“It’s Mr. Ashmore’s company,” Laura said, and handed him the briefcase. “He loaned me the shirt to wear after I got caught in the rain.”
Too much information. Richard gave her a swift warning look and put Meg’s backpack on top of her duffel bag. The barre was going to be a problem; he studied it briefly before he wedged it in diagonally across the rest of Meg’s luggage and shut the trunk.
He turned back just in time to see Laura’s hand lift to her temple. He’d seen her make that gesture from time to time – she’d done it that afternoon, when Diana had started making her speech. Before he could ask, Meg burst out, “Mom! Is it one of your headaches? Are you okay?”
“Headaches?” He didn’t like the sound of that.
Laura shook her head, but Meg turned to him, no longer the juvenile delinquent who had led them on a rain-soaked trek across the state. “She gets these stress headaches real bad. She’s been getting them since – you know, last year. Mom,” she turned back to her mother, “you okay? Maybe you should lie down.”
“I’m okay,” Laura said in a low voice. He took stock of her pale face and the finely drawn look around her eyes. She wasn’t okay. Right now she had the same look of resistance to oncoming pain that he’d seen on his mother’s face before a migraine hit.
He had to suppress his exasperation. She was suffering from headaches, headaches that had started last fall, still plaguing her in times, he guessed, of great emotional stress. And she hadn’t bothered to tell anyone. He’d been right when he’d told Lucy that Laura was heading for a long overdue crash.
And she wouldn’t take help. For someone determined to make him expose thoughts and emotions he’d just as soon protect for the time being, she excelled at concealment herself. It seemed to take a cataclysm – Diana’s suicide attempt, their confrontation that evening – to make her lower her guard with him.
That needed to change.
“Come on.” Richard opened the passenger door. “Laura, take the back and lie down. Meg, sit up front with me.” He looked at Laura and saw her compressing her lips again, not in anger but in pain. He gentled his voice. “Do you have something to take?”
Laura nodded. Meg seized the opportunity to stick two fingers into her mother’s pocket and snake out her credit card. She backed up, just out of reach, and held it up. “I’ll get you some bottled water, Mom. Back in a sec.”
Her action caught him off guard. She took off in a fast run before he could reach out to stop her. He started after her and stopped after ten feet; he couldn’t leave Laura standing by herself in a deserted parking garage at night. You and I, my fine little miss, are going to establish some ground rules. Meg stopped to speak to the security guard at the terminal door, then turned to point back to them; the man shrugged and let her in.
Through the lighted windows, he saw her running across the concourse.
He shook his head, glad for the moment that she was not his problem to deal with. Julie’s case of teenage hormones was looking more attractive and manageable every minute. He turned back to Laura, who was counting out some white tablets into her hand. “How bad are these headaches?”
“It’s just tension.” She looked exhausted. “I took aspirin earlier, but the pain came back. Don’t worry.”
Richard looked at her steadily until he had her attention. He ran a firm ship at Ashmore & McIntire; no one, including his partner, argued with him when he had what Lucy called the listen-up look. It worked with Julie. It was going to have to work with Laura.
“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “you’re going to see my internist, and you’re going to get some help.” He gave her a direct look. “Stop suffering in silence, Laura. You’re as bad as Lucy.”
She looked at him in surprise, and her eyes grew wary. She wasn’t used to someone making decisions for her anymore, taking the choice out of her hands; she’d resisted it with her husband, and it must have frustrated the man. St. Bride must not have chosen his moments wisely, or he’d made decisions for her as a matter of routine, and now she interpreted every attempt to help as a threat to her autonomy.
Her resistance was beginning to frustrate him too.
He gave her no quarter, just continued to give her that same direct look. His will against hers, and he didn’t intend to lose.
Then her eyes dropped, signaling retreat. She gestured towards the terminal. “Should we go in after her? Maybe I was too rough on her – but she scared me so much – five dollars—”
Five dollars more than Meg ought to see for the remainder of the summer. “I can see her. She’s in one of the shops. If she’s not out in five minutes, I’ll get her.”
