Lucy had known too. She had admitted as much when Laura had called to ask for advice. I couldn’t tell you. I’m bound by client confidentiality. Lucy couldn’t help her, because Richard was her client and Laura was now the witness called against him. I’ll find you a lawyer, was all Lucy could promise. First thing in the morning. Don’t worry, Laurie.
But she couldn’t help but worry. She felt betrayed by both Richard and Lucy; neither of them had trusted her enough to warn her or even think she was grown up enough to handle the truth.
She was always going to be little Laura Abbott to them.
“Laura?” Richard appeared at the side of the flagstone terrace, a tall shadow in the late evening darkness. “What are you doing out here? Didn’t you hear me?”
She sounded rusty and strained to her ears. “I just wanted to sit outside for a while.”
He came over to her, and she saw through the filtered light from the kitchen annex that he looked weary and drained. He had his suit jacket slung over his shoulder; his tie was loosened and the top shirt button undone. He leaned down to brush a kiss across her lips, and surely he felt her lack of response. She avoided his questioning look, but, when he motioned to her to move over, she shifted so that he could sit down beside her.
They sat shoulder to shoulder, as they had so many times in their past, and for a few minutes, he respected her need for distance, letting the silence lie between them. Laura felt his body touching hers, warm and secure, inviting her to lean on him and lay all her problems in his hands. She wanted to howl. He was her problem, he and his disastrous marriage, he and the wife he should have divorced years ago, long before she ever came back.
She’d wondered how they would cope with the real world – now, without warning, the real world was upon them.
She noticed a small paper bag at his feet next to his briefcase. “What’s that?”
Richard glanced over at her. “Coffee.”
That startled her into a normal response. “Coffee? Why?”
“Because all you have in your kitchen is instant.” She heard the amusement in his voice. “I’ll keep some over here so I can have a decent cup of coffee.”
She turned to look at him, and her cheek brushed against his shoulder. “Is that a hint?”
He turned towards her, and now she saw a faint smile through the dusk. He put his hand warm and flat against her back. “Could be. It’s been a long day.”
His touch soothed away some of her tension. She buried her face in her hands. “Mine too.”
“I know. Lucy left me a message. I’m sorry, Laura.”
At his words, her shoulders lost their rigidity, and she felt her anger start to seep away. She still couldn’t look at him. “Di subpoenaed me to testify about you and Francie.”
“Tom faxed me the notice last Friday.”
So he wasn’t trying to hide that he’d known about it the whole weekend. If she was keeping secrets from him, he was keeping just as many from her. “Then you knew before—” she swallowed hard— “you came back Friday night.”
He was silent for a moment, and then she heard him sigh. “I see what’s going on. Yes, I did, but – you can’t seriously think that’s why I came back to you.”
She lifted her face from her hands. “Richard—”
“No,” he interrupted, “stop whatever you’re thinking. You know better than that, Laura. You know me better than that. You can’t possibly—”
“Do not even think about calling me dumb.”
He sounded irritated. “Don’t put words in my mouth. I was going to say that I hope you have more faith in yourself – and in me – than to think I’d make love to you to keep you from testifying. Forget the subpoena, Laura. Nothing’s going to happen. I don’t know what Diana’s game is, but I can promise you that, as of this evening, she has bigger problems than this.”
Laura turned her head to look at him. “Like what?”
“That’s what I came over here to tell you about.” Richard swatted at the air. “Look,” he said, and his voice gentled, “can we go inside? The mosquitoes are out in force, and I want some coffee. I’ve been on the go since six this morning. We’ll talk about the subpoena, but let’s do it in some comfort.”
She said lowly, “I don’t want to testify. This isn’t fair of Di. She shouldn’t expect me to do this.”
“You are not going to. Let’s get inside.”
He rose to his feet and then extended his hand to help her up, but, instead of letting her go, he pulled her loosely against him until she dropped her resistance and put her arms around his waist. Max threw himself against Richard’s legs in ecstasy at the return of his hero.
