All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (19 page)

Laura, still recovering from her second miscarriage:
Oh, Fran, no. Stay a while. I need you.

No, you don’t
, said Francie flatly.
And I don’t need to be around Cam or Meg. I can’t stand him, and it hurts to see her. But, Laurie, you call me whenever you want, okay? We’re still twins. We’re twins forever.

So Francie left her twin to a marriage far from her dreams. The marriage that had worked well on a college campus changed character in the real world. Laura Abbott melted into Laura St. Bride, the wife of a man coming up fast on his own in a new industry, the mother of a child determined to work her way through every entry in the behavioral textbooks. She had a baby to take care of, a husband to please, and a household to run, and Cam left no room in their marriage for the girl who stayed up late at nights writing poetry and finding music in old romantic myths. A few hours at the piano during the week ought to satisfy her. Her time belonged to him.
She
belonged to him. Laura Abbott had gone forever, she was Mrs. Cameron St. Bride….

Resentment began to rage below the surface of her Cinderella marriage. (And how
had
Cinderella liked marrying up the social ladder, anyway? Had she wearied of remembering how much she owed her prince?) Oh, how often did she wish that Cam had taken a shine to Francie instead? Francie had her own apartment and a job at the St. Bride family investment bank; she had resumed her voice lessons. She dated; she went to college classes; she even cajoled Cam into flying lessons. On the weekends, she crewed on the local lakes with Cam’s parents. Dallas blessed her. She was coming into her own, her natural allure deepened by her thwarted love affair; she seemed happy again.

Only once, when Laura found her crying over an architectural magazine, did Francie admit that Richard had not vanished into the past
. I want to see him. I try and try to forget, and it’s no good. Every time I look at Meg—

Then go back,
said her disillusioned twin, certain that, for someone, the world must still be well lost for love.
To hell with Daddy. To hell with Diana. If you still love him – there’s divorce. Even Richard has his breaking point.

Francie shut the magazine wearily.
He asked her once,
and that startled Laura.
Do you know what she said? She told him to go ahead if he wanted to lose Julie. How that bitch uses that child – Richard loves Julie. I think he’d do anything to keep her. He won’t risk a divorce, not now.

What are you going to do?

I’ll go back eventually. When Diana is gone and Richard is free.

But she’d not paid attention to that, the first clue that Francie had her own master plan. She’d not seen that in her twin’s eyes seethed the birth of a long-awaited revenge. Swamped in her own unhappiness, falling out of love with a husband she wasn’t sure she had ever been in love with, resolving to keep her third pregnancy to herself until she got beyond the danger stage – oh, with all that baggage, she thought later, no wonder that she’d not divined that Francie had reached Richard again.

Then one day, fresh from a quarrel with Cam, she had sought refuge at Francie’s apartment. She had her own key, and she let herself in quietly. And she heard Francie talking wildly, passionately:
Get her out of the way, everyone will just forget about her. Oh, dear God, I am so sick of losing to her, that bitch, that two-faced bitch – and I want my family back, I want my place back, I do, I do….

Confronted, Francie confessed. Diana had denied Richard a divorce. They had one option left.

We’re going to kill her.

~•~

His voice called her back. “Laura?”

When she looked at him, all the attraction that had shimmered between them earlier had gone. (And it had shimmered, no use denying that now.) She saw him, this man who had struck back using sister against sister, and the ice that had protected her for so long closed around her again. She was no longer as vulnerable as she once had been.

“You know why Francie left,” she said. “What did you expect, after Di caught you together that day? Francie was devastated, she was humiliated beyond belief. She wanted to leave, and – and I went with her because—” She grasped at control of her voice. “I loved her. She needed me, and you and Di were so caught up with each other – you didn’t give a damn about her.”

Her words hit home, hard. She saw a flash of pain in his eyes, the knowledge of an old guilt, before he retreated behind his shield.

“I cared,” every word deliberate. “Diana was brutal to her. I’m glad Francie had you to go to. I’m sorry—” he stopped, and he straightened up. “I’m sorry that you got mixed up in that. It must have come as a shock—”

Her voice was calm, Cat Courtney’s voice. “I’d known for months,” she said, “Francie told me as soon as she got back after New Year’s. She couldn’t wait to tell me.”

