All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (39 page)

If Julie wanted to know, then she could deal with the truth.

“The summer after my junior year, I dated a boy named Neil Redmond. He was cute, just a really nice guy. Very shy, like me—”

“I’ve heard of him,” Julie broke in. “My dad knows him, I think.”

“I’m not surprised,” Laura said. “Neil’s mother was a friend of your grandmother – they fixed us up. Anyway, Neil and I dated all summer – we went to movies, and he took me to the July 4th celebration down near the old city, and we just hung out together – he was a very restful person for me, and I think I was the same for him.”

She stopped. Just how much could she tell Julie? But, even if Richard was bent on keeping his daughter pure and unsullied, surely Lucy had clued her in. Surely Julie knew
something
.

“I don’t think we were in love – he was seventeen, and I was still sixteen, but—”

Julie solved her dilemma. “You had sex?”

Richard’s little girl was a lot savvier than he thought she was.

“No,” Laura said definitely. She could do her auntly duty and deliver a little morality lesson. “I never had sex until I met my husband, and that’s really a good life plan to follow, Julie.”
Even if he picked me up in a night club and I went with him because he had a lot of money in his wallet.
“But we were teenagers, so we fooled around some. And then my father found out.”

“Really?” The girl sounded startled and a little worried. “You can tell by just looking?”

Interesting. So Julie had done some experimenting of her own. “No. He found out because Neil wanted to discern if he had a vocation to the priesthood and he went to talk to my father because Daddy had been a priest, and Daddy asked him about his experience, and I guess Neil didn’t deny it fast enough. Daddy told him to stay away from me, and then he ordered me not to see Neil again because—” Dominic’s order still rankled after all these years. She said flatly, “Because he was concerned that I would divert Neil from God. That’s what my mother had done to him.”

Julie stared at her.

“Something else happened – oh, I think it was a few months earlier, maybe in late spring. My father was pretty tough on me during voice lessons. He did train me – in fact, he spent quite a lot of time working with me, but I’m a mezzo soprano, and I guess I wasn’t enough of a challenge for him.” She was surprised when Julie nodded – had she already heard this? “We were listening to the opera – the Met used to broadcast on Sunday afternoon – and I was notating the music because I liked the arrangement, and Daddy looked at my music notebook and realized I was notating everything perfectly.”

She saw the moment when Julie caught on. “You’re kidding! You have perfect pitch?”

“Yes,” said Laura. “I’m the only one in the family, unless—?” Julie shook her head. “It’s very useful when you write music, believe me. I can hear music and tell you exactly what key it’s in – I can tell you all the chords, I can even hear parts in a choral piece and write them down correctly. I can sight-read anything, and I rarely sing pitchy. I can sing
a cappella
without hearing a note, and – this is really useful – I can anticipate the next note based on the key and the chords. If I hear a motif I like, I can remember it to write it down later. Of course, Daddy realized right away what I had and that he could use that. So,” she drew a breath, “right after he finished telling me that I couldn’t see Neil anymore, he said that Francie could go ahead with her plans for Juilliard, but he needed me to stay here and go to school at William and Mary so that I could work for him.”

Julie looked bewildered. “So what was so terrible about that? He was a great musician.”

“No.” Laura made her voice forceful. “He wasn’t. He was a good conductor, but his compositions – don’t buy too far into that myth about the misunderstood genius, Julie. There’s a reason his work never caught on. He was – well, he was Salieri, just without the fame.” Julie looked shocked. She probably couldn’t comprehend that a daughter could say such terrible things about her father. “But that’s not why I decided to run away – and that’s when I made the decision. I stood there, listening to him lay out my future, and I knew I had to get away.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I was the sacrificial lamb,” Laura explained. “He was determined to keep one of us by his side – I don’t know why, maybe he was still obsessed with my mother. He needed one of us to be his muse. It was supposed to be your mother, but she escaped when she and your dad got married. He never did get his hooks into Lucy because she didn’t live with us. And Francie—” She hesitated. It still felt disloyal to tell the truth about Francie’s voice. “Francie didn’t have a professional voice, her tone wasn’t quite there, it was a little muddy. That’s why he was willing to let her go away. But I did have a professional voice, and I had the pitch, and that’s why he said I had to stay there with him. He said – he said I owed him.”