“Traitor cat,” Laura said with mock resentment. “I feed him, and he fawns all over you.”
Richard looked down at her levelly. “You are a goose,” he said. “You’ve got this all backwards, my lady Cat. The real mystery isn’t why I came back, but instead why you’re with me. All you’re going to get from being with me is a lot of trouble from your sister.” He stopped and looked down at Max. “Damn it, he’s shedding fur all over these pants—”
“Shhh.” Laura opened the back door. “Don’t listen to him, Max. He’s just cranky because he needs a caffeine fix.”
Inside, the cool air brushed their faces. Laura pushed the subpoena towards Richard and set a late-night dinner out for Max before her cat could deposit the rest of his fur on Richard’s suit. He worked beside her, setting the kettle on for her tea, measuring the ground beans into the coffee maker, pulling down mugs from the cupboard. How comfortable it felt, the two of them, working side by side, performing these small domestic tasks – no, she wasn’t going to succumb to what-might-have-been. The subpoena had been a rude awakening. Eleven years of separation or not, Richard still had a wife with an interest in his past and a desire for revenge.
And she not only knew about that past now, but she had the most compelling evidence of all in her daughter.
She heard herself say, “I don’t have any papers. Why does Di think I do?”
Richard carried his coffee over to the trestle table and held out a chair for her. “Actually,” he said when she sat down, “you may have something and you don’t know it.”
“I don’t have anything,” said Laura. “If you’re thinking about those tapes—” Francie’s foray into the world of erotic fiction. She shuddered. “All her stuff is in storage. I can’t imagine those tapes would be good after all these years.”
“Not the tapes.” He shook his head. “I got rid of those years ago. No, what you may have is a burgundy book with gold lettering on the front – it’s her flight log, and I signed and dated every lesson as her instructor. It completely slipped my mind until I was filling out my flight log yesterday. I’m certain she took it with her. No one ever mentioned it. Did you see something like that?” He looked at her and exhaled. “Yes, I see you did.”
She’d seen that book every weekend during the final spring of Francie’s life. “Cam signed it when he gave her lessons in ’91. I know exactly where it is.” From the look on his face, that was not welcome news. “But it’s okay, really it is! It’s in storage with the rest of her stuff.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Richard said flatly. “Read the wording. If it’s in your control—”
She touched his arm. “But it’s not, that’s just it! After—” she took a breath and plunged ahead as his eyes shadowed— “after Francie died, I was sick for a while, so Cam had his admin pack up her stuff and rent a storage space. I never had the key. He always kept it in his desk drawer. Everything is probably still there – I’m certain he never gave it another thought.”
He drew a breath and said patiently, “You don’t understand. You’re his heir, so I assume you inherited the furniture. That’s what this whole brouhaha about the piano is about, isn’t it? That means the desk, and its drawers, and its contents, belong to you. So, yes, you do control it.” She started to speak, and he overrode her. “Listen, Laura, I
’m no lawyer, but I’ve dealt with subpoenas for years. Architects get dragged into lawsuits all the time. You may be a thousand miles away, but the desk and its contents are still in your control.”
“But that’s it, Richard!” She smiled triumphantly. “I wrote an email tonight giving Mark the desk. I thought it was his all along. It belonged to their father at the bank. How was I to know? I haven’t thought about that key for years. Mark wrote me this plaintive email about how I could take every stick of furniture and would I please let him keep that one thing – why are you laughing?”
“Oh, God.” He covered his eyes with his hand. “I can just imagine Kevin Stone’s reaction to the timing of your transfer of that desk. Well, here’s the good news. On the face of it – my signing that flight log was no more incriminating than your husband signing it. It links her to me, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because you’re not going to testify.”
He acted as if he had a magic wand to make it all disappear. “Lucy said she couldn’t help me, since she’s your lawyer. So she’s going to talk to a friend of hers and see if he’ll represent me.”
