The Lost Girls of Devon Page 5

  As I busied myself behind the counter sorting empty fabric bags into various sizes, I flashed on Zoe at age five, arranging plastic beads into designs on a table. Must have been at the farm, that long wooden table where we’d all gathered in the evenings to eat lentil soup and fresh bread and tea brewed in gallon jars using herbal infusions and honey. Three families had gathered together on Will Cooper’s family farm: Ben and Zoe and me; Will and his wife, Aline, and Sage; and Diana and her mother, Joan, with a series of men who didn’t stick. A few others came in and out over the six years we lived there, from the time Zoe was a year old until she was seven.

  Until she was seven. When I left her.

  Discomfort bloomed between my ribs. I pushed it away and turned to the memory of her arranging those plastic beads on the table, at first like with like, all red and all yellow and all blue. Then red and yellow in a row, and blue with red with yellow. Sage brought in wooden blocks in more colors, and the two of them wove color with shape to create a mosaic of fields full of flowers that took my breath away. Ben was not his best self by then, drinking and smoking weed way too much to fill the hole left by being away from home, away from the landscape that grounded him. He came through the room, high on weed, and stopped. “This is good, you guys.” He touched one finger to the uneven yellow beads representing flowers. “Better be careful, or the goats will think it’s breakfast.”

  So long ago, I thought, returning to the sorting in front of me. And two minutes ago, like all of time. Our lives bent and twisted around themselves, and we never knew where the connections really were. Like sweet Diana, grown up and a bit lost, coming to me for readings in the shop, and Sage wandering in to ask about herbal remedies for the eczema that plagued his hands in the wintertime: so that two of the children from those happy years had been attracted to my realm. Even Zoe had stopped, admiring my windows before she knew they were mine.

  Patience, patience. She would have to come to me. There was no other way.

  Diana walked through my mind again, and a thorn pricked my heart. I’d seen trouble in her cards, the Tower, never reversed as one would hope; and the Moon; and the Shadow in my Celtic deck. She also drew the Lovers and Cups and all manner of cheering cards, so I focused there. She was so in love with her mysterious man. It glowed in her rosy cheeks and the dewiness of a woman having plenty of sex after a period of drought. It was hard to find the link between those dark cards and the joy that dripped from her, but she would not have been the first woman to have been hoodwinked by a man.

  Witness the sorrowing woman here in my shop. She wandered back to me, two fingers resting on the moonstone at her throat. Already the energy around her was less agitated. The power of suggestion could cure a great many emotional ills. “I’ll take the necklace, please.”

  I nodded. “Be right there.”

  It was only then that I spied a tarot card half-hidden beneath the edge of the counter. I slid it out with my foot and picked it up. It was from the Everyday Tarot, a simple deck with clear shapes, and the one Diana liked. It was the Tower, probably the very card she’d drawn the last time she was in the shop. A faint shudder sped down my spine. Warning. Or fear.

  Where are you, Diana?

  Chapter Seven

  Zoe

  Gran retreated to her bedroom for a nap when we returned. I put the groceries away in the cavernous pantry and double-wide American-style fridge. Isabel had texted me a little while ago to say she was going for a walk, which displayed about one hundred times the amount of energy she’d shown the past few weeks. It gave me a thread of hope. Maybe the wild Devon coast and the mysterious woods of my childhood would help heal her. Nature had that power at times.

  My visit to Gran had been much overdue, as well. Our long chat this morning in the tea shop warmed me. I sometimes forgot just how old she’d become. Not just aging or elderly, but genuinely, undeniably old. Spending time with her should have been one of my highest priorities. How did such awareness get lost in the dailiness of things? I was grateful for the reminder.

  The kitchen smelled of the dinner cooking in the Rayburn that warmed the room. A bank of windows looked to the garden tucked on the leeward side of the manor, and in the soft gray light May flowers glowed.

