All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (3 page)

“That was awfully sad, don’t you think, Dad?”

After an intermission, Cat Courtney turned from goddess into glamor queen, in an abbreviated black dress that showed off her long legs and most of her bosom. Maybe she changed to keep cool under the hot lights of the stage, but not a single male in the audience failed to appreciate the cleavage appearing centimeter by centimeter. Cat seemed not to notice. She switched from songs of love lost and never found to celebrations of love grabbed with both hands, pulsing music meant to stir every blood cell in every man in the theater. By the end of her second encore, he suspected that he was not the only hormonal basket case present.

Julie revealed an unexpected strain of her Aunt Lucy’s bossiness as the audience started to file out. “Down that aisle, Dad. That’s how you get to the back.”

He had to exert pressure to keep her still. “Hold on, Julie.” He did not often talk to her in that tone of voice, and she stopped in her tracks. “Look, I’m serious that this might not be a good idea. I don’t think Laura wants to see us—”

“Let’s
try
, Dad, please.”

“Or anyone else,” he continued inexorably. “She was a very unhappy girl when she left. Don’t you think she would have gotten in touch with someone – maybe not me, but at least Lucy – if she wanted to see us again?”

The crowd eddied out around them, but he heard none of them, he felt none of the jostling. The world had narrowed down to his daughter absorbing the bitter taste of the tragedy that had torn the family apart. He had protected her from the folly of his marriage for the whole of her life, but he could not protect her forever.

She laid her other hand on top of his. “We have to try,” she said. “I know what you’re saying, really I do. You mean that I shouldn’t get my hopes up because maybe she’ll refuse to see us, right? But it’s okay, Dad, honest. It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t want to see us. She’ll know we came, and maybe someday – well, someday she might be lonely or sick or she’ll need us for something, and she’ll know we still love her. She’ll know it’s okay to come home.”

The lights overhead caught shadows on her face, and he saw again the splendid young beauty her mother had once been. But it had been a long time since Diana had looked that innocent.

Diana’s heart had never been that loving.

So they went backstage, too easily, for all the security guards standing around. His architectural knowledge of theatrical structure guided them down one passageway and up a flight of stairs through a morass of props and pianos and musical instruments, and when one attendant finally stopped him for identification, he said merely that he was Cat Courtney’s brother-in-law and he wanted to talk to her.

The guard took one look at Julie and made the obvious mistake.

“Ah, this must be Meg. To the left, Mr. St. Bride, and up those stairs.” He obligingly pointed the way. “You look just like your mother.”

Julie did her best to look like a Meg.

St. Bride
. A name for Lucy. As easily learned as that, after all the years of silence. And Laura had a child. He had known that; it should not come as such a shock, that she had become a mother.

Meg. Margaret. She had named her daughter for his mother.

St. Bride.
In memory, he saw a card, one among many that had arrived after the funeral. Lucy had handed it to him, asking if he knew who had sent it.
Peggy, Philip, I shall miss you forever, L. St. Bride
, in handwriting unremembered across the years.

She had known. And, dear God, she had reached out.

Where had that card gone? Had they kept the envelope?

“I can’t believe it,” Julie whispered, as they started to ascend the stairs against the wall. “We’re really going to see her. Let’s ask her out to dinner. I’ll bet she’s starving.”

But more security guards milled about upstairs at the entrance to the green room. A champagne reception with Miss Courtney was about to begin, and their tickets were not enough to admit them. “I’m her brother-in-law” did not work this time, and a careful match of his passport against a list produced only a shake of the head. Julie was not as prepared as he was for the polite statement, “I’m sorry, sir, but Miss Courtney did not put your name on her list. I cannot allow you through.” She was tired from the day and the high of anticipation, and she looked devastated.

He thought for a moment, then pulled out a business card and wrote
Call us
on the back. A long shot, but Julie was right. Laura might need them someday. He nudged Julie, who obediently signed her name, and he turned back to the guard.

A gamble on the name. “Could you please see that this gets to Ms. St. Bride?” he asked formally, and knew victory when the guard nodded and took the card. “She didn’t know that her niece and I were going to be in London.”

