All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) (44 page)

A few feet away, in a little pile, sat a backpack, an expensive leather briefcase, a big duffel bag, and a long cylinder in a canvas cover. Laura said sharply, “What are you doing with your father’s briefcase?”

“I asked Mark for Dad’s laptop. It’s better than my old one. Mark had one of the techs get all the business stuff off for me.”

Laura looked stormy. Now that the mother and child reunion was past, she appeared ready to work herself up into a lather. He forestalled her – plenty of time later to chew Meg out – by assessing the little mound of luggage. He slung the duffel bag strap over his shoulder and knew from its heft that Meg had packed for more than a weekend visit. “Here, take your backpack.”

Laura, lips starting to compress, swooped to pick up the briefcase. He picked up the canvas bag that looked as if it contained a long, slender roll of blueprints and was surprised at its weight. Meg didn’t look strong enough to have carried this anywhere. “What is this?”

They spoke together. “My barre,” said Meg, and Laura said, “It’s a portable barre for her ballet workouts. So,” she turned on her daughter, “you did this on the spur of the moment, did you? Don’t tell me you took all this to the lake. You came prepared.”

Meg’s eyes darted to him. “Uh, well—”

“And don’t tell me Emma took you to the airport. I know her. She wouldn’t put you on a plane without calling me. Does she
know
where you are?”

Meg tried, “Mom, I just—”

“You,” said Laura ominously, “are so busted. Did Cindy’s sister take you to the airport?”

“No! Cindy doesn’t know anything about it. Don’t get her in trouble with her mom and dad.” Meg looked alarmed now. “I said you texted me today, you needed me to come up here real fast and you bought me an e-ticket, and—”

“Uh-huh.” He’d seen her angry, upset; he had never seen her in full mother mode. She was scary. No wonder Julie had scurried to apologize so fast this afternoon. “How did you get to the airport? Did you take a taxi?”

“No, I—” Eyes darting back to him.
Sorry, kid, I’m not getting in the line of fire. You’re on your own
. “I called that car service SBFA always gets for us. I – okay, I hid my barre and the briefcase in the hedges out front before I went to the lake.”

“You left your father’s computer outside?”

“Well,” said Meg in a reasonable tone, “I knew Emma wouldn’t find it there. She never goes over that way. No one could see anything. And it wasn’t going to rain.”

“So you had the town car take you to get your stuff, and then take you to the airport?”

A cautious nod. Meg wasn’t sure where this was leading.

“And how –
how
, pray tell, did you pay for all this?”

“I—” Richard watched Meg weighing the lie.
Is it worth it?
Classic Francie. Better to ask forgiveness than permission. “I charged the town car to the company account.”

“And your plane ticket?”

“I charged it on the online travel service.”

“On my credit card?”

“Mine,” said Meg indignantly. “Dad gave me a card, Mom.”

Laura held out her hand. “Your purse.”

The airport was nearly deserted; even the car rental people were closing up for the night. The cleaning crew was out in force; he saw no other passengers and only a couple of security guards. Any minute now, they were going to be asked to leave. He intervened before she escalated into war. “Laura, we need to get going. There’s rising water near Williamsburg. This can wait.”

She merely looked at him, and he took a mental step back at the Irish mother expression on her face. He’d seen that look on his mother’s face when she’d gone on the warpath. It was a terrifying look, designed specifically to send the recipient straight to hell without passing go.

She put down the briefcase and took the little initialed bag that Meg reluctantly held out. Her expression changed. “Oh, my God!” She pulled out a platinum card, a passport, and a bedraggled five-dollar bill. “
Five dollars?
You flew across the country on
five dollars?
”

“That’s all I had left. I don’t get my allowance till Saturday.” Meg looked stubborn, unwilling to go down without a fight. “And it’s not like I was poor. I had my card—”

Laura tucked the card in her skirt pocket. “Not,” she said, “anymore.”

Meg’s jaw dropped. Laura snatched up the briefcase and marched toward the door. Her rigid backbone indicated that, as far as she was concerned, there was nothing more to discuss. Irish mother again – Peggy
had
taught her well.

He and his daughter –
niece
– gave each other long, level looks, and then he shrugged and waved his hand toward the door. “You heard your mother. Get going. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”

He listened to Meg grumbling under her breath –
what’s the BFD?
and
this is so unfair
– as he followed her outside. Good Lord, he must be a foot and a half taller than the child; it was hard to imagine where she had gotten such a diminutive frame. Her arms were thin, her wrists so slender as to appear breakable, yet she had managed to heft her barre from the baggage claim. She wore a typical teenage uniform of T-shirt and fashionably dirty jeans, but she moved with a grace beyond a normal teen’s reach. She didn’t slouch; her posture was perfect. A dancer, very much at home in her body.

He wondered why she hadn’t taken the traditional Abbott road into music.

Laura had already reached the Lexus and was waiting by the trunk with the air of someone tried and pushed past all human endurance. Another Peggy Ashmore tactic – he remembered the pattern. He saw Meg’s shoulders fall, wilting under the force of her mother’s anger. Well-deserved anger, but he had to wonder if Laura was trying to compensate for her earlier loss of control – in his bed and in his car – by becoming too much the strong mother in control of her child.

“Hey, nice shirt, Mom,” Meg said, as he hit the remote to open the trunk. “Where’d you get it? What’s Ashmore & McIntire?”

“It’s Mr. Ashmore’s company,” Laura said, and handed him the briefcase. “He loaned me the shirt to wear after I got caught in the rain.”

Too much information. Richard gave her a swift warning look and put Meg’s backpack on top of her duffel bag. The barre was going to be a problem; he studied it briefly before he wedged it in diagonally across the rest of Meg’s luggage and shut the trunk.

