He looked at her sharply – he had a longstanding policy of not discussing his private life with anyone, including his daughter – but Julie had inherited the Abbott acting ability, and she was looking particularly innocent right now. He wondered if Lucy had said anything to her and rejected that thought out of hand. Little in life could be counted on, but Lucy’s discretion was solid. Perhaps this was only another manifestation of Julie’s natural longing for a mother, and so he said nothing to her.
~•~
Cat Courtney.
The Great Cat, a reporter had dubbed her, linking her to that other beauty whose passion for privacy had become the stuff of legend. A merry chase she had led the media these last years, a Cat-and-mouse game played from the safety of a wall of managers and shell corporations. Her New York address was empty, her biography patently false.
Her fans did not care. She drew them from all walks of life, young, old, her own tired contemporaries. Men sensed that she had long since lost all innocence; women recognized her pain. Cat Courtney knew all the anguish of loving a man who looked right through her.
You never saw, you never knew, I drifted by, a ghost of a girl….
She had loved him once. She had followed him around, baked his favorite cookies, defended his wilder ideas, smiled bravely when he married her older sister. He stood before the giant lobby poster of her incredible, lost face, and on cue his shoulder began to ache.
Thank heavens for Julie. She exclaimed over the ornate settings of the old theater, begged him to buy her the Cat Courtney bear (long curls, provocative outfit, two emerald glass eyes), speculated on the shadowy figures in the boxes, swore she saw Royalty, and fell into blissfully silent worship when the current James Bond took his seat three rows ahead. He retreated from her raptures by reading Laura’s official biography in the glossy program.
Julie read along. “Is this true, Dad? She’s married to some professor at Harvard?”
“No.” Lucy had checked that out and found it as false as Cat Courtney’s Foreign Service father or her Juilliard education.
“Then why—”
“She doesn’t want us to know, Julie.”
Indeed, Laura plainly did not. Her manager had so routinely met Lucy’s calls with the statement that Cat Courtney had no living relatives that Lucy had long since abandoned that avenue.
“I wonder what she’ll sing,” mused Julie, flipping through her program. She sent him a sidelong glance. “Maybe ‘Francie’?”
“Maybe,” he said with gentle finality. He had no intention of discussing Francie Abbott with his daughter.
Not that Laura’s first single had anything at all to do with the mercurial girl who had illuminated a long-ago spring. “Francie” had been a shining light, a beacon of conscience, and no one who had known the real Francie had ever misread her as Laura so plainly had. Wishful thinking on Laurie’s part, Lucy had said, after they listened in disbelief. Francie brainwashing Laura as usual, Diana had snapped. Dominic Abbott had walked out of the room rather than hear one missing daughter sing the praises of another.
But not even “Francie” had prepared them for the devastation of Cat Courtney’s second single, one of the most heavily promoted releases of the decade: “Persephone,” a song of such startling contrast, such galvanizing energy and passion, underlaced with a strong dance rhythm, that it had promptly sailed above “Francie” on the charts and gone platinum. Critics had enjoyed a field day, speculating about the identity of the dark god and the unexpectedly masculine Demeter locked in mortal combat over the soul of their ultimate prize. Richard Ashmore had heard it first in public and struggled to control his shock at the unerring exactness with which Cat Courtney had dissected his marriage. From then on, he listened to it only under the protective cover of night, away from prying eyes.
One interviewer, at the beginning of her career, had made the mistake of asking her to explain “Persephone” and refused to take “I don’t discuss that” for an answer. Cat Courtney had clammed up and refused to answer any more questions, a move that won her a place on every reporter’s worst interview list. She obviously did not care. Her private life was her own business; her refusal to talk only added to her growing mystique. No one wanted her reality; her fans wanted Cat Courtney, clothed in lace and secrets.
Only her critics, hearing the occasional keen blade of her lyrics, carped that she wasted her talent in fantasy. Only her family, listening in anger and anguish, wondered if Cat Courtney was the reality after all, Laura Abbott the fraud.
“Maybe she’ll see us out here in the audience?”
“No.” He heard the edge in his voice and softened his tone. “She’ll have the footlights in her eyes.”
The second warning bell had sounded. And now the lights were dimming, the humming of the crowd was dying down, the stage was blackening. The first notes of the anthem song from “Persephone” drifted out from the string section, and the percussionists started their slow, steady underbeat.
A slow small light, the blackness breaking.
She stood stage center, a solitary figure against a background of shifting lights. She wore a trademark Cat Courtney costume, a confection of lace and pearls and glittering gold fabric, and the lights caught the sparkle of heavily made-up eyes and the graceful lift of her chin. Her hair, that incredible hair, glistened with interwoven pearls.
He remembered losing his soul in that hair.
“Come home with me,
Down to the deep,
Where heaven and hell meet….”
Her voice seduced and charmed, beckoned and invited, implored and remembered and wept. She lifted her voice in entreaty and need, reached out her hand, asking for love, willing to settle for so much less, as she had always settled. But perhaps, he thought, now she was merely acting, perhaps she had finally found someone to love her.
As he never had.
