All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1)

by Forrest, Lindsey

  LINDSEY FORREST

  All Who Are Lost

  Ashmore’s Folly Trilogy: Book One

  St. John Publishing Group, Inc.

  Plano, TX

  Act One: If All Else Perished

  If all else perished,

  and he remained,

  I should still continue to be;

  and if all else remained,

  and he were annihilated,

  the universe would turn to a mighty stranger:

  I should not seem a part of it.

  (Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte)

  Chapter 1: Ghost of a Girl

  I KNOW YOU’RE OUT there somewhere….

  She stared out across a crowded London square, unknowing, unseeing, the serenity of her face captured in the flat surface of the theatrical poster. The light noon rain ran down in small diagonal rivers across her, crinkling the smooth plain of her forehead and the gentle cut of her jaw. She wept, large, abandoned tears that warred with the lovely turn of her mouth.

  The Great Cat, they called her.

  Many of those who had come to Leicester Square, hunting for half-price theater tickets, gravitated to her, beckoned by her eyes, lured on by the legend of mist and mystery that surrounded her. A few balked at the price of “An Intimate Evening with Cat Courtney.” Others realized to their sorrow that they had conflicting tickets, meals planned with in-laws, flights to catch. Three nights only, announced the poster, and this, unfortunately, was the last night.

  She smiled out at them all, oblivious to their concerns, uncaring of the rain wetting her face.

  The American tourist who came walking into the square, his daughter by his side, did not notice her at first. The rain had stopped for a few minutes, and other matters engaged him: folding up a handy umbrella, glancing at his watch, reading a guide book over his daughter’s shoulder. For one minute longer, he remained merely a tourist on a much-needed vacation. For one minute longer, the Great Cat never crossed his mind.

  But the Great Cat could wait, and for this man she would wait forever.

  She had left him a decade before, both of them reeling from the blood of their folly, in a deserted cottage on a desolate shore on the other side of the world. Had she eyes to see, she would know him instantly.

  Eventually, respite ended. Eventually, Richard Ashmore lifted his head, his eyes scanning across the theatrical posters, in search of an evening’s entertainment suitable for a young girl. The titles made little impression – Les Miserables, The Graduate, Noises Off – until he saw her and everything around her blurred into oblivion.

  He knew her too, instantly.

  Laura.

  His worst mistake.

  ~•~

  “Dad?” Julie touched her hand to his. “Do you think we can get tickets?”

  “We can try.” Richard closed his fingers around hers, a talisman to ward memory off. “Don’t get your hopes up, Julie. Her concerts usually sell out.”

  “Let’s ask over there,” suggested his daughter, pointing across the square to the ticket kiosk. “Maybe someone bought tickets and can’t go. Maybe someone dropped their tickets, and someone turned them in. Maybe—”

  “Maybe, maybe, maybe,” he teased, but already he was allowing her to drag him across the stones towards the waiting queue.

  They took their places in line. Julie was glowing with excitement, the happiest Richard had seen her since the morning before her grandparents had died. He was less optimistic. Others ahead of them had requested tickets, and the possibility of stray tickets lessened as they moved up the line. He sought to cushion her against disappointment by letting her plan the afternoon. They were only a couple of blocks from the National Gallery, or would she prefer to hop the tube for Harrods?

  “Harrods,” said Julie immediately. “And tea, Dad.” She leaned in against him to look at his guidebook. “I have my birthday money from Lucy. I want to get something to wear to the concert.”

  “Keep your money, kitten.” He wished that they had never seen the poster. Selfish, yes, but if meeting her eyes in a poster disturbed him, how would he feel to see her again, even in the black anonymity of an audience? Better not to know, better to go back to an occasional evening of listening to her songs in the dark and trying to make some sense of what had happened.

  And Julie had endured enough recently.

  They were second in line now, behind a couple attempting to get tickets to the latest Andrew Lloyd Webber. Good luck, thought Richard, who had tried for three months. They bought him a few minutes of reprieve while they settled for a sex comedy instead.

  “Two for Cat Courtney,” he said, and if the gods had been with him, just this once, he would have been told in that inimitable British way, Sorry, sir, but that show has just sold out….

  “Yes, a few tickets have been turned in,” and his fate was sealed. He and Julie looked at the seating chart. She sparkled as she so seldom did, and as he paid for the tickets he thought that he would bear any pain, any guilt, to see that look on her face.

  “Those are good seats,” said the man behind him, another American from the sound of him. “I’ve seen her before, and she’s worth twice the price.”

  Julie forgot her usual shyness with strangers. “I can’t wait! I’ve wanted to see her for so long—”

  A woman with a Southern accent said kindly, “You know, darlin’, you’re just the picture of her.”

  “Thank you,” said Julie. “I’m glad I am. She’s my aunt.”

  And Richard Ashmore looked at the tickets and realized, with a shock, that it was June 9, and he had been married for seventeen years.

  ~•~

  In his life, Richard Ashmore had made three mistakes with women. Not that three was so unusual; no man reached his thirties without suffering the particular pain that women could inflict and without inflicting it in return. He was luckier than most men, perhaps, for he had erred early and grievously, and caution had been driven into him like a bullet. He carried with him permanent reminders of his follies: a marriage gone disastrously wrong, the painful conscience that he had not always been the upright man his daughter loved, a shoulder that ached in cold weather.

