All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) (51 page)

He couldn’t have heard her correctly. “Kids? What kids?”

“Don’t you know?” If he heard that once more, he wasn’t going to answer for his actions.
No
,
I don’t know. And you know damn well I don’t know. What else haven’t you told me, Laura?

“Mom wants to adopt a girl and a boy from another country. She says, since I’m growing up and I’ll be out of the house in a few years, she wants someone to be a mom to. I saw the brochures from the adoption agency on her desk, so I asked her. She wanted to know how I felt about it.”

He turned abruptly and entered the grotto. It had been Peggy’s special refuge, sheltered from the rest of the world by a wall of olive trees and dominated by the life-size statue of the Blessed Virgin before the small reflecting pool. He’d found her here many times in the little shrine, sitting on the marble bench, rosary in hand, deep in her prayers.

I need those prayers now, Mom. This is getting murkier and murkier.

“Oh, wow,” Meg said. “Our Lady of Knock.” She skirted the pond to touch the statue. “See, she’s got the rose on her forehead. Knock is in Ireland, did you know? Mom was born in Ireland.”

“Yes, I know.” He’d had no idea which apparition of the Virgin the statue represented or why Peggy had been so determined to buy it at auction once she had seen it. He’d gone with her to pick up architectural castoffs from a group of closed churches – pews, stained glass windows, even a beautifully carved baptismal font that a client had snatched up eagerly – and he and his father had spent the better part of an afternoon hauling her new treasure back to the grotto.

“Anyway,” Meg resumed her thread of conversation, “I thought it was a great idea. I’ll get to have a brother and sister – be the boss, you know.” She grinned at him. “They’ll have to do what I say. Isn’t it a great idea? Mom says she’ll get the ball rolling after she gets off tour.”

He said mechanically, “I see.”

He went behind the statue and switched on the little waterfall, buying a few seconds of silence. So Laura had kept another secret. She had told Meg about her adoption plans before she ever came back to Virginia – and rightfully so, this would affect Meg more than anyone else – but she had not discussed it with him.

But no, she had mentioned it. In the midst of his fury against Cam St. Bride, he had paid little heed.
I met some people who had adopted abroad... a chance to give a couple of kids a good life... I broached the idea, and he turned me down flat.

And now she no longer had to consider her husband’s wishes in the matter. Now she no longer need assuage the feelings of the man who had dominated her and denied her what she wanted.

Now she could do what made her happy.

Maybe she still intended to go through with her plans and was waiting for the right time to tell him. Or maybe – the thought struck him – maybe she was looking now to a different future. One with him. One where he would give her the children St. Bride had denied her. He had a sudden image of himself walking towards the stable on a future July morning, his sons beside him.

Strange, this urge, dormant for so many years, to father a child. He had resigned himself to never holding a child of his own blood in his arms, never seeing his own line reflected in the eyes of a child. Diana had seen to that. But now – he came around the statue to see Meg making herself at home on the marble bench where her grandmother had so often prayed – here was that very child so long unknown, beautiful, bright, if unbelievably maddening. Behind her, tantalizingly, in the mist from the falling water shimmered the promise of others, waiting.

“This is really pretty,” Meg said. “I bet you like to come here.”

“I do.” Her comment called for more. “This was my mother’s special place – she was from Ireland, and she was very devout. She’d come here and pray.” She looked at him, her eyes open with interest. She listened, this one, very little got by her. “Her name was Margaret Mary O’Brien.”

She grinned. “Me too. The Margaret Mary part, I mean.”

“I believe your mother named you for her. They were very close.”

Meg nodded. He took the bench opposite her and watched her swing her foot back and forth.

Blood called to blood. He had assumed, growing up, that he and Diana would have children. That was the warp and woof of a man’s normal life: career, marriage, fatherhood. He’d had the splendid example of his father, and he had taken it for granted, wrongly, that his own life would follow the pattern. But Diana hadn’t wanted children. She had made that crystal clear on the night their marriage had cratered:
I don’t want a baby. I never did. You won’t make me a mother. I won’t be one. I can’t be one. The idea sickens me. You are never, never going to get me pregnant again.

Not like Lucy, with her fervent desire to have a child, putting her health in jeopardy. Not like Laura, her deepest longing in her eyes as she told him of St. Bride’s infertility. He supposed that women felt a more visceral longing to nurture and bear life, while men wanted a legacy to leave to the world.

Well, Julie was his legacy. And this one, a secret legacy.

Perhaps, eventually, those barely glimpsed souls in the mist.

But not for economic reasons. Not because their mother was a rich woman.

Meg broke into his thoughts. “You don’t have anything against adopted kids, do you?”

Julie as a new infant, listening for his voice…. “Of course not.”

“Good,” said Meg. “Because I’m adopted too.”

~•~

Here it was, then. Her agenda. Finally out in the open.

In the midst of his shock, as she clapped her hands to her mouth – a false gesture if ever he’d seen one – he recognized her strategy. She had engineered it all. She had had her little checklist of topics – career, age, background, money – all leading up to this moment. She had meant all along to confront him.

“Oh! I am such a blabbermouth! Forget I said that!”

She wasn’t shocked, and she wasn’t sorry. She had a properly remorseful look on her face, but her eyes were shrewd and watchful.

She knew. No. Impossible. She couldn’t know. If he was certain of one thing, it was that neither Laura nor St. Bride had ever revealed her true parentage.

No pretending not to understand. They had gone beyond subterfuge. “How do you know this?”

She didn’t answer, but merely continued to look at him.

