All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (11 page)

The Folly. Richard’s old dream….

He had made good on that, at least. It stood there now, an incongruous piece of the Gilded Age set against a Virginia hill, limestone-walled and slate-roofed and multiple-chimneyed. His plans to restore the rain-shattered wreck of the Great Lakes shipping heiress’s brainstorm, dismantled stone by stone from a Beaux Arts mansion in Newport because she insisted on living in a bigger house than her mother-in-law, had run like a thread throughout childhood.

“We’ll live here someday, Di,” he’d told her sister, who had glanced at his sketches as if they had nothing to do with the future he wanted with her. Lucy had stomped on the idea with all the confident supremacy of one who hadn’t thought of it first, and Francie had looked pityingly at Diana because, after all, who wanted to live in a hovel – a very big hovel, a very fancy hovel, but still? He’d said nothing, only surveyed his small harem until his gaze rested on the youngest of them all.
Well?
his eyes challenged, and so Laura chimed in her enthusiastic support, because he was the center of her limited universe and she was his devoted handmaiden. He’d rewarded her well for her loyalty. He had given the others his most superior, aloof smile, and bestowed upon her the honor of a lift home on horseback.

She had nestled against him, his arms reaching around her to hold the reins, while the three traitors trudged beside them, complaining step by step.

Laura shielded her eyes from the sun beating down and peered through the trees, branches waving in the breeze. But she had parked too far away to pick out details easily, and the thicket lived up to its name. She hesitated only a minute before she reached into the passenger seat for the binoculars she had packed for use in the mountains. She was not, she thought ruefully, strong enough to resist the temptation to use them.

But first she needed a safer perch. She started the engine and headed for the house at the end of the wooded road. The great house of Ashmore Park, Ashmore Magna, situated on the highest point of the estate. Five minutes, and she threaded her way up through the front gardens to the portico. And she settled down to watch.

For years she had struggled not to remember. Once, a face in the crowd had caught her eye, and she had turned wildly to stare at an elusive resemblance – the frame of an eyebrow, the cut of the jaw, the set of the shoulders. All too often, his eyes as she had last seen them, blazing, furious, filled with hatred, had haunted her as she slept.

But oh, that shouldn’t matter now! She was an adult. She was Cat Courtney, toast of the West End, with three pending proposals to her credit. She wasn’t his handmaiden anymore. He meant nothing to her, nothing at all, that wasn’t why she was coming home, no matter how he looked leaning against a pillar. Julie had said it best in her message – she wanted only to find her sisters again. She had only come to Ashmore Park first because Diana and Julie lived here with him, and she still hadn’t found any trace of Lucy.

In her hotel room the night before, she had rehearsed it all in front of the mirror. She would drive the remembered path to his home. She would walk bravely to the door, and when he answered, she would be the one to smile, to put him gently at his ease, to gloss over the raw awkwardness of the long-lost runaway turning up on his doorstep.

She would thank him for his note to her. She would tell him she was sorry she hadn’t responded before this. She would tell him of her sorrow at his parents’ death. She would visit prettily, catch up on old times. She would be poised, polished, sophisticated, Laura St. Bride at her Plano matron best.

She would never, ever let him know that she had called him just to hear his voice. That she had tucked away the picture of him leaning against the pillar. Or that she waited here, courage extinguished, binoculars in hand, spying on him for all the world like a teenage girl with her first crush.

She waited over an hour in the shimmering heat, leaning against the same pillar on the portico of the great house, feeling the same warm stone against her back, before she saw him, riding over the rise behind the Folly.

The glasses brought him close to her, so close that surely he saw her…. Oh, but he didn’t, he couldn’t. He sat astride an enormous gray hunter, a tall man silhouetted briefly against the bright morning horizon before he blended into the trees and the glasses blurred.

She knew him at once.

Her heart skipped. She adjusted the glasses to bring him back into focus, starved for all the signs of the years’ passing, starved for the sight of him.

