All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) (81 page)

He said nothing. Probably blaming himself for Francie’s wrist. She had her own thoughts on why Francie might have wanted to harm herself.

“I ran her through the usual databases this afternoon. There’s no such person in the U.S.”

Silence, and then, “Not surprising.” She heard his fingers striking a keyboard. “That name sounds like Francie – silly and off-the-wall. You realize she was sending a message, don’t you?”

She had to tread carefully. “To you?”

“No. It means nothing to me.” He was typing away. “But you can bet that name meant something and she figured St. Bride would never catch on. Francie usually had a purpose for what she did. She was trying to get someone’s attention, and it didn’t work – at least, until now.”

“What did he hold over her? It can’t be the thing about Di. He wouldn’t have cared.”

“When you find her,” he said, “ask. In the meantime, you know as well as I do who to call.”

“I know.” She dreaded the call.

~•~

Around dinner time, Scott McIntire checked the weekly statistics on the Ashmore & McIntire web site and noticed that, inexplicably, they had experienced over a hundred hits that day alone.

~•~

“Well, well,” said Diana. “My dear sister – or, should I say, my dear soon-to-be-ex’s lawyer. And how are you this fine evening? Are you allowed to talk to me?”

“Knock it off, Di.” She’d put off the call as long as she could. She and Tom had eaten dinner and watched a movie in their den, followed by a leisurely soak in the tub. At that point, she had run out of excuses. Even as she had pressed the speed dial, she’d prayed Diana would be too busy to come to the phone. “How are things going?”

“Fine. Just fine.” Diana didn’t sound ready to give an inch. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

The things she endured for her family. She took a breath. “Does Gomerberg mean anything to you?”

A moment, then Diana sounded puzzled. “Dr. Gomerberg?”

Lucy shot up straight. “Who’s that? A doctor you went to?”

Diana laughed. “Heavens, no. Dr. as in Professor. From Norway. Why?”

“Oh.” She tried to sound casual. “Just saw the name in Dominic’s papers and wondered.”

“I’m not surprised.” Diana audibly swallowed something. No wonder their Scotch bills were so high. “He and Daddy corresponded for a while – he is, or I should say
was
, the world’s foremost expert on Verdi’s motifs in
Aida
, if you can believe that.”

She believed it. “Do you know anything about him? Where he lived?”

“Why do you care?”

“Because—” She cast around for a plausible excuse. “It looks like Dominic owed him some money. I can’t quite make out his address—”

“Oh, that.” Diana sounded relieved. “Don’t bother. He’s dead. He died a long time ago – when we were in high school. He was on sabbatical down in Alabama, and he had a heart attack a few weeks after Daddy went down to meet with him. God, I’ll never forget that trip, I was so bored—”

Lucy said cautiously, “I don’t remember that.”

“You wouldn’t,” Diana returned. “Lucky you, Peggy and Philip took you and Richard to New York for spring break, and I got to go to bloody Montgomery, Alabama, with Daddy and the twins. Talk about awful – Francie was up to her usual tricks, Laurie had her nose in a book – I wanted to scream. And then a few weeks later he keeled over, and Daddy said how ironic it was, because—”

Lucy said slowly, “I get it. Gomerberg. Montgomery.”

Diana sounded put out. “Then why did you ask?”

“I didn’t realize he was dead.” Her heart was racing. “Well, I guess I won’t bother to send him a check for the twenty dollars Dominic borrowed. Listen, I’ve got to go. Talk to you tomorrow.”

She disconnected over Diana’s protest and pressed another speed dial. When her foster brother answered, she barely had time to get out, “Montgomery. Her name—”

He interrupted. “I know, I was about to call you. I had a brainstorm – the boxes of papers Laura took from Dominic’s. I went through them, and underneath the checks, I found an envelope for a Christmas card. No card, but the return label showed an F.D. Montgomery at a P.O. box in Bellevue, Washington. Got a pen? Here’s the address.”