  Feeling the drag of sadness and exhaustion, I wandered out in a sweater and wellies and allowed myself to rest my thoughts and heart in the old perennial garden where I’d spent so much of my childhood. A drift of Queen Anne’s lace fluttered against the wall, and a bank of poppies was just beginning to bud. Pinkish-purple rhododendrons had taken over an area beneath a cluster of trees near the man-made pond that shimmered silver in the breeze. A pair of blue butterflies danced from flower to flower.

  I plucked stray weeds out of a patch of primroses, and some grass out of the border, feeling my nerves ease. I’d learned to garden at my grandmother’s knee, following her around or playing nearby in the grass with my little family of dolls. By the time I was five, she’d allowed me a little space of my own, where I grew peas and coleus. Later, it grew to an entire section of annuals, whatever took my fancy each spring. Gran encouraged me to experiment, and I wholeheartedly did so—orange marigolds with purple phlox, daisies with foxglove. I loved the brightest flowers I could find, in outlandish combinations.

  I found that space now, lying fallow as though it awaited my hands. For a moment, I considered what I might plant. Maybe Isabel would like having a garden spot of her own, though she’d never been inclined back in Santa Fe, where gardening was an extreme sport. Heat, violent rainstorms with lightning and hail, and the short season made many of my English favorites impossible, but I’d planted our courtyard anyway, with cosmos and tickseed and dahlias that would grow nearly as large as they did here.

  Santa Fe seemed very far away as I came out of the shelter of the house, lured by the sea view. As I walked toward the bench beneath a twisted tree on the high cliff, I was glad of my sweater. Clouds hung low over the restless waves, heavy with more rain. I sat on the bench and looked out over the view I knew so intimately, taking comfort in its sameness—the sea, the little harbor against the cliffs on the other side, the tumble of the village in between. Diana and I had sat here often during childhood, sorting out problems, dreaming of the future, commiserating.

  Without her, I felt slightly dizzy. She’d not been my anchor for a long time, but the world seemed off kilter if I couldn’t just send her a text and get a reply. It felt . . . lonely.

  Which was ironic, considering how little actual communication we’d had over the past year. I had been so very angry with her when she’d simply become friends with my mother as if nothing had ever happened, as if she were just a kooky lady back in the village after her travels. I had felt insanely betrayed.

  Just as my mother had betrayed me. And Martin. Now Diana, who knew intimately how I’d felt about the other two. She’d listened to me cry about my mother a thousand times when we were children, and I’d leaned hard on her when I found out about Martin’s affair.

  But she’d been angry when I accused her of betrayal. “No one can betray you, Zoe, because you won’t let anyone close enough.”

  I’d been too angry to even reply.

  Now, I slipped my phone out of my pocket and pulled up the long, long text message thread between us, looking for anything that might help me make sense of her disappearance. With a sense of guilt, I saw that our texts in the past six or eight months had been limited to very stilted exchanges over surface things.

  Two weeks ago, before she’d disappeared, we’d been talking a bit about a new movie coming out, and exercise, and recipes. She’d landed two more accounts, regulars, and was delighted by the influx of catering jobs after years of building the business, referral by referral.

  I scrolled backward, looking for the first mention of her new boyfriend. I had to reload four times before it showed up, six months ago.

  Met someone. We’ve been out three times and I think he really likes me as much as I like him!


  Really?

  Name’s Henry. Met him when he came in to book catering for a retirement party for one of the yacht club boys.

  It’s a nice name.

  He lives in London. Travel agent of a sort. Divorced, long time. Pretty eyes. Good smile. He’s a bit older.

  A bit older? How much older? At the time, I’d hesitated over how to respond to that. I’d been sitting at my desk at work in an open-concept office, a new design I honestly hated, exchanging texts surreptitiously while I pretended to design a logo for a new account. Diana had not had the best luck with men. In all other areas of life she had remarkably good judgment, but she’d been plump since youngest childhood, and her mother—a bone-skinny woman who seemed only to smoke cigarettes endlessly and never inhale a single calorie—had ridden her endlessly about it. I suffered with Diana as her mother put her on one diet after another: soup for weeks, or no fat at all. Whatever the latest craze was.

