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

by Forrest, Lindsey

  Cat Courtney, Inc. The Texas corporate databases showed a Delaware corporation doing business in Texas with – a-ha! – Cameron St. Bride’s personal lawyer as registered agent. Brian searched the Delaware database and found another Cat Courtney, Inc., with 100% ownership by a South Dakota Cat Courtney, Inc.

  It took an hour, two more cups of coffee, and half a ream of printer paper, but eventually he assembled a corporate chain that mirrored the Aural Gem CC chain he had found – a chain winding its way across the country into Canada, the Virgins, and the Caymans. The only difference was – he double-checked to make sure – unlike Aural Gem, the Delaware Cat Courtney, Inc., did double duty in Texas and Virginia.

  Texas. Interesting, and what he expected. But why Virginia?

  Chesapeake Bay.

  Like Aural Gem CC, Cat Courtney, Inc., came to an end in the Caymans. No smoking gun, unfortunately. There must be some missing link – something untraceable, like 100% ownership by a trust. He’d have to wait until he got to the station to search the SEC databases.

  He made a list of things to research.

  Find out who had filed the trademark application for Cat Courtney.

  Find out who had filed the copyrights for “Francie.”

  Find out if Laura St. Bride held any copyrights or trademarks in her own name.

  Find out if Laura St. Bride had ever done anything noteworthy under her own name.

  Find out, once and for all time, if CC meant Cat Courtney.

  Find out if Cameron and Laura St. Bride had pulled off one of the great deceptions of the century.

  Then find Cat Courtney and ask the question no one had answered for six years. Who are you?

  But that answer might lie right here. He went back to the Cat Courtney web site and looked for the biography of the elusive and eminently seductive Miss Courtney. Emma had given him plenty of clues, but the most important came straight from Cat Courtney herself.

  Writing music since childhood. Cat Courtney must have come from a musical background. Unless she was a second Mozart, she hadn’t been composing from an early age in a vacuum. Someone had taught her; someone had nurtured her talent. She hadn’t just come out of nowhere – even if she gave the world that impression.

  And she’d had operatic training. How did a girl from nowhere get operatic training?

  Brian typed in “Laura Cat music.”

  That brought up more hits than he had time to go through. “Laura Cat opera” whittled the list down by half, but still… again, mostly lists of people’s favorite books and CDs.

  All right, he was missing something. He thought for a while, looking for another hook. Well, Laura St. Bride had a sister named Francie, and Cat Courtney had written about a girl named Francie. Francie, treacherous Francie, likely a nickname. Short for what? Frances? Francine?

  He typed in “Laura Franc* opera.”

  Another long list of hits, mostly relating to Phantom of the Opera. He ignored those and went down the list, looking for something out of the ordinary. He clicked to the next page of hits, and there, at the top, was an AP wire about the death of a musician in Virginia the year before.

  Brian felt the hair stand straight up on the back of his neck.

  He followed the link and read about the murder of Dominic Abbott. He devoted himself to his music and the cultivation of musical talent in his four daughters. He read about the trail of suspicion that had led to the man’s oldest daughter, her subsequent arrest and release for lack of evidence. Then, at the end of the article: The whereabouts of his other two daughters, Francesca and Laura, have been unknown since the late 1980s.

  Francesca. The infamous Francie?

  He Googled Dominic Abbott and found a web site on famous Irish murder cases. The case was over thirty years old, but the web site included a 1967 photo of Renée Dane as Medea and one of Dominic Abbott with three pretty little girls in 1973. The tallest, older by a few years than her sisters, looked bored and distracted, the littlest looked scared. The middle one was mugging for the camera. Hard to tell much about the man, except that he didn’t look too prosperous, and where was the other daughter?

  The Irish prosecutor had argued that the birth of the youngest daughter had been the catalyst for the murder. Boy, there was a guaranteed lifetime guilt complex, growing up knowing that your father killed your mother because you were born. No wonder that little girl looked scared.

  Maybe she had grown up always bearing that burden. Maybe she had felt like an outsider in the family. Maybe she had carried an air of sadness into adulthood and written needy, heartbreaking songs about never being loved.

  Maybe she had turned to a man twelve years her senior, looking for a father figure.