He nodded. “She told me. It’s fine that you’re getting a lawyer, but I promise you that you won’t need one.”
Laura was getting tired of those words. “You keep saying that. How can you make this go away?”
Richard reached into his briefcase, pulled out a blue-backed sheaf of papers, and put it in her hands.
“I filed for divorce this afternoon,” he said. “Diana was served at the Tavern this evening.”
If he’d meant to knock the breath out of her, he succeeded. She stared at him in shock. She must have imagined his words; he hadn’t said what she thought she’d heard. He hadn’t stepped off the precipice so abruptly; he hadn’t tossed away eighteen years of marriage – miserable years, but, still, eighteen – for her. He hadn’t decided to cut the love of his life out of his life for her.
But he had. He’d laid the petition in her hands in the same way that Max liked to bring her his dead bug trophies. Maybe, she thought hysterically, he wanted her to pat him on the head and tell him what a good boy he was.
He was divorcing Diana.
“Why?” she whispered.
He paused for a moment. “It’s time.”
She nodded, dazed, and looked down at the petition. Richard Patrick Ashmore, Complainant, vs. Diana Renée Abbott Ashmore, Defendant…. Plain words on a paper. Eighteen years of marriage, the end of the fairy tale, right here in her hand. She bit her lip and felt tears bathing her eyes. Stupid to cry, she hadn’t even cried when the FedEx package had arrived in London with Cam’s divorce petition, but no fairy tale had ended there. No Prince Charming had danced with his Sleeping Beauty at City Hall in San Francisco.
She paged through the petition, unseeing. He said nothing, he justified nothing. He merely waited while she absorbed the reality that in her hands lay the end of one dream and – no, she wouldn’t think it, wouldn’t wonder if it could be the beginning of another. This was a tragedy. Two people who’d been in love beyond all thought were finally admitting that their love had come up short, that they hadn’t well lost the world for each other.
She handed the petition back to him. Without a word, he put it back in his briefcase.
He said evenly, “This will take some time – a year or so. I don’t know how long it takes in Texas, but here in Virginia, it takes several months even when the parties agree. I don’t expect that she’ll cooperate at first.”
Laura pulled together her scattered thoughts. Diana must be devastated right now. Being served papers must have come as a shock. “How – do you know – how is Di taking this?”
He paused with his cup halfway to his mouth. “Judging from the incoherent message she left on my cell – not well.”
“Oh, my God.” Laura buried her face in her hands. “Poor Di.”
This was probably not the reaction he was looking for. “Diana is going to be all right. Please believe that. This is the best thing for us both. It’s time she and I let each other go.”
“Richard – she thinks you are mated for life. She told me so.”
He sounded startled. “When did she say that?”
“Last Friday when – when I was driving her home from the hospital. She asked me—” Laura stopped, and then said slowly, “She asked me if I’d give her an affidavit about Francie, and I said no. She said it didn’t matter anyway, so I guess she was thinking about the subpoena. She said she used to worry you’d divorce her, but maybe you felt the same way she did, that you were mated for life.”
She still didn’t look at him, but she heard his sharpness above her head. “Considering Kevin was filing this subpoena at the very moment you were driving her home, I find her comment more than a little self-serving and her request more than a little suspicious.” He waited until she looked at him. “Listen to me, Laura. You are not to feel guilty. You didn’t cause this. I should have filed years ago and spared us all several highly unpleasant months. I had my reasons, but—” He gave a shrug. “I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time over the next few months to regret waiting. But I don’t want you to worry about her.”
“I can’t help it,” she said wearily. “She’s my sister.”
Oh, heavens, how had she gotten herself into such a melodramatic situation – feeling sorry for her lover’s wife? Maybe Cam had been right. Maybe she needed a keeper.
