All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) (72 page)

“Likely.” Lucy had put on her detective hat again – precisely the reason he’d given her the assignment to find her younger sister. Her words reminded him – he pulled out the envelope of Laura’s documents to give to her. “I talked to Laura about the other matter.”

“Really?” Lucy’s voice perked up. “How did that go?”

“We’ll survive,” he said crisply. “St. Bride was not her source. This was all Francie’s doing.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” Lucy took a moment of silence. “So Cam paid Dominic off? Do you have a total?”

“Around four hundred thousand. I found a separate check stub for one hundred thousand that looks like a one-time payment back in June 1996.” He sent her another digital image. “Which, if memory serves me correctly, is right around the time Cat Courtney had her first hit.”

He let her stew on that. Knowing Lucy, he could almost see the steam pouring from her ears. “After the review he wrote? I wouldn’t have given him the time of day.”

No, it had been a master strategy.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
St. Bride had cleverly co-opted Dominic Abbott; not another negative word had escaped Dominic’s pen. A movement caught his eye, as Meg shifted on the sofa and her power drink hovered precariously at the edge of the coffee table, right above his grandmother’s prize Aubusson rug. He shifted the phone away and raised his voice. “Meg! Move that drink away from the edge.”

Something must have drifted through those headphones, as she looked up blankly. At least she wasn’t eavesdropping. She lifted a headphone off one ear and said, “Huh?”

“Move that drink before it spills on the rug.”

“Oh. Sure.” Meg used her foot to nudge the glass over and immediately went back to her laptop.

Richard shook his head and returned to the call. “Sorry about that—”

Lucy’s voice, full of shock. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my
God
.”

“Luce?”

“Oh, my
God
.” Fingers tapping on a keyboard. “I’m sending you something. I didn’t check my work email last night – I’ve got to call Amy – did you get it?
Did you get it?
”

He got it. The breath drained out of his lungs.

There, in his inbox, was Francie Abbott. He ignored the message and bored in on the woman at the back of the table in the picture. Her hair was shorter than he remembered, her face a little fuller and more mature. She was wearing gray, a color the Francie of 1988 would never have worn.

But no mistaking those mischievous eyes, that flirty smile, that
joie de vivre
that remained a bright memory of that long-ago spring.

“I can’t believe it.” Lucy sounded dazed. “How – I’ll call you back – I’ve got to call Amy.”

He put the phone down without a word. His eyes swept through the message, registering facts to pursue later:
ER doctor
.
SeaWest Group. Reciprocal relationship with St. Bride Investments.
But they faded in the shock of seeing her again. He had not seen her since his father had said, in utter irritation, “Francie, if you can’t be quiet, go in the other room, and stay there.”

He’d been right, then. She had not died – or, at least, as of three years ago, she had been alive and still capable of charming the pants off men who ought to know better. Cameron St. Bride had not dropped her from a plane over the Atlantic. Instead, he had shipped her out of his wife’s life and off to – Seattle? And found her a job through his family’s bank, where, true to form, he could control her.

You must have been damn sure that she was never going to pop up again, like a bad penny.

For all her faults, he did not think Francie had been bought off. Or that she had consented willingly to a lifelong separation from her twin. How had St. Bride bent her to his will?

You son of a bitch. You knew, didn’t you? And you punished her. You took her sister away from her. She stayed with you out of guilt, and you played on that guilt to keep her in line, until you finally went too far, and she’d had enough.

He shut down his fury and went to work. Within minutes, he had established that no variation of “Francesca Abbott” existed anywhere on the Internet, except in a
Missing
ad Lucy had posted.

But Francie must have left tracks in the sand. Time to forget that desire to beat the hell out of St. Bride; time to outwit the strategies of eleven years past.
And I have the advantage, you bastard, because you thought you’d live forever.
Richard pulled a yellow pad toward him and started to make notes.

“Hey, what’s up? You look like something’s wrong.”

He glanced up to see Meg standing right in front of him. He hit a key to minimize his inbox. “Nothing. Need something?”

“Not really.” Meg perched on the side of his desk, ignoring the obvious fact that he was busy. He’d never met anyone more immune to taking a hint. “Hey, did you and my mom have a fight?”

Running full-tilt, as usual, into someone else’s business. “Excuse me?”

“Well, at breakfast, she was so quiet, she didn’t seem very – you know,” and her expression caricatured a giddy, love-struck woman so exactly that Richard came close to laughing. “She seemed kind of weirded out.” Her voice turned accusing. “Did you say something bad to her?”

He
was
going to laugh. He’d forgotten what a dogged guardian Laura had. He might have twenty-four years and a foot and a half on her, but she was his equal in sheer bloody-minded determination. “That’s none of your business.”

“You did say something,” said Meg, stiff with outrage. “You promised you’d be good to her! You promised!” She slammed her foot against the side of his desk, and then – unbelievably – she leaned in, right in his face. “Whatever you said, you take it back, you hear? You
promised
.”

He stared back into Francie’s eyes, only inches away from his, and thought ruefully that he was getting his just desserts. He’d been spared what must have been truly terrible twos, but he was getting her right in time for her teens. An object lesson for any man tempted to enjoy a few Saturday afternoons with a pretty girl.
This is what awaits you, fourteen years down the line.

He said, “Back off, Margaret Mary. And do not kick this desk again, unless you want to spend the rest of the day in timeout. No headphones, no cell phone, no computer.”

Inexplicably – no telling with that devious mind – that grabbed her interest. She sat back with an air of curiosity. “Really? You’d punish me?”