  Brian sent the articles to his printer. The age for the youngest girl fit. Renée Dane had died on October 2, 1970, three weeks after her youngest child was born; that child might have shared a birthday with Laura St. Bride.

  He read the AP story again. Unknown since the late 1980s. Meg St. Bride had been born in September 1988. If Dominic Abbott’s daughter Laura had gone missing in 1987 or early 1988, she’d had time to meet St. Bride at Stanford. She’d had time to get pregnant, give birth in September 1988, and get married in January 1989.

  Which meant she had been underage when her whereabouts had become unknown, and Cameron St. Bride was even more of a schmuck than his sister had admitted. Laura Abbott’s family didn’t know where she was, even now. She must have run away, and her sister Francesca with her. One runaway was strange enough for a family, but two? Why would two girls run away and never come back?

  Especially when one of them could come back in glory, armed with a spectacular musical career and a trophy husband?

  Two missing girls. Had someone looked for them?

  He entered “Laura Francesca Abbott Williamsburg Virginia missing.”

  One hit. Missing – Need Information.

  And there it was. The smoking gun.

  ~•~

  A web page dated seven years before, maintained by a private investigator’s firm, listing as contact Lucia Abbott Maitland at a law firm in Williamsburg. Lucia, the daughter missing from the family picture. He assembled them in his mind: Diana the suspect, Lucia the lawyer, Francesca and Laura the missing. Four operatic names, fitting for a composer of minor Italian opera.

  The web page looked like a Wanted poster in the post office, not the desperate outreach of a sister: two teenage girls, virtual twins, Francesca on the left, Laura on the right. A description of each: dark auburn hair, green eyes, fair-skinned. Francesca taller than Laura and a year less a day older. A brief synopsis of their June 1988 disappearance, along with a hefty gem stash from the late Renée Dane.

  He was astounded at how much alike they looked. Had that been the attraction for Cameron St. Bride – Francie’s likeness to his wife? But why turn to Francie when his wife was right there?

  A description of each girl’s likes and interests. Lucia was a smart cookie, he thought. People who disappeared often tripped themselves up through their hobbies. Easy to change name and looks, impossible to change personality.

  Francesca: Enjoys music, reading, socializing. Lyric soprano, plays the piano. Very friendly and outgoing. Usually called Francie.

  Laura: Enjoys writing songs, singing, reading, needlework, cooking. Mezzo soprano, talented on piano. Very quiet and shy.

  Finally: Francie and Laura are likely to remain in close contact.

  So close that Francie had helped herself to Cameron St. Bride. Lucia had omitted husband-stealing from the list of Francie’s hobbies.

  Of course, Francie had started her husband-stealing career later, after she’d left home.

  No doubt, no doubt at all, who the girl on the right had grown up to be. Same date of birth as Laura St. Bride. Same hair, same eyes, same mezzo voice, same lovely skin, same sad air to her as Cat Courtney. She looked like someone who had known her whole life that she shouldn’t have been born.

  She looked like someone who
had grown up to write a song called “He Never Loved Me.”

  She also looked – way back behind those solemn eyes – like someone forged in a pitiless crucible. That woman is tough as boots.

  Not so for her Irish twin, Francesca, who looked full of the devil. She had the air of someone who had never heard or said no in her entire life. He’d bet that Francesca had been no virgin when she’d graduated from high school in – when?

  June 1988.

  These two girls had disappeared days after graduating from high school.

  Meg St. Bride had been born in September 1988.

  Which meant that Cameron St. Bride, getting his doctorate at Stanford, had somehow met high-school senior Laura Abbott from Williamsburg. He’d been twenty-nine, she’d been barely seventeen.

  What a bastard.

  Why would two girls from a good family run away?

  Because one of them, desperate for affection, had found herself pregnant.

  Brian said aloud, softly, “Bingo.”

  He sent the web page to the printer and disconnected from the Internet.

  ~•~

  It was almost dawn and he’d had no sleep and way too much coffee, but Brian felt energized. In less than forty-eight hours, he had followed the trail from a bewildering number of corporations with the same name to the true identity of one of contemporary music’s most elusive figures. He’d solved a mystery that no one else in six years had come close to solving.

  And now that he’d solved it, what was he going to do?

