What are you going to do?
I’ll go back eventually. When Diana is gone and Richard is free.
But she’d not paid attention to that, the first clue that Francie had her own master plan. She’d not seen that in her twin’s eyes seethed the birth of a long-awaited revenge. Swamped in her own unhappiness, falling out of love with a husband she wasn’t sure she had ever been in love with, resolving to keep her third pregnancy to herself until she got beyond the danger stage – oh, with all that baggage, she thought later, no wonder that she’d not divined that Francie had reached Richard again.
Then one day, fresh from a quarrel with Cam, she had sought refuge at Francie’s apartment. She had her own key, and she let herself in quietly. And she heard Francie talking wildly, passionately: Get her out of the way, everyone will just forget about her. Oh, dear God, I am so sick of losing to her, that bitch, that two-faced bitch – and I want my family back, I want my place back, I do, I do….
Confronted, Francie confessed. Diana had denied Richard a divorce. They had one option left.
We’re going to kill her.
~•~
His voice called her back. “Laura?”
When she looked at him, all the attraction that had shimmered between them earlier had gone. (And it had shimmered, no use denying that now.) She saw him, this man who had struck back using sister against sister, and the ice that had protected her for so long closed around her again. She was no longer as vulnerable as she once had been.
“You know why Francie left,” she said. “What did you expect, after Di caught you together that day? Francie was devastated, she was humiliated beyond belief. She wanted to leave, and – and I went with her because—” She grasped at control of her voice. “I loved her. She needed me, and you and Di were so caught up with each other – you didn’t give a damn about her.”
Her words hit home, hard. She saw a flash of pain in his eyes, the knowledge of an old guilt, before he retreated behind his shield.
“I cared,” every word deliberate. “Diana was brutal to her. I’m glad Francie had you to go to. I’m sorry—” he stopped, and he straightened up. “I’m sorry that you got mixed up in that. It must have come as a shock—”
Her voice was calm, Cat Courtney’s voice. “I’d known for months,” she said, “Francie told me as soon as she got back after New Year’s. She couldn’t wait to tell me.”
“Of course not.” He sounded tired, strange. “It wasn’t any good if she couldn’t tell you.”
“Yes.” Why did she hate hearing him so unhappy? What was wrong with her? She had to get her feelings for him in order. “I was the only safe one to tell.”
“I’m sorry you ever had to know. You cared about me, and it was hard to lose that.” He sounded weary, like someone who has watched a favorite keepsake slip away forever. Without warning, he held out his hand. “Come, I’ll take you back to your hotel. I don’t see any point in dinner.”
She nodded. Better to leave now, better to savor her anger away from him, away from the scent of his skin and the timber of his voice. He had done her a favor; he had reminded her of all the reasons she had to despise him, and maybe, away from him, she would not forget.
Black is the color of my true love’s heart….
She waited quietly while he settled the bill for their wine and assured the waiter that, no, there was nothing wrong, they had merely discovered that they were not hungry…. The waiter was suitably discreet, but he cast her an appraising glance, as if to judge her not worth the loss of a dinner. She was furious to remember that her own thoughts had run in that channel earlier, and she spared the waiter a scathing look before she obeyed Richard’s subtle, guiding pressure out to his car.
“Laura.”
She stopped at the passenger door and stared down at his hand.
“Where is Francie now? Did she come with you?”
All the pain she’d held inside for eleven years hit her then in a flood. Its passage was instant and splintering, and she looked at this man who had killed Francie as surely as if he had cut her throat himself.
“She’s dead.”
“Dead!” His fingers bit her arm. “When? What happened?”
And then she took her revenge. She remembered the horror and humiliation of that bloody afternoon, she imagined the terror of Francie’s last moment on earth, and she lifted her chin and looked straight into those lying eyes, alive now and full of remembered anguish. She said softly, “She bled to death, Richard. Eleven years ago. Right here in Virginia.” And then, “After you left her.”
