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

by Forrest, Lindsey

  Now, that he believed. She was fully capable of hiring someone who would blow this entire story out of the water and into the public eye. She didn’t care if she destroyed her niece’s security and exposed the family dirty laundry to the world, just as long as she got to humiliate her sister-in-law.

  And, damn it, this was his story. Irresistibly, there shimmered now a more tantalizing puzzle than the identity of a singer whose star would eventually wane. He had assumed that Laura Abbott had run away from home to be with her boyfriend. But, if she and St. Bride had met in California, she had not run to someone. She had run to leave someone behind.

  She had been seventeen, in trouble, probably desperate. Even with two older siblings – and Lucy Maitland came across as someone who had wanted desperately to find her missing sisters – she had not found help at home.

  This was no longer a news story. He’d never be able to present this on the news; not only was it inappropriate for business news, it was impossibly convoluted, too complex to present in a few minutes on the air. But perhaps a feature story for one of the magazines – Vanity Fair or another of that ilk.

  No. He wasn’t going to do that either. He’d meant what he had said – he wasn’t going to help Emma ruin Meg St. Bride’s life.

  But he could let her think he might. She was willing to foot the bill far beyond what the station would pay for, and this way he could control her involvement. He could keep her from hurting a widow and a fatherless child who didn’t need to deal with her misplaced desire for vengeance. His one advantage, Brian Schneider saw, was that Emma desperately wanted his good opinion. She had this one spot of vulnerability, and he could use it to sit on her.

  And he wanted to know. This went beyond the making of a singer, or an elaborate cover-up of a wife’s past and alter ego by a control freak husband. Something had gone badly wrong with Dominic Abbott’s daughters, that two of them had run away from home forever and another had been accused of her father’s murder. Some pathology lay buried deep in that family. Maybe that death off the Irish coast thirty years before had cast a haunting shadow over the Abbotts. Maybe Dominic Abbott’s death had been a long-overdue execution.

  And that story he could pursue with a clear conscience.

  “All right,” he said, “but I don’t work for you, Emma. You pay expenses only. Got that?”

  “Fine,” said Emma, and now she relaxed. “I’ll charter a jet for tomorrow. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go slip into something more comfortable.”

  ~•~

  To: Laura St. Bride

  From: Mark St. Bride

  Subject: Read this

  (Read receipt requested)

  Dear Laura:

  This is beyond childish. I understand you are angry with me for my presumption about our marriage. I understand you don’t want people to think you are stupid. You’re not – but, I must tell you, your behavior this week is very disappointing.

  I must talk to you. Since you are refusing to answer your phone – and, by the way, I did not appreciate you hanging up on me last night – I am flying to Williamsburg to meet with you. I did not intend to intrude upon your vacation time, but you have left me no choice.

  About Richard Ashmore – I am going to ask that you try not to get too involved there. I understand you are lonely and you have needs, so I assume this is some sort of summer fling, or perhaps it is a rebellion against the life you led with Cam. I am prepared to overlook this and forgive you because I know you have had a rough year. We can discuss it further when I get there tomorrow.

  Love, Mark

  Chapter 16: From the Sky to the Sea

  AT MID-EVENING, LAURA FOUND TIME and space enough to fall apart.

  The sun had set when she walked softly by Julie’s closed door, past the downstairs solarium where Meg was working out on her barre, and through the French doors to the Folly’s back terrace. The heat of the day had started to fade, but the terrazzo stones remained warm under her bare feet. She pulled her bathrobe around her to cover her bathing suit and walked down to the pool area.

  She sat down on the edge of the pool, just a few feet from where the Queen Bees had reigned only the day before, and dangled her legs in the water to test its temperature.

  Warm enough against the twilight air, cool enough against the remnants of a hot July day. Laura slipped the bathrobe off and lowered herself in, and let the cocooning waters envelope her for a few seconds. They bathed and soothed and warmed. She sank down to cover her shoulders, letting the ends of her hair fall back into the water, and felt, for those brief moments, like a child back in the womb, without trouble, without care, knowing nothing more than vague sensations of light and noise.

