All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2)

by Forrest, Lindsey

  What havoc the storm wreaked on to the party, Laura didn’t know. If it interrupted the fireworks display from Williamsburg in the sky over the woods of Ashmore Park, she didn’t know. If the guests went running for cover, or if many people were still there to have to run for cover, she didn’t know. If her carefully fashioned tarte à l’orange – Terry’s signature dessert – drowned in the deluge that suddenly poured down on the Tidewater, she didn’t know.

  She had left, shaken and sick, all the adrenaline of her star turn deserting her, pain slashing behind her eyes as lightning now slashed through the sky. How she’d made it back to Edwards Lake, she didn’t remember; she drove mindlessly, without thought for oncoming traffic or stop signs. Once safely inside her temporary home, she tore her clothes off and threw all her laundry in the wash, and then she huddled in the shower for a long time, letting the water rain down on her, cleansing away the day. Cleansing away the sight of her sister face to face with her lover, electricity sparking between them, mating them for life.

  She stood now at the drawing room window at Edwards Lake, cleansed in body but not in spirit, Max purring against her shoulder, and watched with blank eyes and blank heart as nature exacted vengeance for too peaceful a day.

  When a crack of lightning knocked out the power to the electric grid for the entire area and plunged the house into darkness, she scarcely noticed. She needed no illumination. She was a creature of the night.

  ~•~

  She might have stood there all night, watching the storm, the fury of the heavens counterpoint to the leaden emptiness of her heart, if her phone hadn’t brought her back to the land of the living.

  Richard! Until the phone rang, she hadn’t let herself listen for his call. Of course, the evening was off. Diana was there, and they were talking, or who knew what else… or maybe Julie was simply grounded, and he couldn’t leave her alone for the night in this weather.

  Her heart shouldn’t beat this fast. She’d had the luxury of being a lovesick schoolgirl for a week, but that day had ended.

  She hadn’t seen him since the moment she had looked up from her autograph signing. She hadn’t seen Diana after she had walked away on the top of the terrace. She had no idea where either had gone.

  “Hello?” She scarcely recognized her voice.

  “Laura?” Not Richard. Oh, Lord, not Richard. “Laura, don’t hang up! You have to listen—”

  Thunder cut across Mark’s voice.

  “Mark.” She raised her voice. “It’s storming here. What—”

  His voice was breaking up. “—have to tell you—”

  Another crash of lightning, and she lost the connection. It had to be the satellite; her phone never worked right in a storm. She tried to call him back, but her phone could not connect to the satellite service.

  He might realize that, for once, she hadn’t hung up on him; he might send an email. It didn’t matter. She’d have to read it later. She had no electricity.

  Laura stood watching the storm for a few minutes longer, then shoved her phone in the pocket of her robe and went into the kitchen, Max at her heels, to fix his late night dinner.

  ~•~

  She tried to sleep, but, without air conditioning, the air was stuffy and uncomfortable in her room. She found herself back in the kitchen, sitting at her trestle table, drinking ice water that was rapidly losing its bite. Staring out the window, petting Max, watching, waiting.

  Over and over again, the afternoon played out in her mind. Her own runaway imagination, Diana’s unexpected appearance, the whole appalling scene with Julie and Diana – and how had Julie managed to pull the wool over their eyes for so long? Richard and Lucy had said so definitely that Julie had nothing to do with her mother, but – she remembered the night Diana had come to dinner with Tom and Lucy. How long has it been since you saw Julie? And Diana hesitating, thinking, Christmas, maybe?

  Not because it had been so long that she didn’t remember. Of course not. Because she’d had to scramble to remember when everyone else thought she’d last seen Julie.

  Sneaky, clever Julie. A pipeline of information. And what had Diana learned from Julie—?

  Had Julie shared with her mother her suspicions about her father’s new girlfriend?

  She started to shake. She clamped down on her reaction, dragged her mind to examine the problem. Had Diana indicated in any way, by any flicker of the eyelash, that her sister was the floozy she suspected her husband of having on the side?