~•~
Later, much later, Richard Ashmore sat in his darkened home, while his daughter slept upstairs. He treasured these pockets of night, his only refuge from the privileges and burdens of his life; he sought these moments to regain those parts of himself that the day had chipped away.
Most nights, he listened to music, to relax himself for sleep. He’d learned to love Chopin and Rachmaninoff during his years with Diana, and Francie had taught him Verdi; he often intermixed a symphony with the rock of his youth.
But tonight only the music of Cat Courtney would suit, and he was not a masochist.
Most nights, too, he fixed himself a cup of coffee. Years of watching Diana drink herself down the drain had given him a healthy dislike for the oblivion of the bottle.
Tonight, he granted himself one small glass of wine.
Tonight he faced the fact that he might not be a masochist, but when it came to women, he was certainly a fool.
Three mistakes….
Diana, Francie, Laura.
And the least memorable had just caught up with him with a vengeance.
He did not often think of Francie, lovely, seductive, scheming Francie. The guilt he had carried after her disappearance had given way to quiet regret and then to a more adult acceptance of a young man’s follies. He had yielded to temptation one New Year’s Eve; he had broken an unspoken code; he had hurt his unfaithful wife terribly. He wished he had never stayed home with Francie that evening, and he certainly wished he had never touched a drop of the champagne she had so thoughtfully brought with her. But wishing changed nothing. He could only live with the past, and live his life.
He looked down through the dark at the photo album. He had pulled it down from the shelf after Julie had gone to bed, knowing what he would find. His trained eye saw shape and line, and Laura must have forgotten that or she would never have left that picture of her daughter where he could see it.
His mother, Margaret Ashmore, at ten, in a shot taken over sixty years before; Margaret St. Bride, in the photo he had phone-mailed to himself while Laura dressed for dinner. Nearly twins. Oh, he saw some subtle differences. Meg St. Bride beamed in jeans and T-shirt; Peggy had been wearing her Sunday best. The older picture was in black and white, Meg’s in full color, so no casual viewer would know that Peggy’s eyes were the Irish blue that she had passed to her son. But anyone could see the forest green eyes that Francesca Abbott had given her daughter.
His daughter, too.
Meg St. Bride, of course, had to be more than ten.
He leaned back and tried to figure just when she might have been born. After fourteen years, a few isolated sexual incidents (and he refused to dignify them as anything more) were difficult to date. The only one he knew for a certainty was New Year’s Eve, and it did not seem possible that Francie had conceived then.
Easter break…. The timing worked out, so Meg would have been born after Christmas. He thought in horror of the hardship Laura and Francie must have known, while he enjoyed his first holiday out of college.
It did not bear thinking of.
He had scarcely remembered how to think in those few seconds after he’d seen her picture and realized that he had fathered a child. How he’d managed…. And Laura had instantly gone on edge. Even through his shock, he had sensed her fear, and every instinct had warned him that he must not alarm her. Betray once that he recognized his own blood in her d
aughter, and she might well vanish back into Laura St. Bride’s life.
She had only the one child.
How had she ended up with Meg? Ah, Cameron St. Bride. He’d forgotten the reclusive computer genius, although he certainly had never forgotten the utter hatred that St. Bride had turned on him in London. Of course, and he understood now. Not because Laura’s husband had ever learned of that hidden afternoon – not unless Laura had suffered a fit of conscience and confessed – but because St. Bride had loved his daughter.
He understood that. He would fight to the death to protect Julie.
And Laura, he suspected, could kill like a tigress for her cub.
He sipped his wine and wondered what primeval fear underlay that incredible hostility she had turned on him. He’d expected her to be nervous, secretive, even defiant. Returning home after fourteen years, blood on her hands, she risked rejection on a scale he’d never known. He’d expected that she would never relax until he forgave her.
The moment he’d seen her, those wide green eyes panicked at the sight of him, forgiveness had become moot. Best instead to bury that hour forever.
