“She doesn’t need this right now, Di.”
“But I want to talk to her,” said Diana, half-heartedly, and then sighed. “Oh, I know, I know. That damn baby. Like if I call her, she’ll lose it?”
She said through her teeth, “Stay off the phone, Di, or I’ll rip it out of the wall.”
“All right!” Diana stomped over to the bed and made a big production of climbing under the whisper-light comforter. “Have it your way.”
“Damn straight.”
She held up, long enough to call for Diana’s sedative, long enough to sit with her sister until Diana stopped fighting the medicine and fell asleep. Long enough to take stock in the mirror and recoil from her blood-stained image (no wonder the pharmacy delivery man had left before she could tip him). Long enough to step into the shower under hot, soothing water and wash her sister’s blood down the drain.
Long enough to open a drawer in the vanity, searching for a comb, and find instead a veritable pharmacy. Mostly prescription – she read label after label, her alarm growing – some not – and she dragged a plastic bag filled with grass out of the back of a deep drawer. She opened another drawer and pulled out paraphernalia that she hadn’t seen since her late teens: water pipe, roach clip, paper for rolling your own.
She stared at the means of Diana’s destruction. Then she met her own reflection in the mirror, and even Dominic would have recognized Cat Courtney now, of the borrowed bathrobe and the towel twisted around her head, in the utter determination in that tilted chin and those flashing eyes.
It took her over an hour. She found a large trash bag in the kitchen, and she searched the apartment thoroughly while Diana slept in blissful ignorance. Everything went into the bag, pills, bottles, plastic bags, syringes, a king’s ransom in white powder. She overlooked nothing, and she spared nothing; she ransacked the dresser drawers, the desk, inside the flower vases, even under the bed, Diana sleeping inches away.
Let Diana hate her when she awoke. She didn’t care.
She left nothing to chance. She paged through Diana’s address book, looking for strange entries, and found a card listing a liquor store that delivered. After she tore it up, she poured the contents of every bottle in the wet bar down the drain. The empty battles vanished into her sack, and that she took with great ceremony and destroyed in the trash compactor.
Every time Richard came to mind, she drove him out.
Until she found the folder.
It lay in the large drawer of Diana’s desk, right next to a silver flask, and Laura knew instantly what she’d found. Manila, worn – it had borne handling over the years – and someone had once written on its tab, in now-faded ink, Divorce.
She stared at it for a long moment, her instinct at war with her conscience. Read it, read it, urged one, against the whisper that to open the folder might answer questions best left unasked forever.
But she had already asked.
She reached for the folder and hesitated for one last moment.
You’ll like him better if….
Her heart beat painfully; her breath hurt her throat. She took the folder to the sofa and laid it down.
And there it sat for a while. She put off reading it as long as she could stand it. She checked on Diana, she made herself a cup of tea, she called her voice mail for her messages. She made herself a second cup of tea.
And it beckoned, lured, offering knowledge and secrets, the key to the great rift in Diana’s life.
As Richard had so decisively said, it was nothing to do with her.
Or it might be everything.
She resisted no longer. She picked it up and opened it.
~•~
A letter from an unknown attorney: This letter serves as notification that Mr. Ashmore intends to seek a full separation and will petition the Court for custody of Julia Ashmore.
A letter from Philip Ashmore to Diana: I beg you to reconsider. Don’t fight him on this. Julie is happy with Richard. He adores her. They’re good together. Don’t persist in breaking two hearts.
A petition for custody filed by Richard Ashmore: Defendant has repeatedly demonstrated a predilection for abuse of alcohol and controlled or illegal substances. Defendant’s violent behavior on the occasions detailed in the attached affidavit raises questions as to her ability to serve as the custodial parent of Julia Ashmore and the advisability of prolonged unsupervised visitation.
Diana’s counterclaim: Complainant has shown a flagrant disregard for the sanctity of the marriage bond by engaging in an adulterous relationship with Defendant’s sister, Francesca Mariah Abbott.