  No. She would have smashed my face in.

  The storm showed no signs of dying down, winds blowing high and fierce. Through the window, she saw the trees whipping over the terrace, rain slashing across the window. She’d find mounds of leaves to sweep off the terrace in the morning. Early for hurricane season – she tried to remember if this was an actual hurricane or just an unusually heavy tropical storm.

  Max rubbed his head against her hand.

  Her phone remained silent.

  ~•~

  She’d thrown down the gauntlet to her sister, no doubt about that. She’d known, the moment she decided to sing “Francie,” that the song would send Diana reeling in pain. And then “Nessun Dorma,” Diana’s great triumph, swiped from under her nose now by the least of her sisters. For that, Diana might well never forgive her.

  Nor might Richard, who had certainly understood what she was doing.

  She felt sick at heart.

  And why, why had she done it? Because Diana had exposed her to the world? Because she still couldn’t know for sure that Diana did not have Francie’s blood on her hands? Because Diana had invaded Richard’s home and made herself the center of attention?

  Because Diana had stood toe to toe with Richard Ashmore, the wife of his heart?

  Laura buried her face in her hands and swallowed hard.

  This was worse than feeling jealous of Francie. This went beyond jealousy into a realm she had never visited before. What a hideous monster, this jealousy. She’d felt it tearing at her heart – that magnetism between her lover and his wife, hatred crackling between them, hatred and resentment and the most ferocious of sexual attraction.

  But not indifference. No, never indifference.

  They had teetered on a knife’s edge, and a whisper could have tipped them to passion on one side, murder on the other.

  She’d seen her sister winning a contest where Laura had never been meant to be a player. So, deliberately, she’d set out to do to Diana what she had done to those silly girls at Monticello. She’d used Cat Courtney to flatten her.

  Except that flattening Diana took more than a crushing remark. Flattening Diana took—

  She bit her lip and tasted blood.

  It took stripping her of all that she held dear. And what Diana Abbott Ashmore still held dear was her place as Dominic Abbott’s star and Richard Ashmore’s wife.

  The one thing Di clings to, like a badge of honor, is that she is still married.

  She laid her head on her arms. What have I done? What have I done?

  The phone did not ring.

  ~•~

  She drifted between worlds, in a dreaming state that protected her from the worst of her guilt. Her mind skipped from memory to memory, from Diana singing in concert, shining in white satin, to that younger Laura, sitting beside Dominic Abbott at the piano, listening to his relentless criticism, going away deep inside herself.

  She skittered away from the image of Richard standing apart at the end, watching her with untrusting eyes, and circled back around to Dominic.

  Dominic, grim taskmaster, pursuing excellence in a despised daughter, never giving up on her.

  Never giving up.

  Richard staring silently at her, as Dominic had once stared silently at another.

  A thought wandered into mind, something she hadn’t even known she remembered.

  ~•~

  She knew so little about her mother. All the time growing up, she and Francie had wondered and speculated, but they had never as
ked. In the Abbott house, all mention of Renée Dane had been strictly forbidden. Or had it? Had they simply always known, without being told, not to talk of her?

  She’d finally found the courage to ask Peggy. But Richard’s mother had shaken her head and plied a needle on the wedding quilt with uncharacteristic fury. She wasn’t old enough to hear the details, said Peggy, and it had taken a few years to realize that, of course, Peggy disapproved of Dominic’s actions – he’d been a priest, an alter Christus, and he had left God and church to run off with a married woman! And then he’d compounded his sins by marrying another woman, a marriage that disintegrated fast enough when Renée Dane crooked her little finger.

  Peggy’s opinion of Renée, while never spoken, had been crystal clear. What seemed romantic and heartbreaking to a teenage girl – running off with the love of one’s life – had been the epitome of wickedness and depravity to a virtuous Irish Catholic wife and mother.

  Max laid a paw on her arm and purred loudly.

