The Lost Girls of Devon Page 4

  I shrugged. “Let’s get some tea.”

  We ducked into a café called the Steaming Pot, with a charming mullioned window. I was surprised to find it busy at this odd hour. “Doesn’t anyone work?” I asked, brushing rain off my hair.

  “Hello, Lillian!” called a plump woman in a fluting voice. “Right there by the window, if you like, my dear.”

  My grandmother lifted a dignified hand, and we made our way through the crowded space. Gran paused twice to greet someone, a graying couple in hiking pants, hats hung on the backs of their chairs, and a youngish woman in jeans. We settled at a narrow two-top next to the window. It gave a long view of the street and hills beyond. “Do you ever write here?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said, lowering herself carefully, leaning hard on the cane and the back of the chair. “I only write in my study. I love to sit here, though, and watch the people.”

  “Tourists?”

  “And locals too.” She set her stick aside, leaning the carved beauty against the wall. “Everyone in town passes by during the course of a day. Mothers take their children to school. The farmers bring their goods to the market.”

  I smiled. The secret to Lady Dawood’s success was the power of her observations. “One must simply keep one’s eyes open,” I quoted, a phrase her character used in her mild way.

  Gran’s eyes narrowed. “Are you mocking me?”

  “No! Not at all.” I covered her hand. “Just making connections. That is what you do, isn’t it? Keep your eyes open?”

  “Well, yes. By observing my world carefully, I populate her world.” She raised an eyebrow. “No one takes her seriously either.”

  “I take you seriously, Gran. Always have and always will.”

  “Thank you.”

  A girl came to the table with an iridescent ceramic teapot and a mismatched teacup and saucer, one with pink roses scrolling around it, the other blue. “Good morning, Mrs. Fairchild. Here’s your tea. Would you like a scone? We have orange this morning.”

  “Oh, yes, dear, that would be lovely.”

  “And you?” The girl turned to me. “Tea?”

  “Yes, please. Ceylon if you have it, and a scone as well. Plenty of Devon cream, if you will.”

  “Are you . . .” She tipped her head. “Australian?”

  The accent confused anyone who heard it—Americans heard it as English, while the English guessed Australian or South African or any number of things. “American,” I said, smiling. “I’m her granddaughter.”

  “Oh, I see! How nice.” She tucked her order pad in her pocket. “I’ll be right back.”

  I leaned in. “Tell me what you know, Gran. About Diana. And you keep saying something is going on in the village. What do you think it might be?”

  She glanced to her right, into the room, then leaned in and said quietly, “I’ve been noticing new people around, and a lot of activity in the bay.” She frowned. “Which I realize is vague, but it’s a vague feeling. Something is not quite right.”

  “If you had to guess?”

  “The cliffs are filled with caves and passageways and all sorts of pathways. It’s always been a smuggler’s paradise.”

  “I remember that.” I watched as she removed the lid of her teapot and swirled the leaves within. “Isn’t there a passageway to the manor?”

  “It’s closed off now, but there was. It leads right down to the sea on the other side of Hyrne Rock.” A spindly finger of rock that stuck up out of the sea, creating a cove and semicircle of beach in front of a cave.

  “What did the family smuggle?”

  “All sorts of things. Brandy and arms and coin.”

  “Coin?”

  “It still washes up on occasion,” Gran said, “from a pair of galleons that wrecked eons ago, Spanish, though I suppose in those days they didn’t much care what government the coin belonged to—’twas all gold and silver.”

  The girl brought my pot, this one slightly tarnished, with pale-orange glazing on the cup and saucer. The plate of scones matched nothing else, with a woven pattern of canes around the edge. It made me wish to collect dishes again, a habit I’d fallen into as a young teen who haunted antique stores for china cups and saucers. I had imagined I’d furnish some future kitchen with them, and I wondered now what I’d done with them all.

  “What do you think they’re smuggling now?”