Laura stared at the paper for a long time. With no proof, with nothing but his silence and her own suspicions, Diana had accused Richard publicly.
How had he felt, having such damaging truth brought to light? Richard, private, proud, bruised survivor of the bleak wilderness of his marriage?
But he had struck back, and swiftly. The next court document bore a filing stamp the day after Diana’s accusation: Complainant and Defendant must agree that the issue of adultery by either party has been waived by subsequent cohabitation. No independent evidence exists to support Defendant’s allegation that Complainant engaged in a sexual relationship with Defendant’s sister. The young woman in question has been missing from her home for three years, and her whereabouts remain unknown. She is not available to testify.
Three years? She looked again at the dates, and her skin turned cold.
The summer of Francie’s murderous plans. While Francie had planned and plotted in Texas, Richard and Diana had engaged in combat for the soul of their daughter.
And while coincidence existed in everyday life, surely this could not be.
You knew where she was, Richard.
Laura swallowed hard, and turned to the next page.
Richard to Diana, in a letter fraught with crossed-out words: Julie is having nightmares again. I think she is picking up on my tension. For God’s sake, let’s work something out. I can’t stand to see her in such terror. And a photocopy of Diana’s return volley: You’re so concerned about Julie. How well do you think she slept three years ago? Maybe she’s afraid you’ll throw her out just as you did me.
Richard: Try remembering why I asked you to leave.
Diana: Try remembering what you said to me that night. Or are you just too damn holy these days to remember?
No wonder they refused to see each other now. Even after eleven years, who could forgive this?
A child psychologist’s report: Observation of the child interacting with her parents leaves little doubt in my mind that her father should retain custody. Mr. Ashmore is a devoted parent and takes great pride in Julie. Mrs. Ashmore appears tentative and distant with Julie, and Julie refuses to go to her mother even when directed to do so. My opinion of Mrs. Ashmore is that she has not bonded with her husband or her child. Her statements indicate an unhealthy dependence on her father and warrant further investigation, but she refuses to cooperate.
Laura’s hand shook as she turned the report face down.
Dominic must have been furious to read that.
A court order, entitled “Interlocutory Judgment,” giving custody of Julie to Richard, with supervised visitation privileges granted to Diana, conditioned upon her seeking medical treatment for her addictions.
Signed two weeks before that afternoon on Ash Marine.
Not coincidence, no, it couldn’t be. Diana at the center of this horror, while her rival planned out her murder? Surely not. But Richard might not have known, or cared if he did. This war he had clearly been winning.
It might have made more sense if Diana had tried to kill him.
A motion entitled “Intervenor’s Motion to Request Paternity Test” with a note dated the day after the Interlocutory Judgment, in handwriting she remembered all too well: I will file this if you do not cease and desist. Dominic. She looked at the motion, unmarred by any court stamps: Comes now Dominic Abbott, Intervenor, and requests permission of the Court to inte
rvene in this custody action between Complainant Richard Ashmore and Defendant Diana Abbott Ashmore…. Intervenor asserts, on information and belief, that Complainant did not have access to Defendant when the minor child was conceived because Complainant and Defendant were living apart.
She heard herself gasp in the stillness of the apartment, her breath a sword cutting through the quiet.
The paper started to slide from her fingers. She put it down on her lap and smoothed it out.
Dates cited, bald dates spelling out the disintegration of Richard and Diana’s marriage. Dominic’s own words, in all their sparkling malice, in the attached affidavit: My daughter admitted that she does not know the identity of her child’s biological father, but she is certain that her child could not have been fathered by her husband, Richard Ashmore.
And Lucy, recounting that long-ago time: She moved out for a while after their first anniversary… He told me to make myself scarce for a couple of days so he could talk some sense into her… she found out she was pregnant… Richard told her to come back… everything really went south.
Richard, in weary, age-old bitterness: Ask how many abortions… the first was my child, a year after we were married.
Richard, seen through the glass, smiling at the most important person in the world.
She stared into space and felt the tumblers click softly into place.
