. It’s normal.” He offered me a mint from a roll he pulled out of his pocket. His hand, his calm voice, steadied me.

  “What if we do find her?”

  “In the most pragmatic terms, that’s why we’re here,” he said, taking a mint from the roll for himself, “but even more so, what are the chances of her two oldest friends just stumbling over her body?”

  We’d been the Three Musketeers as children, as close as siblings. “You know chance isn’t like that.”

  “Come on, we’ll be all right.” We turned and began to shuffle through the tall grass along with everyone else. I concentrated carefully, looking for threads or discarded food or a mark that didn’t seem to go with the area. I saw fungi and wildflowers, grass and fallen leaves. We walked slowly and carefully, picking up bits of debris and litter with gloved hands and dropping them into a bag each of us carried. I was glad of Cooper beside me, steady and quiet. No one talked.

  Despite the grim nature of our task, I found the forest unknotting my tension. It was filled with birds chattering back and forth, whistling and chirping and making all manner of noises. I heard a squeezed note and a series of hurried chirps, a repetitive whistle. I didn’t know which notes belonged to which birds, but I was sure Cooper could name them all easily. He’d always known them, all the birds and animals. The legend was that he’d spoken bird before he’d spoken English.

  The air itself seemed quieter here, under the trees, the air softer. I had grown to love the austerity of Santa Fe’s landscape, sketched in tones of earth and clay and sky, but it was never comfortable.

  “Do you remember when we built our fort?” Cooper asked quietly.

  Surprised, I laughed softly. “Yes. Do you think it’s still here?”

  “Doubtful.” He paused, looking back toward the sea. “I believe it was that way a bit.”

  “Diana hated it. She was so afraid of spiders.”

  “Not an outside girl, that one.” He resumed his slow, steady search, and I fell in beside him. “Do you still like the outdoors,” he asked, “or have you grown out of it?”

  “Grown out of it? Who does that?”

  A half shrug. “A lot of people. They just forget what magic there is here.”

  I paused to pick up a cigarette butt. “Magic, all right.”

  He grinned, and it was the face I’d loved all my life: the high cheekbones, the straight, aggressive nose. “Not all of it, admittedly.”

  Dropping the butt in my bag, I said, “I was just thinking how the forest makes me feel like myself.”

  “Not the moor?”

  “I haven’t been there for a long time.”

  “You should come back.” He untangled something from a curl of weed. “Go for a wander. Do some sketching, if you still like that.”

  “I do.” I paused, thinking of how intimidating the open moor could be. I’d been a teenager when I’d been there last. Probably with Cooper. I remembered a day fighting bitterly about our future. Another making love in a mossy forest where the fairy queen might have seen him and arranged to take him for herself, turning his heart against me.

  I remembered the taste of his mouth, the way he didn’t entirely close his eyes when he kissed me. Some lost part of myself said, “After such a long time, I might need a guide.”

  He straightened, took off his hat, and wiped sweat from his brow. The hat had left a mark on his forehead and mashed his curls, and it didn’t dent his beauty in the slightest. “You’d be fine when you got out there.”

  A sting of disappointment made me look away. “I’m sure.”

  “But I’ll go with you, if you like. Give Matt a good run.”

  Something stirred in me, as if I’d been thickly cocooned and had suddenly glimpsed light through the walls, just a little, as they thinned. The hope was almost painful, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. “I should bring Isabel. She would love it.”

  He slapped his hat against his thigh. Raised his head. “As we do.”

  The words carried a thousand hours of happiness, in childhood and preadolescence. My body softened in memory of those wide skies, the rolling, endless fields and hills.

  The summer I was fifteen, I’d returned to England for the first time in three years. During my time away, we’d written hundreds of letters, sent dozens of packages, even spoken on the phone when one or the other of us could raise enough money for it.

  I’d
been longing to see him, burning. My grandmother had driven Diana and me out to the farm, a few miles outside the village. Cooper had been waiting outside his cottage, restless. I leapt out of the car before it had time to fully stop and flung myself into a hug.

  He held me as tightly as I held him, and I buried my face into his neck, and before we let go, we were in love. As if it had been destined, as if we’d just been waiting to get old enough to make it real.