  Years later, pawning Renée’s jewelry to pay Meg’s hospital bills, Laura had wondered about the woman who had worn such lovely pieces. Had she loved her children? How had she felt, leaving her baby with her lover because the earl had taken his errant wife back but had made it clear that Diana was not part of the bargain? How had she felt later when she’d had two babies virtually back to back? Had she ever hung over a cradle and wondered what her daughters would grow up to be – would they have her stage presence, her voice? Would they have Dominic’s forest green eyes?

  Only by accident had Laura learned the answer.

  It had been a coincidence, really. She had still been in college. She had accompanied Cam to London on a business trip, and while he met with potential clients, she wandered through the used bookstores in Bloomsbury. Idle browsing, that was all, she had no real aim in mind. She paged through old diaries and books of poetry, flipped through ancient dress patterns and sheet music, and looked for a couple of paperbacks to read on the flight home. The book had been misfiled; the clerk had seen the title, Death beyond Measure, and placed it in the mystery section.

  The Shocking True Story of Love, Death, and Money on the International Opera Stage, proclaimed the subtitle. She’d turned it over to read the blurb on the back and nearly gone into shock. A beautiful American diva who became a countess… a man of God, sworn to chastity and obedience, swept away by passion… a cold autumn morning off the coast of western Ireland….

  It was an awful book. Not only could the author not write, he seemed completely incapable of getting his facts right. The Earl of Shilleen, not Shireen, and Dominic had hailed from upstate New York, not Connecticut. The names of Dominic’s daughters had been changed “to protect the innocent.” The author engaged in a great deal of pious posturing about the unfairness of the Irish divorce laws, overlooking the fact that Renée, an American, could have easily obtained one in her own country any time she liked. But the author had done some homework; he had read the trial transcripts, and what he reported came across, clear and appalling.

  Renée Dane, the soprano who had bid hard to succeed to Callas’ throne, wife to an Irish nobleman and mistress to an obsessive monk, was a spoiled, selfish, unbalanced narcissist.

  In hindsight, Renée was easily recognizable as a borderline personality. Even through the awkward prose and heavy moralizing, her daughter had detected the symptoms of mental illness – charitably referred to as artistic temperament – and, for the first time in her life, Laura had felt sorry for Dominic Abbott. He’d fallen head over heels in love, run off to America with his love, gotten her pregnant during a tour of Medea, and found himself unceremoniously dumped a few months later when Renée decided she’d had enough of romantic poverty. After her baby came, she’d been ill for a long time, and the daughter who had witnessed Francie’s postpartum depression wondered if such a tendency might be hereditary. Renée had handed her baby over to her ex-lover, to all appearances glad to be rid of her, and fled back to being a countess. He’d been a middling musician and unemployed ex-monk with a brand-new baby and a broken heart, and Renée had been the penitent wife of an indulgent husband with apparently inexhaustible patience.

  Dominic had done the best he could. He’d returned to Ireland and promptly married the young Irishwoman that he’d hired to take care of Diana. Nine months later, and he had another daughter on the way – but the wife, in what must have seemed like déjà vu, had had her fill of him. Husband material, Dominic wasn’t. The wife fled to America where her cousin (“Penny Ashland”) had married a Southern doctor, had her baby, and disappeared.

  Then Renée had changed her mind, run away from the earl again, and come back to Dominic. They’d vagabonded around Europe, living off his conducting jobs and her increasingly important roles – until one day the earl showed up and wooed Renée back. She had gone. And the pattern had repeated for a couple of years, until finally she left Dominic and Diana and went home, seemingly for good.

  And there she had stayed for a year.

  Until, the author had said, Dominic had acted. With little to his name beyond a minor talent and a powerful determination, he had gone to Derryvane, the ancestral castle that the earl had turned into a luxury hotel and golf course. He had taken Diana with him, confronting Renée as she and the earl presided over a banquet for minor British royalty, and there the final break in the marriage had occurred. An operatic director would have staged it as a heartrending scene, full of pathos and beseeching arias, culminating when the abandoned child cried, “Mama!” in a childish soprano and Renée clasped her to her bosom and sang of her joy at the mother and child reunion in key of G.

