All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) (32 page)

She ignored Diana, eyes dark with fury and humiliation. She ignored Lucy, eyes bright with pride and apprehension, and she walked down into the crowds.

She was inundated, people thrusting pens and napkins at her. She put them off, laughing, telling them to come see her at the Queen Bee table. She carried cards for such occasions; many times people didn’t have anything to write on when they asked for an autograph, and she wanted to give them something much better than a napkin. Her purse still lay by her chair that she had deserted – oh, it seemed ages ago now. She dug out the engraved
Cat Courtney
cards, and started to sign autographs.

Lucy came to sit beside her, handing out fliers, talking prices for tables briskly with some of the businessmen who came to their table. Once in a while, she gave Laura a cautious glance – for the first time, Lucy had seen Cat Courtney at work, and she wasn’t sure what to think – but mostly she did what Lucy did best. She negotiated. Mel took one look at Laura’s pale face and poured her a margarita, and Laura downed it swiftly between autographs. Mel poured her another.

Julie hovered around the table, receiving compliments for her performance.

Diana disappeared.

A long time later, Laura glanced up to see Richard standing several feet away, watching her. The darkness was gathering, and people were eating dinner, waiting for the fireworks to rise above the treetops from Williamsburg. She saw his eyes, and knew that they now stood on the shore of a great dark river, the currents of time flowing too strong against them. Eighteen years before, Richard Ashmore had made a covenant, and it reached across time and space to bind him still.

She saw, too, that the time of night had run out on them. Diana had cast them, pitilessly, irrevocably, into the day.

Vincerò!

Finally, Laura signed the last autograph. She turned down a third margarita and Julie’s offer to get her something to eat. She nodded when Mel said she’d call her the next day.

Then she gathered up her handbag, walked around the side of the house, and threw up all over the roses.

Chapter 9: Truth Will Out

“WOW.” EMMA FELL BACK. “
Where
did you learn that?”

Emma St. Bride, Brian Schneider decided, lived up to the sultry glances she’d thrown at him all evening long. He slid back up the sheets. “You,” he told her, “are a wild woman.”

“Wild?” Emma snuggled in next to him. “That sounds sexy. I like that.”

He had just enough energy left to wrap one of her carefully coiffed blonde locks around his finger. He wasn’t sure why, but he really wanted to mess up her hair, make her a little less put together. “You are very sexy,” he said. “A very wanton girl.”

She seemed to like that too. What a surprise she’d turned out to be. She’d called him mid-morning and asked him if he was free for dinner at the St. Bride mansion, and then had surprised him by making him grill traditional hamburgers and hot dogs out on the spacious back patio while she fixed everything else. No traditional beer, though – she’d told him that her religion didn’t permit alcohol, and he’d mentally consigned any possibility of late evening gladiator sport to the dustbin. Maybe he’d misread her. Maybe she just liked to tease a guy.

Still, he hadn’t minded. There were worse ways to spend the Fourth of July. They’d lain out on chaise lounges and watched the stars, and even the soft drinks she’d substituted for the beer hadn’t seemed too tame. The rich really were different; the St. Brides had a mosquito misting and outdoor cooling system that made lying on the terrace perfectly comfortable, even though by 10 PM the temperature had only dropped a few degrees. The cost of literally air conditioning the outdoors didn’t faze them.

Lying there, they’d exchanged life stories. She’d asked him about his work, his progression from economics instruction to print to TV. He’d told her about his failed marriage, now five years in the past, how he’d wanted kids and his ex hadn’t. She told him about her marriages; she seemed to bear the second and third husbands no ill will, and the first had been a starter marriage in college.

It became clear, as the evening progressed, that she bore only one person any ill will.

She talked about her brothers, and he’d learned a little more about Cameron St. Bride. Nothing exciting, other than that the man had been a control freak. “You know why he set up the Family Administration?” Emma said. “So he could see what everyone was doing with their charge accounts. I’ve had my own accountant for years, and he never tumbled to that.” Mark seemed less dynamic, less colorful, but generally cut from the same piece of cloth. “Too bad Cam didn’t appoint me CEO,” Emma said, but she didn’t seem angry. “I have more imagination than Mark does.”

He saw a way to get some real information. “Why didn’t he?”

“Because Cam,” said Emma, “was a world-class male chauvinist you-know-what. Women had their purposes, but not in the business world. He thought women belonged in the arts – our mother was a painter. Just goes to show men say one thing to their wives and another to their daughters – he doted on Meg, always told her she could be whatever she wanted.”

“What about his wife?” he asked casually. “How did she take that?”

“Oh,
God
.” Tones of deepest loathing. Now they were getting somewhere. “Dear little Laura. All sweetness and light and ‘yes, Cam,’ ‘no, Cam,’” she mimicked. “Took him for all he was worth, and then the second she had a little success it went right to her head, and she showed her true colors, started doing what she damn well pleased, neglecting her family, running off to Europe all the time. And keeping up that I’m-so-helpless-take-care-of-me act! And then she got upset because he saw other women on the side. Please! What did she expect?”

Whoa. More information than he’d imagined. “Well, sometimes successful businesswomen get a little full of themselves.” He mentally apologized to his sister.

“Business?” said Emma, and laughed. “Right. Like that woman can add two and two together. No, just like Cam wanted, she’s an
artiste
, above mundane things like money. Played right into his Neanderthal ideas. Cam thought she was
sooo
fragile, and Mark is just as taken in. I’m not fooled, though. I see right through her. That woman is tough as boots.”

He said, not entirely honestly, “You seem very perceptive.”

Not that perceptive. She was clearly so jealous of Laura St. Bride that she had lost all perspective.