  Gran hated it. When she came to my house, Gran fed her all she could eat—making crumbles with custard and special tea cakes, but also healthful meals balanced with the copious vegetables Gran loved to grow. Every variety of vegetable known to womankind—turnips and spinach and potatoes and asparagus and every other thing she could grow or others grew. As a child in the war, she’d learned to eat mainly vegetables, and she’d never lost her love for them. She passed the passion on to both Diana and me, and even now we traded recipes for the best vegetable dishes we discovered.

  But all the diets and the vegetables in the world never made her into the slim swan her mother wanted, and instead she grew into a classic curvy countrywoman. She was always slightly apologetic about it. In recent years she’d taken up long walks on the South West Coast Path, which ran right through the village—in fact, my feet practically touched it from my perch on the bench—and had toned up, dropped a few pounds, and whittled her waist a little. The main effect was that exercise gave her a sense of love for her body, which made her open to the idea that others could love it as well.

  But what did “a bit older” mean? And did it even matter?

  I’d texted back:

  Have fun.

  We’re going to Lyme Regis sailing on Sunday.

  She had sent a slightly out-of-focus picture of a man with thick hair and a cheery smile, completely ordinary, a little beefy but fine. I would have to show it to the police.

  I had not replied. The terseness—the meanness—of my responses to her happy texts now made me feel ashamed of myself.

  The final text in the line was the one I’d sent the night Gran called:

  Hey, is everything okay? Gran is worried about you. Text me back when you get this.

  It hung there, unanswered, like a warning signal. It made me feel hollow.

  As if I could nag her into replying, I texted now:

  I miss you. I’m home and you’re not here and I’m worried.

  Henry. I wondered if he’d been looking for her since she disappeared, and if anyone would know that. Had any of her friends met him?

  Not that I suspected him of wrongdoing. He had seemed quite devoted, by Diana’s accounts, surprising her with presents, talking to her at length about all sorts of ideas, making her laugh.

  I scrolled through texts, looking for anything that might seem strange. It was all as ordinary as porridge—walks by the sea, meals consumed in her little house or on drives to neighboring villages. He wasn’t in town every week, but he came at least once a month, usually twice. Several times he’d taken her on a luxurious outing—the sailing in Lyme Regis, a country inn for a long weekend, that kind of thing. It made him seem as if he had some money, which wouldn’t be terrible for my friend.

  To my shame, I’d only responded to one out of five texts, but she, valiantly loyal, kept texting me. For a year.

  What a wretched friend I was!

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement and turned to see my daughter climbing the hill from the opposite direction from the house. She looked so small against the vast, dramatic landscape—a tiny figure against the big sky and endless sea and treacherous cliffs—that my heart caught in my throat. My baby.

  I had not given much thought to children. Unlike many of my friends, I hadn’t played with dolls or cooed over the faces of tiny babies in the streets. When I lived with my dad in Santa Fe between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I sometimes liked to play with my little cousins, but they didn’t make me want to hurry up and get pregnant and have a bundle of my own. They were cute enough, but my heart didn’t thrill to them. I liked nature and art and the sea.

  Martin and I had only been married for six months when I found myself pregnant. When he wasn’t touring, we lived in a bungalow near Old Town in Santa Fe, an adobe with thick red walls and a kiva fireplace in one corner of the tiny living room, where we burned mesquite and pine and roasted marshmallows and played with Simba, who was one of the most adorable puppies who ever lived, all roly-poly furriness and floppy shepherd ears. Often we made love, and on one of those deliriously happy nights, Isabel was conceived.

  I knew almost instantly. Within a day, I could feel the presence of her, an Other, a Being. At first I thought I was just being fanciful, and anyway, Martin had left on tour for a two-month gig through the clubs of the Midwest. I wouldn’t bother him with my suspicions until I knew for sure.