But Meg made it in less time than allotted. He saw her fly across the terminal and out the door, her arms full of bottles. She stopped to let a taxi drive by and then raced back across the access road to them. “Here.” She thrust a bottle into her mother’s hand breathlessly. “Drink this up, Mom. You’ll feel better. You’re probably dehydrated. And here,” she handed Richard a bottle, “I figured you’d want something too.”
Whatever her faults, the child cared about her mother. She bullied Laura into the back seat, made her swallow the aspirin, and arranged a car blanket tenderly beneath her head. It was in no small way to Meg’s credit that, a couple of minutes later, they were ready to leave the airport.
Except for one detail. Richard was about to pull out of the garage when he saw the warning light on his dashboard. “Is your belt buckled?”
“Huh?” Meg peered at him. “I probably shouldn’t wear one. I might need to crawl back there to take care of Mom.”
He braked and turned to look at her. “Seat belt,” he said pleasantly. “My car. My rules.”
She stared at him – how dare anyone speak to her like that – and he returned stare for stare. He could wait her out as long as it took, but, by God, she was not going to run circles around him. He’d used gentle firmness with Laura; he was prepared to be a great deal more direct with this one. After a minute, while the car idled, Meg lowered her eyes and buckled up.
~•~
The rain had now moved east from the Tidewater. As soon as they reached the interstate back to Williamsburg, they encountered the ferocity of the storm that had drenched them earlier. In the car, no one spoke. Richard concentrated on driving through the slashing downpour; beside him, Meg pulled a small MP3 player from her purse and plugged in earphones. Laura remained silent in the back seat, and when he stole a look in the rear view mirror, she seemed to have fallen asleep.
“Laura?” She did not answer.
The best thing for her. She’d been through the wringer; this mad dash through the night to rescue her errant daughter had been the icing on the cake of a very long day. It was a measure of her exhaustion, he thought, that she had blurted out that unexpected confession about San Francisco. She’d never told anyone; she had meant to take it to her grave, even as he had planned to bury forever the truth about Francie.
All these secrets, Lucy had said. Not a very firm foundation.
As usual, Lucy was right.
And what else did Laura plan not to tell him? What else was out there? He doubted that there was much else of value to learn about her marriage; she’d put up with infidelity and infertility because she’d never forgotten that St. Bride had come to her rescue. The ongoing tension, the underlying power struggle, seemed to have worn them both out so that the final miscarriage had broken the marriage for good, but there had still been loyalty and devotion. Laura had nothing to blame herself for, she had been a faithful wife—
No. She hadn’t.
Ash Marine. He’d forgotten about that.
“How long till we get there?”
Richard said mechanically, “About forty minutes. We can’t go any faster in this rain.”
He remembered the guilt he had felt over Francie, the burden of shame, the years of working to regain his self-respect. What had Laura faced in the mirror after that afternoon? She’d borne not only the guilt of
unfaithfulness, but she’d had to confront what he had not – the memory that she had aimed a gun to kill. Never mind that she couldn’t shoot straight to save her life. Her intent had been far more lethal than her aim.
He had never understood her actions that day – why she had behaved so desperately out of character, why she had let him believe she was Francie, why she had fired at him. Why she had taken the initiative and made such passionate love to him – passion resonating across the years.
The stuff of fantasy, the fabric of his wildest dreams—
His breath stilled.
Oh, God, no.
The tapes.
She’d remembered the tapes. She’d thought he expected that of Francie. And she had done her best to give him what she thought he wanted.
He wanted, all these years after the fact, to laugh and swear at the same time. At her, for not understanding what she had unleashed by her masquerade. At himself, for not having the sense to walk away from temptation. At both of them for being such fools that day, playing with fire that had ignited a deadly fury and blighted a decade of their lives.
