All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (6 page)

He had not then choked from the smoke. The screams and cries of those trapped with him had not transmitted in perfect digital fidelity. The sound as he collapsed to the floor had not clearly bounced off the satellite and come to rest forever on her voice mail.

On their daughter’s birthday, their time ran out.

Amid the snowstorm of free-floating paper, the cameras caught people falling from the sky, limbs held tightly against their bodies, arms and legs splayed out to brace against the approaching ground, hands clasped on their last journey. Men and women whose only crime had been to go to work, keep an appointment, attend a meeting – lost souls who preferred a last rush of cool, clear air against their faces to the flames of hell.

Not Cam, though, not Cam. For all his faults,
not Cam. Please, please, please, not Cam.

Then the explosive clouds, cries of disbelief because they could not trust their eyes.
Though mountains may fall….
Buildings did not fall; they stood forever, urban peaks against the heavens. But now a mountain fell, the second tower hit, buckling from its mortal wound, in a mushroom cloud that foreshadowed the end of the world. She stood between her two friends, their arms wrapped around her, her fingers endlessly working the redial –
your call cannot be completed
– and she sent up mindless prayers to the God she had neglected too often in the years since she had last seen Richard Ashmore.
Oh, please, please, please, please….

For twenty-nine minutes, she lived beyond hope, beyond despair. That second mountain could not, would not, fall. That pledge to love again could not, would not, go unheard. That man who had held her only a few hours ago could not—

For twenty-nine minutes, fate tossed her that rope.

Then the north tower fell to its knees and began to slide into the abyss, the great antenna descending into the obscuring ash of history.

And hills turn to dust….

It fell, eleven inexorable seconds of descent from the sky it had once conquered, the last act in a day that had redefined horror. Captains and kings, bond traders and secretaries and waiters, all fell from the sky in the merciless and egalitarian obliteration of millions of tons of stone and steel.

Across a vast sea, under a peaceful sky, Laura St. Bride watched as the man she had married and never loved enough, all his creativity and power, his charm and his infidelities, his kindness and generosity and manipulation – all that he had been, all that he would ever be – ceased to exist.

From dust we came, to dust we shall return.

~•~

Only his wedding ring survived, found in the rubble months later.

~•~

As so many other women did that day, Laura kept on breathing, kept on putting one foot in front of the other, for the sake of her child. The man in the tower was not only a husband but a father; she was not only his wife but the mother of his child. She dug deep inside herself to find the strength to tell Meg that her adored father was missing, presumed dead at the hands of men unknown for a cause he abhorred. In the flat that still held his presence, the day did not seem quite real to her, like one of those violent action movies that he so enjoyed and she took pains to avoid.

Impossible that he would never come back for the shirt he had overlooked, unbelievable that he would never again fiddle with the temperamental thermostat. Unthinkable, and not to be accepted, that he would never again take her in his arms and ask for another chance.

She wrapped herself in his shirt and knew that she was alone, as alone as the night she had met him.

And, in the middle of one of the great cities of the world, isolated. The international telephone lines were all jammed, and her computer kept losing its Internet connection. Her satellite phone became her only lifeline to the United States.

It rang all evening as she fielded frantic calls from Texas, as Cam’s brother Mark tried to find out if he had made it out alive and was now wandering the New York war zone, dazed and hurt. The St. Bride Data counsel, who had escaped down seventy-eight flights of stairs from the sky lobby, searched the hospitals and kept her updated through Mark. The corporate pilot, marooned at Teterboro by the ground stop of all aviation, called her to ask if she had heard from Cam.

They had only his text message:
Fire trapped love you.

Her manager reported that the producers of the show had offered to delay the opening a month, at considerable cost, to give her time. Roger and Terry stayed with her until finally she sent them home, telling them she and Meg were all right.

She held together, existing beyond thought in a day beyond belief.

More than anything, she wanted desperately to be alone with her living and her dead.

