All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (43 page)

“The cove!” Diana finally heard her. “Good God, did she drown?”

“No,” said Laura. “Someone cut her throat.”

The shadows touched this room, this room cleansed bright only a few minutes before by camaraderie and music. Horror brushed them now, horror lived with for eleven years in remembered moments, in dreams, in all the lies Laura had told her husband. It swept over Diana, and the darkness covered her, claimed her like a bride.

“You think I did that.”

“Yes,” Laura said, “I do. Who else?”

“You think – you think I
killed
her. You think—” and Diana breathed in hard, even as her eyes died— “you sit there, right across from me—”

“Di.” She could barely speak.

“You think—” and Diana swallowed for control, and her voice escalated— “you think I went out there prepared, with a knife—”

“No, she had the knife, she must have—”

“And she turned her back on me, or I came up behind her, and I grabbed her by the hair so she couldn’t move, and even with her screaming and fighting, I slit her throat – oh, God, all that blood, the jugular is full of blood – and you think I killed her—”

“I did think it, Di.” She managed only a whisper. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

She had never seen eyes like that, remote, washed clean of all light and life. Diana moved, jerkily, like someone rediscovering how to walk; the movement pulled her up and across the room, back into the realm of the living. Laura dug her fingernails into the leather arm of Dominic’s chair and watched Diana standing over the piano, staring at the keys, her hands flitting across their ivory gloss in search of memory and remorse.

Diana’s fingers slashed across the keys in a jarring cacophony of tangled chords.

“I didn’t kill her.” Diana spoke to the keys. “I never saw her that day.”

“You’re lying.” Laura forced the words out. “You just stood there and described what you did.”

“
Electra
.” Laura saw the scene then on her mind’s stage. “Strauss. Orestes nearly decapitates Clytemnestra while Electra watches. Daddy directed up in Canada a few years ago, and I worked in production. We had to stage it like that. You can’t cut someone’s throat any other way.”

“You’re lying.” But her mind raced into new corridors:
who else? who else?

Diana turned her head and looked straight at Laura.

“Who are you?” she said, and now her voice seemed stronger. “What kind of person are you if you believe I did that to her? How can you be in the same room with me, and believe that I could do that to my own sister?”

“You’re my sister.” Laura’s turn to whisper. “And – to be honest – it’s very tough.”

Diana gave a short, mirthless laugh, and sat down at the piano. Her hands brushed the keys again and swept into a strange, atonal melody, one of Dominic’s. The music took her over like a master: unearthly, as empty of feeling as Diana herself, sparkling with all the cold inhumanity of a jewel.

My God, maybe she didn’t. But the way she talked—

And above her thoughts, rising and falling with the notes, Diana’s voice, saying, “Tell me what happened.”

“I saw Francie lying in the cove.” The music helped her, removed her from the immediacy of this room, this scene. Memory glistened like a painting she had once seen, long ago, in a far-off museum. “I wasn’t seeing straight, I felt faint and strange – she drugged me, you see, she didn’t want me coming after her to stop her—”

“Stop her from what?” Diana ran her fingers up an arpeggio.

“Don’t you
know?
”

Are you telling the truth and you weren’t there – or don’t you remember? Have you blown your mind so completely?

Are you mad, Diana?

“Laurie?” Diana had stopped playing; her hand whipped around to grasp Laura’s arm with unexpected strength. “Stop her from what?”

She said nothing.

“Laurie!” Diana’s hand had started to shake. “Tell me! You know. I can see it in your face. She wanted to meet me. What was she planning, why did you need to stop her—”

And she saw the truth then.

Diana whispered, “You said she had a knife.”

She felt fragile and unreal in Laura’s arms, as though the slightest touch might cause her to crumble into dust. She did not cry. She did not break down the way a sane woman might have, faced with the knowledge that her own sister had intended her death.

Then, somehow, she managed to pull away. “Then what happened?”

My God, I am cold, I am so cold. There’s nothing in you, Di, only brittle ice. No wonder Richard left you – but you, my poor sister, you can’t leave.

“I tried to get to her.” Laura found herself shaking, and her voice shook with her. “I kept hoping – I couldn’t believe my eyes – and then I got closer, and I knew she was dead….”

“And you didn’t call for help?”

