All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (7 page)

The money didn’t concern her. She could take care of Meg by herself.

The setup of the trusts bothered her.
Typical Cam
, she thought, and then felt guilty. Leaving Mark in charge showed his complete lack of faith in her. He had never quite grasped that she was no longer the frightened teenager he had met in San Francisco. His child bride had grown up, raised a daughter, made a success of herself, and still he had never trusted her to come in out of the rain.

She felt uneasy about Mark’s intentions. Cam had certainly trusted him, and she had no reason not to. Still, he now had the power literally to sell her songs out from under her. If the Beatles could lose control of their catalog, then who was she to stop Mark from licensing “Persephone” for antihistamine commercials? With his majority vote, she could not stop him from doing anything.

That was brought home to her several days after the memorial service, when Mark explained gently that, since Cam had bought the house in the corporation’s name, she had no real rights to it, although he wanted her and Meg always to think of it as their home. Except for her flat in London and the brownstone in New York – and she was not going there, not for a long time – she was now homeless.

“Are you moving in?” she asked.

“When it’s convenient for you,” said Mark. “When are you going back to London? You still have that contract to fulfill, don’t you?”

Laura made up her mind on the spot. She had never been so grateful to her mother-in-law for leaving her the London flat; it was hers outright, and Mark had no say about it. “I want Meg back in a normal routine. She needs to get back to school as soon as possible, and I want to return to work.”

“I agree,” Mark said, and his casual assumption that he now exercised any control at all over her child shocked her. She had not felt her rights to Meg so in jeopardy since San Francisco. “Don’t worry about anything, Laura. You take care of Meg and write your songs. I’ll take care of everything else.”

That was what she was afraid of. Whether intentionally or not – and probably not, since Cam had never planned to die in his early 40s – her control freak of a husband had substituted for himself a new protector, one equally prone to think he knew best how she should live her life, and one without his vested interest in her happiness.

She immediately felt guilty for thinking of Cam as a control freak.

The headaches began that were to plague her for several months.

~•~

It was a relief to return to London, away from Mark and his helpful suggestions, away from Emma and her uneasy jealousy, away from all the talk of Cam’s estate when no one had officially declared him dead. Away from the fog of fear that hung over her country. People knew fear in London, but they’d had decades of experience dealing with the IRA, and they had learned to live with terror. No one, Terry pointed out, was going to blow up Knightsbridge. “They
like
to shop at Harrods.”

Laura settled Meg back into her school and ballet and reported back to
Rochester
. Her manager had been in touch with her director and voice coach, and they did their best to help by working her to the point of collapse. She had just enough energy left over to be a mother. She couldn’t write or compose – the music that had flowed through her for so long had dried up. For the first time in her life, she experienced writer’s block, and she panicked.

“It will pass,” said Roger. “Indeed it will, my girl. Give yourself time. You’re processing a jumble of emotions right now – you can’t write with all that chaos inside.”

Her manager said the same thing, but he must have told Mark, who called within the hour. “You know, Laura, all things come to an end. Have you thought of retiring?”

The fax from Richard Ashmore was never far from her thoughts, but she pushed it away into a compartment to take out later when she and Meg had begun to recover. Right now, Meg had to be her top priority. Terry gave her the name of a grief counselor, and she left the card on her desk until the night Meg threw her father’s birthday gift at the wall and crumpled in a sobbing heap. The next morning, shopping for groceries, Laura found herself gasping for breath in a full-fledged panic attack. As soon as she stumbled into the flat, she called for an appointment.

After several sessions, Meg began to regain some of her sunny nature, remembering her father without obsessing about his death. One day in late October, she found enough of her old self to talk back to her mother, and Laura had never been so glad to see her daughter serving up attitude.
You just don’t get it, what’s the BFD
, were welcome, familiar words.

Laura spent several hours putting Meg’s music box back together, her head aching, wishing she could piece their lives back together as easily.