“She’s upset right now,” Richard said flatly, “but deep down Diana is a very pragmatic woman. She’ll curse me out and drown her sorrows tonight, and tomorrow she’ll go weep on Kevin’s shoulder because Lucy won’t talk to her about this. Then Kevin will call Tom to open negotiations. We have an offer all ready to go.” He covered her hand. “Before we ever talk money, which I promise you is what she cares about most, she has to waive any claims about Francie, sign a custody agreement, and drop the subpoena. That’s why you aren’t going to testify.”
Laura’s mind was in turmoil. She pulled her hand away from him and stood up to carry her cup back to the counter. “I still think – Richard, you don’t know that Di will go along with that. I think,” her voice faltered, “she cares about you more than she wants to admit.”
Richard shook his head in answer.
She picked up a towel to wipe the counter, wishing she could wipe this whole situation clean as easily as she cleaned up the stray coffee grounds. “I think I should go see that lawyer.”
He faced her across the island. “That’s a good preventive measure. I’m giving Diana an excellent incentive to cooperate, but God knows how long before she decides to go along. Laura—” His voice turned serious, and she stopped cleaning to look up at him. “If it ever comes to that deposition, don’t be concerned about either Francie or me, do you understand? Tell the truth. There’s very little damage you can do to either of us. Don’t hand Diana any weapon she can use against you. Just tell what you know, and let me worry about the damage control.”
But she couldn’t, she thought with a sinking heart. She’d had the entire evening, between emails, to work her way through the possible quicksand of testimony. What if, by accident, Kevin asked the right question – was Francie pregnant? Now that she and Meg were thwarting Emma’s lawsuit for Cam’s death, she couldn’t run the risk of admitting the truth about Meg. Telling Richard in private was one thing. Telling Diana in a public pleading that Emma might access was quite another.
But she couldn’t tell Richard now. What if Diana made him testify? What if they asked him the pertinent question? Emma might be able to get her hands on that too. As long as he didn’t know about Meg, he could honestly say that, as far as he knew, there’d been no consequences to that long-ago relationship.
She hated feeling so paranoid, but Emma’s vicious attack and her attempt to sue for Cam’s death put Meg in too vulnerable a position. She didn’t put it beyond her sister-in-law to try to overturn the adoption if she ever found out that Francie had lied on the birth certificate, depriving Ri
chard of his rights. She’d heard of adoptions overturned for one parent and not the other.
What a disaster! She’d been home less than three weeks, and she was embroiled in a tangle of lawsuits and emotions with her sister and her brother-in-law, her lover and his wife, her twin and the natural father of her daughter. She was a sister, lover, mother – all threatening to collide.
She whispered, “I’m the other woman. How did this happen?”
Richard said quietly, “You don’t have to do this, Laura. I’ve been concerned all along about coming between you and your sisters. You can walk away from this.” He gestured at the two of them. “Things are going to be messy. I’ll understand if you want to back off.”
Her throat caught. “I thought we stood together.”
“Only as long as you want. I don’t want you hurt. This isn’t your fight.”
She regarded him, her soul-nicked, heart-banged knight, ready to stand alone as he had for so many years, and she tried to think back before that moment when he’d lowered her to this very floor. Time before had receded into an ancient forgotten past. “Oh, dear God.”
“I’ll go along with that.” He gave her a rueful smile. “If ever there was a time for prayer, this is it.”
She couldn’t help but smile back. “Do you know,” she said, “suddenly I’m covered with lawsuits? I’ve never had a lawyer of my own. I always used Cam’s – even when we started working out the divorce, I just used his. We weren’t arguing about anything, and Cam went out of his way to be generous to me. I’ve never had a lawsuit as Cat Courtney. And now, in one day’s time—” She lifted her hands. “Lucy’s threatened Mark with a restraining order, and Emma wants to sue everyone in the world, and you and Di – if I’ve been subpoenaed against you, are you and I supposed to have any contact? What if this lawyer says I can’t talk to you?”
All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) Page 7