Seattle. Laura had explained Boston; she had filmed a video at Cape Cod. The St. Brides had once stopped in Miami on their way to the Virgin Islands, and of course she had lived just north of Dallas. Seattle, though – Laura had shrugged and said that she didn’t know, she had never been there. But of course she hadn’t. Cameron St. Bride would have ensured that his wife never toured in the city where her supposedly dead sister was living.
She sat impatiently through brunch, ignoring Tom’s quizzical looks and deflecting questions about her sisters. She couldn’t wait to get home and dive into the files she had painstakingly assembled on Cat Courtney, looking for that one elusive news blurb – a gossip item in a local newspaper – because, she felt certain, it had contained what she needed.
A name.
~•~
At the same time, two families headed for the hills: one by interstate to a legendary resort in the Alleghenies, the other by air to a small music college nestled in the Great Smokies. Each adult concentrated on the way ahead, deep in thought; each daughter sat quietly beside her parent, sick with apprehension, gearing up to ask the question.
The answer confirmed each girl’s worst fear.
~•~
Julie asked first. “Are you in love with her?”
“I care about her.” Richard had known this was coming; Julie had seen too much – and, thanks to St. Bride, heard too much – not to know what was going on. “She has always been very special to me.”
Silence. He glanced over at her, with a feeling of déjà vu. They looked so much alike, Julie and Laura, and now Julie sat as her aunt had only a few nights before, twisting her hands in unconscious imitation. He saw her gear up for another question.
The big one, he thought. The one that Mark St. Bride, damn him, had put on the table.
He had probably lucked out longer than he’d had a right to expect. How many others had found their public lives as fathers and their private lives as men in uncomfortable collision? A married father had it easy; he never had to justify to his teenage daughter, three days after he had caught her making out with a boy, why he was sharing a bed with a woman.
He braced himself.
But she didn’t care that his behavior telegraphed Do as I say, not as I do. “Are you going to marry her?”
Back up twenty-four hours, and he would have told her crisply that he would not discuss it with her, and she would have obediently swallowed her curiosity. But between then and now stood the specter of Mark St. Bride, with his crude comments and vicious accusations. Julie, witness to that outburst, only two years from adulthood, had a right to an answer.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I’m not trying to fob you off – I don’t know. She and I have never discussed it.”
“But you might.” Julie’s voice was tense.
He paused, and said finally, “I won’t rule it out.”
That visibly shocked her. She must have expected a quick denial, an assurance that she need not worry about the St. Brides. The assurance that, only days before, he could have given her easily.
“If you asked, she would marry you.”
A silent plea. Please don’t ask. “I haven’t, and don’t be so sure.”
More hand-wringing, and another round of silence. He thought he knew the source of her worry. Julie’s world had changed; for the first time, his private life had impacted their lives as father and daughter. He decided to be direct. “You don’t want this, do you?”
After a while, she said, “I thought we were doing pretty well. I mean – everything was going fine, Dad. You seemed like you were all into your work, and I’ve been working in harp – I’m thinking I want to concentrate on that next year—”
“Do you resent your aunt’s presence in my life, Julie?”
Squared shoulders. She had courage, his Julie. “If I do?”
“Then you need to get over it.” He gave her a level look. “I thought you liked Laura. You said you had fun when she took you shopping. What happened? Other than her getting after you?”
Julie took an audible breath. “I do like her.”
“But you think Laura changes everything.”
“She does, Dad.” Julie’s voice echoed back the flat toughness that he had adopted with her earlier in the day. “Nothing is the same. Not since she came back.”
“We’ll survive.” He banked around a low-lying cloud. “We’ve been on our own for a long time, Julie. We need some shaking up. People move on. You’re moving into senior high. Next summer, we’ll start looking at colleges. I need to move on too.”
“Is that why you’re divorcing my mother?” An edge to her voice.
How to express the loneliness that had eaten at his soul, sending him out into the night to run until he was too exhausted to think? He said bluntly, “Not because of Laura. Don’t blame your aunt. Our marriage has been over since you were little.”
“I know.” Julie hesitated. And then, “But what about Meg?”
“What about her?”
“Well – suppose you and Laura get together? Would she live with us? Would you adopt her?”
They were finally getting down to brass tacks. “We get one, we get the other. They’re a package deal, just like us. But, no, I am sure I would not adopt her. She’s very attached to her father’s memory.” He paused. “You don’t like Meg, do you?”
She didn’t want to answer. She said finally, torn between what she wanted to say and what she thought he wanted to hear, “She’s rather immature, don’t you think? She’s so—”
He suppressed a surge of amusement. She really had taken his lecture to heart. “Loud? Opinionated? Full of herself?”
Julie glanced at him in surprise, and he flashed a grin at her. Assured that they were finally on the same page, she relaxed. “Well – she has attitude, doesn’t she?”
The sun had climbed high in the sky, and the glare coming in through the windows had become uncomfortable. He reached for the sunglasses he kept in the overhead slot and switched them with his everyday glasses. “That she does. But don’t let that fool you. That girl is sharp. Nothing gets by her.”