She held her daughter in her arms all evening, as she had from the precarious beginning of Meg’s life. For all her new teenage status, Meg was a child who had lost her father in an act of unspeakable evil, and she needed her mother. There was purpose in that, Laura acknowledged to herself, terrible as it was to find any relief at all on this day of days, she found it in being a mother. She cradled Meg in her arms, rocking her, until Cam’s little girl sobbed herself to sleep.

Then, for hours, she sat in bed beside her sleeping daughter, unable to close her eyes, watching as CNN relentlessly replayed the images – the smoke, the airliner, the fireball, the Pentagon, the falling bodies, the south tower, the rural field, the north tower. She saw the second plane dive to its doom again and again and again; she saw the towers, in their death throes, fall again and again and again. She could not summon the wherewithal to stop watching, even when the small part of her mind that hadn’t succumbed to shock told her to stop torturing herself.

When CNN reported that a man had been pulled alive from the rubble, she allowed herself to hope until the reports came that the survivor was one of the missing police officers.

Towards dawn, pictures of the prominent among the missing and the dead began to flash on the screen, and she saw the studio portrait that Cam had used in the last annual report. She stared at him as if at a stranger, not the man she had slept beside for so long. A summary of a life – founder and CEO of St. Bride Data, former Marine pilot, engineering doctorate, inventor, programmer, one of the few cyberspace masters who had flourished throughout the dot-com collapse. Husband. Father. The only member of his party who had not taken the last elevator to safety and a chance to see sunset.

No one picked up on the newly filed, newly rescinded divorce petition. No one knew that the glamorous Cat Courtney was now a widow. In the enormity of September 11, no one cared.

The London night had started to lighten, a sliver of light against the horizon, when she heard the line engage – not her satellite phone, recharging on the nightstand, but the data line for her laptop and printer. She trailed through the darkened flat – the flat that Cam’s mother had left her, an unexpected bequest from someone who hadn’t accepted her for years – and found paper lying in the top printer tray. Through the shadows, she saw the blinking light signaling a voice message.

She forgot to breathe.

She had checked her voice mail when she had come home, in one last bid for hope. The message, among so many thousands from Manhattan that day, had been delayed in transmission.

She pressed a button, and her husband spoke from the grave, what some were already calling Ground Zero. Paralyzed, she listened for minutes – ages – eternity – while around him people gasped for breath and begged for help that would never come.

I did love you, I never stopped….

The message ended abruptly, long after he had last spoken and the phone had fallen to the floor. It ended with the most ungodly sound that had ever existed on earth – the death cry of a mountain that could no longer stand tall against the heavens, surrendering to the dust from whence it had come.

The absence of hope, she discovered, lay beyond hell in a vast, icy void.

After a long time, she switched on the reading light and reached for the fax. The cover sheet showed that someone at Cam’s office, where his admin and senior executives were keeping vigil through the night, had looked up her private number and forwarded the message.

She looked at the next page.

~•~

ASHMORE & McINTIRE

Architects and Designers

RICHARD P. ASHMORE, AIA

SCOTT N. MCINTIRE, AIA

FAX TRANSMITTAL SHEET

TO: Whoever is in charge at St. Bride Data

FROM: Richard Ashmore

DATE: 9/11/2001

NOTE: URGENT! Please transmit to Laura St. Bride ASAP

Laura—

I just saw your husband’s picture on CNN – like so many Americans tonight, I cannot sleep, I cannot tear myself away from the TV. I have no words to express my grief for you. I cannot imagine what you are enduring right now. We’ll continue to pray that your husband has survived.

Don’t feel you need to respond – you have enough to deal with right now. If you need anything, call me. It doesn’t matter what time of day or night. If you need me, I will come to you.

For the time being, I will not tell your sisters that your husband is missing. Lucy is in the hospital and Diana is falling apart. I will leave it to you to contact them – or me – if and when you feel like it.

