All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) (58 page)

Meg wasn’t finished. “I hate this place. I hate the trees. I hate the – the – I –
hate
– it. And I hate that stupid—” She bit the word off. “Let’s
go
, Mom. I don’t ever want to see this place again.”

To make her point, she aimed a kick at the island.

Beneath the rage, a genuine fear. Laura’s heart sank. She wasn’t a solo act, any more than Richard was, and there was no escaping the obvious antipathy between the two cousins. Meg, for whatever reason, had taken everyone and everything in dislike, especially her cousin. Why Julie had hated Meg on sight was anyone’s guess.

She would
not
believe that history was repeating itself.

Still… throwing them together, even for a couple of days, might not be a good thing. She turned to Richard – security or not, maybe Ashmore Minor was a better idea – but he cut her off.

“This is your lucky day, Meg,” he said. “You won’t have to see this place again. You and your mother are moving in with Julie. Go get your cousin, please. I have work for the two of you.”

Meg’s mouth sagged open.

“Now,” Richard added.

Steam figuratively poured out her ears. Laura watched, unable to quell the uneasiness that welled up again. It wasn’t only Meg’s reaction. If she’d thought about it at all, instead of drifting in a haze like a lovesick schoolgirl, she’d have foreseen that Meg would treat any change to the status quo as a threat to her well-being. Meg had dealt with so much in the past year. Maybe she wasn’t as cool about the new man in her mother’s life as she pretended.

Even more disturbing was Richard’s attitude. She sensed a connection – an instinctive bond coming from – she didn’t want to know where it came from. She didn’t want it to exist.

But no use pretending that it didn’t. She saw it plainly, that undercurrent of familiarity and understanding running between them. They weren’t each other’s biggest fan, that was obvious, but each had clearly taken the other’s measure. How, when they had just met? When Richard had been predisposed not to approve of her daughter? Why had he so quickly stepped into – no matter that she resisted the idea, there it was – the role of father figure with Meg?

And why was Meg letting him?

On some deep level, did they
know?

Whatever it was – and, oh, she was going to get the scoop about that walk this morning – Meg had already clued in that resistance was futile. Her eyes dropped, and even as she gave him a mocking salute, Laura saw her backing down. Meg liked to preserve her options.

Still, she wasn’t going to be gracious about it. She glared at her mother, telegraphed her extreme resentment – in that moment, with an uncanny resemblance to Julie – turned on her heel, and stalked off in high dudgeon.

“Tell you what.” Laura broke the silence. “You take them. I’ll move to Ashmore Minor.”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” said Richard. “They’re all yours.”

~•~

By noon, the vendor that Cat Courtney, Inc., had contracted to handle sales for the benefit notified Dell Barnes in Santa Fe of a sellout. Was Miss Courtney amenable to a second concert the following evening?

“I’ll talk to her,” Dell Barnes told the ticket rep, “but don’t count on it.”

Dell Barnes had always sworn that, when he retired, he was going to write the definitive manual on artist management. He’d managed three singers before Cat Courtney: a petulant pop princess whose too-thin talent couldn’t carry her when she grew too old (21) to appeal to her tween audience, a Romanian tenor with the voice of an angel and the thirst of the devil, and a rock star who blamed everyone but herself when her films bombed at the box office.

He had been whiling away time as a music producer when he had listened to a demo tape submitted by a friend who taught music composition at a Texas university. He’d listened as a courtesy for the first few seconds. Then he had bolted upright and told his secretary to book him a flight for Dallas.

He had found a mid-twenties matron, her conservative dress matching the conservative milieu in which she lived. She called Dell “sir” in a soft voice that pegged her as southern rather than Texan. She poured him tea in her music room, happily showing off the magnificent piano her husband had given her for her college graduation; afterwards, she had played and sung for him an album’s worth of her original compositions. As she sang, he’d seen her transformed from deferential young wife to dynamic performer, and he’d found his next project. The girl had more than potential; she had leaped years ahead of most songwriters her age. She had discipline and tenacity. More than that, she had
heart
. With proper handling, she would go the distance.