She had followed his lead. No apologies, no explanations – maybe… and he turned his head towards the window, a thought breaking through the wine. Maybe she honestly believed her cover still held. Only if a woman believed that the man on whom she’d turned fury and violence did not know who she was could she go to dinner with him, dance with him, ask to meet his daughter.
Certainly, that last vicious remark, born of the pain and horror he’d seen in her eyes, made sense only if she still felt herself shielded from discovery by Francie.
In that, hope might wait for them yet. He had lost his wife, the only woman he had ever loved, in the dreadful aftermath of their mutual betrayal; he had lost a daughter he’d never known he had; he had lost confidence in his own honor and integrity.
He hated to think that he had also lost his friend.
He finished off his wine and contemplated a cigarette, and Laura’s laughing, disapproving gaze settled around him.
She had come home. She had come to him. She might not want to see him again – she’d told him so when he took her back to her hotel, in a burst of adolescent melodrama – and at the moment, he was of a mind to grant her wish.
Not because of what she’d said. But because the curve of her throat caught his breath – and her sidelong glance roused his heart from long anesthesia—
And because he’d learned not to be a fool.
He had not forgotten, God help him, that she was his sister-in-law.
Chapter 7: Upon That Shore
ON A DAY SUCH AS THIS, Laura had last seen the ancient Chesapeake sands. The high afternoon sun had bathed her then, laying a light blanket of humidity over the landscape, and surely those gulls were descendants to those that had circled over Francie’s death bed.
On such a day, she had come to this remote shore, a mother and sister, desperate to prevent the bloodshed she saw coming.
She had never remembered leaving, sick, betrayed, a mother and sister no longer.
She parked the Jaguar close to the cottage, far beyond the gates that locked the bridge and barred access to the spit of land, and pocketed the keys she had filched from Dominic’s desk this morning.
On such a day….
But the day had changed. She felt that change, standing there on the shore, listening to the squish of the wet lands beneath her sandals. Eleven years had come and gone, the signs of their passing even in the changeless scene before her. Dominic’s hideaway, that old guest cottage where he had gone to compose his unearthly music, bore a fresh coat of paint. Hundreds of yards away, the Ashmore summer cottage, its proximity symbol of the intermingling of the two families, stood guarded by a new fence. The seascape itself had shifted infinitesimally; the crescent of the cove where Francie had lived her last minutes had widened and deepened.
And the greatest change, she knew, lay deep within herself.
She forced herself to unlock the door of her father’s cottage. The sunlight from the east spilled into the room, and old dusty air flooded out around her. No one had come here in a long time. The one main room held the few essentials of the solitary composer’s life – the piano (not the best, for the salt air), the kitchenette where Francie had prepared that treacherous cup of tea, the double bed where (family legend had it) Dominic had brought an end to Renée Dane’s career by impregnating her with Francie. The bed—
She swallowed the sickness in her throat and touched the bed.
The bed, ancient site of her greatest shame.
Oh, God! She battled down her nausea. She felt as frozen as she had on her rare occasions of stage fright, as terrified as if the curtain were about to rise on an unfamiliar act. She shut her eyes to block out the image of those younger players, trapped in their cross-dramas, clashing in one terrible moment.
I can’t think about that….
But you will. You’re here, aren’t you? And it’s time the dreams stopped.
When she forced her eyes open, the phantoms had fled. Before her stood merely an old, dusty bed, sagging, nondescript, where heaven and hell had never met in supreme explosion. Beyond it, Francie had never stood at the stove, brewing her beguiling ticket to oblivion, ensuring her own death on the Chesapeake shore. And Laura herself had never fled this room, destroyer of her own dreams.
The musician in her could not resist testing the keys of the piano. She winced at their sound, discordant, neglected, ruined by the rich air of the bay, untouched for how many months before Dominic’s death. Had he still sought refuge here, after the trauma of Francie’s death?
For surely he had known.
