“Oh, dear God.” He closed his eyes for a few seconds as he absorbed the significance of that. She heard him keep his voice deliberate and flat. “Then you know he never had a chance.”
“No.” She looked down at their joined hands and thought how beautifully shaped his fingers were. “There was no way out – it was hit first – they say all the stairs were blocked. His group had left, but Mark – his brother – called him, and he missed the last elevator.”
“So you must have known pretty quickly.” Quiet, matter-of-fact.
“Yes. He’d been with us the night before – I was rehearsing in London, and he flew over for the weekend because—”
He finished for her, “Because your birthday is September 9.”
She nodded, surprised that he remembered. “We knew he was supposed to be there, in the restaurant. And then,” she swallowed hard, “I saw CNN, right before the second plane, and I knew – I was afraid he was in danger.”
His stillness told her, as clearly as if he had said the words aloud, that he would wait for her to tell her story. The tension in her shoulders seeped away. Even now, after all these years, this was vintage Richard, kind, considerate, taking the time to listen to a small girl’s problems.
Except that now it was one of the biggest cataclysms of a woman’s life, and in all these months no one had asked her to tell her story. No one had asked, What did you know? What did you see? So many people had told her how they had felt watching the tragedy unfold, but no one had asked – had wanted to know – how she had felt watching the man she had married burn to death.
Not even Mark, who avoided talking about that morning. She suspected he was still carrying guilt for the call that had kept Cam off that elevator.
“He left a call for me.” She hadn’t planned to tell him that.
“You spoke to him?”
“No. I found it on the voice mail that night.” She saw the compassion in his eyes, and now she felt like a fraud. She bowed her head so that she didn’t have to look at him. “We were talking about divorce,” she said, and didn’t know why she had admitted it. “We’d been separated for over a year. It – it was a lot worse for other people.”
Other survivors had actually loved those they had lost. She had steadily deflected all suggestions that she join a survivors’ support group for that very reason.
Richard spoke over her head. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “It must have made things even more difficult for you. Did you and he – do you have children?”
Her heartbeat picked up. She looked up; she couldn’t keep staring at the floor. “A daughter.”
“How is she doing?”
Of course, he’d consider the impact on a child; Julie was not much older than Meg. “Okay. Better than last fall,” Laura said. “She had some rough moments. It’s gotten easier, but she misses him terribly. We’ve included her in all the decisions, like the memorial service and the marker, and that helped her, I think.”
Richard glanced around the suite. “Where is she?”
“She’s spending the summer with Cam’s brother and sister. I thought—” she hesitated and then said truthfully, “I thought it would be better if she stayed in Texas. I knew this would be stressful – I didn’t want her to have to deal with it on top of everything else.”
And you can’t meet her, not ever.
He lowered their joined hands, and it startled her. It had seemed natural for her hands to nestle in his, and Laura missed the touch with a physical intensity as he walked over to pour himself a fresh iced tea. She couldn’t help her eyes following him. “Last year,” he said, and his tone had changed, stepping back from the morass of grief to a place of objectivity, “was a terrible year for this family. Do you know about Dominic?”
Thank God, this she felt honest about. “Oh, yes,” she said, and matched his tone. “Cam showed me the news clippings that last weekend. He had just found out himself.”
“Is that—” he gestured loosely— “is that why you’ve come home?”
She nodded. She could not lie to him. Too often, he had rescued her from Dominic with a well-timed Come riding, Laurie or Mom wants you to come over and help her. Once, he had stopped Dominic in the middle of a punishing tirade. You hit her again, I hit you. Then I call the police. “It helped. It wasn’t all of it, but – it helped. It would be much harder to have to see him.”
He came back towards her and stood against the wall by the French doors. “Laura,” he said, “Dominic should never have mattered. This was your home, and God knows you showed him up. If it’s any consolation, he never got over the shock of Cat Courtney. Lucy is going to wring your neck and then forget you were ever gone. She’s missed you terribly. Diana—” He stopped then, seemed to keep his own counsel. “I don’t know how Diana will react.”