“Remember
Remember
Remember me for the dreams
I lost in the dark of your heart….”
Memories glimmered of a long-vanished afternoon on the other side of the world: Laura, reaching out in welcome, all her secrets and schemes hidden behind a mouth that answered his own needs, behind a body that ached and melted and echoed his loneliness.
And Diana, he thought as Cat Courtney shook out her great mane, Diana as she had stood before him a few weeks before, offering, yielding, finally granting the desire long ago extinguished in the cold nights when he had reached for her and she had not been there.
“My wish to love you
My wish to seek you
In the silk of warm summer winds….”
Cat Courtney looked pale, he noticed, tired beneath her stage smile. A few months before, ill health had forced her to cancel a concert tour, and a photo of the Great Cat in silhouette at a New York ballet had given rise to a rumor of a possible pregnancy. A false rumor, certainly. Her gown clung to the slender figure she had bewailed as a young girl.
“I like her dress,” Julie whispered. “Is she as pretty as you remember?”
“Prettier,” he whispered back, and looked through the autumnal goddess to the child twenty years gone, a child who had cheerfully given up her Saturday mornings to fly model planes with him, a child who had unabashedly loved him and trusted him never to break her heart.
He glanced at his watch.
“Across the earth,
Across the heavens
I will seek you with my heart….”
Cat Courtney sang for two and a half hours with only one break. By the clock, she gave a satisfying performance; by his heart, it lasted interminably. For the better part of an hour, she accompanied herself on the grand piano for a set of throbbing ballads, one of which summoned such arousing images to mind that he forced himself to think hasty thoughts about his income tax. That song, thank God, sailed right over Julie’s head.
“That was awfully sad, don’t you think, Dad?”
After an intermission, Cat Courtney tur
ned from goddess into glamor queen, in an abbreviated black dress that showed off her long legs and most of her bosom. Maybe she changed to keep cool under the hot lights of the stage, but not a single male in the audience failed to appreciate the cleavage appearing centimeter by centimeter. Cat seemed not to notice. She switched from songs of love lost and never found to celebrations of love grabbed with both hands, pulsing music meant to stir every blood cell in every man in the theater. By the end of her second encore, he suspected that he was not the only hormonal basket case present.
Julie revealed an unexpected strain of her Aunt Lucy’s bossiness as the audience started to file out. “Down that aisle, Dad. That’s how you get to the back.”
He had to exert pressure to keep her still. “Hold on, Julie.” He did not often talk to her in that tone of voice, and she stopped in her tracks. “Look, I’m serious that this might not be a good idea. I don’t think Laura wants to see us—”
“Let’s try, Dad, please.”
“Or anyone else,” he continued inexorably. “She was a very unhappy girl when she left. Don’t you think she would have gotten in touch with someone – maybe not me, but at least Lucy – if she wanted to see us again?”
The crowd eddied out around them, but he heard none of them, he felt none of the jostling. The world had narrowed down to his daughter absorbing the bitter taste of the tragedy that had torn the family apart. He had protected her from the folly of his marriage for the whole of her life, but he could not protect her forever.
She laid her other hand on top of his. “We have to try,” she said. “I know what you’re saying, really I do. You mean that I shouldn’t get my hopes up because maybe she’ll refuse to see us, right? But it’s okay, Dad, honest. It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t want to see us. She’ll know we came, and maybe someday – well, someday she might be lonely or sick or she’ll need us for something, and she’ll know we still love her. She’ll know it’s okay to come home.”
The lights overhead caught shadows on her face, and he saw again the splendid young beauty her mother had once been. But it had been a long time since Diana had looked that innocent.
Diana’s heart had never been that loving.
So they went backstage, too easily, for all the security guards standing around. His architectural knowledge of theatrical structure guided them down one passageway and up a flight of stairs through a morass of props and pianos and musical instruments, and when one attendant finally stopped him for identification, he said merely that he was Cat Courtney’s brother-in-law and he wanted to talk to her.
The guard took one look at Julie and made the obvious mistake.
“Ah, this must be Meg. To the left, Mr. St. Bride, and up those stairs.” He obligingly pointed the way. “You look just like your mother.”
Julie did her best to look like a Meg.
St. Bride. A name for Lucy. As easily learned as that, after all the years of silence. And Laura had a child. He had known that; it should not come as such a shock, that she had become a mother.
Meg. Margaret. She had named her daughter for his mother.
St. Bride. In memory, he saw a card, one among many that had arrived after the funeral. Lucy had handed it to him, asking if he knew who had sent it. Peggy, Philip, I shall miss you forever, L. St. Bride, in handwriting unremembered across the years.
She had known. And, dear God, she had reached out.
Where had that card gone? Had they kept the envelope?
“I can’t believe it,” Julie whispered, as they started to ascend the stairs against the wall. “We’re really going to see her. Let’s ask her out to dinner. I’ll bet she’s starving.”
