All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) (61 page)

If he hadn’t known better, he wouldn’t have even thought this could be Laura’s child. This kid had attitude. Hard to reconcile that with the sad-eyed girl on the
Missing
web site.

Something tugged at the back of his mind.

And what a different light this cast on St. Bride. Not a schmuck who had seduced a girl twelve years his junior, but a man who had married an unwed mother and adopted her child. He didn’t buy that Laura had pulled the wool over her husband’s eyes about this or anything else; St. Bride had always known. He’d taken on the child to win the mother.

He wondered when they had met. Sometime after she had left home, he’d bet, out in California.

He handed the picture back. “You realize, of course, that your brother adopted Meg?”

Which made the prospect of finding Meg St. Bride’s birth certificate even more problematic. Scratch that idea.

For a moment, Emma looked flummoxed, but then she recovered. “You don’t know that.”

“No, but I can be reasonably sure about it.” He felt more in control now – dangerous, ever, to let Emma St. Bride get the upper hand. “Your brother was no one’s fool. He didn’t get another man’s child foisted on him without knowing the score. You said he was a control freak, so you can bet he made sure the birth father could never make a claim. So – what do you want me to investigate?”

She started to open her mouth, and he added, “Understanding that I will not be a party to destroying the peace of a kid. She’s lost her father once. I won’t help you do that to her again.”

For a moment, silence. Emma’s eyes fell. She hadn’t expected the scenario of a voluntary and undoubtedly legal and airtight adoption; she had seen only the specter of a deceitful, grasping girl who had tricked a man in the cruelest way.

That’s your weak spot, Emma, you don’t see that people can act from the heart. You can’t accept that your brother was not a victim of a girl too young and probably too desperate to trick anyone. You can’t accept that maybe she loved him and not his money and that’s why she stayed with him.

You don’t trust anyone. No wonder you keep getting divorced.

Being Emma, she found her composure in record time. She lifted her chin and looked him straight in the eye. “I want the truth,” she said, and Brian didn’t believe her for a second. “If you don’t help me, I’ll find someone who will.”

Now,
that
he believed. She was fully capable of hiring someone who would blow this entire story out of the water and into the public eye. She didn’t care if she destroyed her niece’s security and exposed the family dirty laundry to the world, just as long as she got to humiliate her sister-in-law.

And, damn it, this was
his
story. Irresistibly, there shimmered now a more tantalizing puzzle than the identity of a singer whose star would eventually wane. He had assumed that Laura Abbott had run away from home to be with her boyfriend. But, if she and St. Bride had met in California, she had not run
to
someone. She had run to leave someone behind.

She had been seventeen, in trouble, probably desperate. Even with two older siblings – and Lucy Maitland came across as someone who had wanted desperately to find her missing sisters – she had not found help at home.

This was no longer a news story. He’d never be able to present this on the news; not only was it inappropriate for business news, it was impossibly convoluted, too complex to present in a few minutes on the air. But perhaps a feature story for one of the magazines –
Vanity Fair
or another of that ilk.

No. He wasn’t going to do that either. He’d meant what he had said – he wasn’t going to help Emma ruin Meg St. Bride’s life.

But he could let her think he might. She was willing to foot the bill far beyond what the station would pay for, and this way he could control her involvement. He could keep her from hurting a widow and a fatherless child who didn’t need to deal with her misplaced desire for vengeance. His one advantage, Brian Schneider saw, was that Emma desperately wanted his good opinion. She had this one spot of vulnerability, and he could use it to sit on her.

And he wanted to
know
. This went beyond the making of a singer, or an elaborate cover-up of a wife’s past and alter ego by a control freak husband. Something had gone badly wrong with Dominic Abbott’s daughters, that two of them had run away from home forever and another had been accused of her father’s murder. Some pathology lay buried deep in that family. Maybe that death off the Irish coast thirty years before had cast a haunting shadow over the Abbotts. Maybe Dominic Abbott’s death had been a long-overdue execution.

And
that
story he could pursue with a clear conscience.

“All right,” he said, “but I don’t work for you, Emma. You pay expenses only. Got that?”

“Fine,” said Emma, and now she relaxed. “I’ll charter a jet for tomorrow. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go slip into something more comfortable.”

~•~

To: Laura St. Bride

From: Mark St. Bride

Subject: Read this

(Read receipt requested)

Dear Laura:

This is beyond childish. I understand you are angry with me for my presumption about our marriage. I understand you don’t want people to think you are stupid. You’re not – but, I must tell you, your behavior this week is very disappointing.

I must talk to you. Since you are refusing to answer your phone – and, by the way, I did not appreciate you hanging up on me last night – I am flying to Williamsburg to meet with you. I did not intend to intrude upon your vacation time, but you have left me no choice.

About Richard Ashmore – I am going to ask that you try not to get too involved there. I understand you are lonely and you have needs, so I assume this is some sort of summer fling, or perhaps it is a rebellion against the life you led with Cam. I am prepared to overlook this and forgive you because I know you have had a rough year. We can discuss it further when I get there tomorrow.

Love, Mark

Chapter 16: From the Sky to the Sea

AT MID-EVENING, LAURA FOUND TIME and space enough to fall apart.

The sun had set when she walked softly by Julie’s closed door, past the downstairs solarium where Meg was working out on her barre, and through the French doors to the Folly’s back terrace. The heat of the day had started to fade, but the terrazzo stones remained warm under her bare feet. She pulled her bathrobe around her to cover her bathing suit and walked down to the pool area.