Remember that you have a family here that loves and misses you.

Always know that you can come home.

Richard

~•~

She sank to the floor, her legs no longer able to hold her up. She traced her finger across his scrawled name, and then she buried her face in her hands and went far, far away.

Chapter 4: After

AS SHE HAD FOR SO LONG, Laura St. Bride did what she had to do. With air traffic grounded in the United States and British flights under restriction, she and Meg waited in limbo for the first transatlantic flight out. Cam’s final message to her had dashed any hope that he might be found alive. They could take comfort from that, his brother Mark said, he had not lived to know the final moments of the tower.

Five days after a group of fanatics had decreed that their cause trumped his right to live, Laura and Meg arrived at the house in the exclusive community in Collin County, Texas.

There she found an awkward welcome. Cam’s siblings were unsure how to deal with a widow whose husband had been divorcing her. They didn’t dislike her, but they had never understood her; she did not share their business interests, and her career as Cat Courtney had only placed more distance between them. Only her position as the mother of his only child and her status as his best investment smoothed the way for her. No one wanted to traumatize Meg further or antagonize Cat Courtney by suggesting that Laura not stay at Cam’s house or attend the memorial services.

Cam had left complicated legal issues. He had not changed his will after he had filed for divorce, and she remained the beneficiary on his considerable life insurance policies. He had named Mark, now CEO of the St. Bride Data companies, as executor, and it was Mark, finally, who assessed her obvious grief at the memorial service, along with Meg’s heartbroken declaration that her parents had been reconciling and the confirmation from the attorneys that Cam had indeed ordered the divorce petition withdrawn, and decided that everything should stand as Cam had originally intended.

“Look, you were married for – what? Twelve years?” he said, and she nodded. “I know that Cam was no picnic to live with. Believe me, when you see this will, you may wish he’d changed it.”

Their sister Emma, who had never forgotten that her mother had left the London and New York residences to Laura, objected, “But they were getting divorced. Ex-wives don’t inherit—”

Mark seemed very much like Cam as he wheeled on her. “He’s provided for all of us. No one’s going to suffer if Laura’s place in the estate stands. And she wasn’t his ex-wife.”

“I really don’t care. I have enough money,” Laura said wearily. She loathed all this discussion of wills and inheritances; it seemed surreal and venal when bodies were still surfacing at Ground Zero. When she had finally fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion on the night of September 12, she had suffered nightmares of Cam trapped alive beneath the collapsed mountain of steel and rubble.

Then, in the midst of the haunting images she could not scrub from her mind, a practical thought occurred to her. She didn’t care about the St. Bride fortune, but she did care about her own creations. Cam had owned the Cat Courtney trademark and the copyrights to her songs. “I still have the rights to Cat Courtney, don’t I?”

Yes and no, she learned. Cat Courtney, Inc., one of Cam’s privately-held companies, indeed owned all that – but under the terms of the will, all intellectual property went into a special trust to be run by his brother. He had intended to protect his own patents and trademarks, Mark explained, never considering how it would affect her. He had probably thought she would tire of being Cat Courtney long before he died, so it would never be an issue.

“Oh, my God.” Laura sat down and stared at her new boss. “Do I have anything?”

“Of course,” Mark said immediately. “You own half right now – you always have. This is a community property state. And the rest of it – well, come on, Laura, I’m not going to interfere with a successful property like Cat Courtney. I do have some ideas that we can talk about when you feel like it.”

He outlined the rest of Cam’s will to her – a third to Meg in trust until she turned 35, a third to her in trust until she turned 35 or remarried, a third to be split among Mark, Emma, and various charities and minor beneficiaries. She and Mark were co-trustees, but he held the controlling vote. The total of Cam’s holdings in his privately-held companies and his portfolio gave the trusts astounding capital, but she had made her own money as Cat Courtney – that, thankfully, had already been in her name, along with the shares of stock Cam had given her and the investments he had made for her.