He pulled the reins up quickly and looked back over his shoulder, and did she imagine it or did she hear him call to someone? Diana? Julie? He turned back, and she saw his hand reach to the pocket of his shirt, as if he wanted…. Oh, no. The impatient movement of his hand as it came away empty brought a warm tide of memory. So many times she had chided him about his smoking; so many times he had tried to quit. “For me?” she’d wheedle, and with a quick smile, he’d promise to try again….

Did he still devour homemade cookies to chase away the craving? He had liked hers best.

He cantered the hunter around, still waiting for his companion, and now she saw the full range of him. Still lean, despite all those cookies (
don’t look, don’t remember
), but his shoulders had filled out. He had needed that, he had needed to leave that boy’s lankiness behind, gain the stature of a man. She looked at him as he waited on the great horse, and he was perfect.

Nothing had changed, nothing….

I am sick with old longings.

She lowered the binoculars to dash her hand across her eyes, and when she looked again, she saw the girl riding over the rise, approaching him.

Enormous sunglasses and a riding helmet hid the girl’s face, but even so, this must be Julie. Her body was too young, her movements too lithe, her clothes too ragtag, to belong to Diana, and Richard leaned in towards her with the universal protective stance of a father towards a daughter.

Julia Ashmore. Sixteen now, not the newborn who had won Laura’s heart through the nursery glass or the toddler who liked the songs her aunt made up for her. In her infant innocence, clearly the center of Richard’s life, even as Diana receded in importance. No one watching Richard and Diana that last Christmas had missed the obvious deterioration of their marriage, the careful politeness, the contempt coiled beneath the surface. Francie had seen, had moved in swiftly to strike.
He just wants to keep Julie,
she’d whispered fiercely later, in the shadows of night,
or he’d get rid of Di. She doesn’t deserve him, she doesn’t know how to make him happy.

Oh, but Francie had known. By then, she and Richard had become lovers….

While her mind wandered, she had stopped paying attention. She refocused on the pair and saw, in horror, that Julie had bolted upright on her horse and was pointing straight in her direction. Dear God, not like this, she hadn’t thought they could see her! She didn’t have to hear Julie’s words to catch the girl’s urgency. Richard looked at his daughter, his brow creasing in consternation – and then – no, no,
no!
– he turned and stared in the direction of her arm until he stared right at Laura.

And then he forgot Laura completely, as Julie’s mare reared up and dumped her unceremoniously onto the ground.

Laura’s breath froze.

For one terrible moment, Julie lay motionless. Richard reached out quickly to catch the mare’s reins and failed as the mare shied away from him. Laura watched him dig his heel into the hunter’s flank to urge it on after the fleeing horse, and she released a breath she hadn’t even known she held when he caught up with the mare, grabbed the reins, and yanked them sharply to bring the horse under control and away from the girl lying on the grass.

A second after the horses stopped, he was sliding off his saddle and running across the grass to Julie. Oh, dear Lord, what had she done, was Julie hurt or worse…. She tasted blood where she had bitten into her lip, but she never felt the pain until she saw Julie sit up, shaking her head.

Richard leaned forward, his arms slipping around his daughter, and then he stopped.

In one terrible glance, across hundreds of yards, he looked straight at Laura.

She lowered the glasses and found herself shaking. Oh, what had she done, why hadn’t she waited for him to open the door….

She went running for her car, slamming open the door, fumbling for the ignition, desperate to leave before Richard Ashmore decided to come find the woman who had nearly killed his daughter.

~•~

She drove restlessly all morning, relearning the roads of her younger life, marking the changes of her lost years. Her old school, the park where she had received her first kiss, the bookstore where she had worked…. She stored up her mental snapshots to mull over the lunch she ate out at the James.

There, Mark found her. Well, it was her fault, she shouldn’t have answered the call. She listened patiently to his tale of woe. Meg had talked back to Emma again, and Mark, who had already discovered that it was easier to master the universe than to referee between two strong-willed females, wanted her to fix it all. Not now, she thought, not now, but she was inured to responsibility, so she chastised Meg and commiserated with Mark about the trials of living with a rambunctious teenager. While she talked and listened, she looked out over the waters of childhood and let herself bathe in the soft airs of Virginia, and she did not easily remember all the years of exile.