Dear God, what a burden he had carried. How had he managed? Where had he found the strength to love Julie, this biological stranger foisted on him after the destruction of his own child? How had he kept her, loved her, sheltered her, built that wonderful home for her?
How had he not killed Diana?
Maybe he tried. Or maybe Francie suggested it, and he hated Diana just enough not to stop her.
The final order granting custody, signed by Richard and Diana. She read through it quickly and then read it again, mystified. Three pages long, spelling out visitation and financial arrangements, with no mention of everything that had gone before. Signed one week after Ash Marine.
What had happened, between Dominic’s annihilating motion and this quiet, antiseptic document, to drive underground the bitterness and hatred raging between Julie Ashmore’s parents?
Laura saw the answer as she sat there, a vision shimmering in the western light: an afternoon shining on the Chesapeake, a beseeching telephone call made, a treacherous cup of tea brewed, a young woman silenced forever on the sands.
But, while these papers laid bare all the reasons in the world for Richard and Diana to kill each other, Francie had died.
And Diana had instinctively accused Dominic.
She held her breath and turned over to the last document.
Another legal document, again smooth and white, without the usual court date stamp. Clipped at the top, a note, in handwriting Laura knew without question, taut with fury and despair: Call off your father, or I swear I’ll file this and fight you to hell and beyond.
“Complainant’s Counter-Request for Paternity Test”: Now comes Complainant, Richard Ashmore…. Complainant regrets the necessity of this distasteful accusation…. Defendant Diana Ashmore admitted the truth of Julia Ashmore’s paternity to Complainant six months before the birth…. On information and belief, the sexual relationship between Defendant and Intervenor Dominic Abbott predates the marriage of Complainant and Defendant…. Clearly, neither Defendant nor Intervenor is a proper party for custody of the child.
And Julie – with those green eyes, that unquestionable talent, and that Machiavellian mind – was all Abbott.
She was surprised, moments later, to come back to herself and find that the room sang of silence. The late afternoon had scattered shadows and sun dust in the air, a gentle, giving warmth; she lifted her hand in the eastern light and noticed, quite curiously, that it remained steady and that the light sparkling off her mother’s ring did not shake down a shower of stars.
The screaming had echoed all within her head.
The papers on her lap were only papers, with marks and stamps; they held no real power. This all lay in the past, new only to her. The battle had finished, decisively, with two signatures on a paper. Diana had crept away in defeat to drink away her wounds; Richard had retreated into his controlled world and shut out any chance of further pain. Francie had washed away into the night; Julie had grown up a willing prisoner to her father’s anguish.
And Dominic Abbott, composer of this twisted symphony, had walked away from the destruction he had wrought until one day a person unknown had meted out long-overdue justice.
Damn you, Daddy. May you rot in hell forever.
And if you weren’t there already, I swear I’d send you on your way. I’d cut your throat, poison you, drive a stake through your heart.
Across the years, she heard Dominic laughing.
Chapter 15: Diana, Mrs. Ashmore
SO I MARRIED RICHARD. Was he the problem?
Probably not.
I just didn’t like being married.
I think engagements must be a trick. You’re supposed to spend the time contemplating marriage, discussing your hopes and dreams for the future… all that. I read all the manuals. What no one tells you is the dirty little truth: that you’re so damn busy running around planning the wedding and discussing all those earthshaking details like flowers and should the maid of honor have a different dress and what to do with your spoiled brat sister that you really don’t want in the wedding – not to mention, of course, that I was in school, and so was Richard, and we were a hundred miles away from where the wedding was being held, so we had to run down there every weekend – and anyway, with all that, who has time to sleep, let alone reflect upon the gravity of the step you are about to take?
