When Mark finally dragged Meg off the phone, Laura expected him to resume the interrogation, but he surprised her. Maybe the day had worn him down; maybe her show of resistance had knocked the fight out of him. He said merely that he’d check up on her the next day and to call if she got lonely again.
She remembered, too late, that she had questions of her own. He had signed every one of those checks.
She didn’t stir from the sofa, not even to switch on a light in the darkness. She couldn’t tell the time; she thought from the embers of the sunset that it must be late. Max, snoozing on her lap, seemed in no hurry for dinner, and she slouched down into his fur and let herself retreat into her thoughts.
She wondered if Diana were still asleep.
She hoped so. Diana shouldn’t see Richard until she felt stronger. Strange, that she didn’t fear for Diana’s safety, but he hadn’t killed her when she’d made her terrible confession before Julie’s birth, when the desire must have ridden well nigh irresistible. And Diana had survived Ash Marine, survived to sign that document handing Julie over a week later.
If Diana had been there at all.
She resisted remembering her words to Diana, words that had put the dagger into Diana’s hands. Words that sparkled now before her, in all their malice.
She hadn’t considered Diana at all, in that moment when she’d struck back, eleven years too late, to avenge Francie. She considered her now, Diana who might have lied when she’d said she had never seen Francie that day, Diana who might have told the truth about the flat tire and the keys she’d picked up from Ashmore Park.
If Diana had lied – if she’d lied, or blanked the entire memory from her mind – how much must that burden have weighed, all these years? And the memory of Francie coming at her, murder in her eye – had that haunted Diana in her dreams?
Had it driven her mad, driven the memory straight out of her mind?
But if she had not lied, then another person, unseen, had crept up behind Francie.
And if Diana had not killed Francie – if Richard had not lured Francie on – if she, Laura, had blamed them both unjustly for eleven years—
Then she had done her sister and her love a terrible wrong.
And she’d not only finished Francie’s murder by abandoning her dying twin, but she’d helped the murderer walk away forever.
~•~
An hour passed, maybe more, before Richard came to her.
He forestalled her immediate question with “Any coffee?”
She inspected him from the corner of her eye while she started hot water boiling and set out cream and cookies. He looked tired, withdrawn, as he loosened his tie and draped his suit jacket over the chair. She remembered that he’d been in Charleston on business earlier, before Julie’s message summoned him back. “How did your trip go?”
“What?” He looked startled, as if he’d forgotten her presence. “Oh, fine. We’re going to contract to restore and expand an old subcathedral. It’s diocesan money, and everything has to be approved up the church hierarchy all the way to Rome, but at least it won’t fall apart.” He accepted the steaming cup she held out to him. “Ah, thank you, Laura.”
He’d drained one cup and asked for another by the time her tea steeped properly. She joined him at the table, and fell uneasily into his silence. The coffee apparently wasn’t reviving him; he was stirring it endlessly, his hand cradling his temple, exhaustion around his eyes.
She finally asked about Diana.
“She’s not alone. I called a nursing service, and they sent someone over.”
“Good,” Laura said faintly, and tried to repress a shiver of reaction. “Richard, I – I’m sorry about what happened, really I am.”
He said quietly, “I didn’t know that you had anything to be sorry about.”
She hadn’t seen that coming. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again and took refuge in a swallow of hot tea.
“Diana tried to kill herself about six years ago.” His voice held all the interest of yesterday’s news, but she knew better now. “We were in the middle of a shouting match about – well, never mind, it’s private, but suffice it to say that we were having another interminable discussion about our marriage. It was – ungodly, to say the least. I turned my back and—” He stared into his mug. “What happened today?”
She thought of Diana’s blood spilling onto the carpet, splotching the gold dress, and papers coldly spelling out the destruction of a marriage. Diana, sobbing that she had given up this man for her father.
She said faintly, “I can’t. Not right now.”
Above her bowed head (her turn now to seek sanctuary in the bottom of her cup), he said quietly, “If it helps, I can assure you that Diana was in control today. I looked at her wrist. She slashed herself sideways, didn’t she? That’s not the way to do it, and she knows it. She demonstrated for me one time, laughing as if it were all a game. She was playing with you, Laura, she wanted attention. Tell me what happened.”
She barely managed, “She was playing… she bled, she bled all over the place. And you’re saying she didn’t mean it?”
“No.” No resisting the gentleness underlying his firm voice. “Don’t torture yourself, Laura. I intend to talk with her when she wakes up, and I promise you she’ll admit the truth. But I want to know. What brought this on?”
She swallowed once, hard. “We were talking—”
“What about?” Quiet, inviting, seductive.
“Daddy.” She turned her head nervously away. “We tried on some old clothes that belonged to my mother. Daddy’s will.” She couldn’t bring herself to mention the cottage, not to him. “Lucy’s baby – Di’s mad at her for getting pregnant. Some trip Di wants to take driving around Europe—”
You and how you’re mated for life.
“And Francie,” he said, “you talked about Francie, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she whispered, and looked down at her hands.