As nothing had gotten by Mark St. Bride. He had carefully concealed his shock – and fury – at the financial and personal information St. Bride had managed to unearth. He’d give a great deal to know how the man had obtained the balance of the Great Lakes shipping trust. He’d give even more to know how St. Bride had found out about his weekend with Laura.
But he owed Meg, attitude or not. She had tipped him off to St. Bride’s interest in Laura, so that he had not walked blindly into that confrontation. It was not her fault that, at her age, she hadn’t fathomed the depth of Mark St. Bride’s rage against his dead brother.
He pulled his attention back to the matter at hand.
“I know you don’t like your cousin,” he said. “You two are very different, and under other circumstances you might be nothing but acquaintances. But consider this, Julie. No matter how things stand between your mother and me, we are both still here. Meg doesn’t have that. She’s got Laura, but she was close to her father, and he’s gone – in a very public way, too.”
Julie nodded.
“Think how it would have been—” He stopped. “Consider having to share your grief for Mom and Dad with the entire world. Think about having the accident captured on film, played over and over again, and hearing people talk about it on the news and in the papers and on TV – and no matter where you go, you can’t escape. Think about that tower collapsing again and again and again, and while to most people it’s a falling tower, to you it’s your father dying. That’s what she has to deal with, Julie.”
Julie was silent.
“The first anniversary for her won’t be like it was for us. Do you know what Laura and Meg have to do on September 11 – which, by the way, is Meg’s birthday? They’re going to Ground Zero. We didn’t have cameras on us when we laid flowers at their graves. Meg’s first anniversary will be televised worldwide.�
�
Julie said in a low voice, “I never thought about that.”
“Think,” said her father. “Put yourself in her shoes. A lot of that bravado is her way of holding herself together. Her father now exists as a memory and a sliver of bone. That’s all she has left. I’m sitting here right beside you.” He heard Julie’s intake of breath, and knew finally that he had reached her. “Think about that, and see if you can’t cut her some slack.”
She thought about it across two states and into the mountains. She remained quiet as they landed, rented a car to drive to the small college campus, straightened out her registration, and moved her gear into the tiny dorm room she would share with three other girls for the week. She said very little during the parent-camper kickoff dinner, and as she walked with him to the parking lot to say goodbye, he thought that he might have pressed her too hard.
But, at the end, after his instructions to email or call every day, and her reminder to feed Max as soon as he got home, she caught him off guard with a fierce hug.
“I understand, Dad,” she said, “and I’ll try, really I will. I want you to be happy. If you call Laura tonight, tell her I hope everything goes all right. I’ll see you next weekend.”
~•~
Meg’s question was equally blunt: “We’re gonna move up here, aren’t we?”
“Yes.” If she owed Mark anything, Laura thought, she owed him gratitude for the perfect excuse to move. “I’m going to make an offer on the house where I was staying.”
“Huh.” Going by the scowl, that didn’t sit well with Miss Margaret. “I thought you didn’t like that place now.”
“I liked it fine before the robbery.” She shouldn’t have been so adamant about never spending another night at Edwards Lake. “I’ll like it again once I get a good security system installed.”
Meg mumbled something unintelligible.
“Not right away, though.” She might as well get this out of the way. “We’re going back to London in a couple of weeks, and you can go back to your school in Kensington. You liked it, didn’t you? You’ll get to see all the friends you made last year.”
More mumbling.
“Roger’s cousin needs a job. I’m thinking of hiring her to stay with you when I’m out of town.”
Horror. “You’re getting me a babysitter?”
“And I’ll get a tutor for you that week in Australia, so you can go with me. You’ve never been to Sydney – you’ll like it, it’s very different.”
Meg’s shoulders hunched. Her lip started to stick out.
“Then we’ll spend next spring in London and come back when your term is over. I’m going to do some renovations on Edwards Lake. The stables out back aren’t used anymore – I can have them converted into a studio for us. A workout room for you, a recording room for me. By the time we move back in June, it will all be finished.”
Her daughter’s silence, heavy and hostile, was having the desired effect. She heard herself babbling into the void.
“You can decorate your room any way you like. We’ll get your furniture shipped up here from Plano, but if you want new stuff, that’s fine. I’m making an offer on the contents of the house too, but the owners may want their furniture back, so we can get our stuff shipped from London or maybe we’ll feel like going out and getting everything all new.”
Meg just gave her the look.
“And I’ll talk to Richard about getting you into my old school. He’s on the board of governors. He’s bound to have some pull.”
She saw Meg’s eyes close and her jaw set. I’ve heard enough.
“And there’s a ballet theater in Williamsburg. I looked it up on the Internet. We’ll see about getting you in as soon as—”
“I get it! I get it, I get it, I get it!”
“Meg—”
“Stop it, Mom. We’re moving. I get to leave all my friends and my ballet and everything so that we can move up here because you’re in love and you gotta be with him and if we don’t move, Mark will make me live with him and Emma. I don’t get a choice. I get it, okay? I get it.”
No one could doubt her desperation. Laura bit her lip.