He turned the yellow pad over and put it to one side. He didn’t put it beyond her to read upside down. “You bet.” He matched her tone. “I told you. My house, my rules. Leave that alone!”

He’d made a mistake. In moving the pad, he’d exposed the envelope with Laura’s documents.

He made a grab for it, but she had slipped off the desk, just out of reach. She ran off immediately, dancing nimbly, holding the envelope above her head – as if she seriously thought he might not be able to reach it. The arrangement of his desk slowed him down; he lost a couple of seconds coming from behind the desk, and by that time she had sprinted across the room.

“You’re not my father!” she trilled. “You can’t punish me! Just wait till I tell my mother! She’ll be so mad!”

The phone rang just as he reached her. She took advantage of his momentary pause to thrust the envelope up under her T-shirt. He said in disgust, “Grow up. It’s only your mother’s birth certificate,” and swung back to his desk, leaving her to her victory dance. He had to catch the call – probably Lucy, calling to report what she’d found out from Amy Stewart – far more important than winning this idiotic skirmish.

But on his way back to his desk, he glanced over at her laptop, and got the shock of his life.

For once, he wished he weren’t far-sighted. Coincidence, of course, had to be, that her browser showed search results for “standing stone of Ireland.” Wherever she’d heard that – surely not from Julie, and Laura would have said nothing – she was on the wrong track. Still, he felt the blood rising in his face.

He shook his head and reached for the phone.

Meg wandered back to the sofa, not bothering to pretend that she wasn’t eavesdropping.

“Yes?” She wasn’t going to get anything from him.

Lucy was speaking so fast, he had to ask her to slow down. “It’s her. It’s her. I know it. Amy says her brother saw a picture of Cat Courtney and recognized this woman. He’s going to talk to us. Today. Not right now, it’s still early there, he was going fishing with his kids, but when they get back,” she ran out of breath, “he’ll call us.” The hard-nosed lawyer who had held his feet to the fire the night before had vanished. “Oh, Richard, it’s her! She’s alive!”

He hated to quash her. Poor Lucy, she’d wanted nothing more than her family reunited all these years, but there wasn’t going to be any happy family gathering here. Francie had committed a crime. Not the one she’d aimed for, thanks to a flat tire, but she had drugged Laura and left her to die, and that he did not intend to forgive and forget. And if she had truly meant to kill Diana, then she had two crimes to answer for.

If she had implicated him to Laura, three.

Maybe she had rebuilt her life, just as he had. Maybe she was happy and contented now, thinking herself safe, forgotten. She was going to find her past hard to outrun.

“Luce,” he sliced through her very un-Lucy-like excitement. “Calm down.”

She sobered immediately, recognizing how misplaced her excitement might be. This prodigal wouldn’t come home to open arms. “Oh, I know, but – well, let’s see what happens, okay?”

They left it finally that they would make the call together. At Ashmore Minor, he decided, not here, where Laura might overhear, where Meg would certainly eavesdrop, where even Julie might listen accidentally.

He had finished his emails when, from the corner of his eye, he saw Meg flop back down on the sofa, put her feet up on the coffee table, and open the envelope of documents. She started reading through them, blissfully silent, far enough away that she couldn’t see the printout of Francie’s picture.

“Hey, guess what. My mom got baptized on your birthday.”

He was searching the private investment banks in Seattle, not paying attention. “Hmmm.”

“Yeah, my grandfather baptized her. It says here it was a conditional baptism. What happened? Do you think he made sure she got baptized before the police dragged him away?” Meg’s eyes sparkled. “Cool. Just think – he’s a wanted killer, the police are breaking down the door, they’re going to lock him up so they can hang him, but he has to make sure my mom won’t go to – where do pagan babies go?—”

“Perhaps,” but she went on.

“I got baptized that way too. My mom baptized me in the hospital.”

That got his attention. “Why?”

Meg shrugged. “I was real little when I was born. Guess Mom was afraid I wouldn’t make it or something.” She pulled out another document before he could frame the questions:
Why were you born in September? How premature were you?
“Oh, wow, I never knew this. Mom’s name wasn’t plain Abbott? Dane-Abbott? What the heck kind of name is that?”

He saw it then, as clearly as if he and Diana had only now applied for their license.
Diana Renée Dane-Abbott
, she’d written in the space for
Bride
, at the insistence of the registrar who had told her to put down her legal name.
But I’m not anymore, that’s not my name
, Diana had protested, and the clerk had said no matter. Her marriage license had to match her birth certificate.

He remembered his surprise; he had never realized that Lucy and Diana did not have the same last name. He remembered his words:
Don’t make a fuss, Di, just do it
, and her response:
You don’t get it, Richard. I don’t want her name. Not now, not ever.

Laura in his car, confessing in the dark of the night.
I said my name was Laurel Dane
.

He said, “Your grandmother’s name was Dane. I believe they hyphenated the name—” she knew about illegitimacy, no delicate sensibilities to protect there— “because they weren’t married. Some people do that, to make sure the children share both names.”

But, as he spoke, he pulled the copy of his marriage certificate from the divorce file, and, sure enough, there it was, in black and white:
Diana Renée Dane-Abbott
. They’d overlooked that – Dominic, the police, everyone – no one had ever thought that the two runaways might use their mother’s name.

“Oh, wow,” said Meg. “How veddy,
veddy
British. Like St. Bride, isn’t it?”

“Very.” Within three mouse clicks, he found Francesca Dane, member of a banking association in Seattle, Washington.

~•~

There was, Lucy saw immediately, trouble in paradise. Laura and Richard were on the outs.