She felt herself relaxing. “I thought she liked me when we were growing up.”
“She liked you just fine.” You weren’t Francie hung between them. His manner, abruptly cool and remote, shut down that line of discussion. A moment of silence, and then, unexpectedly, “Did you send a note after my parents died?”
“Yes.” The shadow had returned to his eyes, and she saw that this man still grieved. The Ashmores had died in an auto accident four months after the Christmas miscarriage. It had indeed been a terrible year. “Cam told me. I made him promise to tell me if anything happened to any of you. He probably had news alerts too – he didn’t tell me much, he tried to keep all that away from me. Richard—”
“I know,” and she heard the quiet sorrow in his voice. “It’s been over a year, and I still find myself thinking I’ll see Mom out in her garden or pick up the phone and hear Dad’s voice.” He gave her a small smile. “I didn’t put two and two together until later. It meant something that you wrote, Laura, indeed it did. Thank you.”
She had thought about going to the funeral incognito, but she had still felt shaky from the miscarriage and hadn’t been sure if she could pull it off. “I couldn’t not do something. Your mother was the closest I ever came to a mother, and – I always envied you your father.”
He nodded. The silence lay there between them. The room, she thought, had shrunk on them. She felt wound up, almost ready to fly apart, with the emotional probing of wounds not yet healed. Did he feel the tension? She thought that he did, as he wandered around the room, looking at the framed prints on the wall, rifling through the stacks of books on the desk. She hoped she didn’t have anything too lightweight in the stack; he used to read books like Atlas Shrugged while she read The Thorn Birds.
“Richard?” The question in her voice brought his quick glance at her. “You said that you told Lucy about – about Cam after she recovered. What was she recovering from?”
Her question visibly caught him off guard. For the first time, he seemed at a loss for words.
Laura pressed on, “In your fax, you said she was ill.”
He put the fourth Harry Potter down and picked up The Lovely Bones, buying time, she thought. “Let her tell you about it. Do you know what this book is about? The subject matter’s pretty gruesome. It might upset you to read it.”
Of all the paternalistic deflections. “I’ve already read it, and I’m not that fragile. Is Lucy all right?”
“She’s fine now.” He put the book down and walked towards the open door into the bedroom of the suite, and she had a sudden, unasked-for appreciation of the lines of his long body. “I’d wait for her to tell you – is that your daughter?”
Her heart leaped. “What?” She followed his line of sight, and she saw it then, on the nightstand, Meg’s picture, the picture she had taken out that morning, to remind herself what was truly important. She held her breath as he picked it up and looked hard at it, and surely he heard the pounding of her heart, the knell of guilt and fear.
Why, why hadn’t she put that picture away?
But she had never expected that Richard Ashmore would stand in her hotel suite to see it.
“What a beautiful girl.” He sounded merely like an interested uncle. “She has your eyes.”
“Margaret.” She forced herself to speak. “We call her Meg.”
“Margaret.” His voice dropped, and her heart stopped. Oh, no, no, no…. But his tone was pure pleasure. “For Mom. She’d have loved that, Laura. Thank you.”
He turned around, and through the shadows of the room, she saw no latent recognition in his eyes. Blood had not called to blood…. He came back out into the living area with the picture still in his hand, looking at it – why? He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a cigarette case, and Laura, who despised smoking, forgot her alarm long enough to shake her head at him. He promptly put it back. “Sorry, I forgot what a stickler you are.”
“My voice is my trade,” she reminded him. “I take care of it.”
He was instantly penitent. “And you should. It’s an awful habit. I’ll give them up again, if—” and he smiled at her— “if you’ll make me some of your wonderful cookies. I’ve missed them. No one else made them like you.”
Now how could she resist such a charming request? “I’ll have Meg send up a batch. I passed along your mother’s recipe.”