  No lights from Williamsburg. Nothing but a few stars and the faint lights from the Folly.

  Only the faintest sound of a car along the country road outside the gates, almost half a mile away. Only the breeze swaying the olive trees that surrounded the back of the Folly, a tall dark wall shutting out the world so she saw only a dusting of stars in the sky and the faint embers of day, heard only the muted sounds of the pool pump, the heartbeat of her shadowy refuge.

  She felt safe. She felt secure. And she went to pieces.

  Yesterday, she’d been Laura St. Bride, that anonymous woman passing through life undetected. Now, so many people from the party knew who she was that the police probably wouldn’t bother to interview them all to find her thief. It was, she knew with a rock-bottom certainty, only a matter of time before someone said something to the wrong person, and her secret would be gone forever. She would be exposed, vulnerable, her life no longer her own. No more going to the grocery store, where every clerk would analyze her basket to see if the tabloids might pay to know that she took aspirin in copious amounts. No more buying paperbacks at the book store, unless she wanted the world to know that she had a secret weakness for erotic romance novels with bare-chested hunks on the cover. No more running outside in her long nightshirt to get the paper in the early morning.

  Definitely, no more sharing a bed with a man still married on paper to her sister.

  That was all gone, or it would be soon. It was a matter of time.

  She knew what happened to celebrities. Paparazzi happened; tabloids happened. Other than the one infamous picture of her at Lincoln Center, there’d been little gossip about her because no one had known where to get it. But let her secret out, and then the deluge. If she gained two pounds, she’d be pregnant; if she lost two pounds, she’d be anorexic, her friends fearing for her life. If she had a cold, she’d be snorting cocaine; if she failed once to flash a Cat Courtney smile, she’d be teetering on the verge of a breakdown. If she dressed up, she’d have an out-of-control spending problem. If she dressed down, she’d have a drinking problem.

  And she would be bedding down with every man who crossed her path or even stood near her in the same zip code.

  Lies. Pure fantasy. And not a thing she could do about it.

  She felt helpless.

  Yesterday, she’d been a single woman living alone for the first time in her life, with no one to answer to – not a wife, not a mother, not a sister. She didn’t mind Meg’s presence, truly she didn’t – but, oh, she had treasured being alone. She was almost thirty-two, and she had never been truly independent. At Edwards Lake, her life had been hers to order as she wanted. She could go to bed and get up when she wanted, work all night or eat ice cream for breakfast if it struck her fancy. She could make love with Richard in the drawing room, and they could eat omelets in bed afterwards, with no one the wiser.

  That was gone, too.

  She’d lost the temporary home that had been hers alone; she had lost the space that she had needed to find herself again. Yesterday, she had refused to be relegated to his nights; now the nights were lost to her too. In one day, she’d gone from welcoming her lover into her home to living in his, and with none of the usual benefits of living in sin. No one was going to be making love to anyone else this Sunday, f
or sure. He had moved out that afternoon, taking his clothes and laptop, two model airplanes, and five books.

  She’d lost the security of owning her own things, the freedom of owning her own time. She’d lost the privacy of her love affair. And she’d lost her car.

  Laura crossed her arms on the side of the pool, put her head down, and burst into tears.

  She was alone. She didn’t need to put on her brave front anymore – Laura St. Bride, who would never let a small thing like a thief breaking into her house or her sister outing her to the world get her down. No one could see her out here. Richard had gone to his office to work until the wee hours of the morning; the girls were engaged in their own activities in different parts of the house. Max had taken up residence on Richard’s enormous bed. The clothes that she hadn’t bundled off to the dry cleaner were going through their second cycle in the laundry room. She could carry on to her heart’s content.

  She was entitled to her breakdown. She intended to enjoy every minute—

  Stupid, she told herself fiercely, this is stupid, stupid, stupid! What on earth are you crying about! It’s not the end of the world!