~•~

In Williamsburg, Brian Schneider and Emma St. Bride lounged in their hotel after a day of playing tourist and doing nothing of real value. Brian reviewed his notes on Laura St. Bride, paged through the high school yearbook he had found in a local used book store, and planned his interview with Lucy Maitland the next morning.

He found Laura Abbott easily in the junior class section. Just one line, LAURA ROSE ABBOTT, with no listing of extracurricular activities, nothing to indicate that this tense-looking girl was The One Most Likely to Succeed. Francesca, at least, had starred in a school musical,
Paint Your Wagon
, but Laura Abbott had not made a ripple in her very small pond.

She had attended the junior prom with a stocky sandy-haired boy. Unlikely to be Meg St. Bride’s biological father with that hair and build, but who knew? Genetics played tricks. He studied the black-and-white photo of those long-ago children, Laura in a prom dress that looked like a hand-me-down, the boy uncomfortable in his tux. They seemed too young to indulge in teenage pleasures of the flesh. Holding hands, smiling awkwardly, they had an air of anachronistic innocence.

He made a note of the boy’s name, Neil Redmond, and ran a search. The result startled him. Neil Redmond had been ordained six years before and was now a priest and canon lawyer for the Diocese of Richmond. He sat back and thought. If the boy had been intended for the seminary, might that have given Laura an incentive to run away when she found herself pregnant?

And
that
rang a bell. Hadn’t there been family history to that effect, the impact of an untimely pregnancy on an ecclesiastical career? The celibate lured from his monastic refuge by the seductive and unfaithful Renée Dane? Had the pattern repeated itself in the second generation?

He dug out his material on Dominic Abbott while Emma ordered coffee and cake from room service. She chattered; he drank a cup absently and read about the doomed love affair of the Irish-American monk and the Countess of Shilleen.

“Find anything?” Emma asked.

“I don’t know,” he said briefly.
If I do, I won’t be telling you, sweetheart
. “I’ll let you know.”

She nodded, just as her cell rang, and grimaced at the caller ID. “Mark again,” she said, and muted the phone. “What a pest. That makes what, ten calls today? The boy needs to get a life.”

~•~

In Boston, a political reporter for a local station saw the choice nugget about Cat Courtney on the daily’s web site. Normally, he didn’t bother with entertainment gossip, but the 9/11 connection made it too good to pass up. He wrote a quick story and submitted it for the station’s web site.

~•~

At a data center in New Hampshire, the tech on duty noticed that traffic had escalated on the server that housed the web sites for St. Bride Data and Cat Courtney, Inc. He shrugged and added the auxiliary server, normally kept only for emergencies, for load balancing. He hadn’t seen traffic like this since the night of September 11.

~•~

Mark St. Bride sat in his empty house, whiskey in hand, and thought wearily about the days and weeks and years ahead.

~•~

From the safety of her suite, Cat Courtney used one of the phone cards to place a call to her manager. He was surprised to hear from her since he planned to see her the next day. He was shocked to learn that she had left Virginia and would not attend rehearsals until later in the week.

He started to remonstrate, but she cut right across his words. In a tough, determined voice he had never heard from her, she put
the
question to him: “Before we go any further, Dell, I need to know. I’m breaking with St. Bride Data. Are you with me?”

In his bones, he had always known that it would come to this. It meant giving up a lot of perks, she warned – the St. Bride Data umbrella had provided him a cushion for retirement as well as a generous salary and expense account, not to mention the lucrative management fees that came from managing a successful asset like Cat Courtney. He hated to lose all that. She’d try to make it up to him, but….

But Cameron St. Bride had done his damnedest to extend his domination in death, leaving her in an impossible position. When she told him of the scene the day before – and admitted frankly that, yes, she was involved with her sister’s husband, and no, she didn’t give a damn about the potential explosiveness of the relationship, he understood the gravity of her situation.