  “Any number of things, I suppose.” She moved her cup in a circle on its saucer. “Most likely drugs, wouldn’t you suppose?”

  “That’s the obvious answer.”

  She poured a tablespoon of tea into her cup and examined it. Satisfied by the color, she poured a full measure, topped it off with milk, and with small tongs dropped in two sugar cubes. It made me think of Diana, who had loved sugar cubes from the time we were very small. She’d steal them from everywhere, since no one in the commune where we lived approved of sugar. No sugar, no coffee or black tea, nothing “unnatural,” and our mothers baked fresh whole-grain bread every day. I can still get homesick for that bread if I smell a particular yeasty aroma.

  Gran gestured across the street, where two fit white-haired men emerged from a building. “That’s the yacht club,” she said. “Douglas Wills is the commodore there. His wife is one of the Luscombe girls. I think you went to school with Gina Luscombe, didn’t you? They’re all such beautiful redheads.”

  I remembered Gina, a skinny girl with swinging red hair as smooth as the coats of her horses. We’d run in different circles.

  Wills passed directly by the windows, a vigorous seventy-something, with the sheen of wealth in his carefully cut hair and crisp pale trousers. Gran narrowed her eyes. “I’ve always wondered what he did with the first wife. She just disappeared. He always said she’d left him for another man, but just to completely disappear?”

  “What?” I asked. “Murder?”

  “You never know, do you?”

  I had to admit that much was true in the Lady Dawood novels, but I hoped it wasn’t true now. “I suppose you don’t.” With a sharp pain, I thought again of Diana, bustling around her perfectly orderly kitchen in a black turtleneck sweater that showed off her blonde hair. “I hope Diana is all right.”

  “As do I, my dear.” She sipped tea delicately, settled the cup again on the saucer. “As do I.”

  “Has she been bringing you food for long?”

  “Oh, for months. She didn’t tell you?”

  “No.” I said this looking away from her, peering into the hilly distance in an attempt to hide my sense of guilt. “I mean, mostly we’ve been exchanging recipes and jokes, that kind of thing. But you’d think she would have mentioned it.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t want to worry you. You’ve had a lot on your plate this past year.”

  I stirred my tea. “I guess. But she knows how I worry about you.”

  “I shouldn’t fret, Zoe. It was only a good deed. She liked to cook, and I need a bit of help these days.”

  Maybe if we’d actually talked the past few months, rather than exchanging surface-level jokes and recipes, I would have heard more. “What did you two do that day? The day she disappeared?”

  “We had tea and toast, and then she went back to town to do some cooking.”

  “Did she have a catering job that evening?”

  “I don’t know, really, but one supposes she would on a Friday night.”

  I nodded. “I’m sure the police checked her business logs and reservations.”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “I wish I could see those logs,” I said, watching as a girl with a backpack as big as a car struggled up the hill. “I wonder if they’d let me. Maybe I could piece together things they don’t know.”

  Lillian gazed in the distance, her eyes as pale as cornflowers. “I wrote a book about a caterer once. It was set during the war.” She paused. “I always wanted to go up in those balloons.”

  The non sequitur caught my attention. Gran had been a child in London during the war, moving
from place to place with her peripatetic mother. I’d always thought she carried a massive amount of PTSD, but she didn’t like to be coddled. Stiff upper lip and all that. “Barrage balloons?” I asked to encourage her. “What’s making you think of them today?”

  “I don’t quite know.” She frowned, her papery skin folding in soft new arrangements as she peered toward the horizon. “Perhaps it’s something to do with the weather.”

  I frowned, watching her face. “Maybe.”

  When we were in the car on the way back home, I asked Gran if she’d mind if we stopped at the Tesco. “I’d like to get some things for Isabel.”

  “I might wait in the car, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “If you’re tired, I can take you home first and come back down.”

  “Don’t be silly.” She yawned. “I’ll nap like a proper old woman and will never even know you’re gone.”