  It wasn’t as if she couldn’t afford to replace everything. She was one of the fortunate; she didn’t have to wait for some overworked, underpaid insurance adjuster to write her a check so that she could make herself whole again. The frightening amounts she’d spent that afternoon proved that, and she had Cam’s car – a Bentley, for heaven’s sake – as a fallback. It wasn’t the stuff.

  But it was – and, oh Lord, only now did she admit it to herself – it had been the twisted, burned silver of the Jaguar. She hadn’t even realized, until now, how those frightening images kept merging in her mind with memories of other twisted, burned metal. It was the sheer terrifying vulnerability. All the security that money could buy hadn’t stopped someone last night from violating her space and wouldn’t have stopped someone from violating her or Meg.

  Money had already proved it was good for little. It hadn’t saved Cam, standing on top of the world.

  She’d thought, all these years, that people overrated the power of money. It had always seemed unreal to her. For the first half of their marriage, they hadn’t been rich. They’d been comfortable, and even before the IPO, Cam had provided well for her and Meg. She didn’t need to work, he’d said from the start, he wanted her to stay home with Meg and be a full-time wife and mother. Supporting the family was his responsibility, and he’d make sure the bills were covered.

  Later, when she had asked to go to college, he had not hesitated even though he was plowing most of his profits back into St. Bride Data, still a private company scrambling to make its name in the brave new world of the information superhighway. Even with Cam’s generosity – and he had never been stingy with either her or Meg – she hadn’t forgotten that, growing up, she’d worn hand-me-downs, and she’d attended private school only because Philip Ashmore had “found” scholarship money for the Abbott girls. She hadn’t needed a scholarship to go to college, but she’d been cautious. She’d shopped the sales; she’d bought used books; she’d made do with a studio piano.

  And then life had changed. The IPO had catapulted them into the financial stratosphere. They’d moved to the most upscale neighborhood in an upscale bedroom community. Cam had bought her the world’s largest concert piano (as he had joked) and himself a Bentley. Later had come the Gulfstream and other money-no-object toys. But even so, they hadn’t been unduly extravagant. They’d restricted Meg to an allowance. They’d been selective in their gifts to each other, until the Jaguar; their Christmases and vacations had been no more lavish than those of their neighbors.

  But, she acknowledged now, they had relied on money, unseen and unheralded, to insulate them. The security consultants, the satellite phones, the GPS locators, the shell corporations, the acreage around the St. Bride house and the perimeter surveillance cameras, the rigidly enforced confidentiality agreements, the first-class travel and later the private jet – all that had conveyed the reassurance that money could hold the world at arm’s length.

  Maybe safety was an illusion in this September 12 world. She had thought that Cat Courtney would give her privacy and anonymity, and instead it had brought down a destructive and frightening crime and given her sister a way to expose her to the world. Cam had thought that money bought safety, but in the end, breakfast at an exclusive restaurant and monthly maintenance checks to her father had doomed him. Richard had thought that his land provided the necessary fortress to keep his life private, but land and a security system hadn’t kept his estranged wife from breaking into his peace.

  Maybe it was time to stop looking for safety.

  But – she felt violated down to her soul. And so she allowed herself the luxury of mourning a car that she hadn’t wanted in the first place.

  ~•~

  After a while, Laura dipped under the water to wash the tears from her face. She came to the surface, her face cool again, and slid onto her back. She floated aimlessly, feeling the water lap at her sides, staring up in the night sky. Time to stop carrying on. Time to look forward, make some plans.

  She was strong. She could do this.

  Time to figure out how to handle their new living arrangements. She didn’t discount the ruffling of teenage feathers. Julie was clearly torn between a desire to please her father and a desire to get rid of the St. Brides. What was the perfect daughter to do when her father had thrown wide the door to the invaders? Even worse, when her father, who hadn’t let his daughter meet any other woman in his life, had stopped Julie from putting Laura’s bags in one of the spare bedrooms? “Laura will be using the master suite,” he had said. “I’m moving out.”

  Julie’s face had been a study in horror.

