All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) (57 page)

She put out her hand to feel for him and touched his fur.

“Max! Oh, baby, I’m so glad you’re safe.” She scooped him up and snuggled him in against her breast. “My poor, poor baby. Did you get scared?”

Max gave a pitiful little sound.

“Laura?” Richard sounded carefully patient. “What are you doing?”

“It’s Max.” She rose to her feet and walked toward the light, half-bent over. “He was hiding in the back.”

Who cared what the men thought? Now that Max was safe, the rest didn’t matter. She ignored the eye-rolling – Richard had the good sense to keep his thoughts off his face – and led the way to the kitchen, Max content to let her carry him like the baby he was. She set him down by his water bowl, opened a can of tuna, and tapped on the back window to get the girls’ attention. “Max,” she mouthed to them, pointed downward, and saw them head for the back door.

She turned back to the men. “All my jewelry’s in there,” she said, and ran water over her dusty hands. “I don’t have that much, but it hasn’t been disturbed.”

The detectives made her open the pouch and inventory everything anyway. Dotting every
i and
crossing every
t
, no doubt; they knew by now that this was a celebrity crime, and they had to go that extra mile. She couldn’t find the kitchen scissors in the mess. She used Richard’s Swiss Army knife to slice through the heavy-duty plastic to retrieve her velvet jewelry pouch.

She didn’t have a lot of personal jewelry; Cat Courtney, Inc., owned most of what she wore on stage, all kept locked up in a bank vault between appearances. Various earrings, including the diamonds from her twenty-fifth birthday. Her gold link bracelet, a gift from the Ashmores when she turned sixteen. The string of pearls Cam had given her on their wedding day, the Mother’s Day tennis bracelet, the sapphire ring from their tenth anniversary. The diamond pendant, simple and elegant, that he had placed around her neck the night they had taken Meg to Lincoln Center. The agate locket he had given her, with locks of hair from him and Meg, two days before his death. The engagement and wedding rings that she had taken off the night he asked for a divorce.

“Hey, Mom, whatcha doing?” Meg stopped to pet Max, nose down in his food bowl, and came over to the counter.

Laura sorted through everything. “Just making sure nothing was taken.” She lifted the locket and pendant to untangle the chains, and accidentally knocked her wedding ring across the counter. She stuck it on her finger to keep it out of the way. “It looks as if it’s all here. Except—” She tried to think through her steps the night before.

“Except what?” Richard sounded curt.

Laura said slowly, “I was wearing an emerald ring – gold with three emeralds set into the band. I took it off when I got home to – to take a shower, and I didn’t put it on again. Meg, run upstairs, please – you know what I’m talking about – see if it’s on the dressing table or the floor.”

She did not anticipate what happened next.

“I know what it looks like,” said Julie immediately. “I’ll go look for you, Laura.”

Meg gave her a biting look. “I’ll do it.”

“But I can help—”

“No thank you. I can do it myself.”

“But I can help you. I tried it on, I know what it looks like—”

“Oh, so what! I’ve tried on that ring loads of times. I’ll do it.”

“But I want to help. It belonged to our grandmother—”

“Oh, MYOB! She said me.
Me
.”

“I’m just trying to
help
—”

“Break it up.” Richard’s tone could cut through steel. “Both of you. Julie, go help her find that ring.”

Meg protested, “But she said
me
—”

Richard gave Meg a swift, hard look. Her daughter fell silent, and Laura’s mouth fell open.

She had never seen Meg snap to so quickly. Cam had always been lenient with Meg until she pushed him too far; then he had been more likely to get angry when a few pointed words spoken earlier – like now – would have prevented a scene. How did Richard know, how had he sensed so quickly, what a firm hand Meg required? And Meg, Meg who hated being told what to do, why was she falling into line?

Laura felt an edgy frisson along her skin. What had transpired this morning while she slept?

She needed to find out, quick, once she had this present crisis dealt with.

The girls understood that he meant business. They gave him uneasy looks from virtually identical sets of green eyes and scurried to do as he said.

“Any other jewelry?” the older of the two detectives asked.

Laura wrenched her attention back to the matter at hand. “Just my watch, and I was wearing that.”

The younger detective said, “I’ll write this up, Ms. St. Bride. We’ll need you to review it and sign it before we file. Let us know about the emerald ring. We’ll need a description of it if it’s missing.”

The two men left the kitchen – escaped was more like it, Laura thought, they must have felt the abruptly arctic atmosphere in the room. Perhaps they sensed a family quarrel brewing.

Family
. On a level only she knew, it was just that.

The front door opened and closed. She didn’t look up. She concentrated on winding her pearls into a careful circle before she replaced them in the velvet bag.

“What’s this?” His voice was very quiet.

“What?” She glanced up. He had his mask on again, his face still and impenetrable.

Richard reached into the small pile and pulled out the gold circlet she had hoped he wouldn’t see. “This. What is it?”

It was a man’s ring, braided on the edges, dirt and soot driven deep into the gold, the surface crisscrossed by thousands of uneven marks. The sight of it still struck deeply. It had endured the fires of hell, and no one would ever wear it again. “It’s Cam’s wedding ring. They found it at Ground Zero.”

She heard his intake of breath. In that moment, she saw that Cameron St. Bride, husband, became real to him. He had met Cam that once in London; he had even said that Cam had seemed very married. But it had not mattered then. He had been a year away from becoming her lover; she had been merely a runaway sister-in-law whom he wanted to find.

But now he held the ring she had given her husband, and the reality of Cam as a man who had shared her life as he did not affected him more than he had thought it could. It had been one thing to know that she had married another man. It was another to hold the remaining artifact of that marriage in his hand.