Oh, cool, cool Diana. Nothing touched her, did it? “I didn’t – touch her, I don’t think I did, nobody could be alive after that. Her dress looked like she was in a slaughterhouse. All that blood—”

Diana said bloodlessly, “That must be a terrible memory.”

She swerved on her sister then. “I don’t
have
a memory. I talked to a doctor about it, because I only remember bits and pieces. She drugged me so badly, Francie did, to keep me from interfering, she gave me some sort of hallucinogen, I started to miscarry, my skin felt so hot.” Her throat closed up. “Nothing’s ever come back—”

And in the midst of dimming memory, Diana asked, “So how did you get away?”

Here, finally, the dark center of the horror. If Diana had held the knife, she herself had surely plunged it in. The void of her heart lay gaping open now, the wound made by her guilt, weary from the denial of eleven years.

“I left her there.” And now her voice didn’t tremble; her hands didn’t shake. She took vague pride that her composure matched Diana’s. “I don’t know how I got off Ash Marine, I don’t remember leaving, but I did. I didn’t take our car, I must have walked – the state patrol found me, and I was bleeding so badly they airlifted me out to a hospital. I left her there, I never even touched her to see if maybe she was still alive,
I left her there to die
—”

In a spiraling delirium, she had walked away, leaving her earliest and closest fellow traveler to come to the end of her journey. She’d lost child, sister, hero, lover; she’d nearly lost her life
. For God’s sake, stop crying! I have to think what to do…. She’s bleeding so badly.
Old remembrance, barely dreamed, barely known, and the hysterical cry:
Oh, what have I done, what have I done….
Later, the blood she found on her sweater, blood mingled with her own, but not her own.

“So,” said Diana softly, “you killed Francie too.”

And looked Laura straight in the eye, and never blinked.

She’d never heard the words before, but once spoken, they became true. She felt tears falling on her hands, and she looked at them in surprise, astonished that she noticed them in the rapier pain of her heart.

Diana said coolly, “So you saw her and you left and you blacked out. Not surprising. You were in shock. Forget it, I’d have done it too. Did anyone else know?”

Her heart threatened to stop. “What?”

“Think.” Diana prosecuted her case with a cold verve that Lucy might envy. “Someone helped Francie. She couldn’t plan her way out of a paper sack. She simply wasn’t that organized.” She bent her head over the keyboard. “Plus, if you two had a car, someone gave you the keys to the bridge. You couldn’t have gotten to Ash Marine without them.”

She marveled through her grief. She’d never doubt Diana’s intelligence again. In all these years, she had never once thought of the bridge keys that Francie had magically produced, not even when she herself had stolen them from Dominic’s desk the week before. She reached into her pocket slowly and pulled out the keys. “These?”

Diana’s mouth curled. “Nice try, Laurie. When did you get those?”

“Last week. I found them in Daddy’s desk.”

Diana held out her hand. “As far as I know,” musing lazily, as though she were discussing something inconsequential, something that she really didn’t care about, “only three people had keys. I always had to borrow Daddy’s.”

She spoke slowly, trying to fit the pieces together, “Then how were you planning to get in to meet Francie?”

“I stopped by Ashmore Park when I was looking for Richard, and I took his.”

“But Philip had keys too—”

And Laura stopped.
There’s no help in truth.
If Diana were telling the truth – and was she? could she trust that Diana wasn’t lying, hadn’t gone mad? – she certainly was not going to tell her that the keys filched from Ashmore Park all those years ago must have belonged to Philip Ashmore. Richard had taken his keys with him. She remembered – oh, the little things she remembered – the
clink
of his watch and keys on the old piano bench there in the cottage.

And she completed, because she had to, “But Philip would never give his keys to Francie. He’d have told Daddy she was there—”

She stopped, because she saw it too.