He had never regretted taking her on. After her predecessors, she was a breeze.

No cocaine. No mental breakdowns. No drunken blackouts. No prescription addictions. No shoplifting. No sleeping around with the second violinist. No hysterics because she didn’t like the sheets on her bed in the hotel. No nonsense about rose petals or silk dressing rooms or designer bottled water.

Best of all, she took direction. She viewed him as a collaborator; on tour, she was cheerful and hard-working and understood that she was part of a team. She asked only for scheduled downtime every day. Even her threat to go out in a blaze of glory with
Cat Courtney’s Favorite Polka Hits
, made when she was bone-tired at the end of a tour, became a standing joke. “Time for the polka album?” he’d ask, and she’d reply, with a straight face, that she was still fine-tuning the music. “But soon, Dell. Soon.”

He’d picked up the occasional hint of unhappiness in the St. Bride marriage, and it had come as no surprise when she had told him that her husband wanted a divorce. Cameron St. Bride had been a major red flag and the only downside of managing Cat Courtney; he could have happily drop-kicked the man off a high cliff for getting her pregnant before a major tour. Not that singers didn’t get pregnant all the time, usually at the most inopportune times, but she had told him at the beginning that she and her husband did not plan to have any more children. Accidents happened, but she had seemed nervous and tense and not at all excited about having a child – strange, considering how she doted on her daughter and they had to arrange everything around Meg. It was as if she had known her pregnancy was doomed.

Even her decision, right before 9/11, to go to Virginia had not been unexpected. Her reticence about her background had been another red flag during that first meeting. Something about her had seemed familiar…. He’d been her manager for over a year, with “Francie” and “Persephone” already part of the Cat Courtney legend, when he had read a Toronto newspaper article about a local production of
Electra
, directed by Dominic Abbott, and the man’s picture had rung a bell. He had looked up the old stories about Renée Dane and the murder trial in Dublin, and he never doubted that he had found Cat Courtney’s father and Laura St. Bride’s past.

He had never told anyone, even his wife.

He had worried about his girl after 9/11, and more than one person had expected her to pull out of
Rochester
. But she had soldiered on, and he’d hoped that this sojourn back to her roots would give her time to relax and heal so that she could give the upcoming tour her all. After that – she hadn’t asked to schedule anything, so perhaps she’d make her polka album and he’d retire and write that book after all.

She had always respected his family time, so he was startled when she called him on vacation and asked for help. She sounded apologetic. Someone had robbed her house and totaled her car. No, she was all right, Meg was all right, but while the insurance company worked things out, did he know anyone who could drive Cam’s Bentley to her in Virginia? “The title came to me in the estate,” Laura said. “I called SBFA, and Jean has the keys. It’s in storage. I’ll be more than happy to pay someone to bring it up here – I don’t have the time to fly down there and bring it back.”

Dell volunteered his son, who had graduated from college without a job and needed something constructive to do besides lie around and watch TV. “Anything else before Monday?”

“No.” She sighed. “This is such a mess, Dell. I’m trying to figure out what I need to do. I don’t have my Kurzweil or my laptop. I’ve got to go out this afternoon and buy all new equipment.” She stopped. “Oh, I’m moving – a friend is loaning me his house for a few weeks.”

A friend. A male friend. He knew how to listen for clues, and he heard plenty now in her voice. She sounded like a woman talking about a man she liked very much.

Interesting. And to be expected. She’d been a widow for almost a year. She needed to move on. He felt a fatherly interest in her; she was only a few years older than his daughter, and she deserved some happiness after the trauma of the last few years.

“Who’s this generous friend?” he asked in a teasing voice, and was not at all surprised when she evaded his question.

“Oh, just someone I knew when I was a kid.”