Francie had never been found. When Laura had first awakened in a Newport News hospital, disoriented, empty and sick from convulsions, Cam had soothed her with the promise to search for Francie’s body. And he had tried. But two days had passed, and the evening tide had claimed Francie. Days melted away, Laura grew stronger, Cam searched, but Francie never washed up, mute witness to her own killing.
But not the only victim.
Another life had vanished that day, at Francie’s hands. And Cam, suffering from his own loss, had expressed the savage regret that sharks did not hunt the Chesapeake.
“Bitch.”
Her voice startled her in the claustrophobic silence of the room. She said it again, enjoying the strength of the word, and it occurred to her that she had not dared before to acknowledge her fury. And she had a right to her fury! Forget what she herself had done in this very room, forget that she had put herself beyond the pale in one ill-thought moment, forget that she had brought all this upon herself (as Cam had justly told her) by attempting to deal with Francie and her murderous ideas alone. Fate – or Diana – had denied her the chance to exact her vengeance.
She opened the cabinet above the stove and found it empty. Dominic must have cleaned it out years ago, tossing away the tea, thinking it a leftover from the times he had brought the twins out with him while he worked. He didn’t like tea; he claimed that aged Scotch better oiled his muse.
So only she and her baby had tasted Francie’s fine poisonous brew.
And her baby had not survived.
On such a day had Francie merrily prepared tea for her twin, a task threading together all the events of their lives: Oh, for God’s sake, Laurie, have some tea! You’re so on edge! And trust me, okay? I’ll behave, I promise. I’ll be so sweet and penitent, Di will hardly believe it’s me. And later, brushing her hair, carefully putting on her lipstick: Let me borrow your dress – red for courage! Admitting: I’m scared, Laurie. I’ve never been so scared of anything in my life.
But, on such a day, not so scared that she hadn’t thought to poison Laura into inaction, so that she could destroy Diana once and for all.
~•~
I never want to come here again.
Laura locked the door behind her – no sense advertising her visit – and faced west, away from the
cottage. The sunlight invaded her sight; beneath her eyelids danced a thousand sunbursts. She dug into her bag for her sunglasses.
A lone gull, attracted by the movement, uttered an ungodly cry and careened in closely. Probably looking for food, she thought, and remembered abruptly that she hadn’t eaten since last night. But her hunger faded before the pull of this panorama of remembered death. She walked down into the breeze and the shifting sands at the edge of the Chesapeake, and in a few minutes the crescent of the cove yawned before her.
She descended into the abyss and sat down near the tide.
Innocent enough, that cove. She and Francie had often gone down there to sunbathe while Dominic wrote, untying their bikini tops safe from all prying eyes, giggling, half-hoping that someone would come along and startle them. And, oh, the confidences flying between them there, on those very sands! Francie planning to study in New York after graduation, sight-reading Laura’s first forays into songwriting, endlessly speculating what life would really be like once they were out of school and out from under Dominic’s thumb. Laura never mentioning, not then, not until later, her own plans for escape, with her secret savings account and her mother’s filched social security number and her squirreled-away birth certificate and passport.
She scooped up a handful of sand and let it drift down through her loosely-laced fingers. The grains clouded the stones in her mother’s ring and dulled the gleam of the gold, and she scooped it up and sifted it over and over, while day and time slid away and Francie reappeared there on the sand beside her, talking and singing and laughing. Always laughing.
Meg, too, laughed. She had envied her twin that, and she envied Meg now, for that insouciant giggle and that slapdash confidence. She herself had been too serious a child, too quiet a teenager, too solemn a wife. (“For God’s sake, lighten up,” Cam had complained so often, and maybe his other women had provided him the laughter he missed from her.) Whether her fear of Dominic had stilled her laughter, or whether she simply had never learned how (for in that house only Francie had laughed, and usually at someone), she knew that she had never approached life as a game but as a deadly serious obstacle course.
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 15