  Ah, Diana, unattainable once attained, a monumental mistake made in all the first flush of adolescent desire and pride. Too young to marry, too blindly in love to recognize the ice behind her eyes, he had turned a deaf ear to his father’s warning that his princess was hollow at her core.

  Francie, silver-quick smile and hungry eyes, and his own need for the warmth of a woman’s arms. The dangerous combination of a magnum of champagne on New Year’s Eve and three years of exile from his marriage bed had erupted into a springtime of madness. The gods had demanded their due: a marriage wrecked beyond salvage, a family foundered, two young women cast adrift.

  And the third…. Oh, but even now, all these years later, he stood before her picture, and he still did not understand. She watched him from the poster, more animated in flat gray and white than he had ever known her. But he knew those eyes. He knew how they adored him, how they burned in fever and desire, how they haunted odd moments of the day and dark pockets of the night.

  Diana. Francie. Laura the Cat.

  He supposed he had a special weakness for shuttered eyes that invited a man in with promises implied and unkept, for wild autumn hair spread gloriously across a pillow, for tall, elegant figures and clear, sweet voices and beguiling, destructive ways. They all three had this and more in common, and why not? They were sisters, after all.

  ~•~

  Julie tried hard to contain her enthusiasm all afternoon, first at Harrods, then at the V&A. She tagged along quietly while Richard sket
ched the woodwork, and he explored the bookstore while she toured the Worth collection. Later, they walked through the Pleasure Gardens in Battersea, where, so long ago, a young Air Force pilot attending the Festival of Britain had met a lively Irish nurse and fallen in love forever.

  “Grandma knows we’re here,” whispered Julie, and was not old enough yet to hide the trembling of her lips.

  He cradled his daughter against his chest and let her weep. Fifty years, he thought, a love affair that had spread across decades and formed the bedrock of his childhood. Even the horror of their deaths six weeks before, at the hands of a bourbon-soaked driver, lessened in the soul-felt knowledge that they would have preferred to die together than ever live one without the other.

  He and Diana, married thirty-three years later, had scarcely lasted one summer.

  Julie lifted her tear-streaked face from his jacket. “Dad?”

  He stroked her hair. “Yes?”

  “Grandma always loved Laura—” Julie drew a quivering breath. “Do you think she knows?”

  In the days of grief, in the knowledge that he now stood alone, the last of his blood, he had never thought to wonder if Laura Abbott had learned of his parents’ deaths. He considered the possibility and rejected it swiftly. Surely, surely, if she knew, she would have broken her years of silence.

  “No,” he said. “No, she doesn’t know.”

  For, if she knew, her silence might be the one thing that he could not forgive her.

  “Come on, kitten.” He kissed his daughter’s forehead. “Time for tea. Mom told me about a place she and Dad found when they were here last year.”

  ~•~

  Grief could not be buried, but they could put it aside for an hour, stepping out of time in a Knightsbridge tea shop, accepting scones and fresh cream from a Victorian maid. Peace and healing lay in sharing the tea Philip and Peggy Ashmore had described so enthusiastically. He could enjoy the quiet, the lack of hurry, the sight of Julie’s lovely face across the table.

  A perfect afternoon.

  If only the gods had not decreed that his path would cross the trail of Cat Courtney….

  “Do you think we can talk to her?” asked Julie.

  “No.” Richard reached for the strawberry jam. “She’ll have security backstage.”

  At least, he hoped she did. He had good reason to believe that Cat Courtney was more insulated backstage than most performers. Three years before, her sisters had tried to call her during a live guest appearance on television and found it impossible to penetrate the wall around her.

  “She might talk to me,” Julie said hopefully. “She can’t be mad at me, can she, Dad? I was only two when she ran away.”

  “Julie,” he sighed, and put his hand over hers. “Don’t count on it.”

  “But why? Why won’t she talk to any of us?”

  What could he say? He had kept her safe from the bitterness and guilt running like a cleft through the family. She might wonder occasionally why he refused to live with her mother, why he so carefully kept her away from his father-in-law, but she never asked and he never volunteered. Not that any of that mattered here and now. Nothing explained why Laura Abbott, at seventeen, had left her father’s house one summer day and walked away forever.

  “She was very unhappy at home.”

  “But you didn’t make her unhappy,” Julie pointed out logically. “Grandma said Laura liked you. She might like to see you again, don’t you think?”

  No, I don’t think, Julie. I think Laura would go to the ends of the earth not to see me again. I think I hurt her worse than anyone else ever did, including Dominic. You see, she thought she loved me. Then one day, and dear God, I do not know when or how, I taught her to hate me….

  He took refuge in fatherhood. “Ready? I want to call Lucy before she goes to lunch.”

  “Okay,” Julie said meekly, and bit into her scone.