After listening to her guilt about San Francisco, he no longer doubted that Ash Marine must have, indeed, cast a terrible shadow. Laura Abbott was not the kind of woman to shrug her shoulders and said, “No harm, no foul, get over it, move on.” She had harmed. She had damaged – his shoulder, her conscience, her marriage.
Most of all, she had damaged herself.
Meg started humming to herself, sounding oddly flat.
Maybe that had been another reason why she’d stayed with St. Bride. She must never have forgotten that, when push came to shove, she had betrayed the man who had rescued her and Meg. He was dead sure that she had never confessed that afternoon to her husband, but had she tried to make it up to him by staying with him, tolerating his infidelities, acquiescing to his control?
Had staying with St. Bride been her penance?
He wished he remembered more about that day; the shock of the gunshot wound had knocked him out. He had no memory what he had said, what she had said, when the gun had appeared, where it had come from – everything that had happened in those fateful seconds before she crossed the dividing line. Before/after.
He slowed down around the flashing lights of a wreck.
They were going to have to bring it out into the open. That first night, he had thought it best to bury it forever, but he no longer had that option. Too much damage lay there, the wound ran too deep, for them to survive the silence and build together.
He wanted to build with her. He was a natural builder; he had dedicated his life to preservation and reclamation, rescuing the past from the dust pile of history. He’d pushed through the restoration of the Folly when his fellow architects had advised him to tear it down and start over; even his father had never understood his drive to rebuild. No one had understood that in the Folly he had found redemption for the monumental wreck of his life with Diana. He might have helped to destroy his marriage, but he had brought back from the brink of demolition a masterpiece.
And what had Laura done, faced with the horror of her actions that afternoon? She had rebuilt on the ruins. She had tried to make a go of her marriage. She had gone to college. She had submerged herself in motherhood and music. She had created Cat Courtney.
He’d have to move carefully, find the right time to open dark memories to the sunlight. She had to know first, beyond all shadows, that he loved her, that Ash Marine made no difference to him, that he had long ago forgiven her.
That the only forgiveness she lacked was her own.
“Hey,” Meg’s voice broke into his thoughts, “can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.” Richard checked his speed and glanced at her. She was hunched up in her seat, her knees drawn up to her chest.
“I don’t get,” Meg waved a hand around, “where you come in. You’re my uncle, right?”
“Yes.” Among other things.
“And Julie’s my cousin.”
“Right.”
“Huh.” Meg was silent for a few seconds. “Okay, I know my mother doesn’t have any brothers, so – how are you my uncle? Are you married to Lucy?”
Richard laughed. “No. Lucy is married to Tom Maitland. Lucy is your mother’s sister – they had different mothers, so technically they’re half-sisters, but they never made that distinction. I am Lucy’s second cousin.”
“Okay.” Meg drew a family tree in the air. “So – who are you married to? I know it isn’t Francesca.”
He heard that odd emphasis on the middle syllable – Fran-chess-ca. “I was married to your mother’s other sister.”
“You’re not married anymore?”
Richard said briefly, “We’re getting a divorce.”
“Oh, okay.” Meg processed this. “But Julie lives with you.”
“Right.”
She drew a line in the air, putting Julie in her proper dynastic place. “So Julie and I are cousins through our moms. Does Lucy have kids?”
“Not yet.” He maneuvered carefully past another wreck, replete with ambulances, three smashed-up cars, and flares all over the road. “She’s expecting a baby in January.”
“Cool.” Meg sounded enthusiastic. “Is it okay if I ask you all this stuff? Mom never talked about her family. Wow, I just realized. I have—” she counted on her fingers— “four aunts and three uncles and one cousin. Well, four aunts counting Francesca.”
He started to tell her that her math was off and remembered in time that St. Bride had a brother and sister. And that strange emphasis again – he heard the undertone of mockery. Whatever Meg had heard about Francie, it hadn’t been good.
He doubted that Laura had put her off Francie; apparently, she hadn’t talked about her family at all. That left only one other source – St. Bride. Why the hostility? Had they not gotten along?
Something tugged at his memory.