No, he hated giving up the security that St. Bride Data had provided. He had witnessed artistic breakups in the past, and they tended to be nasty, mean-spirited, and profitable only to lawyers. But he had created and nurtured Cat Courtney, and the thought of losing her trumped all else.

And he was damned if he was losing her to Mark St. Bride.

He said, “I’m with you.”

“Good.” She sounded relieved. “Thank you, Dell. I promise I won’t let you suffer for this.”

“See that you don’t,” he said. “Don’t do this and then bail out with the polka album, all right?”

“No,” and she sounded more like the Laura St. Bride he had discovered so many years ago. “I won’t. But fasten your seat belt, Dell, we are in for a bumpy ride. Oh, get a new phone first thing tomorrow. Mark can see your account.”

~•~

Two years before, Francesca Montgomery had received a parking ticket in Bellevue, Washington. The ticket, buried in the state databases, had a wealth of information: make and model, license tag, registration. It listed the address where she had lived when she had last paid for license plates. It indicated that she had promptly paid her ticket in cash.

Another database showed that, two months later, Francesca Montgomery had traded in that car. A criss-cross directory showed that she no longer lived at the Bellevue address.

Lucy balanced her notebook on her lap and pressed speed dial on her cell. “I am so frustrated,” she told her foster brother. “Every time I think I’ve got her, she vanishes.”

Richard sounded distracted. “What did you find?”

“Little Miss Windy drove a Honda.” She tapped a couple of keys. “And she lived in a condo. Not a house, which would be so much easier to find.”

She heard him moving around – probably working in his bachelor solitude. “What about the husband? How many doctors named Montgomery can there be in Seattle?”

Lucy hesitated. Surely Richard knew the obvious solution – enlist Mel McIntire’s aid – but she knew better than to make the suggestion. “I ran a preliminary search, and over fifty doctors in the Seattle area are named Montgomery. We know he’s in ER, so I can try to narrow it down.” She heard him muttering under his breath. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t get into my files at the office. I wonder if the server is down – oh, there it goes.” He sounded relieved. “Listen, Luce, I still don’t want you going to her house. We don’t know what this guy knows – we don’t even know if they’re still married. I think you’ll learn more if you can find her at work. Start with the bank. She might keep in touch with her former co-workers.”

Lucy was already looking up flight schedules. “I’ve got a meeting with a reporter in the morning about the concert, Tom told this guy I’d be in. I’ve got a ton of contracts I’ve got to do this week, but if I can get an afternoon flight—”

From her peripheral vision, she saw Tom in the doorway, and she cut off. He was staring at her, arms folded, mouth set hard.

She said hastily, “Later,” and hung up.

Tom said, “Flight? Are you going somewhere?”

Lucy nodded.

His voice was hard. “Where?”

Lucy set aside the laptop. Tom never raised his voice – he seldom got mad at her – but she recognized a glitter in his eyes. “I have to go to Seattle for Richard.”

A pause, and then, “No. No, Lucy, you don’t.”

She took a deep breath. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Richard does not do business in Seattle.” He unfolded his arms and came into the room. “What does he need that requires you to fly across the continent when you’re pregnant?”

She wondered how much he had heard. Oh, well, she had known that she couldn’t keep it a secret from Tom forever, but she had hoped to break the news to him at their offices, preferably when he was about to dash off to court and had no time to protest. “Family business.”

“What kind of family business?” Tom wasn’t budging. “Neither of you has family there.”

Lucy swallowed. “I do.”

“Who?” He sat down on the side of the bed. “I know every—” He stopped. “It’s not your mother, is it?”

She hadn’t thought of that. She seldom spared a thought for the woman who had skipped out on her, leaving her to the best parents a girl could have asked for. “It’s not her.”

Tom studied her for a long moment. “Then who?” And he didn’t sound ready to accept any more evasions. “What does Richard have to do with this?”

“Okay.” Lucy braced herself. “You’re not going to believe this.”