  She made one detour on the way back. They passed a florist, and Julie asked if they could send her aunt flowers. He endured one momentary vision of Laura throwing the flowers against her dressing room wall, but he looked at that young, beseeching face and wondered if this, after all, might be the best solution to Julie’s need to reach out to her own flesh and blood. So they went in and ordered white roses sent to Miss Cat Courtney at the Eldin Theatre, and Julie signed the card: Love to Laura, from Julie and Richard Ashmore.

  “Should I put my mother’s name too?”

  “No.” He remembered again that it was his wedding anniversary.

  Seventeen years, and on this day he was sending flowers not to his wife, but to her younger sister. Diana, lovely, lost Diana…. If he sent her roses now, would she even remember what day it was? Would she rub a petal against that exquisite face and remember the flowers he had sent her during their courtship?

  Probably not. She had left off wearing his ring years before.

  He still wore his wedding band – burnished gold, worn and shiny from years against his skin, with its faint memory of the spring afternoon when he and Diana had selected their rings. He supposed that most men were not that sentimental about their rings, and he was sentimental about little else, but he still cherished the ring Diana had placed on his finger. He had broken his marriage vows eventually, in the most spectacular fashion, and he had continued to break them sporadically after she left. He would break them in the future. He did not think that he loved his wife anymore or could ever love her again. But he was not ready to remove his ring.

  He wondered how she was celebrating their anniversary, half a world away. He wondered who was keeping her company in that pale blue bedroom where he had been most manifestly unwelcome.

  No roses. A futile gesture at best, and Diana might not be alone to receive them. He shuttered himself against the old anguish and bought a rose, not for Diana, but for her daughter.

  ~•~

  The overseas operator connected Richard with Lucy just before she left for lunch.

  “Well, this is a pleasant surprise,” greeted the second of Dominic Abbott’s daughters, and the only one who did not scourge his conscience. “What’s up?”

  He told her. She fell silent for a long, expensive moment, and his mind’s eye saw her staring out her office window over the colonial rooftops of Williamsburg and into the past, a past made painful by the shadows of the two sisters who had left her and the one who had not.

  “I can’t promise we’ll go backstage,” he finished. “Julie wants to, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. I don’t want her hurt. She’s been through enough.”

  Lucy sounded subdued, a sure sign, for those who knew her, that she was fighting off her own ghosts. “Can you at least send a message? Laurie will talk to you, Richard. She doesn’t have any quarrel with you.”

  Loyal and straightforward, Lucy did not suspect that Laura Abbott’s quarrel ran more deeply with him than with anyone else in the family. But how could she? Now that his father was dead, that remained a blackness only he knew.

  “I’ll try,” he promised, because she was his dear friend and he knew how badly Laura’s silence had hurt her. “I’ll report in tomorrow.”

  “We need to talk anyway. Listen, when you get back, I need some help with Di. I can’t deal with her anymore.”

  He squelched the instant irritation. Oh, the damnable obligations and burdens of once-spoken vows: For better or for worse. “Now what?”

  She hesitated. “Same old thing, I’m afraid. She hasn’t been sober one day since you left.” Her voice faded for a moment. “Please. I know you hate this, and I don’t blame you, but you’re the only one she’ll listen to.”

  “I doubt that,” he said flatly. “How bad is it this time?”

  “She passed out at the Tavern last night.”

  “God!” What’s happened to you, Diana? Where have you gone? “Where is she? At her place?”

  Alone?

  “I haven’t heard from her today. She’s probably still asleep.” Her tone changed; she had finished wit
h Diana. “Richard, if you do go backstage – even if you don’t see Laurie – listen around, okay? People talk. I just need a name. If I can get that, I might be able to find her through Social Security.”

  He let her talk on, about checking with UK Immigration and trying again with Cat Courtney’s record company and following up on the leads that had the Cat variously glimpsed in Seattle, Boston, Dallas, Miami. He summoned Julie in to talk to her aunt, and they did not speak of Laura again until he brought the transatlantic call to a close.

  Lucy had one last instruction. “If you see her, give her a hug for me, will you? Then turn her over your knee and paddle the hell out of her for doing this to us!”

  ~•~

  He felt on edge now. Julie had lent him her excitement, Lucy her hope and anxiety, but his own feelings encompassed so much more than anticipation of a gala evening on the town. It took him three attempts to knot his tie acceptably, and his fingers were so tensed that he could not insert his cuff links. Diana had performed that for him during their first year, when she still liked being his wife, before Julie was conceived and the world fell apart.

  But his thoughts did not linger on Diana, sleeping off her excesses in her secluded chambers. He was keyed up because in an hour he would see her, she who had haunted him for ten years. He would be in the same room with her, he would hear her voice, he would look at that familiar, once-loving face. He did not feel like a husband seeking out an errant young sister-in-law, and he knew it.

  “Oh, Dad, you look so handsome,” said Julie, when he knocked on her door to escort her. “Too bad you can’t have a real date tonight, instead of just me.”

  “And give up taking the prettiest girl in London to the theater?” He smiled down at her. At fifteen, she had all the promise of Diana’s great beauty.

  “Well,” Julie pursued, as they took the lift down to the ground floor, “you shouldn’t be with just a kid. You should be going with – with – someone sophisticated and beautiful – someone like Laura. That’s the sort of woman you should date.”