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

by Forrest, Lindsey

  Richard made an exasperated sound and gave a jerk of the head to Julie, who obediently led Meg back to the Lexus. Then he turned back to the trooper, repeating that she couldn’t have been the one to drink and drive and smash because she had been with him all night. Stating for a public record – if anyone cared – that they had been together.

  She stared at her ruined car.

  Cam would have been more than upset; he would have been livid. The one time she’d had a fender bender, she’d thought she’d never hear the end of it. Just one more nail in her coffin, as far as Mark was concerned: How could someone steal your car and you didn’t even know until the next day? Where were you?

  The trooper handed her license back. “I need your insurance information.”

  “Oh.” Laura tried to concentrate. “It’s – I’m on the corporate policy.” One more strand of the SBFA cocoon she had forgotten. She had no hope of keeping this from Mark’s ears. “There are papers in the car in the driver’s side pocket. Can I – can we take a look and see if they’re in there?”

  She felt a sick weight in her stomach as the trooper led them across the road to the scene. Hard to fathom that this was her car, this twisted mass of metal now fit only for a junkyard. No more a sleek silver beast, with its precision handling and smooth power, no more the chariot that had borne her across the country on her journey home. She reached out instinctively for Richard and felt the quiet pressure of his hand covering hers.

  How could this be happening? Just a few minutes before, they’d been at breakfast, talking, laughing, ignoring the sulks emanating from their daughters. He’d remarked, sotto voce, “Those two don’t like each other, do they?” and she had whispered back to give it time…. She’d even thought that, after she saw the doctor and Richard left for his office, she’d take the girls out to the post-holiday sales, let them bury their obvious mutual dislike in new clothes. Nothing like shopping to forge bonds between two females who couldn’t stand each other.

  They weren’t going anywhere. She had no car.

  “I know I’m being silly.” She sounded strangled, even to herself. “It’s only a car. Only a machine. It’s just—”

  It had been Cam’s gift to her. With its demise, only memories remained of her thirtieth birthday.

  Richard said quietly, “It’s a shock to be robbed. But thank God it’s only your car, Laura. It could have been much worse. If you’d been there—”

  His voice dropped off and left the thought unspoken. She might have been there alone at Edwards Lake, in a house without power. Worse, she and Meg might have been there in the dark, at the mercy of someone with keys to her house. If someone had taken advantage of the open gate, knowing that a lone woman lived there—

  But, of course, if she hadn’t tried to leave to go to him, the gate wouldn’t have been open. Her keys would have been safe in her purse.

  Her keys. Her London and New York keys were on that keychain. She tried frantically to remember what other keys she’d had.

  “Hey, look at this,” said one of the other patrolmen.

  Laura stopped, and her heart dropped. Oh, no, the driver hadn’t walked away, after all, they’d found a body…. Richard let her hand go and walked to the driver’s side to take a look. She couldn’t hear what the patrolman was saying, for the buzzing of her ears.

  She waited in agony for what seemed like centuries, while Richard crouched down with the troopers, all of them interested in something behind the driver’s seat. She wasn’t at all prepared when he straightened up and called, “Laura, come here. You need to see this.”

  It was a body. In the sudden dread that swept her, she couldn’t bear to look. Edwards Lake had not been totally empty after she and Richard had left for the night. “Is it—” She barely recognized her voice, close to panic. “Oh, please – it’s not Max, is it?”

  She’d never forgive herself if Max had been hurt. Her faithful little companion, and she’d left him there alone—

  “Max? Who’s Max?” asked the trooper, who had looked askance at her earlier.

  Richard said to the man, “Her cat,” and then to her, “No, it’s not. Don’t worry. I’m not sure what we’re looking at here.”

  Then it must not be a body, feline, human, or other. Terrible to admit, even to herself, that she’d rather a dead car thief than an injured Max. She pulled herself together and walked around the trunk of the car, where the damage appeared less severe than the passenger side – there might be some hope of opening the trunk and retrieving some of her CDs. Richard met her on the driver’s side, the other men behind him.

  “Do you recognize this?” He held out an ivory object. “It looks like a piano key to me.”

  He dropped it in her hand. Laura stared down at it in disbelief.

  “There are others scattered underneath the car,” said one of the troopers. “Some black keys too. Got any ideas?”

  “I don’t know,” Laura said slowly, and tried to clear her mind of confusion. Every minute became more bizarre than the last. “I’m a musician, but—” She turned the key over in her hand and ran a finger along it, and immediately recognized the feel. “It’s a key from my Kurzweil.”

  The closest trooper said, “Say that again? A what?”

  “A Kurzweil. It’s an electronic keyboard.” And then the reality of what must have happened swept over her. She felt herself go cold. “I didn’t leave this in the car. It was in the drawing room. Richard – the house – Max—”

  “Oh, Christ,” Richard said, and started for his car.

  ~•~

  Not only the Jaguar, as it turned out. Not only the Kurzweil. Almost every electronic device she had – camera, recorder, laptop, printer, CD player, even the fancy new headphones she’d bought herself as a present the day she had left the London show – had disappeared.