He waited her out, his coffee cup hanging forgotten in his hand, the heaviness of his stare on her head. The uncertainty grew, until it was more than she could bear, and she looked up at him, unable to survive the vast silence between them.
He was watching her steadily, with no apology for staring, his eyes cool and unemotional. She deserved this; she and her sisters had brought him to this, killing off the warmth and kindness at this man’s core. Betrayed by Diana, used by Francie, nearly destroyed by her – if she chilled under his gaze now, if he lacked the heart to forgive her, she had herself to blame.
He continued to watch her for a minute or so, while he drank down his coffee and refilled it with quick, decisive movements.
Laura could take this no longer. “Richard—”
He held up his hand. “Be quiet.”
And she did. They remained there, in the deadening landscape of the kitchen, while her dread and his anger grew. Her tea grew cold, and the cream in his coffee condensed into islands. She couldn’t tell what he felt behind his shuttered eyes or what he thought he saw when he looked at her.
When he finally spoke, it was worse than she had ever imagined.
“Did you know that my parents once approached Dominic about raising you? My mother wanted Lucy to have one of her sisters, and she wanted you with us. Dominic wasn’t fond of you, even when you were small, and he didn’t have the money to train all of you.” He stopped and put his hands on the table in front of him, and he studied them because, she thought, he did not want to study her. “But you and Francie were very dependent on each other – she more than you, I recall – and Dominic didn’t want to separate you. My father couldn’t bring himself to take her too. He watched her once trying to take one of your dolls away – the sort of silly, childish trick that you see on any playground – but there was something about her attitude, he said, that gave him pause.”
He looked up, and his gaze took hers, and she could not turn away.
“But you, he thought, you were worth time and attentio
n and love, and it was clear, even then, that you would never get anything in that house. I was ten, eleven, and they sat Lucy and me down one day and talked to us straight about you, asked how we felt about you coming to live with us. Dominic lavished affection on Diana and Francie, so they were all right – or at least, Dad thought so at the time. But you – you were different, Mom said, you needed us.”
Somehow, through the crushing regret in her chest, she found her voice. “I would have loved to have been their daughter. I loved them very much.”
“And they loved you.” How steady he sounded, how remote. “You know, don’t you, that Mom was hoping I’d forget Diana and wait for you to grow up. They didn’t like her. They never criticized, of course, they trusted me to know my own mind. But they never warmed to her.” He shrugged. “Maybe they were right. Maybe I should have waited until you were old enough, maybe we would have suited each other. We’ll never know. All I know is my parents loved you, and they were devastated when you left without a word to anyone.”
He stood up then, and he walked over to the window overlooking the pool, and he stood there for a while, his back to her, his hands resting in his pockets.
She couldn’t speak. Maybe we would have suited each other. Peggy and Philip Ashmore had picked her for their son. No wonder Peggy had carefully taught young Laura Abbott how to run Ashmore Park, no wonder she had passed along her recipe for his favorite cookies to Laura and not Diana. She had certainly not intended to benefit a computer genius who was allergic to chocolate.
His voice, when he spoke again, was dusty and strained. “They loved you,” he said, “so did I. I may have used you like my personal slave – I’m sorry for that now – but I knew, even then, that you were the best of the lot. You were a quiet little kid, I don’t remember you ever arguing with a soul, but I used to look at you and wonder what you’d buried behind those eyes. Dad thought the world of you. You had all the courage in the world, he said, all the heart.” He stopped, and then he turned around, and he looked straight at her. “It would break his heart to know you now.”
His words hit her lungs like a hammer and knocked the air out of her.
He advanced towards her then, and now she saw that he was not merely cool and detached. Below the calm of his face lay a very angry man.
She raised her hand instinctively in defense.
“Your sister is a very disturbed woman,” and now there was no mistaking the fury in his words. “It’s safe to say that she’s not always in her right mind. She’s tempted the devil for years, and payment is coming due. I can’t really say that she has ever valued either Julie or me. Being a wife and mother never meant much to her. To her, we are not her family, we never took the place of her father and her sisters.”
“Oh, please don’t, Richard. I am so sorry….”
He waved a hand that swept the kitchen. “She came here to dinner, didn’t she? Do you know why? Your sister was thrilled to see you again. She was so happy when you came home—”
Diana? Diana, who’d drunk and sniffed her way through the reunion?
“She’s very excited about playing for you in this concert you’ve got going,” he said. “She called me about it. She felt honored – that’s the word she used – to be accompanying you on stage. She even told me that she was going to make a good-faith effort to stay sober so that she’d be in tip-top shape to appear with you. She won’t even make that effort for Julie! But this is different. Diana is going to play for her famous sister, and she wants to make a good impression. She wants her sister’s good opinion.”
He paused and thrust the knife in.
“And how do you repay all that?” he said. “You deliberately talk to her about the one person Diana needs to forget ever existed. Don’t look at me with those great teary wide eyes, Laura. You didn’t forget for one minute how badly Francie hurt Diana, and not just over me. And whatever you said – God, I don’t even want to know – she had to slash her wrists to stop you.”