He turned it over, looking at the inscription inside the ring, the inscription that had identified it at the Fresh Kills site back in April.
CDSB/LRA January 14, 1989
. She had pawned the last remaining piece of her mother’s jewelry to buy the ring; she had not wanted to ask her husband-to-be for the money. That one last straw of independence had been very important to her.

For the first time that day, she felt close to tears.

He said nothing, but the frigid air between them had thawed. Gently, he lifted her left hand, and he slid her wedding ring off her finger. She held her breath; surely he saw it too, the symbolism of that reverse action.
You were his then; you are mine now
. He picked up her engagement ring and closed his hand over the three rings together.

“You should keep these for Meg,” he said, and she heard the change in his voice. He had not liked the sight of Cam’s ring on her hand. “I have a safe built into the foundation of the Folly – let me put these away for you. We can do better than kitty litter.”

She relaxed in his renewed warmth, and flashed him a smile. “It worked, didn’t it? And it wasn’t – you know,
used
.”

“Even so,” and he couldn’t help laughing. Cam’s moment had passed. “I wish you’d seen yourself, digging down inside that bag. That was pretty clever.”

“I got the idea from a security lecture.”

He leaned against the counter, watching as she replaced the rest of her jewelry in the velvet pouch. “I have room for everything in the safe. And speaking of security – you can’t stay here, Laura.”

Her breath caught, in the sudden presentiment of what was coming.

“It’s a holiday weekend. You have no power, it’ll take hours to get a locksmith out here—” He put his hand on hers. “Come home with us, you and Meg. We’ll move you over there this morning. We’ve got the girls here. We’ll put them to work packing up while we straighten this mess. They need to work off some of that hostility anyway.”

She’d known he was going to offer, but still, hearing the words was almost too great a temptation to resist. Almost.

“I can’t.” Oh, what she wouldn’t have given, even a day ago, to say
yes, yes, yes!
“You know I can’t. We can’t live together, it wouldn’t be right, there are the girls – and they can’t stand each other – and what if Di finds out, or Tom—”

He was silent for a moment. “Then I’ll move out,” he said. “I’ll move over to Ashmore Minor, and you stay there at the Folly with the girls. That way, we can observe the proprieties, but I’m right down the road if you need me. Julie is going to camp on Sunday, anyway, so it will just be you and Meg. I don’t care if they don’t like each other. They’ll learn to get along.”

His voice implied,
Or else
.

“Oh, Richard.” His generosity touched her. This man, who treasured his home, who had built himself a fortress to ensure his privacy, was willing to leave it all for her. “I can’t do that. You – you have your life there, and I have practically nothing. It’s easier for me to pick up and move.” She ran her hand through her hair in distraction. “We can stay in a hotel, it won’t be a bother, really—”

He relaxed now, with all the air of a man who had reason and facts on his side. “What about your cat? No hotel will take him.”

She hadn’t thought of that.

“Plus, Fourth of July weekend, remember? It’s a madhouse around here. You won’t find a decent room for a hundred miles.”

He had her there.

His voice dropped, seductively. “And you’ll have the kitchen to yourself. Now tell the truth, you’ve been lusting after that kitchen since the moment you saw it. You’re more in love with it than you are with me.”

She suppressed a laugh and scowled at him. “Man, are you persistent.”

He gave her a grin. What a smug know-it-all. He knew he was going to win.

She gave up. Ashmore Park was isolated; she’d find the same peace and quiet she had found until this morning at Edwards Lake. “Then – okay, let’s compromise.
We’ll
move to Ashmore Minor. That way, we won’t put you out—”

He held up his hand. “Stop. Ashmore Minor doesn’t have a security keypad. The Folly does. You need a piano to work on until yours arrives, and Julie’s is right there. Meg needs a place to do her workout in the morning – I can rig something up in the solarium.”

“How do you know about—” But he interrupted her, laying his hand across her mouth.

“Don’t be so independent all the time,” he said. “Let me do this for you.”

Her heart was beating so fast, she felt sure he knew. Practically speaking, moving to Ashmore Park made perfect sense. He owned three livable houses all within a stone’s throw of one another; she had a rental house without electricity. Ashmore Park had secure gates; she had a lock that was easy pickings if her burglar decided to pay a return visit. And, she was, after all, Julie’s aunt; in time-honored Virginia tradition, he was extending hospitality to a widowed kinswoman and her daughter.

But he was offering more than temporary shelter.
I want you in my home, my room, my bed. The gates are open – I am asking you in. Come.

And it was slyly clever too. He had just found the only way they could see each other, every single day, under the noses of their daughters, with nothing appearing out of the ordinary. It was more than clever. It was brilliant. Even Lucy couldn’t object.

She murmured, “But there’s no branch outside your window.”

He touched her lower lip. “True,” he said, “but the staircase from the front library goes directly into the master suite.”

She glanced upward at him through her lashes and pressed a kiss into the palm of his hand. “Very foresighted of you, Master Architect.”

They might have stood there like that for minutes – Max nose-down in his food bowl, the house in disarray around them – if they hadn’t heard Meg stomping back down the stairs, displeasure writ loud in every footfall. They had enough warning that they did not have to spring apart – he withdrew leisurely from her – but even so, Meg’s eyes were bright as she came around the staircase and into the hall to the kitchen.

Not bright with mischief, though. Bright with fury.

“It’s gone, Mom. It’s not there. They stole your
ring
.”

The Kurzweil was no longer the most valuable thing missing. Renée Dane’s ring. Some stupid, stupid thief, not content to wreck her car, had stolen her only legacy from her mother.