And everything provoked a fight, either between Richard and me, or between me and someone else. I told Daddy I refused to be married in the Church – I was still afraid of going to hell – but of course, I couldn’t tell him why. Then he refused to walk me down the aisle if we got married in the Episcopal church where Richard had been baptized. So finally I announced that I wanted a garden wedding at Ashmore Park, which let me out of the Catholic ceremony altogether, and Peggy came to my rescue and suggested the municipal judge husband of one of her garden club buddies. That certainly solved my problem, and since Richard was the next thing to a complete agnostic, he didn’t care. Amazingly, Daddy agreed to that, and it was years before I figured out why he and Peggy, both of them more Catholic than the Pope, encouraged a civil ceremony that they knew damn well was not valid in the Church. I was just glad not to have to face the crucifix on my wedding day.
And that was just one of the headaches I faced on my way to the altar.
I was so tired by the time we got married. I remember standing there in front of the judge, and Richard said his vows clearly, confidently, with no hesitation that he was doing exactly the right thing in life. And then the judge turned to me, and I could barely even listen to him to repeat the vows correctly. Of course, everyone attributed it, charmingly, to my being nervous. Nervous? I’d known him forever. I’d been sleeping with him since I was fifteen. What was to be nervous about?
And the only thing I remember about the reception was Francie sulking. Stupid little girl – what did she expect? She was fourteen. Did she think he was going to wait for her to grow up?
I heard that Laurie cried. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember a lot about Laurie.
I do remember one other thing about the reception. I remember dancing with Daddy, who had surprisingly kept his mouth shut all spring once he compromised on the ceremony. He paid the bills and was semi-courteous to Richard. He even walked me down the aisle and gave me away without protest. But he did claim his dance with me. And just when I thought I was finally getting away forever:
“Diana, this won’t last. It can’t.” Now, I ask you, who says that to a bride?
I mumbled something like, “Daddy, I love him,” or maybe I said, “Can I get some sleep now?” since that was certa
inly what I was thinking.
“You aren’t cut out for the life he wants. You’re like your mother.” Oh, right, Daddy, push those buttons again. “And that boy is Shilleen all over again. Conscious of his place in that dynasty, bound up in his land, everything else taking second place, and she couldn’t take it, she couldn’t breathe, she was suffocating….”
Yes, yes, yes, Daddy, tell me that story again, about that night when she replaced your first-choice soprano in rehearsal, and she never went home, because (apparently) there was something irresistible about a man who was supposed to go home himself to a monastery that night.
“Just remember, Diana, you can always come back.” Sure, every new bride needs an escape hatch. “I don’t think your young man, as strait-laced as he is, will satisfy you for long.”
No, Daddy, he’s just been doing a pretty good job since he was sixteen.
But Richard didn’t get the chance that night. I drank so much champagne that I instantly got the fiercest headache. I didn’t wake up until noon the next day in our hotel room, and Richard, of course, had been up for hours. He was kind about it. Richard was always kind. He even joked that it wasn’t as if we didn’t know what a wedding night was supposed to be like.
I remember looking at him and thinking, Oh, my God, has he always been this nice?
It was not a happy thought.
~•~
Well, I asked for it. Marriage, in all its splendor.
I was so bored! In the few moments I’d had to think straight during our engagement, I’d figured life would be perfect once we were married – no more sex in the reclining bucket seats, no more pooling our money to rent an occasional room, no more sneaking back into the dorm because I’d stayed out past curfew! No one making any more impossible demands on me.
Freedom. Space and breathing room to be who I wanted to be, on my own timetable.
A buffer between me and Daddy.
Now we had a fabulous honeymoon. Mr. and Mrs. Richard Ashmore flew to Paris first-class, gift from the older Ashmores, and, for two wonderful weeks, we lived my dream. We stayed up late, slept late, and played hard. We strolled along the Left Bank, danced in night clubs, hung out at cafés and piano bars, browsed bookstores, toured Versailles, drank gallons of cheap wine, and ate lots of great French food. Richard sketched the architecture; I window-shopped the great couture houses. I even got to play one night at a jazz club! (Even though I didn’t follow it up with a meaningless fling with a bad boy – I went back every night to a nice hotel room with my very conservative but exceedingly horny husband.)
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 35