Silence. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the seat.

“So – you decided to run away because your father wanted you to work for him, but you couldn’t leave because of school?”

Laura nodded. “I had to make money so I could leave. It took a long time to build up a nest egg. I figured I needed five thousand dollars, and I didn’t make much working after school and babysitting.”

“Five thousand?” Julie sounded fascinated. “What did you do?”

“I took my mother’s jewelry.” Julie’s eyes flared in acknowledgment, and Laura smiled. So her theft had finally been discovered. How long had it taken Dominic to find out – five years, ten? She held out her hand and twisted the emerald ring on her finger. “See this? It’s the only piece I ever tracked down later. At the time, it brought me okay money. She had an incredible jewelry collection from the earl, and she took it when she left him for good. And Daddy had bought me some savings bonds that I cashed in. I had about four thousand, when I finally left, so that’s what I lived on. The jewelry was for reserve.”

And it would never have been needed, if Francie hadn’t given birth prematurely.

“I don’t know how you did it.” Julie reached out for her hand and angled the ring to catch the sunlight. It glowed, green fire, throwing stars against the leather of the car. “How could you live like that, for a year,
for a whole year
, knowing you were going to walk out? Didn’t it bother you? Didn’t you feel guilty when someone would talk about the future, or make plans, and you knew you weren’t going to be there?”

She cast back in time to that last year, that last Christmas, when she had celebrated with her father and sisters, and each present opened, each carol sung, each cookie baked, had reminded her that she would never celebrate with them again.
Never again, never again
, had echoed in the Alleluia she had sung at midnight Mass. That last Easter, she had sat at the Ashmores’ kitchen table, listening to Richard explain tangents and cosines, and she had watched the pencil in his hand drawing his incomprehensible axes. The overhead light had glinted off his hair and shadowed his eyes, and a strange despairing relief had spread through her. Despair that she would never see him again, that he would never again say patiently, “Laurie, stop daydreaming, you have to pass this test.” Relief that she was leaving them all. Relief that she would never again suffer the reality of her own flaws, flaws so great that her father wanted only to exploit her and the love of her life preferred her sister.

“No,” she said, “I didn’t feel guilty.”

“But you were lying to them,” and the shocked accusation in Julie’s voice reminded Laura all over again of the duality in the girl. The princess of Ashmore Park hadn’t learned yet that even idols sometimes did what they must to survive. “You didn’t even tell anyone what was wrong. You didn’t give anyone a chance to make it up. You – you—” she hunted for the right word. “You
deceived
them.”

Ah, the idealism of youth.

Laura said gently, “Do you ever deceive anyone, Julie?”

“Of course not! I would never!”

Then Julie stopped, now beyond that first instinct to deny. Laura watched in interest as Julie’s hot rebuttal failed on her lips and a quick light of knowledge flashed across the girl’s face, and waited, ready to knock her niece swiftly and decisively off her high horse.

But Julie, she saw, Julie with that first-class Ashmore mind, Julie ticked off her options in lightning order and realized that the game was up.

Julie changed then, as the mask shattered and fell away. The too-wide eyes of innocence became older eyes, quick and rich with knowledge; her hands, frozen in flight, relaxed and fell into her lap.

She said directly, “How did you know?”

An honest response. Laura didn’t think she could have admitted such a thing herself. “It takes one to know one.”

Julie nodded.

“Besides,” Laura added for good measure, “you use a lot of my techniques. I’ll bet you’ve watched the video for ‘Midnight.’ You’ve got my mannerisms down pat.”

Julie sounded a shade rueful. “I guess I should have known better.”

“You probably couldn’t help it.” She could have added that, after a while, playacting became living, and reality and fantasy blurred into one. “It becomes second nature. You don’t even have to think about it, do you, when you’re with your father or Lucy. You just wear it like a skin.”

“I never thought about it that way.”

“Well, think.”