“Of course not.” He sounded tired, strange. “It wasn’t any good if she couldn’t tell you.”

“Yes.” Why did she hate hearing him so unhappy? What was wrong with her? She had to get her feelings for him in order. “I was the only safe one to tell.”

“I’m sorry you ever had to know. You cared about me, and it was hard to lose that.” He sounded weary, like someone who has watched a favorite keepsake slip away forever. Without warning, he held out his hand. “Come, I’ll take you back to your hotel. I don’t see any point in dinner.”

She nodded. Better to leave now, better to savor her anger away from him, away from the scent of his skin and the timber of his voice. He had done her a favor; he had reminded her of all the reasons she had to despise him, and maybe, away from him, she would not forget.

Black is the color of my true love’s heart….

She waited quietly while he settled the bill for their wine and assured the waiter that, no, there was nothing wrong, they had merely discovered that they were not hungry…. The waiter was suitably discreet, but he cast her an appraising glance, as if to judge her not worth the loss of a dinner. She was furious to remember that her own thoughts had run in that channel earlier, and she spared the waiter a scathing look before she obeyed Richard’s subtle, guiding pressure out to his car.

“Laura.”

She stopped at the passenger door and stared down at his hand.

“Where is Francie now? Did she come with you?”

All the pain she’d held inside for eleven years hit her then in a flood. Its passage was instant and splintering, and she looked at this man who had killed Francie as surely as if he had cut her throat himself.

“She’s dead.”

“Dead!” His fingers bit her arm. “When? What happened?”

And then she took her revenge. She remembered the horror and humiliation of that bloody afternoon, she imagined the terror of Francie’s last moment on earth, and she lifted her chin and looked straight into those lying eyes, alive now and full of remembered anguish. She said softly, “She bled to death, Richard. Eleven years ago. Right here in Virginia.” And then, “After you left her.”

~•~

Later, much later, Richard Ashmore sat in his darkened home, while his daughter slept upstairs. He treasured these pockets of night, his only refuge from the privileges and burdens of his life; he sought these moments to regain those parts of himself that the day had chipped away.

Most nights, he listened to music, to relax himself for sleep. He’d learned to love Chopin and Rachmaninoff during his years with Diana, and Francie had taught him Verdi; he often intermixed a symphony with the rock of his youth.

But tonight only the music of Cat Courtney would suit, and he was not a masochist.

Most nights, too, he fixed himself a cup of coffee. Years of watching Diana drink herself down the drain had given him a healthy dislike for the oblivion of the bottle.

Tonight, he granted himself one small glass of wine.

Tonight he faced the fact that he might not be a masochist, but when it came to women, he was certainly a fool.

Three mistakes….

Diana, Francie, Laura.

And the least memorable had just caught up with him with a vengeance.

He did not often think of Francie, lovely, seductive, scheming Francie. The guilt he had carried after her disappearance had given way to quiet regret and then to a more adult acceptance of a young man’s follies. He had yielded to temptation one New Year’s Eve; he had broken an unspoken code; he had hurt his unfaithful wife terribly. He wished he had never stayed home with Francie that evening, and he certainly wished he had never touched a drop of the champagne she had so thoughtfully brought with her. But wishing changed nothing. He could only live with the past, and live his life.

He looked down through the dark at the photo album. He had pulled it down from the shelf after Julie had gone to bed, knowing what he would find. His trained eye saw shape and line, and Laura must have forgotten that or she would never have left that picture of her daughter where he could see it.

His mother, Margaret Ashmore, at ten, in a shot taken over sixty years before; Margaret St. Bride, in the photo he had phone-mailed to himself while Laura dressed for dinner. Nearly twins. Oh, he saw some subtle differences. Meg St. Bride beamed in jeans and T-shirt; Peggy had been wearing her Sunday best. The older picture was in black and white, Meg’s in full color, so no casual viewer would know that Peggy’s eyes were the Irish blue that she had passed to her son. But anyone could see the forest green eyes that Francesca Abbott had given her daughter.