Richard’s manner changed then, ever so slightly; she went back on guard and cursed herself for mentioning Meg again. His eyes traveled over her curiously. “Just the one?”
“Just the one.” She made her voice light, as though four miscarriages and a marriage of desolate infertility had never happened. “And if you knew Meg at her best – or worst, however you want to look at it, you’d think one was enough.”
Damn those eyes of his. He saw right through her. “Going to make it without her?”
“No.”
“Bring her here. Julie would love to meet her cousin. I know you want to protect her, but this – your coming back – isn’t going to be as hard as you think.”
She had foreseen this, and she dealt with it calmly. “No, she’s enjoying being back with her friends in Plano. She’s discovered boys. I couldn’t resist the temptation to run away from that.”
He laughed. “How well I know! I’ve felt like running away a time or two myself, and Julie doesn’t have much of a social life.” He came back around to her. “Strange, you having a daughter old enough to be thinking about boys. How long were you married?”
“Twelve years.”
What was he thinking behind those unfathomable eyes? “You must have met him soon after you left, then.”
Perilous territory, this. That active mind of his might start fitting the timeline together. As much as Cam, Richard had always excelled at puzzles and patterns. “A year or so.”
Did she imagine the fine sharp edge to his gaze?
“You were still very young then. You must have married him very quickly.” She stared at him in horror, unsure how to deflect this dangerous train of thought. “No wonder he wanted to protect you.”
As he had, many times in the past. She had the unnerving feeling that he had forgotten Cam, that his mind had flown straight back to his wife. Had he failed to protect Diana? Against himself? Had they inflicted wounds on each other too deep for healing?
Of course they had. Had the fissures of that marriage ever sealed?
He had accused Diana of spying on him – not the reaction of a loving husband to a wife, nor even of a man to a woman he lived with, no matter what the state of their marriage.
And he had accused Diana of scaring her own daughter.
She said softly, “I’m sorry about this morning, Richard. I never meant to alarm Julie. Did the fall hurt her?”
He looked at her sharply at the change in subject. “No, it just knocked the breath out of her. You weren’t at fault, Julie was, and she knows it. That mare is skittish, and Julie spooked her.” None of the clipped anger of his call to Diana. “Of course, it never occurred to me it was you, not until Tom’s call.”
So Julie was safe. A small burden wafted off her shoulders. “You keep mentioning Tom. Should I know him?”
A startled pause, and then he smiled. “That answers one question. Your husband really didn’t tell you much, did he? Tom Maitland. You’ll like him. He’s my lawyer, my tennis partner, my closest friend, and, not least of all, Lucy’s husband.”
“Lucy’s married.” That small puzzle piece set her at ease. No wonder Kevin Stone had looked so disconcerted. “Are they happy?”
If he thought that a strange question, he still answered gently. “Yes. Mom and Dad thought him perfect for her. It’s one of the best marriages I’ve seen. She’s still as bossy as ever, but Tom just ignores her.” His grin invited her to join in. They both knew that the only defense against Lucy was passive resistance. “She’s mellowed a lot. He’s very good for her.”
“So she doesn’t try to run everyone’s life anymore?”
“Of course she does! I’m a continual source of frustration to her.” Richard took the glass from her hand. “I know today’s been tough on you,” he said, “but we need to talk. Let me take you to dinner.”
And not a word about his wife. She tried again, half-heartedly, “What about Di?”
He smiled, and now he looked more like the old Richard. “I’m not accountable to Diana. And I want to take Cat Courtney, or Laura St. Bride, or Laura Abbott, or even all three of you to dinner.”
~•~
Laura flew around the bedroom, getting ready, while he waited in the living area. Nothing too fancy, he had said, an intimate piano bar with seafood, and she shucked her jeans and shirt and dove into her suitcase. Some of her prettiest clothes were stored back in London, and she wasted a small regret before she reminded herself sternly that this was not a date.