  In those early days, when I didn’t know and could just wander through the possibilities, I loved the idea of a child. Martin’s child, who would be a multitude of bloodlines, English and Dineh, West African from Martin’s father, and Swedish from his mother. I hugged the secret close.

  But I also fretted. Martin was only two years older than me, and he was ambitious. Maybe he would be dismayed. Maybe it would change things between us. Maybe—

  Maybe I would be a terrible mother, like my mother had been. It seemed that there was a coldness at the center of my being, a place that no one touched—not Martin or my father or my gran. Not even Cooper had reached it, although he’d tried.

  In those days, I’d edged back toward painting after my big disgrace at Glasgow, and I kept a studio in the crumbling garage at the back of the yucca-studded bare-dirt backyard. For the first week after Isabel arrived in my body, I painted madly, giant flowers and sunscapes and windows.

  One afternoon as I cleaned my brushes, I realized that I should not have been standing there inhaling turpentine with a baby in my belly. In fact, I really should not have been in there at all, with so many chemicals and poisons. A wave of terror washed through me, and I hurried out of the garage and closed the door. More than two years later, when we moved to a much nicer place thanks to Martin’s increasing success, I had not been back. We had the movers pack everything anyway, but the boxes lived, undisturbed, until I gave the usable bits away to a local school.

  I don’t know why. I thought about it sometimes. Thought about my longing, the way it felt to stand and paint something, moving freely, my entire brain alight with color and hue and brushstrokes. I often looked through the adult education offerings at the local community college and imagined how I’d fit them into my schedule. Somehow, I never found the time.

  But Isabel. Isabel. The day she was born, my life turned upside down. One look into her tiny face with her squished little nose and headful of blackest hair, and my heart was no longer my own, as if it had leapt out of my chest and into hers and I’d never get it back.

  Her dad was as besotted as I was. No child had ever been so universally, thoroughly adored. She was the best of both of us: those big eyes and rosebud lips, the length of her fingers and the coral tone of her skin. I could not believe my good fortune.

  Those early days with my daughter, when I was lost in a sea of adoration and perfect wonder, were among the happiest of my life. I had no need of painting. I’d created the most perfect thing I’d ever make. All I wanted was to keep her safe and smooth a path for her to follow toward joy and love and accomplishment.

  And now she’d been bullied in some horr
ific way.

  It was impossible to keep a child completely safe, I knew that, and I’d done everything a mother possibly could, or at least everything I’d thought of, but something terrible had happened to her anyway. She swore she’d not been sexually assaulted, but that was all I’d been able to get out of her. No matter from which direction I’d come at the problem, all I’d been able to discover was that she’d been bullied on social media. No one knew more than that, none of the other parents, none of her teachers. I even cornered one of her friends, Katrina, at a basketball game I’d attended for that express purpose, but she’d stonewalled me with her chirpy, chipper smiles.

  Isabel had refused to go to school and then enrolled in the online school, which she seemed to like well enough. I had begun to worry what the summer would bring. She couldn’t stay locked up in the house wearing a hoodie in ninety-degree heat. I’d worried that she might be hiding evidence of cutting or drugs, but once in a while, she arrived in the kitchen in only a T-shirt. Her arms were the same as always.

  As she came closer, I saw that her expression was very peaceful, and although she was draped in a hundred pounds of black hoodie, like a goth version of Little Red Riding Hood, her step was lighter. She swung her arms widely, a return to an unselfconscious way of moving that I hadn’t seen in at least a month.

  She dropped down on the bench beside me. “Hey.”

  “Hi. Been for a walk?”

  “Yeah. There’s a forest down there that’s got about a billion flowers. It’s really pretty.”

  I smiled. “Bluebells.”

  “Is that what they are? I want to go back and take pictures, but—”

  She was a budding photographer with a genuinely good eye, and her father had bought her a beautiful camera and an array of lenses last Christmas. Just before everything started falling apart in her life. “So why don’t you?”

  Her joy slid away, and she gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I deleted all my accounts.”

  “You don’t have to post pictures to enjoy them.”