All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (44 page)

If help could get there in time.

“Come on!
Now!
” And she yanked Diana to her feet and pushed her into the hall and to the top of the stairs.

Diana didn’t move.

“Go!
Go!
” And she pressed against her sister’s back.

Diana stirred, and went, slowly. Blood tracked them all the way down the stairs; the carpet would never be the same again.

Her bloody wrist dripped a trail out onto the veranda.

The Jaguar was piled high with clothes. Laura ran back in the house and scooped up her purse and Diana’s car keys.

The sight of the keys woke Diana up. “Not my car! I don’t want blood on the seats.”

Laura stared at her in disbelief. “It’s your blood.”

“
No—
”

“Oh, my God.” She shoved Diana into the front seat, ruined her blouse as she buckled Diana in, and ground the gears as she roared the Mercedes out of the driveway.

“Where’s the nearest hospital?” she asked, and ground the gears again as she attempted in vain to obey a stop sign.

“I don’t know,” murmured Diana, and fainted.

Oh, dear Lord, Diana was going to die on her. She swallowed the terror rising in her throat, shifted awkwardly (she should have let Cam teach her to drive a stick shift), and floored the accelerator down the country road back towards Jamestown.

She hadn’t paid any attention to the roadside before. She’d been more intent on her destination, and she paid for it now. She hadn’t a clue where to find help. Oh, she could phone, ask for help, but she was running out of time. Diana was slumped over, her breathing shallow, her face sheet-rock white, the crimson of her wrist a slash against her pale skin.

Damn! Her cell phone battery flickered out.

Salvation, when it came, appeared in the form of the patrolman who flashed her to the side of the road a mile up. His lecture about her erratic driving and the expired license plates died on her lips when he saw her hand and looked at Diana. He knew first aid, thank God. He rewrapped the tourniquet, gave Diana a fresh handkerchief to staunch the bleeding, and gave them an escort to the ER entrance of a small local hospital.

Then he gave her a ticket for the expired license plates.

“Fine,” said Laura, and threw the ticket on the dashboard. Diana could jolly well take care of it later.

Inside, Diana was already sitting in a glassed-in cubicle, offering her bloodied wrist to the nurse. “What happened?” he asked, briskly unwrapping the makeshift tourniquet. “You’ve got quite a scratch there.”

“I broke a mirror,” Diana whispered.

“An accident,” Laura said, and refused to flinch at his knowing expression. “We were moving furniture, and it fell on her.”

“
Right
,” he said. “Better get those hands looked at.”

She’d forgotten the slashes on her own hands. She stared down at them, and on cue they burned.

Somehow, she and Diana weathered the hospital. The doctor quizzed them about the injuries to Diana’s wrist and didn’t pretend to believe Laura. “Frankly, Ms. St. Bride,” she said finally, “you can lie your way to kingdom come and back again, and I don’t care, but your sister needs to be watched carefully. She didn’t do a particularly skillful job of this, so I don’t think she seriously set out to kill herself, but you know she’s done this before, don’t you? She’s got scars. Don’t leave her alone tonight.”

The admitting nurse proved another stumbling block. “Next of kin, please.”

“Lucy Maitland,” said Diana.

“No.” Laura thought of Lucy, stroking the antique folds of the baby blanket; she and her baby shouldn’t deal with this. “Richard Ashmore.”

Diana showed the first sign of life since she had disappeared upstairs. “No! Don’t tell him, please! I don’t want him to know!”

No doubting her real alarm; no ignoring her real pain. “Laura St. Bride,” said Laura to the nurse. “I’m her next of kin. I’ll take care of the bill.”

Miracle of miracles, no one looked at her – covered with blood, hair wrecked, hands torn up – and recognized Cat Courtney behind Laura St. Bride. Not, she thought wearily, traipsing down to the business office, that she really cared, but she hadn’t the strength left to deal with the inevitable publicity. The doctor and nurses might dubiously accept her stupid cover story. No self-respecting tabloid would make the same mistake.

Diana said nothing until Laura had checked her out and bundled her back into the Mercedes. She sat quietly in the early afternoon sun, holding her wrist stiffly in her lap, her head tilted against the car window, and winced only slightly when Laura again ground the gears trying to shift out of first. The trauma of the last few hours had barely touched her face, Laura thought, stealing a glance from the corner of her eye; Diana looked frail and unearthly and utterly lovely.