Finally, she disentangled herself from her two master manipulators and told them in no uncertain terms to work it out and not to call her for the rest of the day. She needed to be alone, to remember that once she had been Laura Abbott, and she had loved the man who had married her sister.

After a while, she headed west, following the bends of the river, and with one hand on the steering wheel, she fished around in her shoulder bag with the other for the key she had found in her jewelry case.

Not that it would fit now. Surely her father had changed the locks at some time in the last fourteen years; if not, then Lucy or Diana must have changed them after his death…. She hadn’t a hope that the key still opened the front door of the house where she had grown up, but maybe they had never fixed the window in Diana’s old bedroom, the one with the broken latch and the strong branch a foot away.

Her father’s house looked cared for, for all that the sign in the front lawn read FOR SALE BY OWNER, with
Call D. Ashmore
and a phone number below it. Not the number at Ashmore Park, so that must be Diana’s work number. The grass was mowed, the bushes trimmed, the windows clean, and someone had watered the roses Lucy had planted when she was fifteen.

No hint of death or violence here.

She parked the Jaguar in the drive, unworried that someone might see her. Even now, the nearest neighbors were at least a mile away. No unwelcome company had disturbed the silence that Dominic Abbott demanded. And such silence! She was used to the muted rush of London traffic, but she heard nothing now but the engine cooling down and a far-away plane trailing above.

Dominic’s piano had fallen silent forever.

She stared at the front door, and she felt sick.

He was dead. They had buried him, his remaining daughters, in some unknown grave that she intended never to visit. She need not worry that he would appear at the dining room window, his cold, remote eyes watching her turn the key over and over in her hand. The sound of the key in the lock could not disturb his reverie, could not wreck whatever strange, atonal chord occupied his mind, could not summon him into the front hall to confront the daughter whose key still worked.

Someone had seen to that.

So you’re back
, he might have said, if a person unknown had not swung at his head with tremendous force.
I’m working, don’t disturb me now….
She walked into the music room, just off the main hall, and the strain in her fingers eased ever so slightly around the key. She slipped it into the pocket of her jeans.

Oh, this room! Dominic’s refuge from the world, where he mapped out his conducting strategies and wrote that unworldly music that no one wanted to hear. He had replaced his old stereo system, and the musician in her was absurdly pleased to see that. She stepped around his reading chair to the shelves that held his vast music collection, and she was startled to see that he even had bought one of her own CDs. She lifted it out, with shaking fingers, and she saw his jottings among the liner notes.

Well, she could imagine what he had written; she remembered very well his comments in that unspeakable review. She tucked the CD back into its place.

She wandered around the room, avoiding the piano where he had died as long as possible, letting her fingers trail over his desk, his reading chair, his stack of once-read
Opera News
. She stopped at the desk where he had spent so many solitary evenings, planning the next step in his vagabond career, and she picked up the photograph – the only sign that the man who had dominated this room had any human ties.

Diana, on that unforgettable night when he had conducted her in concert. She had worn her elegant satin wedding dress a second time, and Dominic had paid tribute with the string of pearls he placed around her neck. Richard had taken the picture, probably gritting his teeth as his father-in-law monopolized his bride – or perhaps not. He and Diana had still been happy, still laughing in the glow of their summer honeymoon.

Just off camera, Francie had been ready to spit nails.

She put the picture down and sat down at the piano.

No trace of blood, no lingering remembrance of life seeping away….

For a moment, she was afraid to touch the keys. What might she not hear
– Sit up straight, keep your fingers curved, how many times do I have to tell you, child?
Or, more likely,
Again! Again! Pay attention! Higher! Higher!

Everyone in the family knew what Dominic said to his daughters at the piano. Anyone could stand outside the door and know instantly who sat beside him at the keyboard, just from the tone of his voice. For Diana, lovely, blessed Diana, all gentleness and awe; for Lucy, a certain guarded respect – if he ripped up at her, she might just rip right back, and Lucy always had the option of leaving. For Francie, laughter and flirtation; Francie had known from birth how to charm him. But for Laura—