Meg mourned honestly, and so she recovered faster. She joined a group of teens who had also lost parents in the attacks – nearly a hundred Brits had been among the victims – and she had friends to talk with, email, and IM about her feelings. Her friends from home rallied around her; she spent the greater part of each evening on the computer chatting with them. Learning to use her position as Cameron St. Bride’s only child, she insisted on being included in the engineering chair that St. Bride Data endowed in Cam’s name, and she asked to participate as a full donor when the family created a relief fund. Before Laura’s eyes, the willful, demanding child of September 10 began to mature into a more sensitive and thoughtful young woman – but, more than once as the autumn wore on, Laura woke up to find that Meg had crawled into bed with her.

September 11 was a terrible way to grow up.

Meg, at least, had her peers to talk to. Laura found herself isolated, her anxiety only increasing over time. The wall she and Cam had erected between Cat Courtney and Laura St. Bride meant that few people in London knew that she had lost her husband, and the people she had known in Texas did not know where Laura St. Bride had gone. Both Roger and Terry had told her to call any time she needed them, but they were busy and she shrank from the idea of burdening them with her grief.

This was the time, if ever, that a woman needed her sisters.

But the sister she’d been closest to had been gone for ten years. She’d never been that close to Lucy and Diana.

Cam’s sister Emma didn’t even want to acknowledge that Laura had a right to grieve.

She told the counselor about her headaches and the panic attack, only to hear that her reactions were normal. Many of his American clients were suffering from sleeplessness and anxiety. It would pass, he said, gradually the shock of seeing her husband die before her eyes would fade, and she would think more about the good days of her marriage than about its end. She couldn’t admit the truth, that mixed in with all her grief and horror was relief that the marriage, with all its heartache and failure, was over.

She couldn’t tell him her conviction that the headaches were God’s way of punishing her for never loving Cam enough.

The Atlantic shielded them after the
Wall Street Journal
ran an article on the financial holdings of the wealthier victims. Cam, it turned out, had the unenviable distinction of being the richest man to die in the attacks, and since most of his holdings except for St. Bride Data had been private, the appetite of the financial reporters was only whetted for the probate proceedings. To buy time and privacy, Mark held off filing the inventory that could expose Cam’s 100% ownership of Cat Courtney, Inc.

“I can’t delay this forever,” he said in one of his daily calls. “I filed a preliminary inventory, but eventually I’ll have to file the full document, and the press will be all over it. The company gets calls every day about his will.”

“I know,” Laura said wearily. Did it really matter now if anyone knew who Cat Courtney was? Did anyone care? Daddy was dead. Richard knew, and by now he had certainly told Diana and Lucy. The years of running had ended the moment the airliner had slammed into the north tower. “Just – please keep them out of my hair as long as you can. I don’t want Meg exposed to that. She’s been through so much – she’s doing so much better.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said. “How are rehearsals going?”

On opening night, Mark crossed the Atlantic to accompany Meg to the theater. As Cam had predicted, Laura dazzled as Jane, stunning even those critics who had carped that Cat Courtney never quite connected emotionally. She reached deep down inside herself to illuminate Jane’s wretched childhood, bringing up chilling memories of Dominic Abbott at the piano for her lessons. She fueled the adult Jane’s attraction to Rochester by remembering her own reaction to Cam in San Francisco. In Jane’s passion, she mirrored that long-lost afternoon – she didn’t want to think about that.

She knew the source of Jane’s grief.
That
was all too easy to bring to the surface.

That night, a new problem reared its head.

At the opening night party, Mark stood at her side, his arm around Meg’s shoulders, beaming at all the praise showered upon Laura – for all the world as if he had the right to share in Cat Courtney’s night of triumph. The next evening, as Cam had after her first concert, he hosted an intimate late dinner for the cast at an exclusive restaurant. When he raised a toast to “our glorious leading lady – Miss Cat Courtney!” Laura felt the elves in her head start their enthusiastic banging behind her eyes.

Roger, no one’s fool, looked at her quizzically and kept his own judgment.

~•~

Over the next few months, Mark crisscrossed the Atlantic to check for himself how she and Meg were coping with Cam’s loss. He now had the corporate jet at his disposal, and he made use of it so often that Laura wondered how he got any work done. He flew over in the middle of the week for Meg’s ballet recital. He brought papers dealing with the various trusts so that he could explain them to Laura before she signed them. He hired Terry to prepare a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner at the flat and dragged Emma along so that Meg would have her family together for the holiday.