“I call my uncle Mark just Mark,” said Meg. “What do you want me to call you?”
He felt a sudden revulsion at the idea of his own flesh and blood referring to him by the honorific. “You can call me by my name,” he said crisply. “I’m sure Tom prefers not to be called Uncle Tom.”
“Oh, gosh!” Meg giggled. “I’ll bet he doesn’t! Does Julie call them Lucy and Tom?”
“Yes, she does.”
“Then I will too.” That settled that. “So – what’s your wife’s name? My mom’s sister that used to be your wife?”
“Diana. She’s the oldest. Your mother is the youngest.”
A sudden silence, then an audible intake of breath. “You’re married to Diana?” She sounded thrilled. “Die-die-die Diana? Wow! I read the stories on the Internet. What do you think happened? Do you think she really killed her dad? Did they have a fight and she bonked him over the head—”
“That’s enough!” His voice was sharp. “Be quiet.”
“Yes, but—”
“No. You do not talk back.” He wasn’t going to brook disobedience from this one. “You are never to say that again, do you understand?”
“But it’s on the Internet—”
He looked at her hard. “I don’t care. The Internet is hardly a citadel for truth. My wife did not kill her father, and you are to treat her with the utmost respect when you meet her.”
What an evil meeting that was going to be. He wasn’t concerned that Diana would see all, but she was going to hate this kid as much as she had hated Francie.
“Oh, sure.” Meg didn’t seem to have paid even the slightest bit of attention to him. “Wow! I read all about my grandfather online. Sounds like she – someone had to drive a stake through his heart.” Would that someone had, long ago; he and Diana might have had a chance. “Did you know he threw my grandmother into the ocean and they never found her body? They wanted to hang him. But he got off.” She lowered her voice. “Mom has this book on the trial she hides in her dressing table. She thinks I don’t know. I read it – it’s really good, it has al
l the gory details—”
Not all of them. With Dominic’s death, only he and Diana knew what had happened that day so long ago. She had told him once, as they lay in bed, and asked him to keep her secret forever.
Laura or not, that covenant he intended to keep.
“So what do you think happened?” Meg’s voice was hushed with excitement. “You don’t think she killed him? How do you know? So who did it?”
He was losing what little patience he had left. “Did you listen? Your aunt did not kill her father. I know for a fact—”
“Really? How do you know?”
Damn. She was quick. “The police believe he surprised a burglar. I’m going to say this once more. You are to watch your words and be respectful of your aunt. Do you understand me?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said offhandedly. “So why did the police arrest—”
“Yes, sir.”
A moment of silence, and then, “Yes, sir. I promise I won’t call her Die-die-die Diana again. I promise I won’t ask how she killed my grandfather again.”
Underneath the sullen tone, a barely contained merriment at slipping in the forbidden words.
He shut his eyes briefly, torn between annoyance and a desire to laugh. Annoyance won out. He’d spent sixteen years bringing up a child to be a well-mannered member of society. Right now, he wanted nothing so much as to turn Miss Margaret St. Bride over his knee and teach her a lesson.
If it would do any good.
Doubtful.
“Anyway,” said Meg, unaware how close to the edge she was skating, “I don’t care if she did. He wasn’t very nice to my mother, you know. My dad said he was a real assh – uh, not very nice.” She peered at him. “Did you like him? Was he nice to Di – Diana?”
He said shortly, “No to both.”
She must have finally heard his exasperation. She fell silent, and after a few minutes she put her earphones back in and started humming, again off-key. Richard took advantage of the silence to concentrate on the road.
He and Laura should have been asleep by now, warm body to warm body, relaxed and at peace with each other. If he woke at all, it should have been to listen to her soft breathing, reach out to pull her close against him. She should not be lying asleep in a back seat, sick with pain, one of her closest secrets spilled to him in the dark confessional of his car. And he should not be driving through one of the worst rainstorms he could remember, dodging questions from this enfant incorrigible.
All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) Page 31