“You and I both know your mother didn’t tell you. How do you know?”

Whatever she had been expecting – a show of disbelief, an outraged denial – he wasn’t giving it to her. Her eyes fell.

“How did you find out about this?” Richard repeated. She wanted to tell him; she was going to tell him. She wasn’t going to play games with him any longer.

He saw her take a deep breath. “I found out from my dad.”

After St. Bride’s hostility? “I don’t believe you. How did you find out?”

Meg said stubbornly, “I told you. I found out from my dad.”

He stood up, needing the release of movement. Action helped him to focus. She was fishing. She was looking to fill in the gaps in the story, trade tit for tat.

So what didn’t she know?

“Do you want to know about it?” she asked.

Margaret Mary St. Bride was in for a rude surprise if she expected to worm anything out of him.

He turned around and looked at her. “What do
you
know?”

That took her aback for a moment, to be challenged. She didn’t know how to handle someone getting in
her
face. Her voice lost a little of her bravado. “If I tell, will you promise not to tell my mom? That I know, I mean?”

Richard said coolly – too quickly becoming his stance with her – “If you’re adopted, as you say – and I am not accepting that – then she knows all about it.”

Meg just gave him a look. “Of course she knows.” Her tone dripped with scorn for his obtuseness. “But she doesn’t know I know, and you,” she pointed a finger at him, “you can’t tell her. It would break her heart if she found out.”

He said nothing.

His silence agitated her. “Look, Mom has had a really bad time, okay? She took what happened to Dad really hard, lots harder than she lets on. Please don’t tell her.
Please
. She’s always made such a deal about stuff – I mean, when I was little, I used to ask her about when she was expecting me, and when I was born, and was I a good baby, and did I sleep all night, stuff like that, and she’d always tell me. She’d be really upset if she found out I know she made it all up.”

But Laura hadn’t had to make anything up. She’d been with Francie; she had probably witnessed Meg’s birth.

“Listen, if I tell you, will you promise not to tell her?”

“Look here.” Direct was the only way to deal with her. Subtlety was lost on her. “I’m not making deals with you. Either tell me, or keep quiet, but stop – playing – games.”

Her chin started to stick out stubbornly. Richard said sharply, “Stop that right now.”

She sat there in smoldering silence. Then, “Is this one of your strategies?”

“Yes. It’s the strategy of either tell me or keep your mouth shut.”

That ought to be blunt enough to penetrate even her hard little head. She stared at him – if this weren’t so serious, he would have laughed at her assumption that they were evenly matched – and he stared right back, not giving her an inch.

He would have given anything for a cigarette just then.

Her eyes shifted away. “I was born before Mom and Dad got married.”

“That happens.”

Meg swallowed. “I found out when I was ten. I heard Dad saying to Mom how they should do something special for their tenth anniversary, and I said, wait, how can it be the tenth when I’m already ten? Then Dad got mad and said I shouldn’t listen in on other people’s conversations, and Mom looked weird and said she had to tell me something.”

Here it was, at last, the cover story. He wondered how many times over the years Laura had been forced to explain her wedding date.

“She said how she and Dad met and fell in love, and she ran away from home to be with him, and then I came along, and they didn’t get married right away even though Dad wanted to because she felt like marriage was only a piece of paper.”

Had the St. Bride family actually bought that?

“Then Mom said how I shouldn’t think about doing the same thing and not getting married first was really unfair to the baby – that’s me – and it was really a stupid idea.”

“I agree.”

“Except,” Meg’s voice dropped, and he had to strain to listen over the sound of the falling water, “it wasn’t true. Mom was covering up for—” She glanced up at him. “Want to guess?”

“Tell me.”

“Fran
ces
ca.” She said the name as other people might have said
Satan
. “That’s my birth mother, you know. Fran
ces
ca. She got pregnant with me, and she wasn’t married, so Mom and Dad got married and they adopted me.”

He grew still. Did she really know all that she was pretending to know? She thought that he wouldn’t know who her birth mother was – either a devastating commentary on his character, that he’d impregnated so many women that he wouldn’t know which one had given birth to her, or a genuine ignorance of her entire parentage. “Why do you call her Fran
ces
ca?”

Meg shrugged. “Dunno. That’s how my dad always said her name. Fran
ces
ca. He didn’t like her much. I heard,” she leaned forward, a co-conspirator, “she was a major B. You know what a B is, right?”

Wrong week to give up smoking. “I can guess.”

“You knew her, right? Since you knew Mom and all. Was she a B?”

Poor little Francie. What had she done to St. Bride to earn this? “No. She wasn’t.”

“Well, I heard she was. I heard she was a real slut too.”

This, from someone who looked small enough to still play with dolls, rubbed him the wrong way. “She was not a slut.”

“Oh, really?” Meg looked contemptuous. “Well, she didn’t even know who got her pregnant, how slutty is that? He’s not on my birth certificate.”

He settled back. Meg did not know all she thought she did, that was clear. It was also clear that dear old
Dad
had said far too much to his daughter. “Have you seen it?”

Even if St. Bride had been seized by the desire to tell all – and that went against everything he knew of the man – surely he wouldn’t have shown Meg the original birth certificate. That would have done nothing but whet her appetite, and that was something that St. Bride the control freak would never have permitted.

So how had she found out?

“Yeah, I’ve seen it lots of times. It has Mom’s and Dad’s names on it.” Meg hugged her knees to her chest. “You get a new one when you get adopted.”

As Tom had thought. “So how do you know about your original birth certificate?”