  In the dark, without power, her burglar had been thorough and focused. He’d gone through every room, ignoring the antiques and the china – thank heavens for some small mercies; at least, she didn’t have to explain that to the property management company. He’d gone through her papers, now littered all over the drawing room floor. He’d taken all her CDs out of their cases and thrown them on top of the papers. He had even – she couldn’t believe it – taken her clothes out of the washing machine and left them on the trestle table.

  Worst of all, he’d gone through her bedroom. Her lingerie was dumped out on the floor, the rest of her clothes tossed out of the armoire. Her makeup lay in disarray on the dressing table.

  She’d been robbed. Ransacked. Violated.

  Laura stood in her bedroom, unable to think beyond the sight before her eyes.

  “Unbelievable,” Richard said behind her, and immediately turned around to signal the police.

  She was vaguely aware of his order to Julie and Meg – “Go find the cat” – and his words to the two troopers who had accompanied them to the house. She looked at the destruction of her property – no, not only that, of her refuge, her sanctuary – and could not think beyond the one thought: Someone touched my things.

  The peach silk slip that she’d worn for Richard – that he had untied oh so slowly – lay on the foot of the bed, where she knew she hadn’t left it. Her black linen skirt that she’d worn to meet Jay Spencer lay in the bathroom doorway. Her linens, towels and sheets alike, were strewn all over the bed. The paperbacks on her nightstand had spilled to the floor.

  She turned around, unable to bear the carnage any longer, and met the tall wall of Richard’s chest. She couldn’t help the sudden, small sound that escaped her then, the mewing of a wounded kitten, and he instantly put his arm around her. The feel of him against her gave her a steadying comfort amid the chaos.

  “It’s all right, baby,” he said quietly, and held her against him, without regard for the police or their daughters. At the moment, they were past discretion. “I’m here, I’m not going to leave you. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  “I don’t understand.” She cou
ldn’t manage anything but a whisper. “Who – it’s like he – he was after me – he touched my clothes – if we hadn’t stayed with you—”

  “It’s all right,” he said again, and smoothed her hair. “It’s just stuff, Laurie, remember that. It’s just stuff. You and Meg are safe. That’s all that matters.”

  But it wasn’t just stuff. It was her clothes, her books, her music. She was going to burn every single thing; she’d never be able to touch any of it again.

  She said into his shirt, “What about Max?”

  “The girls are looking. They’ll find him.”

  She could replace everything else; she couldn’t replace Max, with his soft metal-grey fur, his dopey laziness, his steadfast affection. He didn’t like strangers; surely he’d have hidden out of sight until the coast was clear, and her thief had thoughtfully closed the front door. She drew in a shaky breath. “Should – do I need to talk to the police?”

  “It will help,” he said. “Are you up to it?”

  She had to pull herself together. She was the victim of a crime, but it wasn’t the end of the world, after all, just some things that she could easily replace. She’d been through worse. Even so, she was going to move herself and Meg to a hotel as soon as she could pack up what remained. No way was she spending another night in this house.

  She gave him a tentative smile. “I’m okay.”

  He escorted her downstairs, his hand warm against her back, to the two troopers in the hallway. She heard the girls going from room to room, Julie calling, “Max, Max,” and Meg, “Maxie, please come out, please.” That was a stroke of genius on Richard’s part, giving them something constructive to do together to keep them out of the way. A strong, independent woman probably shouldn’t feel so relieved to have a man standing behind her, supporting her, but she didn’t care. She was just glad he was there.

  The troopers she’d met earlier had summoned two detectives. She derived a certain comfort from their matter-of-fact attitude; this might be a calamity to her, the ravaging of her temporary home, but it was all in a day’s work to them. She should probably be grateful she rated detectives. No doubt they saw worse every day – and, after all, no one was lying dead on the floor. It was just stuff.

  “Officers.” Laura took a deep breath. “What do you need me to tell you?”

  They started with needed information – name, insurance, descriptions. SBFA handled her property insurance, and – she glanced at her watch – no one would be at work in Plano yet. “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

  They needed all their fingerprints for elimination, and the detectives led her again through the problem of the missing keys. “It must have happened when the wind knocked me off my feet.” They asked Richard again to recount their actions the night before, and he gave them a carefully edited story of Meg’s call and their drive to the airport, with no hint that they had left Edwards Lake before Meg’s call. “Her power had gone out, so I suggested that she and Meg stay with us.”

  If the detectives thought his offer went above and beyond the call of neighborly duty, they said nothing.

  The detective tried her power and found it still out. To be expected, the man said, the storm had caused massive blackouts, and she was one of thousands still without electricity. “May not get it back until Monday, being a holiday weekend.”

  “All right.” It didn’t matter. She was never staying here again.

  They walked her through the house, room by room. The hardest hit was the drawing room she had set up as her studio. “A laptop,” Laura said. “I’m not sure of the exact model. It’s a year or so old. SBFA will have the information. A laser printer.” She walked around the room. “I had a CD player here, and a digital recorder. I write music – I have to be able to record and play back.”

  Once he realized that she was indeed all right, back in control of herself, Richard stepped away. She heard him talking on his phone, rescheduling the doctor’s appointment. Well, she wasn’t going to protest any longer about seeing a doctor. She needed that prescription. She’d be lucky to lift her head once this headache hit her.