He hand-delivered the death certificate from New York.

He brought over her collection of blown glass Christmas ornaments and stayed to trim the tree with Meg. He took Meg shopping for presents. He hung around in the kitchen while Laura and Meg made their traditional Christmas cookies. Then he announced his intention to fly back to spend the last two weeks of the year with them, obviously hoping that Laura would invite him to stay in the guest bedroom.

“
Guest
bedroom?” said Roger. “Right. And I’m jolly St. Nick.”

Laura fiddled around with her tea and felt the stirrings of another headache. “He’s taking a suite at the Kildare.”

“How happy you must be. A hop and a skip away.”

She started to retreat – when she was tired, she was no match for Roger’s sarcasm. But then she remembered the email Mark had sent that morning, and she burst out, “Oh, my God, he is such a pest!” She took a deep breath. “He emails me every morning! He forwards me jokes and links all day long. When I get home at night, I’ve usually got at least five messages from him. He put me on speed dial. He calls me at least once a day. He wants Meg’s grades sent to him—”

“And how is she doing?”

“Badly. She’s barely passing math, so of course he has all kinds of helpful suggestions about that.” She looked at her friends. “Last weekend, he got worried because the heating is so temperamental in the flat, so he called a contractor to repair it.
It’s my flat!
And then this morning – he called to find out what I’m doing for New Year’s Eve after the show.”

Roger and Terry looked at her.

She calmed down. “Okay. I know what I think. What do
you
think he’s up to?”

“Terry, can I have more wine? Thanks, love,” said Roger. “Laura, I don’t think you see this as Mark does. He doesn’t see that he’s being a pest. He sees his brother’s beautiful young widow who will someday remarry. He sees that aura of vulnerability that he fears will attract the wrong sort of man. He sees that trust that will dissolve the moment you say ‘I do’ to another man, with all that lovely money flying out of the St. Bride family. And he sees – forgive me, Laura, but this is true – that Meg misses her father. And he is thinking to himself, she needs a husband, her child needs a father – why not me?”

The elves began to pound.

“He’s also thinking that he may have inherited Cam’s toys, but he inherited a lot less than you. Didn’t you say that he and his sister had to split the remaining one-third with other beneficiaries? If he heroically steps in and marries his brother’s widow, becomes a father to her poor fatherless child, then he controls more than two-thirds of the estate.”

“And,” added Terry, “he’s thinking that you may start dating again—”

“I’m not interested in a relationship with another man. In fact,” she hesitated, and then said before she lost her courage, “I think that’s dead and gone in me.”

“No, it’s not,” Roger said. “You’ve had an
annus horribilis
. You lost a baby, your husband told you he wanted a divorce, and then you watched him die in the most horrific way imaginable. Of course, you’re not interested, but you will be again, and Mark knows it. He is thinking logically that he needs to stake his claim before you meet someone else. If he marries you, it solves a whole host of problems – a win-win situation. I detect some sibling one-upmanship at work here also. Mark knows that you weren’t happy with Cam. If he succeeds where his brother failed, doesn’t he prove himself the better man?”

Terry watched as she rubbed her temples, and, without a word, fetched her some aspirin. She gave him a grateful smile and drank the tablets down with the herbal tea he placed in front of her.

“I don’t get it. Mark is a fundamentalist.” She saw their blank looks and explained, “He takes the Bible literally. Isn’t there somewhere – Leviticus – where it forbids a man marrying his brother’s wife?”

“Leviticus 20. You are grasping at straws,” said Roger. “Keeping the money in the family with a second marriage is a time-honored tradition, and don’t think that Moses & Co. didn’t do it when they thought they might lose a flock of sheep. You haven’t been upper crust your whole life or you would have expected this. You won’t even have to change your monograms. And, Laura sweetie, don’t talk to us about Leviticus – it forbids certain other things too.” He settled back, and the light in his eyes warned her of his change of mood. “Of course, you have another solution to your problem.”