  Laura had forgotten her father’s cleverness, his knack for the truly dramatic. He had staged a scene almost apocryphal in its impact. This, the author hadn’t made up; the earl and two other witnesses testified to it during Dominic’s trial. But no heartbroken cry of a child, no beseeching lover’s word, had passed between Dominic and Renée. He had merely come to the door of the dining hall at the castle and stood there relentlessly, watching Renée with an unblinking stare that unnerved everyone present. When the earl had asked him to leave, Dominic had stared right through him as if he didn’t exist. Finally, with a cry, Renée had flung down her napkin and brushed by him on her way up the stairs, pausing only to take his hand and press it to her lips. The earl had gone after her to make his case (and why, Laura wondered, had he bothered? Renée seemed more trouble than she was worth). Renée packed her bags and jewelry, descended the staircase, and “gave Dominic Abbott a look that conveyed all the passion and longing that had gone unanswered in their hearts for a year.” Awful prose, thought their daughter. But thank heavens for that jewelry.

  Dominic Abbott had not given up. Against the odds, he had not given up. He’d had Renée back for two years, time to father two more daughters, and he’d managed to keep her with him until the October day when something had snapped between them.

  Laura had finished reading the paperback on the flight, while Cam slept beside her. She’d put the book away and stared out the window at the Atlantic miles below, into her own heart.

  The apple doesn’t fall far. In her veins mingled the blood of the unstable Renée and the man who refused to throw in the towel. Renée had been described as a dreamer – was that why she could escape inside herself so easily? Renée had written poetry as a child – had that been passed along with mother’s milk? And if she indeed had Renée’s genetic imprint, she had asked herself at 40,000 feet, then what had she inherited from Dominic? She’d spent even more years than Renée trying to escape him, but – she’d looked at her hands, the long fingers that she had inherited from her father – she could never truly leave Dominic Abbott behind. Wherever she went, she carried within herself that same determination, that same refusal to give up, that had kept her at Meg’s side in the intensive care nursery.

  She was more Dominic’s daughter than Renée’s.

  Laura stared out at the rain falling against the window,
the lightning crashing through the sky.

  Dominic would have understood the scene at the Folly. He would have understood that need to win, to dominate, to vanquish. He might even have applauded. But even more, he would have understood the drive to push herself. Her throat ached slightly now; she hadn’t been as warmed up as she had thought. But no matter. She had won.

  And was she going to throw in the towel now? Abandon the field? Let Diana win by default?

  Leave?

  She moved her hand over Max’s silky neck, and he opened one feline eye and glowered at her.

  She had to leave. Tom’s words rang in her memory. She didn’t see that she had any other choice.

  But did that mean she had to give up?

  ~•~

  Easier said than done, though. It took a difficult few minutes to get ready, throwing things into her overnight bag with one hand while she held a flashlight in the other. Max didn’t help. He hated thunderstorms, moaning and cringing every time the sky flashed, flattening his ears as if an enemy were pounding at the door, and making a nuisance of himself by throwing his furry self against her as she moved around the room. Toothbrush, silky nightgown, diaphragm – mustn’t forget that!… she stuffed everything into the bag without regard for wrinkles or order. Her hair was still wet from her shower, and the French twist that she had planned to take down for Richard, oh so carefully and seductively, was ruined. That belonged to another hour, another woman, innocently looking forward to her evening.

  She clipped her hair up and forgot about seduction.

  No raincoat. She searched through the armoire… and then she remembered where she’d left it, hanging in the coat closet in London.

  “Ouch!” She banged her knee against the edge of the armoire. Max hissed. “I know, baby. I’m such a wuss.”

  A pitiful little meow, and a brush of fur against her ankle.

  She stood at the back window and watched the torrents come down. The wind was whipping through the trees, blowing leaves and debris furiously across the terrace. A good night to snuggle in bed and listen to nature’s fury.