But more security guards milled about upstairs at the entrance to the green room. A champagne reception with Miss Courtney was about to begin, and their tickets were not enough to admit them. “I’m her brother-in-law” did not work this time, and a careful match of his passport against a list produced only a shake of the head. Julie was not as prepared as he was for the polite statement, “I’m sorry, sir, but Miss Courtney did not put your name on her list. I cannot allow you through.” She was tired from the day and the high of anticipation, and she looked devastated.
He thought for a moment, then pulled out a business card and wrote Call us on the back. A long shot, but Julie was right. Laura might need them someday. He nudged Julie, who obediently signed her name, and he turned back to the guard.
A gamble on the name. “Could you please see that this gets to Ms. St. Bride?” he asked formally, and knew victory when the guard nodded and took the card. “She didn’t know that her niece and I were going to be in London.”
Another nod, a flicker of irritation in the guard’s eyes, a dismissing “I’ll deliver it to Miss Courtney. Please move along, sir.”
So easy now, a simple way out. He had tried; he had made the effort.
Richard Ashmore stood there for a second, while his daughter’s face saddened with the failure of their mission, and knew, to his relief and regret, that he could still reach Laura.
He need only wait for her and then raise his voice. The old theater walls echoed back at them murmurings from the departing audience, an inefficient sound muffler. At most, she sat scant yards away, behind one of those wooden doors, waiting for the arrival of the ticket holders who had paid a premium to meet her, summoning up energy to bury Laura Abbott in Cat Courtney for one more hour. But she would enter that room he saw over the man’s shoulder, and she’d hear him, he’d make sure of that.
And then, perhaps, she would take the bait, turn around and step into the corridor, come face to face with him, acknowledge the blood on their hands.
“Move along, sir,” an edge to the guard’s politeness.
But she might not care. The need to know might not gnaw at her as it gnawed at him. He was only, after all, a small, dark part of her past.
“Dad?” Julie whispered.
Richard Ashmore looked down at his daughter’s beseeching face, and chose to walk away.
“Come on, kitten,” he said gently, and prompted her back towards the narrow stairs. “Let’s go on back to the hotel. We’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”
Months were to pass, and mountains were to fall, and the world would change, before he understood what happened next.
A man taking the narrow stairs two at a time, head down, blocked their path down. He clearly did not see them, and Richard pulled Julie back out of the way as the man brushed past them and came into the light. The newcomer was nearly as tall as he was, a Viking giant of a man wearing the familiar CAF bomber jacket.
An American.
Richard instinctively halted Julie’s downward movement with a hand on her shoulder.
“Where is my wife?”
No imperious American intimidated this guard. He requested identification impassively while the man searched through his jacket. “I’m her husband, for God’s sake! Here’s my passport—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. St. Bride, your name—”
But the guard was cut off mid-word by the quiet intensity of the man’s voice. “I’ve flown clear across the Atlantic to speak to her. Don’t give me that crap about her list! Now, I want to see my wife. Where is she?”
The low murmur of the guard’s voice masked the reply. Cat Courtney’s husband pocketed his passport and started down the hall, to be halted by another low comment from the guard. “Her brother-in-law… not on the list, so I didn’t—”
“Brother-in-law?” repeated St. Bride, and his voice rose. “My brother isn’t here. Who the hell—”
And then he glanced down at the card proffered by the guard, and he stiffened, this man whose existence had mattered one terrible afternoon. He straightened, and he turned slowly, too slowly, until he met Richard Ashmore’s eyes.
Then, deliberately, St. Bride crumpled the card in his hand. “My wife,” he said distinctly, “has no family. They died long ago. I am all the family she needs.”
~•~
Richar
d expected tears from Julie, some depression or hurt, but she surprised him. She remained quiet on the way back to their hotel, and she acknowledged his suggestion that she get ready for bed with only a small nod. He loosened his tie and rang the concierge for coffee before he went in to check on her.
She was already sitting in bed, her arms curled around her knees, not far removed from the child she had been until his mother’s death had made her the lady of the house. Her new Cat Courtney bear sat on the nightstand beside her. He sat down by her side and touched her shoulder, and she turned her cheek to his hand. Her lashes swept down over her eyes.
“Thanks for taking me anyway, Dad. I’m glad we went, aren’t you? I’m glad we tried.”
“Yes,” because he was glad too. He had precious few memories of the woman Laura for the dark spaces of his mental lock box. “We needed to go.”
She slumped down against the pillows at her back and stared away from him. “Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Did you remember that today was your anniversary?”
He was silent for a moment, and then he said gently, “How could I forget something like that? Of course, I remembered.”
“Oh.” She turned so that one eye could peer at him through the dusk. She reached out like the adult she would be in too few years, and she touched his hand. “Are you sorry about my mother? I mean, do you wish you hadn’t married her?”
Diana, drifting down the garden path towards him, glorious, not of this world…. Diana, looking him coldly in the eye, with her unspeakable infidelity…. Diana, distant and awkward with the baby she had not meant to give birth to…. He said, and hoped that his voice did not catch, “No, Julie. Without her, I wouldn’t have you.”
She said nothing more. He dropped a kiss on her forehead and went to retrieve his coffee.
Seventeen years.
Who would share Diana’s bed this night, seventeen years after their wedding night?
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 2