  So I left her in the car and hurried into the supermarket, halting just inside to get my bearings and remember how things were arranged here. It wasn’t a massive store like the Albertsons in Santa Fe, acres of gleaming floors with offerings of everything under the sun. This one was more compact, only six or seven aisles, which made it easier for me to zip around to find cereal she would eat, and bananas, and almond milk and margarine, though it came packaged much more glamorously than the margarine of my youth, when everyone wanted butter, butter, butter. Isabel was insistently vegetarian, and even when she ate all day, it never seemed to be enough calories for her long, lanky frame. I gathered sweet potatoes and broccoli and piles of fruit, then swung around the freezer section to seek out whatever appropriate vegetarian fare they might stock.

  A man in a dun-colored Carhartt jacket had his back to me. He opened one of the freezers and pulled out a stack of frozen savory pies. I waited politely.

  “Sorry,” he said over his shoulder, in the way of someone sensing the presence of another person. “I’ll be right out of your way.” Then he paused, stack of boxes in his hands. “Zoe?”

  Damn. It was always like this the first few days, running into someone every five minutes whom I hadn’t seen in ages, but to face my mother and my old boyfriend within hours was a lot. I should have recognized those curls and made a detour. Another person I’ve let down. “Hello, Cooper.”

  We didn’t hug or any of the things I might have done with an old friend and lover in America. Instead, we stood safely on either side of our baskets, staring. Or at least I was staring, because as long as he’d been on the earth, Sage Cooper had been ridiculously, strikingly beautiful. When he was a boy, people stopped to take photos of him, captured by the masses of long blond curls falling around an angelically beautiful face.

  Now his soft cheeks had dissolved to reveal angular cheekbones and a clean-shaven jaw, and he’d grown quite remarkably tall, but the hair was the same—loose blond curls he wore longer than was fashionable. I could smell the meadow-and-spice scent of him, which raised a sense of yearning that swamped me before I could tamp it down—not only for him, but for the moors and wild ponies and the owls hooting in the trees, a landscape unlike any other.

  I found my voice. “How are you?” He’d lost his wife of three years to breast cancer eighteen months before, and although I’d sent a sympathy card (just as I’d sent a congratulations card upon his marriage), I’d not run into him on my last trip home.

  “Well enough,” he said. “You?”

  “I came as soon as I heard about Diana. Gran and I have just been to see the police.”

  He placed the boxes of pies in his cart and turned back. Never many words, this one, only the sentences he found most worth uttering. He looked at me directly, taking me in, allowing me the chance to do the same. We had meant a lot to each other once upon a time. All three of us, Diana, Cooper, and I, had been part of the commune our parents had lived in on an ancient acreage that Cooper had turned back to its original purpose—raising sheep and sheepherding dogs. The farm had belonged to his family.

  I couldn’t remember a time before his appearance in my life, and I also couldn’t imagine bridging the gulf that had lived between us for two decades. “I miss her,” he said simply. “The village seems too quiet without her.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  He swallowed. “Will I see you at the pub later?”

  I nodded.

  “Good.” He steered his cart away, around the corner, and was gone.

  For one moment I allowed myself to feel the waves of grief that washed over me, grief unresolved after the loss of him, grief that our friend was missing, and—oh, please let her be okay!—grief over all the things that happened to a person who grew up and had to live in the world.

  Chapter Six

  Poppy

  I’d seen Zoe pausing to admire my shop windows before she saw me. I took special care with the window displays, listening to my intuition to make each one something beautiful and inviting, not only to bring in the tourists who would soon be thronging the village but also to call those who needed me—or rather just someone to hear them, see them. My tools were tarot and rituals and crystals, but my main gift was for listening.

  Like every mortal being, I had to have cash for food and shelter, for clothing and the odd pleasure, but my purpose in the shop was to be a magnet for those in pain, those seeking an outlet, relief. Hope. Humans were such fragile beings, each and every one. It had taken me a lifetime to learn that simple truth.