He turned back just in time to see Laura’s hand lift to her temple. He’d seen her make that gesture from time to time – she’d done it that afternoon, when Diana had started making her speech. Before he could ask, Meg burst out, “Mom! Is it one of your headaches? Are you okay?”

“Headaches?” He didn’t like the sound of that.

Laura shook her head, but Meg turned to him, no longer the juvenile delinquent who had led them on a rain-soaked trek across the state. “She gets these stress headaches real bad. She’s been getting them since – you know, last year. Mom,” she turned back to her mother, “you okay? Maybe you should lie down.”

“I’m okay,” Laura said in a low voice. He took stock of her pale face and the finely drawn look around her eyes. She wasn’t okay. Right now she had the same look of resistance to oncoming pain that he’d seen on his mother’s face before a migraine hit.

He had to suppress his exasperation. She was suffering from headaches, headaches that had started last fall, still plaguing her in times, he guessed, of great emotional stress. And she hadn’t bothered to tell anyone. He’d been right when he’d told Lucy that Laura was heading for a long overdue crash.

And she wouldn’t take help. For someone determined to make him expose thoughts and emotions he’d just as soon protect for the time being, she excelled at concealment herself. It seemed to take a cataclysm – Diana’s suicide attempt, their confrontation that evening – to make her lower her guard with him.

That needed to change.

“Come on.” Richard opened the passenger door. “Laura, take the back and lie down. Meg, sit up front with me.” He looked at Laura and saw her compressing her lips again, not in anger but in pain. He gentled his voice. “Do you have something to take?”

Laura nodded. Meg seized the opportunity to stick two fingers into her mother’s pocket and snake out her credit card. She backed up, just out of reach, and held it up. “I’ll get you some bottled water, Mom. Back in a sec.”

Her action caught him off guard. She took off in a fast run before he could reach out to stop her. He started after her and stopped after ten feet; he couldn’t leave Laura standing by herself in a deserted parking garage at night.
You and I, my fine little miss, are going to establish some ground rules.
Meg stopped to speak to the security guard at the terminal door, then turned to point back to them; the man shrugged and let her in.

Through the lighted windows, he saw her running across the concourse.

He shook his head, glad for the moment that she was not his problem to deal with. Julie’s case of teenage hormones was looking more attractive and manageable every minute. He turned back to Laura, who was counting out some white tablets into her hand. “How bad are these headaches?”

“It’s just tension.” She looked exhausted. “I took aspirin earlier, but the pain came back. Don’t worry.”

Richard looked at her steadily until he had her attention. He ran a firm ship at Ashmore & McIntire; no one, including his partner, argued with him when he had what Lucy called
the listen-up look
. It worked with Julie. It was going to have to work with Laura.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “you’re going to see my internist, and you’re going to get some help.” He gave her a direct look. “Stop suffering in silence, Laura. You’re as bad as Lucy.”

She looked at him in surprise, and her eyes grew wary. She wasn’t used to someone making decisions for her anymore, taking the choice out of her hands; she’d resisted it with her husband, and it must have frustrated the man. St. Bride must not have chosen his moments wisely, or he’d made decisions for her as a matter of routine, and now she interpreted every attempt to help as a threat to her autonomy.

Her resistance was beginning to frustrate him too.

He gave her no quarter, just continued to give her that same direct look. His will against hers, and he didn’t intend to lose.

Then her eyes dropped, signaling retreat. She gestured towards the terminal. “Should we go in after her? Maybe I was too rough on her – but she scared me so much –
five dollars
—”

Five dollars more than Meg ought to see for the remainder of the summer. “I can see her. She’s in one of the shops. If she’s not out in five minutes, I’ll get her.”

But Meg made it in less time than allotted. He saw her fly across the terminal and out the door, her arms full of bottles. She stopped to let a taxi drive by and then raced back across the access road to them. “Here.” She thrust a bottle into her mother’s hand breathlessly. “Drink this up, Mom. You’ll feel better. You’re probably dehydrated. And here,” she handed Richard a bottle, “I figured you’d want something too.”

Whatever her faults, the child cared about her mother. She bullied Laura into the back seat, made her swallow the aspirin, and arranged a car blanket tenderly beneath her head. It was in no small way to Meg’s credit that, a couple of minutes later, they were ready to leave the airport.

Except for one detail. Richard was about to pull out of the garage when he saw the warning light on his dashboard. “Is your belt buckled?”

“Huh?” Meg peered at him. “I probably shouldn’t wear one. I might need to crawl back there to take care of Mom.”

He braked and turned to look at her. “Seat belt,” he said pleasantly. “My car. My rules.”

She stared at him – how dare anyone speak to her like that – and he returned stare for stare. He could wait her out as long as it took, but, by God, she was not going to run circles around him. He’d used gentle firmness with Laura; he was prepared to be a great deal more direct with this one. After a minute, while the car idled, Meg lowered her eyes and buckled up.

~•~

The rain had now moved east from the Tidewater. As soon as they reached the interstate back to Williamsburg, they encountered the ferocity of the storm that had drenched them earlier. In the car, no one spoke. Richard concentrated on driving through the slashing downpour; beside him, Meg pulled a small MP3 player from her purse and plugged in earphones. Laura remained silent in the back seat, and when he stole a look in the rear view mirror, she seemed to have fallen asleep.

“Laura?” She did not answer.

The best thing for her. She’d been through the wringer; this mad dash through the night to rescue her errant daughter had been the icing on the cake of a very long day. It was a measure of her exhaustion, he thought, that she had blurted out that unexpected confession about San Francisco. She’d never told anyone; she had meant to take it to her grave, even as he had planned to bury forever the truth about Francie.