But the admiration in his eyes fed her imagination.
“Look at you,” he said, and touched the hair that she had managed to tame. “Is this the girl whose ponytail was always falling down and who was always losing a lens out of her glasses?”
“No glasses,” Laura said lightly. “Contacts. I’ve grown up.”
Richard summoned the elevator and turned back to her. “Oh, that you have,” he said, “you certainly have.”
But if his eyes were admiring, his words became casual, matter-of-fact, a brother talking to a much younger sister. The trip to the restaurant blurred before the panoply of family events that he described: Lucy’s wedding, Julie’s first day at school, the opening of his practice, the rebuilding of the Folly…. So much she had missed. She soaked it up like a parched flower. Julie, he admitted readily, was the center of his life, and he handed over his wallet to show her snapshots of her niece. “Trusting soul,” she teased, and was stunned to see that Julie, sans obscuring sunglasses, was Diana reborn, lovely and luminous at sixteen.
No pictures of Diana. He never mentioned her, as though she had no place in his life. Anyone listening to him could be forgiven for assuming that she was dead, that he was well past the shock of loss, content to be a widower.
And no mention of Francie, as though no other sister-in-law had ever existed.
By his silence, Francie and Diana joined them; Laura could not shake the feeling that they watched her and, worse, read her fantasies. She basked in his attention, letting him order her wine, indulging her daydream that they were just another couple on a first date, enjoying the stirring of attraction, feeling out each other’s terrain – and Diana sat there between them, watching with cool contempt. She answered his questions about her career – her stage work, her songwriting – and Francie, frozen at eighteen, hung all over him and tried to distract his attention.
Even Cam intruded.
“Was it your career?” Richard asked.
Laura had heard that assumption plenty from her in-laws. Success gone to her head, they’d said. Ingratitude. Ambition. Another man (and Cam had verbally shredded Emma when she suggested that). “Part of it, I guess. I wasn’t the wife he wanted anymore. He – oh, I don’t know, he wanted to keep me all to himself, and I grew up, I outgrew that. I worked, I worke
d a lot, and I’ve been successful in Europe – more so than here – and I started spending more time over there.” She hesitated. “Neither of us was happy. We’d had problems for a long time.”
Then that final Christmas, when they lost their last best hope….
“Some marriages don’t work,” he observed flatly. “For what it’s worth, when we saw him in London, he seemed very married – he made it clear that he didn’t want anyone trying to hurt you.”
Laura came to attention. “You talked to him?”
“Well,” and she heard a wry note in his voice, “it wasn’t exactly a conversation. But he knew who Julie and I were, no doubt about that.”
In all these months, she hadn’t thought to wonder about that cryptic statement in Julie’s note: My father doesn’t know I’m doing this. If you are the man I saw, I think that is important to you. Richard and Cam had come face to face. She tucked away the thought to mull over later.
“It worked as a business. Cat Courtney makes plenty of money for St. Bride.” She wondered at his look, that a dysfunctional but civilized marriage seemed so foreign to him. Had he divorced Diana, or she him? What had happened after Francie? “But – over time – we stopped working. I knew for a long time that we weren’t going to make it. I knew that I could live to be ninety and be happy if I never won a Grammy, or I never had a – another child, but I just couldn’t see being ninety and still being married to Cam.”
Serves you right, said Francie. I told you not to marry him.
She thought she heard, “Oh, dear God,” but his face told her nothing.
“It was actually a relief once we admitted everything was over.” She drew a breath. “I think we dealt better with each other those last few months – especially after Meg and I moved to London – than we had in years.”
Richard said slowly, “I hoped you were happy, wherever you were.”
She smiled. “Oh, but I was. I had Meg.” She saw an opening. “We weren’t fated to go the distance, I guess, not like you and Di. What has it been now, twenty years?”
He took his time answering, his body extraordinarily still, his eyes not betraying his thoughts by a flicker. “Something like that.”
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 12