  Zoe was fragile, too, though she’d always pretended she was not. I’d seen photos of her, of course. It wasn’t hard to find photos of Zoe Fairchild, the wife of the singer/songwriter Martin Riley. In those photos, she always looked a bit apprehensive, holding her big husband’s hand as he swept through one crowd or another.

  As she peered through the windows of the Kitchen Witch, I had a chance to see her as she was. Looking much younger than her nearly forty years, her father’s straight satiny hair sweeping down her back, cut straight across as if by a ruler, which gave it swing and flow. Such lovely, lovely hair, black as obsidian. It would be cool against my hands.

  If she’d been anyone else, I would have waited for her to enter, knowing she needed to tell a story, to explore the contents of her soul, release the sorrows she carried.

  But not Zoe. Once she saw me, she’d flee. I watched her with a sense of longing so enormous that it emptied my lungs. She looked well. Beautiful, and so much like her father that it gave me a pang. I’d fallen hard for him, long ago when my heart was wide open and my hungers as wild and fierce as the landscape where I found him. He had seemed carved of the desert itself, with his straight, high-bridged nose and black hair.

  Zoe looked at me with his eyes, dark as the new moon, and I saw she’d still not forgiven me. That perhaps she never would.

  Oh, Zoe. My Zoe.

  She turned away and offered her arm to my mother, who gave me a faint smile as Zoe marched her away.

  “What about the tourmaline?” a woman inside the shop asked now, tapping on the glass cupboard where I kept semiprecious stones.

  “That’s one possibility,” I said. “Will you be wearing the necklace for any particular purpose?”

  “No.” Her tone was so defensive it edged on hostile. “I just want something beautiful.”

  Pain seeped out of her pores, almost visible if you knew how to look. It made her neck tight and stiffened her joints. She was in her late forties, with a sleek swinging pageboy of glossy brown, and she wore her sunglasses on top of her head. American, though I hadn’t caught that at first. She carried some extra weight, but not so much it would burden her. I stood on the other side of the counter, waiting.

  “Okay,” I said mildly. “Let me see your eyes.”

  She raised her gaze.

  “Lovely,” I said quietly and then lifted a hand, letting it hover close to her cheek. “Do you mind if I touch your head?”

  She shrugged, but she didn’t flinch when I opened my palm over her crown chakra and gently rested it there. So mu
ch roiling emotion!

  It wasn’t magic or new age or anything of that nature. It was only letting myself feel her pain. “Have you lost someone recently?”

  “Not to death,” she said, and her face sagged. “To another woman.”

  I nodded. “A big loss.”

  “We were married twenty-seven years. Happily!” A sudden shimmer of tears brightened her irises to turquoise. “I just want to fix it.”

  “Mmm.” A sudden image of a shattered vase came to mind. Vase and hammer. “Maybe let it be for a while.” From the case, I took a moonstone necklace. The gem was elegantly mounted in the body of a tree made of pewter, and it was designed to land exactly in the middle of the upper chest. “Moonstone represents female power. If you wear this for a month, every day, you’ll reclaim yourself.”

  Her hope blazed, and she reached for the necklace. “May I try it on?”

  “Of course. Let me help you.” As I fastened the clasp, I added another layer of suggestion. The art of healing mental pain was to believe it could be vanquished. “It will warm against your skin. Do you feel it? That’s the energy.”

  Her fingers stroked the piece. “Yes.”

  “Good. Why don’t you wear it for a little while?” Another layer of suggestion. “Look around the shop and see how it feels?”

  The woman touched the moonstone around her neck again and again as she browsed the herbs, the shelves of teas for sorrow and potions for hope, and crystals and wands to call energies or heal some physical ill. Each time she touched the necklace, she almost visibly straightened just a little more, the slump of sorrow easing its grip on her.

  I’d studied with gurus and monks and nuns, healers of all ilk across the world, and the best advice was all the same: listening was the thing that could cure most ills, mind or body.

  No magic. Only listening.