She sat down on the edge of the pool, just a few feet from where the Queen Bees had reigned only the day before, and dangled her legs in the water to test its temperature.

Warm enough against the twilight air, cool enough against the remnants of a hot July day. Laura slipped the bathrobe off and lowered herself in, and let the cocooning waters envelope her for a few seconds. They bathed and soothed and warmed. She sank down to cover her shoulders, letting the ends of her hair fall back into the water, and felt, for those brief moments, like a child back in the womb, without trouble, without care, knowing nothing more than vague sensations of light and noise.

No lights from Williamsburg. Nothing but a few stars and the faint lights from the Folly.

Only the faintest sound of a car along the country road outside the gates, almost half a mile away. Only the breeze swaying the olive trees that surrounded the back of the Folly, a tall dark wall shutting out the world so she saw only a dusting of stars in the sky and the faint embers of day, heard only the muted sounds of the pool pump, the heartbeat of her shadowy refuge.

She felt safe. She felt secure. And she went to pieces.

Yesterday, she’d been Laura St. Bride, that anonymous woman passing through life undetected. Now, so many people from the party knew who she was that the police probably wouldn’t bother to interview them all to find her thief. It was, she knew with a rock-bottom certainty, only a matter of time before someone said something to the wrong person, and her secret would be gone forever. She would be exposed, vulnerable, her life no longer her own. No more going to the grocery store, where every clerk would analyze her basket to see if the tabloids might pay to know that she took aspirin in copious amounts. No more buying paperbacks at the book store, unless she wanted the world to know that she had a secret weakness for erotic romance novels with bare-chested hunks on the cover. No more running outside in her long nightshirt to get the paper in the early morning.

Definitely, no more sharing a bed with a man still married on paper to her sister.

That was all gone, or it would be soon. It was a matter of time.

She knew what happened to celebrities. Paparazzi happened; tabloids happened. Other than the one infamous picture of her at Lincoln Center, there’d been little gossip about her because no one had known where to get it. But let her secret out, and then the deluge. If she gained two pounds, she’d be pregnant; if she lost two pounds, she’d be anorexic, her friends fearing for her life. If she had a cold, she’d be snorting cocaine; if she failed once to flash a Cat Courtney smile, she’d be teetering on the verge of a breakdown. If she dressed up, she’d have an out-of-control spending problem. If she dressed down, she’d have a drinking problem.

And she would be bedding down with every man who crossed her path or even stood near her in the same zip code.

Lies. Pure fantasy. And not a thing she could do about it.

She felt helpless.

Yesterday, she’d been a single woman living alone for the first time in her life, with no one to answer to – not a wife, not a mother, not a sister. She didn’t mind Meg’s presence, truly she didn’t – but, oh, she had treasured being alone. She was almost thirty-two, and she had never been truly independent. At Edwards Lake, her life had been hers to order as she wanted. She could go to bed and get up when she wanted, work all night or eat ice cream for breakfast if it struck her fancy. She could make love with Richard in the drawing room, and they could eat omelets in bed afterwards, with no one the wiser.

That was gone, too.

She’d lost the temporary home that had been hers alone; she had lost the space that she had needed to find herself again. Yesterday, she had refused to be relegated to his nights; now the nights were lost to her too. In one day, she’d gone from welcoming her lover into her home to living in his, and with none of the usual benefits of living in sin. No one was going to be making love to anyone else this Sunday, for sure. He had moved out that afternoon, taking his clothes and laptop, two model airplanes, and five books.

She’d lost the security of owning her own things, the freedom of owning her own time. She’d lost the privacy of her love affair. And she’d lost her car.

Laura crossed her arms on the side of the pool, put her head down, and burst into tears.

She was alone. She didn’t need to put on her brave front anymore – Laura St. Bride, who would never let a small thing like a thief breaking into her house or her sister outing her to the world get her down. No one could see her out here. Richard had gone to his office to work until the wee hours of the morning; the girls were engaged in their own activities in different parts of the house. Max had taken up residence on Richard’s enormous bed. The clothes that she hadn’t bundled off to the dry cleaner were going through their second cycle in the laundry room. She could carry on to her heart’s content.

She was entitled to her breakdown. She intended to enjoy every minute—

Stupid
, she told herself fiercely,
this is stupid, stupid, stupid! What on earth are you crying about! It’s not the end of the world!

It wasn’t as if she couldn’t afford to replace everything. She was one of the fortunate; she didn’t have to wait for some overworked, underpaid insurance adjuster to write her a check so that she could make herself whole again. The frightening amounts she’d spent that afternoon proved that, and she had Cam’s car – a Bentley, for heaven’s sake – as a fallback. It wasn’t the
stuff
.

But it was – and, oh Lord, only now did she admit it to herself – it had been the twisted, burned silver of the Jaguar. She hadn’t even realized, until now, how those frightening images kept merging in her mind with memories of other twisted, burned metal. It was the sheer terrifying vulnerability. All the security that money could buy hadn’t stopped someone last night from violating her space and wouldn’t have stopped someone from violating her or Meg.

Money had already proved it was good for little. It hadn’t saved Cam, standing on top of the world.

She’d thought, all these years, that people overrated the power of money. It had always seemed unreal to her. For the first half of their marriage, they hadn’t been rich. They’d been comfortable, and even before the IPO, Cam had provided well for her and Meg. She didn’t need to work, he’d said from the start, he wanted her to stay home with Meg and be a full-time wife and mother. Supporting the family was his responsibility, and he’d make sure the bills were covered.