All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) (33 page)

And there was his auburn-haired woman.

Pretty girl. Lots of lace and mystery. He wasn’t crazy about that sort of thing; he preferred women who got to the point, like Emma, and he liked classic rock, not the sort of romantic mysticism he heard in the snippet of song he downloaded. He thought he remembered seeing a Cat Courtney music video on VH1.

So. One wrong tree barked up.

He started to switch off his computer, and stopped.

Little Miss Cat
. Why would someone named Laura be called Cat?

And who said an artist had to work in a visual medium?

He’d heard of Cat Courtney. A friend, a devotee of European classical crossover, had even gone to a concert of hers on vacation. There was some mystery about Cat Courtney – she had successfully hid her real identity for years. No one knew who she was; she was sheltered behind a web of corporations.

A web of corporations.

A woman with a hidden identity. An
artiste
. Someone with copyrights.

Someone who had written and recorded a song about
Francie
.

And St. Bride’s mysterious wife, with her successful career that had attracted no publicity, who owned an incredible piano, who worked in Europe.

Little Miss Cat
. And what set Emma off about her sister-in-law?

Her career.

He heard himself say aloud, “Can’t be.”

But what if?

He didn’t own a Cat Courtney album, but first thing in the morning, he was going to find one.

He surfed to the Cat Courtney web site. A little heavy on the technology – it took several minutes on his dial-up connection to download and play the introductory slide show. While it downloaded, he opened up a second browser window and bypassed the intro. He found a schedule of upcoming concerts in the fall – heavily slanted towards Europe, he noticed – and a listing of the four Cat Courtney albums since her debut six years before. He read a page on the
other
Cat Courtney mystery: who was the dark lord in “Persephone”? No answers, but the composer of “Persephone” was not a dumb woman. She wrote and arranged all her songs, and she seemed to be heavily steeped in literature and folklore. Her biography said that she had been writing music since she was a child. A page of reviews discussed her stage work – she’d spent the past year in London playing the female lead in
Rochester
opposite Roger Duncan. More than one reviewer singled out her obvious operatic training.

London
. Cameron St. Bride had spent the last weekend of his life in London. With his wife? Even though he’d filed for divorce? Interesting.

According to the will, Laura St. Bride’s birthday had been that weekend.

And his lawyers had withdrawn the divorce petition before his death could be confirmed.

Happy birthday, honey. Guess I don’t want that divorce after all.

He wondered how old Cat Courtney was.

Brian found a page with downloadable wallpaper and screen savers and maximized the pictures. Auburn hair – lots and lots of hair, it must be a wig – forest green eyes, lovely skin, a gaze that haunted with its story of love offered and never returned. An otherworldly air, sensuous and sad all at the same time. Late twenties, early thirties max. Definitely not a teenager. Hard to tell much about her figure; she looked a little on the skinny side. Not the lush body he’d enjoyed earlier that evening.

Still… if what he suspected was true, what had Cameron St. Bride been thinking, to cheat on a woman like this?

Too bad he couldn’t find a picture of Laura St. Bride. No way to tell if Cameron St. Bride’s widow was, improbably, the singer who had kept the world guessing for six years. Curious, he looked up the lyrics to “Francie.” Poor girl. Emma was right. She must never have found out that her sister had helped herself to St. Bride; she couldn’t have written this hosanna if she’d known.

The Flash file had finished installing. Brian started it playing – a skillful marketing piece, complete with video and stills and a short interview with Cat Courtney saying something mystical about her personal music philosophy. And then, at the very last, the picture he’d carried around since the moment he’d seen that huge piano. Cat Courtney, auburn hair tumbling onto her shoulders, dressed in a strapless dress with a bodice made out of pearls and nothing else, playing at the great rosewood piano and singing a song guaranteed to bring back to life even a man who’d spent most of the night romping with Emma St. Bride.

Whoa.

Still, not enough. It was conceivable – barely – that Cat Courtney and Laura St. Bride owned similar pianos.

He leaned back and thought.

This whole quest had started with Cameron St. Bride’s inexplicable web of corporations. Cat Courtney supposedly hid behind multiple corporations. And what was the great thing about corporations, from a reporter’s point of view? They were public entities. They existed in the sunshine. They left tracks in the sand.

He surfed again to the Cat Courtney site. At the bottom of each page, in letters so faint and small that the casual viewer would overlook them entirely, was a copyright line: “Cat Courtney, Inc.”

Brian logged into the station databases, a long and painful process that allowed him enough time to brew some coffee. He was going to need it. This could be a very long night.

Cat Courtney, Inc. The Texas corporate databases showed a Delaware corporation doing business in Texas with –
a-ha!
– Cameron St. Bride’s personal lawyer as registered agent. Brian searched the Delaware database and found another Cat Courtney, Inc., with 100% ownership by a South Dakota Cat Courtney, Inc.

It took an hour, two more cups of coffee, and half a ream of printer paper, but eventually he assembled a corporate chain that mirrored the Aural Gem CC chain he had found – a chain winding its way across the country into Canada, the Virgins, and the Caymans. The only difference was – he double-checked to make sure – unlike Aural Gem, the Delaware Cat Courtney, Inc., did double duty in Texas and Virginia.

Texas. Interesting, and what he expected. But why Virginia?

Chesapeake Bay.

Like Aural Gem CC, Cat Courtney, Inc., came to an end in the Caymans. No smoking gun, unfortunately. There must be some missing link – something untraceable, like 100% ownership by a trust. He’d have to wait until he got to the station to search the SEC databases.