He still loves her.
“Not Francie, it was Daddy….”
His voice cut through hers, rode above the rising roar in her ears. “You were such a sweet kid. Lord, I used to think that every stray kitten in the county knew to come to you. Look at that gray beast chewing on my tie – I’d lay odds he showed up on your doorstep, and you took him in. But when it comes to your own sister, you are a cruel, judgmental, cold-hearted bitch, determined to make everyone suffer for your own pain—”
“No, I’m not!” He’d flicked her right across the heart. “How dare you—”
“I’ll tell you how I dare,” he interrupted, and he stood over her and held her still with the sheer force of his anger. The heat from his body prickled her skin. “You’re living in the past, Laura! You shove Francie down our throats – I hate to break it to you, but we left her behind when she left us! No one thinks about her, she’s gone, she’s in the past, and, damn it, let her stay there—”
Rage, long-buried, white-hot, erupted within her.
“You bastard!” She nearly knocked him off balance as she rose and shoved at him. “What do you mean, you don’t think about her?”
“She was a mistake.” He caught at her arms, to stop her flailing, and the touch of his hands sent her rage spiraling upward. “A mistake! I let her go because I came to my senses—”
“Francie loved you! You call her a mistake—”
He said very quietly, “Calm down, Laura.”
“— My God, you were a disaster for her! She loved you, she ruined her life for you—”
“Calm down.”
“No, I won’t calm down!” She felt consumed by a vast flame born of pain and fury, half a lifetime’s worth of anguish and loss, touching the heavens and shaking down the stars. “You son of a bitch, you used her! That was the real war, wasn’t it, not Francie and Di fighting over you to get at Daddy, but you using Francie to get revenge on him! He adored Francie, so it was sweet vengeance, oh, wasn’t it just, to take Francie because he had ruined Di—”
She’d struck home.
He never moved, but he shut her out. She saw it instantly. She was too much the mistress of other personas not to recognize it in him, and she wasn’t having any of it. She grasped his shoulders and shook him as fiercely as her strength allowed.
“Stop that! You can use that trick on everyone else, but I won’t stand for it. You listen to me!” He came back to life; she saw surprise, suffering, fury take fire on his face, and she gloried in it. She’d dammed up fountains of agony, and he, their architect, had damn well better face his handiwork. “You took my sister from me! She was all I had, she was the only one I could count on, and you stole her from me! All that spring, Richard, I was desperate, I was getting ready to run, I needed her, and where was she? Skipping school to meet you, having me lie for her, take her tests, cover with Daddy—”
“Oh, dear God—”And he reached out for her.
She struck his hand away.
“And for what?” She was light-headed, delirious, from the relief of unleashing emotions too long restrained. “It was all so useless! Francie scarcely made a dent, did she? Oh, Di screamed and carried on and tore into her, but in the end it didn’t make a damn bit of difference, did it? It tore her life apart, but, hell, as long as you got away with it, who cared? To you, she was just a regrettable little mistake, a little fall from grace, no big deal, all men do it, just another condom wrapper in the car—”
“That’s enough.” But, in his voice, she heard dawning realization.
“Don’t you tell me it’s enough! Maybe she used you, but you used her worse! All these years, I felt sorry for you, Richard, I thought you were a pawn just like me – oh, so much more valuable, of course! What was a sister compared to a lover—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Laura!” Her anger had laid flame to the timber of his own; the fingers holding hers tightened painfully. She refused to back down in the face of his fury – let him raise his voice to her, let him crush the blood fr
om her fingers! She didn’t care. “Is that what you’re after – to punish us all because you were jealous?”
The word hung in the air between them, a living, palpable presence.
In one fell swoop, he had broken the back of her fury. She lifted her hand to her throat, speechless, unable to think in the sheer horror of that one word.
The silence of her shock screamed at him. He moved in quickly for the kill.
“That’s what all this is about, isn’t it? All this bitterness – that scene yesterday, trying to bring me to my knees because I’m not the boy you remember – and, my God, that filthy lie, Francie bleeding to death—” She recoiled, fighting off the sickness that arose at his words, but he had caught her, and he would not let her go. “Did you think I didn’t know? I felt it, I saw it every time I saw you, your eyes accusing me—”
A surge of humiliation swept over her, pulled her under. “No—”
“I talked to Francie about it.” He caught her chin in his hand and forced her to look at him. She shut her eyes tightly against him. “She said not to worry, you knew nothing, she’d kept you in the dark. I didn’t press her about it. I persuaded myself that my conscience was making me hypersensitive. That I was just imagining the fury coming at me in waves.” He added, “You were so young, you were such an innocent, I thought, you couldn’t know.”
She was going to be sick. She could see them still: Richard asking, Francie saying earnestly not to worry, that eventually Laura would grow up…. Talking about her, laughing indulgently at the sweet schoolgirl crush that could never compete with Francie’s exuberant sexuality.
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 38