  With the detective’s permission, she went through the media that had been scattered on the floor, and for the first time since she had seen her totaled car, she began to feel a sense of relief. Thank heavens Cam had harped so much about backing up – she routinely backed up her work to the St. Bride Data servers, and even the few pieces she had worked on since Jay Spencer had told her to stop doing so were recorded on a CD. She’d be able to recover all her data.

  “The laptop had a BIOS password. It’s going to be unusable to anyone who tries to boot up.” But, oh, what a pain to have to set up all her passwords and network access again. She felt a healthy spurt of anger. Not only had someone robbed her of things, they’d robbed her of time she didn’t have to spare in the next few weeks.

  In the kitchen, nothing appeared to be missing, although it too had been ransacked. The sight of Max’s food and water bowls brought to mind that Julie and Meg, crawling around the terrace outside, calling his name, still hadn’t found her pet. “Nothing’s gone here,” Laura said, and felt uneasy when the detective looked at her damp clothes dumped on the trestle table.

  “Were these here last night when you left?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  He said, “So your intruder took these out of the washing machine.” He walked around the table. “Strange.”

  Laura swallowed. “You need to see the upstairs.”

  The other bedrooms seemed virtually untouched. Only in hers had the intruder gone to town, as the older of the two detectives was quick to point out. “Ms. St. Bride, I’m sure you realize how unusual this is. This seems to be focused on your belongings.”

  He had put her uneasy feeling of the wrongness of the robbery into words. “I can’t imagine why,” Laura said. “I don’t know that many people around here.”

  “Surely she was a target of opportunity,” Richard said, but she heard the edge in his voice.

  The man said, “No casual thief would have left the television, but it didn’t belong to you. This person came in looking for something specific, and I suspect he found it.”

  The other detective looked up from his notes. “The Jaguar may have been an afterthought, to transport the electronics in a dry environment. If your thief parked down the road, he probably took the car to get back to his, hydroplaned, and crashed into the tree instead. The interesting theft is the keyboard, by the way. Except for the auto, that’s the most valuable thing missing. Who around here knows you are a musician?”

  “Just a few people,” Laura started to say, and Richard cut across her words.

  “Over a hundred people know,” he said. “She sang at a party last night where she was introduced by both her stage name and her real name.” Laura stared at him, feeling shock drain her face, and he gave her a level look. “Your sister did you a very nasty turn,” he said. “She made you a sitting duck.”

  Diana certainly had. And she herself hadn’t been particularly smart, either. She’d told more than one person she was leasing a house nearby. Not naming it, she was sure she hadn’t done that, but still, how hard would it have been for someone to figure out where the house was? How many luxury rental houses were in the general area? All anyone had had to do was look for the Jaguar parked in front of the house.

  This had to be disturbing for Richard. Everyone at the party had been either a friend or a client. She thought, a stray thought, that Tom’s fears were already coming true. She was causing problems for him, just by being who she was.

  The detective said, “This makes a difference. We’ll need a list of the people who attended the party. Now, Ms. St. Bride, is anything missing up here? Jewelry?”

  Her jewelry. She had forgotten about that. “I have my jewelry hidden. I’m sure no one—”

  “We need you to check, please.”

  Laura hesitated. No one would have found the jewelry, she was certain, but these
men – Richard and the two detectives, all looking at her expectantly – were going to laugh their heads off. She bit her lip.

  “Laura?” Richard prompted.

  She murmured, “It’s downstairs,” and turned on her heel.

  They followed her down the staircase, none of them having a clue why she was leading them to a half-open closet door near the powder room. The closet, winding its way under the staircase, was a walk-in for anyone who didn’t mind hunching over. It had been the perfect place for Max’s box – convenient for him and out of the way for everyone else.

  It had also been the perfect hiding place.

  She heard a distinct “You’re kidding” from someone – not Richard – as she knelt down and thrust her hand into an open bag of kitty litter. She’d gotten the idea from one of the security lectures Cam had made her attend a few years before. No one in his right mind would ever look in or around a cat box for valuables. At least, that was the theory, and she prayed it had worked now.

  She shoved her hand nearly to the bottom of the ten-pound bag, touched plastic, and breathed in relief. It took a little maneuvering to snake the plastic-wrapped pouch up through the litter granules, but in a few seconds it came free.

  She was turning around to hand it to Richard when she heard a tiny noise from the dark reaches of the closet.

  “Max!” She tossed the pouch behind her – who cared about jewelry? – and crawled behind the domed cat box around the bend in the closet. Of course, of course, it had been dark, the storm had been raging overhead, and a stranger had been prowling in the house. Her smart little guy had run for cover where he felt safe and no one could find him. Through the dark, two unblinking green eyes glowed at her.

  She put out her hand to feel for him and touched his fur.

  “Max! Oh, baby, I’m so glad you’re safe.” She scooped him up and snuggled him in against her breast. “My poor, poor baby. Did you get scared?”

  Max gave a pitiful little sound.

  “Laura?” Richard sounded carefully patient. “What are you doing?”