His daughter, too.

Meg St. Bride, of course, had to be more than ten.

He leaned back and tried to figure just when she might have been born. After fourteen years, a few isolated sexual incidents (and he refused to dignify them as anything more) were difficult to date. The only one he knew for a certainty was New Year’s Eve, and it did not seem possible that Francie had conceived then.

Easter break…. The timing worked out, so Meg would have been born after Christmas. He thought in horror of the hardship Laura and Francie must have known, while he enjoyed his first holiday out of college.

It did not bear thinking of.

He had scarcely remembered how to think in those few seconds after he’d seen her picture and realized that he had fathered a child. How he’d managed…. And Laura had instantly gone on edge. Even through his shock, he had sensed her fear, and every instinct had warned him that he must not alarm her. Betray once that he recognized his own blood in her daughter, and she might well vanish back into Laura St. Bride’s life.

She had only the one child.

How had she ended up with Meg? Ah, Cameron St. Bride. He’d forgotten the reclusive computer genius, although he certainly had never forgotten the utter hatred that St. Bride had turned on him in London. Of course, and he understood now. Not because Laura’s husband had ever learned of that hidden afternoon – not unless Laura had suffered a fit of conscience and confessed – but because St. Bride had loved his daughter.

He understood that. He would fight to the death to protect Julie.

And Laura, he suspected, could kill like a tigress for her cub.

He sipped his wine and wondered what primeval fear underlay that incredible hostility she had turned on him. He’d expected her to be nervous, secretive, even defiant. Returning home after fourteen years, blood on her hands, she risked rejection on a scale he’d never known. He’d expected that she would never relax until he forgave her.

The moment he’d seen her, those wide green eyes panicked at the sight of him, forgiveness had become moot. Best instead to bury that hour forever.

She had followed his lead. No apologies, no explanations – maybe… and he turned his head towards the window, a thought breaking through the wine. Maybe she honestly believed her cover still held. Only if a woman believed that the man on whom she’d turned fury and violence did not know who she was could she go to dinner with him, dance with him, ask to meet his daughter.

Certainly, that last vicious remark, born of the pain and horror he’d seen in her eyes, made sense only if she still felt herself shielded from discovery by Francie.

In that, hope might wait for them yet. He had lost his wife, the only woman he had ever loved, in the dreadful aftermath of their mutual betrayal; he had lost a daughter he’d never known he had; he had lost confidence in his own honor and integrity.

He hated to think that he had also lost his friend.

He finished off his wine and contemplated a cigarette, and Laura’s laughing, disapproving gaze settled around him.

She had come home. She had come to him. She might not want to see him again – she’d told him so when he took her back to her hotel, in a burst of adolescent melodrama – and at the moment, he was of a mind to grant her wish.

Not because of what she’d said. But because the curve of her throat caught his breath – and her sidelong glance roused his heart from long anesthesia—

And because he’d learned not to be a fool.

He had not forgotten, God help him, that she was his sister-in-law.

Chapter 7: Upon That Shore

ON A DAY SUCH AS THIS, Laura had last seen the ancient Chesapeake sands. The high afternoon sun had bathed her then, laying a light blanket of humidity over the landscape, and surely those gulls were descendants to those that had circled over Francie’s death bed.

On such a day, she had come to this remote shore, a mother and sister, desperate to prevent the bloodshed she saw coming.

She had never remembered leaving, sick, betrayed, a mother and sister no longer.

She parked the Jaguar close to the cottage, far beyond the gates that locked the bridge and barred access to the spit of land, and pocketed the keys she had filched from Dominic’s desk this morning.

On such a day….

But the day had changed. She felt that change, standing there on the shore, listening to the squish of the wet lands beneath her sandals. Eleven years had come and gone, the signs of their passing even in the changeless scene before her. Dominic’s hideaway, that old guest cottage where he had gone to compose his unearthly music, bore a fresh coat of paint. Hundreds of yards away, the Ashmore summer cottage, its proximity symbol of the intermingling of the two families, stood guarded by a new fence. The seascape itself had shifted infinitesimally; the crescent of the cove where Francie had lived her last minutes had widened and deepened.