He made a list of things to research.

Find out who had filed the trademark application for Cat Courtney.

Find out who had filed the copyrights for “Francie.”

Find out if Laura St. Bride held any copyrights or trademarks in her own name.

Find out if Laura St. Bride had ever done anything noteworthy under her own name.

Find out, once and for all time, if CC meant Cat Courtney.

Find out if Cameron and Laura St. Bride had pulled off one of the great deceptions of the century.

Then find Cat Courtney and ask the question no one had answered for six years.
Who are you?

But that answer might lie right here. He went back to the Cat Courtney web site and looked for the biography of the elusive and eminently seductive Miss Courtney. Emma had given him plenty of clues, but the most important came straight from Cat Courtney herself.

Writing music since childhood
. Cat Courtney must have come from a musical background. Unless she was a second Mozart, she hadn’t been composing from an early age in a vacuum. Someone had taught her; someone had nurtured her talent. She hadn’t just come out of nowhere – even if she gave the world that impression.

And she’d had operatic training. How did a girl from nowhere get operatic training?

Brian typed in “Laura Cat music.”

That brought up more hits than he had time to go through. “Laura Cat opera” whittled the list down by half, but still… again, mostly lists of people’s favorite books and CDs.

All right, he was missing something. He thought for a while, looking for another hook. Well, Laura St. Bride had a sister named Francie, and Cat Courtney had written about a girl named Francie. Francie, treacherous Francie, likely a nickname. Short for what? Frances? Francine?

He typed in “Laura Franc* opera.”

Another long list of hits, mostly relating to
Phantom of the Opera
. He ignored those and went down the list, looking for something out of the ordinary. He clicked to the next page of hits, and there, at the top, was an AP wire about the death of a musician in Virginia the year before.

Brian felt the hair stand straight up on the back of his neck.

He followed the link and read about the murder of Dominic Abbott.
He devoted himself to his music and the cultivation of musical talent in his four daughters
. He read about the trail of suspicion that had led to the man’s oldest daughter, her subsequent arrest and release for lack of evidence. Then, at the end of the article:
The whereabouts of his other two daughters, Francesca and Laura, have been unknown since the late 1980s.

Francesca. The infamous Francie?

He Googled Dominic Abbott and found a web site on famous Irish murder cases. The case was over thirty years old, but the web site included a 1967 photo of Renée Dane as Medea and one of Dominic Abbott with three pretty little girls in 1973. The tallest, older by a few years than her sisters, looked bored and distracted, the littlest looked scared. The middle one was mugging for the camera. Hard to tell much about the man, except that he didn’t look too prosperous, and where was the other daughter?

The Irish prosecutor had argued that the birth of the youngest daughter had been the catalyst for the murder. Boy, there was a guaranteed lifetime guilt complex, growing up knowing that your father killed your mother because you were born. No wonder that little girl looked scared.

Maybe she had grown up always bearing that burden. Maybe she had felt like an outsider in the family. Maybe she had carried an air of sadness into adulthood and written needy, heartbreaking songs about never being loved.

Maybe she had turned to a man twelve years her senior, looking for a father figure.

Brian sent the articles to his printer. The age for the youngest girl fit. Renée Dane had died on October 2, 1970, three weeks after her youngest child was born; that child might have shared a birthday with Laura St. Bride.

He read the AP story again.
Unknown since the late 1980s
. Meg St. Bride had been born in September 1988. If Dominic Abbott’s daughter Laura had gone missing in 1987 or early 1988, she’d had time to meet St. Bride at Stanford. She’d had time to get pregnant, give birth in September 1988, and get married in January 1989.

Which meant she had been underage when her whereabouts had become unknown, and Cameron St. Bride was even more of a schmuck than his sister had admitted. Laura Abbott’s family didn’t know where she was, even now. She must have run away, and her sister Francesca with her. One runaway was strange enough for a family, but two? Why would two girls run away and never come back?

Especially when one of them could come back in glory, armed with a spectacular musical career and a trophy husband?

Two missing girls. Had someone looked for them?

He entered “Laura Francesca Abbott Williamsburg Virginia missing.”

One hit.
Missing – Need Information
.

And there it was. The smoking gun.

~•~

A web page dated seven years before, maintained by a private investigator’s firm, listing as contact Lucia Abbott Maitland at a law firm in Williamsburg. Lucia, the daughter missing from the family picture. He assembled them in his mind: Diana the suspect, Lucia the lawyer, Francesca and Laura the missing. Four operatic names, fitting for a composer of minor Italian opera.

The web page looked like a
Wanted
poster in the post office, not the desperate outreach of a sister: two teenage girls, virtual twins, Francesca on the left, Laura on the right. A description of each: dark auburn hair, green eyes, fair-skinned. Francesca taller than Laura and a year less a day older. A brief synopsis of their June 1988 disappearance, along with a hefty gem stash from the late Renée Dane.

He was astounded at how much alike they looked. Had that been the attraction for Cameron St. Bride – Francie’s likeness to his wife? But why turn to Francie when his wife was right there?

A description of each girl’s likes and interests. Lucia was a smart cookie, he thought. People who disappeared often tripped themselves up through their hobbies. Easy to change name and looks, impossible to change personality.

Francesca:
Enjoys music, reading, socializing. Lyric soprano, plays the piano. Very friendly and outgoing. Usually called Francie.

Laura:
Enjoys writing songs, singing, reading, needlework, cooking. Mezzo soprano, talented on piano. Very quiet and shy.