“She’s still playing the helpless card. She’s so dumb that Cam wouldn’t even let her handle her own copyrights. Mark has to do it all for her, like he doesn’t have enough to do.”

So Laura St. Bride was successful, and not in business. She was an artist with copyrights. She worked in Europe. And she’d neglected her family for her career. He made a mental note to see if Aural Gem CC held any copyrights. Might as well check the trademark index too.

Why had no one ever heard of her? Did she work under another name?

Another painter like Kate St. Bride? Was that why she’d been left the London and New York residences? The mother with her business-minded children, seeing a kindred spirit in her daughter-in-law?

An artist. How did that fit in with the image he couldn’t shake, the woman at the piano?

“Well, it sounds like Cam got really fed up with that, if he started seeing someone,” he said. Actually, it sounded as if Cameron St. Bride had been a real schmuck. He was beginning to feel sorry for the mysterious Mrs. St. Bride. She’d been considerably younger than her husband; it must have been tough to put up with his infidelity.

“Oh,” said Emma, and waved a hand, “that started long, long before she was out of college.” College! He hadn’t thought to check on Laura St. Bride’s education. The privacy laws might make it difficult to find out very much. “In fact,” she turned on her side towards him, “do you want to hear just how dumb that woman really is?”

“Sure.” He wondered why Cameron St. Bride had started cheating on his wife so early in their marriage. Generally, a thirty-year-old man who married a girl twelve years his junior did so because he was besotted with her. Of course, there had been the baby; maybe her family had put the screws to St. Bride and insisted he make her an honest woman.

Interesting, but not a story he wanted to air, tarnishing a 9/11 victim and his widow.

“She had this sister, Francie,” said Emma. “I never knew her. I was living in Philadelphia then with Robert, so we were only here on holidays. She worked for the bank, but she stayed away most of the time… don’t really know the story there. Maybe she got sick of all that sweetness and light too. Anyway, she faded from the scene after a few years, so I never knew what happened until Mark told me.”

Francie.
Francie
. Why did that name ring a bell? “What happened?”

“She and Cam had a thing.” Emma rolled her eyes. “Honestly, my brother was a great guy, he took really good care of the family, but he
could not
keep his pants zipped. Mark says Francie started hanging around the airport, wanting flying lessons, pestering Cam all the time. This was during that time when Laura kept trying to have another baby, and I have to say, I did feel sorry for her about that, she went through hell. But every time she lost one, she got depressed, and Cam never did cotton to that, he liked people to buck up and take their lumps – anyway, I don’t know when the thing with Francie started or when it stopped, but I know Laura didn’t find out. He probably spun some story, and she bought it. She always believed everything he told her. And are you ready for this? She
still
doesn’t know.”

In Brian’s experience, wives always knew on some level. “She may have known more than she let on.”

“No,” said Emma positively. “He even said something about Francie in his last message – he called her from the tower, his last thoughts were for her, he
apologized
for Francie, and she is so dumb, she still didn’t get it.”

Brian was torn between horrified fascination – maybe it was his middle-class upbringing, but in his world, an honorable man did not have an affair with his sister-in-law – and his bloodhound scent for the story. His instincts told him this was important. He had to admit that there was something touching about a husband reaching out to his wife with his dying breath to heal old wounds. “That’s just as well. She shouldn’t have her memories of her husband ruined by something that happened – when was this?”

“Oh, I don’t know, ten years ago or so.” Emma sounded vague. “Maybe more. Let’s see, Robert and I were still married, and we got divorced right before the IPO, because Cam said he might be able to claim part of my stock, so this fling with Francie was before that. I’m thinking early 90s.”

She started talking about her second marriage and her disastrous third marriage to a New York lawyer, ruined by the burden of unsuccessful infertility treatments. Brian let her talk. The torrent of words gave him cover for assembling what he knew in a mental checklist.

Then they talked about movies and favorite songs and whether the Stones or the Beatles were the best group of all time. They put on a classic rock CD and Emma said she didn’t think it would be too bad to dance, the Lord would forgive her, and they danced under the stars. Then they lay back down and held hands, and talked a lot more about not much of anything.

Then she stopped talking, and she moved over to his chaise lounge and settled alongside his body, and he found something else she was willing to risk her immortal soul for.

It was the wee hours of the morning before Brian left, and by that time, he was a drained man. She had her character flaws, and clearly contentment and charity weren’t her more outstanding virtues, but he sensed that, deep down, Emma St. Bride was a very lonely woman. She had no children, no family other than a brother and a niece on loan for the summer. Her only hobby was taking care of the family mansion, and she was bored and at loose ends. Part of her hatred of Laura St. Bride, he surmised, was that Laura had a child and a career to take up her time, and her husband had loved her even if he’d been a complete jerk. Emma needed something to occupy her mind.

He wasn’t sure how much he liked her, but she did intrigue him. He was willing to give it a shot, see if he might occupy her mind for a while.

He was exhausted by the time he reached the Emma-less suburb of McKinney to the north, but not so exhausted that he didn’t go immediately to his computer and log online. The search he had in mind required access to the specialized databases that the station subscribed to, but at least he could see what “Cat” and “Francie” and “piano” and “Europe” had in common besides a nagging feeling that a monumental story was hovering just out of his reach.

He typed in “Cat Francie Europe piano” at the Google web site, hit
Enter
, and waited.

The search, crude as it was, garnered over 200 hits. He scrolled through them, and none of them, mostly lists of people’s favorite books, seemed important. Then one listing caught his eye: a listing for an album by singer Cat Courtney with a song called “Francie” on it. He linked to it on Amazon.com, and pulled up a thumbnail of the album cover.