  Meg had decided to be at her Meg-worst – cynical, smart-aleck, and determined to impress upon Richard the impossibility of living up to the legend of Cameron St. Bride. By mid-afternoon, even Laura had gotten tired of Dad said to do this and Dad always said not to do that. Richard had taken it in stride, but even so, he had begun to get testy by the time Meg started waxing lyrically about her father’s Marine Corps service – having first ascertained that Richard had never served in the military.

  “And Dad said it’s really important to serve your country, to fight and defend her—”

  Cam had spent his Marine years defending the shores of San Diego and writing computer games to sell on BBS boards. Laura had tried to distract her daughter by sending her to pick up an extra USB cable, but Meg was not to be deterred. She had launched into a detailed history of Cam’s military career, ending in an off-key rendition of “From the Halls of Montezuma.”

  Julie – probably still stinging from the master suite comment – had finally said, “Gosh, Meg, I’m surprised you sing so flat. All the other Abbotts sing on pitch.”

  “Oh,” said Meg, and beamed at both Ashmores, “I don’t take after my mom’s family. I’m tone-deaf. I have a terrible voice. I figure I get it from my father’s side.”

  Peggy had always said that Philip couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, not that Richard needed to connect that with Meg.

  What he was clearly connecting with Meg was the idea of corporal punishment. By the time they’d replaced the Kurzweil and the laptop, Laura could read his thoughts as easily as if he had put them in neon lights: that Meg could do with a good spanking, and he’d be first in line to give it to her.

  “I’m sorry,” she had whispered to him, as he hauled the box with her new laptop out to the Lexus. “I’ll talk to her. I don’t know what’s gotten into her.”

  He had merely given her a look. “I know what she’s doing,” he had said, and his tone had signaled that he did not wish to discuss it.

  And then Julie had started to sulk, complaining that she needed to go home and practice a piece for music camp. The sulking had lasted until her father pulled her aside for a few terse words, and for a few moments, peace had reigned. Then at the music store, while Lau
ra looked at electronic keyboards, she and Meg had started to snipe at each other, the sort of sniping that only teenage girls did well.

  “It’s so sad you didn’t take after Laura, Meg. She’s so pretty and talented. I mean, with the singing.”

  “I’ll bet you’re really artistic, Julie, what with an architect dad and all. Oh, really? Too bad.”

  “Wow, I can’t believe the airline let you travel by yourself, Meg, don’t kids your age have to wear that card around their necks?”

  “How do you stay so skinny, Julie? Do you have to diet all the time? Me, I have to drink these special protein drinks so I don’t lose more weight.”

  They bestowed cold-blooded smiles on each other. “Like cobras,” Richard muttered beside Laura, and tried to ignore them by reading the specs for a high-end keyboard.

  “It’s a shame you have to go back to summer school and do your math, Meg. I’ll send you lots of emails from camp to cheer you up.”

  “You can text me. Huh? You don’t have a cell? How does your boyfriend call you? You don’t have a boyfriend?”

  “Laura says,” said Julie loftily, “you shouldn’t get too involved when you’re young.”

  Richard gave Laura a look. Oh, now Julie chose to listen to her.

  “That’s true,” Meg agreed. “My dad always said it wasn’t a good idea to get married too early.” Thoughtless of Cam, considering his wife had been eighteen on their wedding day. “So, you’re sixteen, right? And your dad is thirty-seven – gosh, he got married before he even got out of college! You’re right. You shouldn’t get involved too young. You can end up having kids too early.”

  “Like your mom,” Julie shot back.

  Excuse me, Julie, I am standing right here.

  “Like your dad!”

  At that, Richard had taken them aside. They listened with stone faces. Laura would have loved to flatten them both, but she had begun to feel the flickering of pain behind her eyes. She wanted nothing more than to get the shopping over with so that she could go back to Ashmore Park and take a nap. Failing that, fix herself a stiff drink. Or take one of the tranquilizers the doctor had prescribed for her, and have that drink.