She waited until she’d successfully maneuvered the Mercedes onto the interstate to Hampton before she interrupted her sister’s reverie.

“Your prescription, Di.” The doctor had prescribed a tranquilizer and bed rest once she got home. “Does your pharmacy deliver?” No answer. Ahead loomed the exit ramp for the exclusive riverfront community where Diana lived. She remembered just in time to hit the clutch before she attempted to downshift. “Di?”

Diana said in a small voice, “Why’d you lie for me?”

She wasn’t sure why. Maybe the desire to shield Lucy; maybe the fear of telling Richard. She didn’t doubt for an instant that he was going to blame all of this on her.
And don’t you deserve it? Didn’t you push her, because you can’t let Francie go?

She said, “You’re my sister. I love you, Di. You may choose not to believe that, but it’s true and I do. Sometimes there are laws about doctors having to report suicide attempts. I don’t know if that’s true here, but I didn’t want to chance it.”

“Oh.” Still the little girl’s voice. A moment of silence, while Diana fiddled with the bandage. “Do you think Daddy wanted to kill me?”

“No, I don’t.” Surely, the most bizarre conversation she could ever remember having. The sun beat down around them; they rode in well-sprung luxury on the Virginia roads, talking of lost blood and ancient rage. “I swear it couldn’t have been Daddy. Francie said—”

Francie had said, unequivocally, that Richard wanted his wife dead.

Not that Francie had ever been noteworthy for telling the truth.

She said carefully, slowing the car down for the turnoff to Diana’s condo, “You don’t mention Richard. They say the husband is always the first one the police look at.”

“Richard? Oh, heavens, no!” And Diana actually laughed. “No one could seriously think
Richard
would hurt me! He’d never jeopardize Julie. Besides, he loves me.”

She hadn’t a clue what to answer in the face of that confident declaration. And if this wasn’t interfering in their marriage, what was? “But if you were separated, and he wanted a divorce, and you wouldn’t give him one—”

“If he really wanted a divorce, he could get one.” Diana picked again at her bandage, and Laura snapped at her to leave it alone. “I can’t stop him, I don’t have grounds. Unless,” she glanced sidelong, “you’d like to give me an affidavit on Francie?”

“Forget it.”

“Francie doesn’t matter anyway. He’s found someone else.”

Instinctively, Laura resisted. “Di, you don’t have to tell me—”

“Oh, not just a one-night stand,” said Diana, “though I’m sure he’s had plenty of those. I mean, I have, I can hardly get mad at him if he hooks up, can I? But Lucy thinks he’s interested in some woman in London.”

“London!” Her breath caught.

“It’s his ring.” Diana ducked her head. “He went to London last year, and Lucy thinks he met someone there because he stopped wearing his ring. He hasn’t been back, though, so I don’t know if there’s any truth to it, unless,” and she raised her head again, “she’s come here, and I don’t know.”

Laura stared at the unforgiving plain of that bandaged wrist.

Diana whispered, “He doesn’t want me, you know. For a long time, he still loved me, but it’s all different now. It changed after his parents died, and I kept wondering: is this the day? Will he tell me that he wants a divorce? Sometimes he’d call, and I’d be terrified, because I knew the time had come…. But he never did, and it’s been a year now. Maybe Richard still feels that we’re mated for life.”

London.
Julie and I saw you in London
….

She’d sung to him, part of that great dark, glistening audience, and as he’d listened to her, some other woman had captured his lonely heart. She’d sung to him, and he’d already been lost to her, snatched again out of her reach by the spinning wheels of fortune.

She’d missed him for the third time.

His parents had just died. He’d rejected Diana. For the first time ever, he had stood alone, save for Julie, and he’d been in a mood to fall in love.

And I never saw him.

She stared ahead, she who had never won him, and said soothingly to she who had won and lost, “You have nothing to worry about, Di. No woman will ever take Richard away.”

She coped, as she’d learned the September before that she could. She hustled Diana upstairs and into bed, in a pale blue bedroom fit for a fairy-tale princess. The parade of visitors Richard had described hadn’t left a mark in this room, as they had not on Diana, the Lady of Shallot floating on bluebell gossamer. Diana had no spirit left in her. She lifted her arms docilely so that Laura could remove her ruined blouse; she stepped out of her jeans, one leg at a time, using her hand on Laura’s shoulder for balance; she held her wrist carefully out of the bath in deference to Laura’s reminder. And she nodded as though she agreed when Laura told her not to call Lucy.

“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.