A small respite. Julie sank into thought, and Laura left her alone. There was no point in pushing the girl. She’d just endured an unmasking with good grace and little hint of the pain that must have come with the ripping away of her veil.

Maybe she might even equate this moment with the humiliation of not going to the prom. A sensitive, intelligent young man might have divined that Julie Ashmore was, at heart, a fraud.

“You know,” Julie said into the sunlit silence, “they like me this way.”

“They don’t know you any other way.”

“Oh, come off it!” Julie’s eyes flashed. “You haven’t been around. You don’t know what’s going on. Dad likes me like this. He has this idea of a perfect little miss, and if that’s what he wants, then that’s what I’ll be. He’s a great dad and he deserves to have his daughter the way he wants. And Tom and Lucy – well, you ask them, they’ll tell you I’m the perfect niece. I’m polite, and I listen to my elders and I do exactly what they want, and they
like
me.”

Laura sat stone still.

“Tell me,
dear
Aunt Laura, you played such a great part, you were so sweet and meek and mild, did they
like
you for it? I’ve heard them talking about you for years. I remember when your first album came out, and Lucy and I saw it in the record store, and do you know what she thought at first when she saw your poster?” Julie stopped for breath. “Do you
know?
”

She sensed the volcano of emotion beneath Julie’s anger. Unknowingly, she had tapped into some deep vein of feeling that the girl had gone to great lengths to bury.

“I imagine,” she said quietly, to neutralize her words, “that she thought I was Francie.”

“They all did!” Julie burst out. “That’s how much you fooled them! Lucy – she bought your album, and I remember her playing it over and over that afternoon, and she looked like death. She played that song ‘Francie,’ and she couldn’t stop crying, because she said she’d never known you had such feeling in you, because you’d never shown any to her.”

“Oh, no.” She saw the picture Julie had so brutally drawn: Lucy sitting cross-legged on the floor, tears streaming down her face, mourning the sister who had hidden herself away.

“And my grandfather!” Julie hadn’t finished. “I’ll never forget how he looked!”

“Philip?” That dismayed her.

“Not
him!
Your father! Lucy made everyone get together for dinner. My father even came, even though he and my grandfather never got along. And no one could figure out what was going on. Lucy made me keep quiet, she said it was a surprise—”

“Oh, no.” She felt what was coming.

“Then after dinner, she put your CD on, ‘Francie.’ And I remember my mother, she started off looking sick, but then she just went blank, and she said something like, ‘Wait a minute, that’s not Francie, that’s not her
tessitura
.’ And Dad, he just looked tired and sad, and I could tell he wanted to leave. But he didn’t, he was going to stick it out as long as everyone else—”

She had heard enough. “Stop.”

“And then my grandfather.” Did Julie even realize that she was sobbing? “He yelled at Lucy, he told her to stop that song and take the CD and – and break it into a million pieces. And then he slammed out of the room. I don’t really remember what he said, I just remember his face and his yelling—”

“Julie.” She saw the horror of memory descend upon the girl’s shoulders, and she reached out for her. And Julie, after a second of hesitation, leaned against her and wept in wild fury and remembrance.

“His face. I never saw anyone look like that, not ever.”

“I can imagine.” She soothed back a strand of autumn hair.

“I saw him,” Julie wept. “Dad said that he’d had enough, and he told me to get my coat. So I did. And I saw him then. I saw him, Laura, your father that you tricked and deceived, that you wouldn’t even stay and help, that you hated so much you ran away from him and never even spoke to him again!”

“
Stop
.” She put all the authority of her years into her voice.

“I won’t stop! You listen to me! He was standing out in Lucy’s garden, next to her roses, and I heard him humming under his breath, and his hands were moving like the orchestra was playing—”

“Oh, God—”

“ ‘Francie,’ that’s what he was humming. And he turned around and he saw me, and he beckoned to me to come closer, and do you know what he said? Do you
know?
He said—”

“No—”

“He said, ‘Laurie wrote that song when she was a little older than you are now, Julie. She wrote it all down in her journal. She must still have that journal.’ And then my father came and – and I had to go with him. But I looked back at my grandfather one more time, I looked at him there, standing in the rose garden, and he had tears in his eyes.”