  From that moment until our breakup three years later, we’d been intensely entangled. Physically, mentally, maybe even spiritually. Soul mates. We spent endless hours on the moor pursuing our hobbies of bird and butterfly, even more kissing. Kissing and kissing and kissing. We must have kissed a hundred million times that first year. Later, the kissing turned to other things. We learned to make love to each other, taking it very seriously at first, less so as time wore on.

  I was deeply in love. We both were.

  In the forest now, looking for our lost friend, we shuffled side by side through the grass. I spied a red ribbon that seemed too nice to have been sitting out in the forest for very long, and I dropped it in my bag, aching for those days, for those two lovers. So many things had come between us. They seemed foolish now.

  Beside the ribbon was an earring. A simple gold hoop, like a million others, but I picked it up carefully, feeling terror and sorrow well up in my throat. Cooper paused, sensing my disturbance. Our eyes met. I thought of Diana laughing in the big, bold way she had, her earlobes hung with hoops.

  We’d been fighting, but I still loved her. The way you love a cousin you shared your childhood with, the way you love the children you grow up with, forever.

  I somberly dropped the hoop in my bag.

  “A thousand girls wear earrings like that,” Cooper said. “It probably isn’t hers.”

  I nodded. We continued our sweep.

  Cooper hummed a folk song I barely remembered, and the air was so much softer between us. He had been so very, very angry with me for so long. We’d never hashed it out, just finally mellowed into a different relationship over time. Those old thorns still pricked me at times, and I’m sure they did him, as well.

  When it came time to choose our university paths, I wanted to go to Glasgow, to the Glasgow School of Art, one of the most famous in Europe. Cooper planned to study environmental science in Bristol. The distance was not terrible between them, and we were sure we could navigate what everyone told us would be the end of our relationship.

  A series of events served to wreck that plan. Cooper’s father died, necessitating a change in his plans. He had to stay close to help his mother with the farm, and there was a perfectly acceptable program at Exeter.

  For him.

  But not for me. Glasgow was my dream, and I couldn’t bear to give it up. Although Cooper was unhappy, he didn’t stand in my way, and we promised, fervently, to put our relationship first.

  It was harder than I expected to be so far from home and family. I felt lost without Cooper, especially, and found it difficult to make friends with people who all seemed to be so much more talented than me, and to top it all off, one of my teachers absolutely loathed everything I did. No matter how I approached a project or assignment, he belittled my efforts, laughed at me, taunted me in front of others. It was excruciating.

  I stuck with it through most of the first term, but he flunked me on my major project, a painting I’d worked on for over a hundred hours. He not only flunked me, but he derided my talent in front of the class. Sitting there with cheeks flaming, I could tell some of the others were uncomfortable, but others snickered. A boy named Jacob who’d been kind to me stood up for me, insisted the painting was flawed, but not impossibly. The teacher roared at him, too, and Jacob stood up and grabbed my hand, and we fled together. We drank coffee for hours until I was finally calm enough to go back to my room and try to call Cooper.

  He couldn’t speak to me. He had exams. He had a problem on the farm.

  I fell to pieces, and instead of packing everything up and going home the way I should have, I went back out to the pub and found Jacob. Predictably and foolishly, I slept with him.

  It was terrible. It was stupid. I confessed the very next day to Cooper, assuming that he would understand, that he would forgive me.

  He did not. Things fell apart in a bitter, passionate, desperate fight.

  I’d had enough. I fled to New Mexico, heartsore and desperate to escape the things I had learned about myself. I was not the great artist I’d imagined, or even a particularly good person. I couldn’t face Cooper, or the village, or even really myself.

  Defiantly, I enrolled in the graphics art program at the University of New Mexico. Cooper refused to speak to me. For months.

  I kept thinking he would soften, that we would find a way to come to peace and get back together, but no matter how many letters I wrote, he didn’t write back.

  When I flew back in the summer, he refused to talk to me. He’d taken up with one of the village girls who’d chased him endlessly. It crushed me.