“I figured it all out yesterday. Mark wants to take me away from you because you’re hooked up with Richard and he’s not divorced yet and you’re a bad influence on me and I shouldn’t live with you or I’ll turn into a slut. It doesn’t take a genius, you know. I get it.”
Tears – genuine this time, not the crocodile variety – glistened at the sides of her eyes.
“I know you get it.” Laura reminded herself to remain calm. Meg had suffered two huge shocks in less than a day. “And I know I’m asking you to give up a lot, Meg.”
“Damn straight you are.”
She chose to overlook the language. “I promise you it will work out. This is a really nice place to live. There’s snow in the winter, and the leaves are gorgeous in the fall—”
“Oh, puh-leeze.” Through the tears, Meg telegraphed scorn. “You thought it was so great you ran away.”
“I ran away from my father, not Williamsburg.”
“I thought you ran away to be with Dad ’cause you got pregnant with me.”
Blast. She needed to keep her stories straight. “Well, mostly that, but also to get away from Daddy. I never minded living here. I lived in Williamsburg since I was two years old.”
“Well, I lived in Plano since I was one, and I don’t want to move.”
Not another word fell between them all the way to the West Virginia border. At the small church where they stopped for Mass, Meg made a big production of shaking everyone’s hand but hers during the sign of peace. In the fast-food lane, Meg leaned across her to deliver her lunch order directly. At the gas station, Meg hopped out to pump as her father had shown her, holding up a warning hand – in uncanny imitation of Richard the day before – when Laura started to speak, and then got into the back seat, slamming the door for good measure.
Laura glanced in the rear view mirror and saw her daughter lying down, arm ostentatiously shielding her eyes from the sun. This seemed to be her weekend to get it from all sides. Mark, Meg, Richard – by now he had certainly seen her note. She didn’t doubt that he was none too happy with her for leaving without telling him first.
The idea had come to her in the middle of a sleepless night. He had walked her back to the Folly, but he had not touched her, he had not kissed her, he had not suggested that they ignore Lucy’s directive about the staircase leading into the master suite. Without a word, he had understood that, for now, she had to be Cameron St. Bride’s widow.
He had left her at the door and stepped back, waiting until she was inside before cutting through the forest to Ashmore Minor.
Around three in the morning, she had sat up in his big bed with one thought: she had to leave. She owed it to Cam, and she owed it to Richard. Cam deserved grieving that did not take place in another man’s bed, with another man’s arms offering her comfort. Richard deserved not to have his life and home invaded ever again on her account.
And she owed it to herself, never again to be in the position where a bitter, disgruntled man could denigrate and humiliate her. It had taken only a few minutes on her new laptop to find the Greenbrier, and another few minutes to make a phone call. She’d spent the rest of the night packing up, sending emails, and making her bulleted lists.
She took care of one bullet point at a store near the border. Meg was still playing possum, so she left her in the car. She scooped up bottles of spring water and Meg’s favorite snacks and was taking out her credit card when she saw the calling cards in a display on the counter.
“If you use these with a cell phone, can you tell what number is calling?”
The clerk shrugged in profound indifference. “Don’t think so.”
“Great.” She bought fifty hours’ worth – no telling how many she might need – and threw most of them into her shoulder bag. Out in the car, she tossed one into the back seat.
“
Here. If you call Cindy, use this.”
Meg opened one eye and picked up the card. She looked at it back and front, stuck it in her pocket, and went back to pretending she was an orphan.
Laura gave up. She was exhausted, mentally and physically. She concentrated on her driving – the hills had given way to the Endless Mountains of the early colonial period – and let Meg work out her demons in the back seat.
By the time they drove between the white pillars of the greenbrier’s entrance, she was ready to do nothing more than fall into a soft, warm bed. The ancient white oak trees and the famous spring house had to wait for another time; she gratefully handed off her rental car to the valet and let the bellman take their bags. Meg emerged from the back seat.
“What is this place?” she said grumpily.
“It’s a very famous hotel.” Laura tipped the valet and accepted her claim ticket. “Lots of famous people have stayed here. Hold it.” She caught her daughter’s shoulder as Meg pushed past her. “Before we go in, we need to talk.”
She ignored the eye-rolling and waited for Meg to look at her.
“I know you are upset about your father’s remains being found.” She couldn’t bring herself to say body; in the dark of night, she had realized that more grim discoveries might lie ahead. “I am too. I didn’t expect – well, neither of us expected that.”
A glimmer in Meg’s eyes.
“But I knew him very well, and I can tell you this. He’d want us to go on. He wasn’t one to stand still; he was always moving and thinking and doing – you know how he was. The other thing I know is that he wanted you to stay with me.”
Meg looked down at the ground.
“Here’s the deal, Meg. I can’t go back to Texas. Even if I wanted to, and I don’t, I can’t. You saw what happened yesterday. And you can’t go back because, if you do, Mark can get a judge to prevent me from taking you out of state. I’ve got that tour this fall. I have to go back to London. If you go back, I think,” she swallowed, “Mark will try to split us up to punish me.”
Shifting from one foot to the other.
All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) Page 56