Richard. Francie. Philip now, a new wild card. And—

“Exactly.” The first crack in Diana’s composure appeared, the first fissure in her glacial calm. Her hands, still clenched around the keys, were shaking. “And Philip probably did want me dead – he and Peggy wanted me out of Richard’s life—” More cracks now. Francie’s death had started to touch Diana; her eyes were dark now, dark with pain and terror eleven years after the fact. “But Philip was getting rid of me. Richard and I were through – I was giving up, so, oh God, oh God,
Daddy
had keys! Francie had
Daddy’s
keys! It was Daddy, wasn’t it, it was, he knew I’d told Richard, he knew Richard wouldn’t protect him—”

“Di, oh, Christ, Di, no,
listen
– Francie said—”

“Daddy,” sobbed Diana. “Oh, God,
Daddy
—”

He’d come back now, filling the room, Dominic Abbott, failed composer, master conductor, deserted lover, acquitted killer, son-of-a-bitch father, with his narrow face and his quiet, icy rage. She saw him there, his long, thin fingers touching Diana’s shining hair, caressing Francie’s uplifted cheek, beating out the time like a metronome while Laura struggled to reach that high E.

“My God,” and Laura heard him break the heart of his most trusting victim, “he hated me that much – I gave up Richard for him, and he still hated me—”

“Di—”

Diana jumped up then, and the keyboard cover smashed down, a loud blasphemy against her sobbing as she shoved Laura back from her. Laura stumbled and lost precious seconds as she fell against Dominic’s desk, seconds long enough for Diana to elude her. Seconds behind her sister up the stairs; seconds late before the door to Diana’s bedroom slammed in her face.

“Di! Don’t shut—”

The crash a brutal slash across her words. She threw the door open, and before her lay all that she’d feared.

The mirror smashed to pieces. Diana weeping, tears, blood, every breath a sob. The light carpet beneath already a splotched painting. She stopped Diana before she could rip her other wrist apart.

~•~

Laura’s mind shut down.

She reached for the mirror shard, tried to force it from Diana’s hand. Diana resisted, backing off, and the jagged edge slipped across her hand and ripped into Laura’s palm and fingers.

Their blood mingled, spilled, streaking the gold silk of the ball gown swept to the floor by their struggle. The history of their parents’ love affair lay there, a canvas for a bloody battleground.

Laura couldn’t think; the agony of the slash on her hand drove all consideration from her mind. Diana hung on to her bloody dagger, fighting, sobbing, maniacal in her grief, unreasonable in her pain.

She raised it above her other wrist, and Laura screamed.

“Di!
No!
”

Diana, distracted, stopped and stared at her.

“Di?” She had to make her voice steady. “
Put it down.
”

Diana stared at her blankly, then looked at her bloody wrist, then looked at her again, and then looked at the shard.

“Di?”

No reaction. Not a flicker of recognition where they were, what she held in her hand.

Laura had never seen eyes so empty – so crazy.

She had to act. She didn’t stop to think; she went on instinct. She clenched her bloody fist, hauled back, and threw all her strength into a punch that landed squarely on Diana’s jaw.

Diana went down immediately, falling limp and docile against the footboard of the bed, her legs bending askew, a puppet whose strings had been brutally cut. The shard fell aside, now harmless.

“Keep your hand up!”

“I can’t – let me just
go
—”

“Squeeze! Damn it,
squeeze!
”

The first aid training necessary to raise a rambunctious child hadn’t allowed for a suicide attempt. She forced herself into calm. If she let herself react, she’d yield to hysteria or – at the very least – to the stinging burn on her palm. She swallowed her panic and ran into the bathroom for a towel.

Diana pre-empted her and proceeded to have the hysterics for both of them.

“How could you say that, Daddy loved me best—”

“He did, Di, he did. Hold still, okay?”

“Not Daddy, he wouldn’t have done that to me—”

“Keep your arm
up
, Di, I don’t want this to fall off.”

“Why didn’t Francie just leave me alone, stupid bitch, Daddy knew I wasn’t coming back, she should have gone after you—”

“Because Daddy loved you best and she couldn’t deal with it.”

“And Richard threw me out, that can’t be it, but he didn’t want her, not really, he only used her to get back at me because of Julie—”

“Hold your arm up, and squeeze! Can you get your other arm around my neck?”

The room looked like the scene of a massacre. Diana had already lost a lot of blood, and the first towel soaked through in seconds. Laura swallowed hard at the sight. She needed help. She needed Cat Courtney’s cool, Lucy’s unflinching balance, Richard’s quiet strength, but she was only Laura Abbott, trying to deal with the worst emergency of her life, terrified that her sister would bleed to death on her before help could arrive.