Another nod, a flicker of irritation in the guard’s eyes, a dismissing “I’ll deliver it to Miss Courtney. Please move along, sir.”

So easy now, a simple way out. He had tried; he had made the effort.

Richard Ashmore stood there for a second, while his daughter’s face saddened with the failure of their mission, and knew, to his relief and regret, that he could still reach Laura.

He need only wait for her and then raise his voice. The old theater walls echoed back at them murmurings from the departing audience, an inefficient sound muffler. At most, she sat scant yards away, behind one of those wooden doors, waiting for the arrival of the ticket holders who had paid a premium to meet her, summoning up energy to bury Laura Abbott in Cat Courtney for one more hour. But she would enter that room he saw over the man’s shoulder, and she’d hear him, he’d make sure of that.

And then, perhaps, she would take the bait, turn around and step into the corridor, come face to face with him, acknowledge the blood on their hands.

“Move along, sir,” an edge to the guard’s politeness.

But she might not care. The need to know might not gnaw at her as it gnawed at him. He was only, after all, a small, dark part of her past.

“Dad?” Julie whispered.

Richard Ashmore looked down at his daughter’s beseeching face, and chose to walk away.

“Come on, kitten,” he said gently, and prompted her back towards the narrow stairs. “Let’s go on back to the hotel. We’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”

Months were to pass, and mountains were to fall, and the world would change, before he understood what happened next.

A man taking the narrow stairs two at a time, head down, blocked their path down. He clearly did not see them, and Richard pulled Julie back out of the way as the man brushed past them and came into the light. The newcomer was nearly as tall as he was, a Viking giant of a man wearing the familiar CAF bomber jacket.

An American.

Richard instinctively halted Julie’s downward movement with a hand on her shoulder.

“Where is my wife?”

No imperious American intimidated this guard. He requested identification impassively while the man searched through his jacket. “I’m her husband, for God’s sake! Here’s my passport—”

“I’m sorry, Mr. St. Bride, your name—”

But the guard was cut off mid-word by the quiet intensity of the man’s voice. “I’ve flown clear across the Atlantic to speak to her. Don’t give me that crap about her list!
Now, I want to see my wife.
Where is she?”

The low murmur of the guard’s voice masked the reply. Cat Courtney’s husband pocketed his passport and started down the hall, to be halted by another low comment from the guard. “Her brother-in-law… not on the list, so I didn’t—”

“Brother-in-law?” repeated St. Bride, and his voice rose. “My brother isn’t here. Who the hell—”

And then he glanced down at the card proffered by the guard, and he stiffened, this man whose existence had mattered one terrible afternoon. He straightened, and he turned slowly, too slowly, until he met Richard Ashmore’s eyes.

Then, deliberately, St. Bride crumpled the card in his hand. “My wife,” he said distinctly, “has no family. They died long ago. I am all the family she needs.”

~•~

Richard expected tears from Julie, some depression or hurt, but she surprised him. She remained quiet on the way back to their hotel, and she acknowledged his suggestion that she get ready for bed with only a small nod. He loosened his tie and rang the concierge for coffee before he went in to check on her.

She was already sitting in bed, her arms curled around her knees, not far removed from the child she had been until his mother’s death had made her the lady of the house. Her new Cat Courtney bear sat on the nightstand beside her. He sat down by her side and touched her shoulder, and she turned her cheek to his hand. Her lashes swept down over her eyes.

“Thanks for taking me anyway, Dad. I’m glad we went, aren’t you? I’m glad we tried.”

“Yes,” because he was glad too. He had precious few memories of the woman Laura for the dark spaces of his mental lock box. “We needed to go.”

She slumped down against the pillows at her back and stared away from him. “Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Did you remember that today was your anniversary?”

He was silent for a moment, and then he said gently, “How could I forget something like that? Of course, I remembered.”

“Oh.” She turned so that one eye could peer at him through the dusk. She reached out like the adult she would be in too few years, and she touched his hand. “Are you sorry about my mother? I mean, do you wish you hadn’t married her?”