A childhood sweetheart. Even more interesting.

He switched gears. “Better give me that number too,” he said briskly. “In case your cell’s down and I need to reach you.”

She gave him the number without hesitation. They talked for a few minutes longer. He gave her the news about the sellout, and she vetoed a second night. “My sister will
kill
me,” she said cheerfully. “But no way.” They firmed up plans for his arrival on Monday and plotted out their work week.

When they disconnected, Dell Barnes called his daughter’s husband, a police officer in Kentucky, and asked him to run the telephone number of Cat Courtney’s generous childhood friend. His son-in-law called back within fifteen minutes. And Dell sat down at his laptop and prepared to find out all he could about Richard Ashmore.

Within two minutes, the third red flag of his career as Cat Courtney’s manager went up.

~•~

At Edwards Lake, Julie Ashmore and Meg St. Bride worked side by side in sullen silence to pack up Laura’s belongings, which, Julie’s father informed Meg’s mother, he was not going to let her burn. Dry clean, yes, burn, no. No need to waste perfectly good clothing, he said, his eyes on the peach silk slip. Each girl, as she worked, was stiff with outrage with the same thought going through her mind: the world as she knew it was coming to an end, and she did not like it one bit.

~•~

At Oak Bend Regional Airport, Lucy Maitland swept her damp hair back from her face and sneezed. She was no stranger to digging around in dusty records – one of her first assignments out of law school had been to review several thousand documents for a bank case – but the airport took lax recordkeeping to a new low.

She hadn’t encountered any resistance, once she identified herself as Philip Ashmore’s daughter and Richard Ashmore’s sister. Enough people had seen her with both men over the years that they hadn’t hesitated to show her to the unused hangar where they kept the old billing records. The airport hadn’t gone online until five years before; all billing had been done with index cards. “It’s kind of a mess,” the assistant manager had said apologetically. “Call if you need help.”

Kind of a mess! She’d never curse a sloppy client again.

She’d started through the boxes, hoping to find the records quickly and get out. No such luck. They did nothing so mundane at this place as file by flight date or pilot name. No, they filed by tail number. Tail number! Who besides the pilot knew the tail number? Both Richard and Philip had changed planes over the years, and, she quickly learned, any cross-reference from 1991 was long gone. So she pulled up a box and started to go through the records, one by one by one.

Each takeoff and landing was recorded on a separate card, dated and signed by the pilot. After a few thousand, she thought she’d go crazy. Scan for date, scan for name, replace. Scan, scan, replace…. No one had been in these records for years. She sneezed and prayed that she wasn’t exposing her baby to toxins.

Wait till I get my hands on you, Richard Ashmore. You are so dead.

She had gone through most of the boxes when she ran across Philip’s signature. She jotted down the tail number and then sat down, cross-legged, to go through his cards. He’d been an active pilot; he and Peggy had flown most weekends until he had finally admitted that his eyesight wasn’t what it had been. She went through a couple hundred cards – nothing was in order by date – and then, suddenly, it was.

August 6, 1991. He had taken off at 3:30 p.m., Ash Marine Inlet, VA, as his intended destination. He had returned to the airport at 10:46 that evening.

Over seven hours. Lucy put the card aside slowly and pulled up the next card.

She felt a chill go across her shoulders.

But shouldn’t she have expected this? Cameron St. Bride’s wife had been lying in a hospital. Of course, he’d rushed up here to be with her. But why –
why
was his landing card with Philip Ashmore’s billing records?

She swallowed hard and looked at Cameron St. Bride’s record.

He had landed at 11:09 p.m. that day – only twenty-three minutes after Philip’s return. He had paid for the landing with a credit card; the carbon of the receipt was still attached, complete with bold black signature. He had paid also to put his plane in a hangar – same hangar as Philip – for three days, after which time he had paid again for a takeoff. Destination:
McKinney, TX
. Passenger:
1
.