  It was over, and I had to come to terms with the fact that I’d killed it. Cooper might have been rigid in some ways, and I had lacked confidence, but the truth was, I’d made a mistake he couldn’t forgive. I didn’t think I’d have forgiven him for such a breach either. I sure hadn’t forgiven Martin.

  At the end of the sweep, Cooper walked with me back to the car park, where he’d left his ratty old Range Rover, which was a completely different thing here than it was in America. This one was approximately five hundred years old, the paint so faded it barely qualified as a color, with excellent tires. Colorful blankets lined the back and the passenger seat, presumably for dogs.

  I thought again of the moor, the most healing place on earth. I wanted to take Isabel there, to show her the wide skies and the ponies and the owls. “Do you have any time in the next few days to take Isabel and me out to the moor?”

  “Sure.” He flung his hat in the back seat. “Tomorrow, maybe?”

  “Really?”

  A slight lift of a shoulder. “Why not?”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to Isabel, get back to you,” I said. “Maybe I should get your mobile number.”

  He tugged his phone from his shirt pocket. “Ready for yours too.”

  I rattled mine off and he punched in it, and I returned the favor.

  “I’ve been keeping an eye on a few nests,” he said. “We might have some baby plovers if we’re lucky.”

  A sharp longing moved through me—I could taste the wind of the moors, the flavor of wild things. “Do you ever see hares anymore?”

  “I’ve had one at the farm around quite a bit of late, but he’s especially shy.”

  “I miss them.”

  “You’ll have to come up early in the morning, then, or evening. Either one. I reckon teenagers are not always ready to leap out of bed at first light.”

  “No.”

  He nodded. Abruptly he said, “I’d like to look through Diana’s flat. Maybe together we’ll see something.”

  “Now?”

  “Later, after dark.”

  “Isn’t it a crime scene?”

  A slight shrug. “No. They can’t really search it until they have more evidence that it’s more than just a woman going away.”

  My heart ached. Going away. As if it were an adventure. “Okay. What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Look around. See what we see. We knew her better than anyone.”

  “We know her,” I said, correcting the past tense.

  His celery-colored eyes were sad. “Right.”

  “Okay, I mean, I guess you’re right about going in and looking around, but I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  “We’ll go in the back. No one will see.” He slapped the hood of his truck. “See you at the Tesco at half past eight.”

  A shiver of nerves, both anticipation and dread, went through me. “I’ll be there.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Isabe
l

  It makes me feel better to do normal things like homework, so I did my assignments for Dr. Kerry (everything that’s happened today, feelings I’ve had, blah blah blah). I wrote another chapter in my main Wattpad story, and I read through what I’ve done so far on the fairy story, which is better than I thought. It feels different, somehow, like I’m stretching my muscles.

  Like when my mom first started making me cook dinner, I found out that it was fun to plan meals. It makes me feel in control of the world to know what’s going to be for dinner. I like having that one thing at the end of the day that I can count on.

  As I walked down the bluff to the village, I thought about my mom and how sad she was when she told that story about Poppy. It made me feel guilty, too, because I like my grandmother a lot. A lot. She is super kind, and it feels good to just be around her, the way it feels good to sit in a hot tub. The person my mom always talked about, the mom who’d left her like that for years and years, sounded like a completely different person.

  So I hate to keep a secret, but I don’t think telling this secret would make anybody happy right this second.

  The village is one of the prettiest places I know about. The light is magical—sometimes soft and golden, sometimes sort of thick or something. Not like the air in Santa Fe at all, or LA, where my dad has an apartment, where everything feels extra crystal clear.

  It was afternoon, and clouds were moving in. The conditions were too bright for macro shots, or even people, honestly, but I sat on a stone bench by the harbor shooting passersby anyway. My teacher made a point of saying that you have to shoot lots of faces, lots of bodies, beautiful and ugly and plain, old and young, thin and fat, to get a feeling for how the light interacts with each one. I miss Mrs. Barrow, the photography teacher. Maybe I should send her some shots if I get any really good ones.

  I miss school, honestly. I liked it. I just couldn’t keep going with my skin on the outside of my body, thinking about who saw what and if that person is looking at me, knowing what I look like naked or—

  Ugh.