Diana, drifting down the garden path towards him, glorious, not of this world…. Diana, looking him coldly in the eye, with her unspeakable infidelity…. Diana, distant and awkward with the baby she had not meant to give birth to…. He said, and hoped that his voice did not catch, “No, Julie. Without her, I wouldn’t have you.”

She said nothing more. He dropped a kiss on her forehead and went to retrieve his coffee.

Seventeen years.

Who would share Diana’s bed this night, seventeen years after their wedding night?

Did he care?

He sipped his coffee, blessedly hot for once, and stretched out in the chair by the window overlooking the rooftops of central London. Across the ocean, his wife was entering her office at her club, chatting on the telephone, reaching for the oblivion of a shot of whiskey. He cherished no illusions that she thought of him or the daughter she had given him.

On his hand, his wedding ring weighed heavily.

He set his coffee down, carefully, bracing himself against the ancient pain. The fingers of his right hand paused seconds, almost a minute, against the worn florentined gold. Then slowly, deliberately, he slid the ring off.

He waited for the pain to descend, but it hovered, a dark presence, just out of reach.

The ring lay against his palm, a mere whisper, a fleeting memory of a sunlit afternoon seventeen summers ago. Diana nervously forgetting her vows and having to be prompted by the judge; Diana’s sisters in their rainbow dresses, catching his eye as he glanced over the veil of his bride. Lucy winking, Francie pasting a smile on her face, Laura staring sadly until Diana finally got her vows right.

And the rest of the world disappearing, as Diana put the ring on his finger and lifted her eyes to him in relief.

He slipped the ring into his pocket and settled back again.

The dark presence over his shoulder vanished.

As simply as that, then, he was no longer Diana’s husband. No longer the cherished husband of one brief summer, no longer the betrayed and betraying husband of all the seasons after.

And his heart did not ache.

Oh, but his shoulder did, as it always ached in the cold or damp. He moved it restlessly. That one mistake, at least, would never let him go.

I will seek you with my heart….

Laura. Quiet, shy, sweet. On the surface, the image of her sisters, but paler, self-effacing, less interesting. A kind heart. A boundless generosity and loyalty that he’d enjoyed and exploited. A surprisingly fierce temper….

Come home with me….

And now mouse into Cat. A mysterious stranger who wooed audiences and broke hearts with that sensuous voice that bespoke a lifetime of experience. Not Diana. Not Francesca. Laura….

She stayed with him now, her voice coaxing him home with her, her eyes watching him as if he were the only man in her world. He thought how anxiously she had once awaited his approval, when she was young and had just baked him a batch of cookies. He remembered teasing her, baiting her hook, teaching her to dance, helping her with her math homework. He remembered trying uselessly to give her some small comfort after her father had destroyed her stray cats.

And his shoulder ached with an old wound, as he remembered a hidden afternoon many years before, the utter beauty of her skin beneath his hand, the glory of her hair spread across the pillow, the hatred and fear brimming in her eyes in those seconds before she tried to kill him.

Chapter 2: What Goes Around

FROM ASSOCIATED PRESS:

Dominic Abbott, the central figure in one of Ireland’s most celebrated trials, was found murdered in his home early Tuesday morning.

Mr. Abbott’s daughter, Diana Ashmore, discovered her father’s body when she returned from a business trip. Police investigators believe an intruder broke in while Mr. Abbott was working at his piano and attacked him with a blunt instrument. Results from an autopsy will be available Wednesday morning.

Mr. Abbott was known as a composer of minor operatic scores such as “Renata” and “Serenissima.” He was better known as the defendant in the trial for the 1970s murder of his long-time mistress, Renée Dane, mother of his three daughters. The two lovers caused an international scandal in the music world when Mr. Abbott, then a monk, directed the American Ms. Dane in “Medea,” then left the monastery to live with Ms. Dane, who remained married to the Irish Earl of Shilleen until her death. The often stormy affair, played out on the stage of the opera houses of Europe, was punctuated by numerous breakups between the lovers and the Catholic earl’s refusal to grant Ms. Dane a divorce.