  Showering, he started to write the story in his head. Exclusive to KTXX…. He needed to get full credit for this. Documents obtained exclusively by KTXX confirm that singer-songwriter Cat Courtney, who has maintained her anonymity despite four double platinum albums, is the widow of Cameron St. Bride, the local CEO killed in the September 11 attacks….

  No. Too wordy.

  Laura St. Bride, widow of St. Bride Data founder Cameron St. Bride, is the singer Cat Courtney….

  He stared at himself in the mirror, shaving cream still covering half his jaw. Poor Laura. He wondered if he’d ever passed her on Central, seen her at the mall, eaten near her in a restaurant. She’d glided all these years beneath the surface, invisible, and he was about to blow her out of the water.

  Singer Cat Courtney, who has the nerve to think she can keep the rest of us from finding out things that are none of our business, has been unmasked as….

  No. No. Never feel sorry for a subject. The public’s right to know, et cetera.

  World exclusive… Cat Courtney’s secret identity is mild-mannered Laura St. Bride….

  Emma thought that Laura was a major bitch. What was he doing, feeling sorry for her?

  In a weird twist on foreplay, and because she hates her sister-in-law’s guts, Emma St. Bride has handed a man she hardly knows the key to the great Cat Courtney mystery….

  And no wonder Emma hated her. Laura St. Bride had done something with her life besides rack up three failed marriages.

  Cameron St. Bride, boohooed by one and all because he had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, was a world-class bastard who knocked up a high school girl, caused her to run away from home, neglected to marry her until after the baby was born, and then spent their marriage cheating on her, including but not limited to a little fling with her sister.

  There. That was the truth. Too bad that story couldn’t run.

  He finished shaving and got dressed in his usual Friday business casual. Might as well get in early and start writing the story, get some face time with the managing editor to discuss how and when to run it. He felt confident that, right now, no one else had it. Other reporters might be puzzling over Aural Gem CC, but they wouldn’t have the keys Emma had presented him on a silver platter. They wouldn’t have seen the piano, or heard Emma refer to little Miss Cat, or heard her mock Laura as a dumb artiste with copyrights. They wouldn’t have heard about Francie.

  But – the Friday after a holiday… if KTXX ran the story today, it wouldn’t get the buzz it might generate if he broke it early next week. Sitting on the story for a few days gave him time to go to Williamsburg and poke around – on the station’s dime, of course. He had Lucia Maitland’s number, but lawyers were notoriously close-mouthed.

  The AP story had mentioned another family member – the architect son-in-law, husband of Diana-the-suspect. The architect ought to be easy to run down. He’d have only a peripheral connection to Francesca and Laura. It might be easier to get him to talk.

  He might even run into Laura herself, who had shipped a piano somewhere near the Chesapeake.

  Brian fixed himself another cup of coffee to tide him over until he got to work, then checked his email. A sweet good-morning from Emma – and why wasn’t she still asleep? He’d left her sleeping soundly. The usual spam. An outbid notice from Ebay. Offers for a performance enhancer, the last thing he needed right now.

  A press release from the news alert he had set up on Cat Courtney.

  He read about the concert for the neonatal wing at St. Blaise Hospital, Williamsburg, Virginia. He read about Hampton Roads Club and Tavern, owned by – damn – Diana Ashmore and Lucy Maitland.

  At the bottom of the press release, he read that interested parties should contact Lucy Maitland for more information.

  Well, Lucy, I certainly will. You can count on that.

  This lent a new urgency to the story. Probably no one else had the St. Bride angle – yet – but Lucy Maitland was now a target for any other reporter trying to get a story on the elusive Miss Courtney.

  In fact, this gave him his hook. He’d call Lucy this morning, make an appointment for an interview, fly up there as fast as he could get a ticket.

  It made perfect sense that Laura St. Bride might have gone back to her roots. Since 9/11, she’d lived in London, estranged from her family, working under extreme stress, a newly reconciled wife who had abruptly and horribly become a widow, mother to a kid who was undoubtedly devastated. She clearly wasn’t welcome in the home where she had lived with her husband, so she’d returned to her family. 9/11 had done that; wrought changes in the national psyche. People had gone back to church; they were rediscovering traditional values of home and family. People needed comfort, and where would a widow whose in-laws disliked her go for comfort? She’d go to the people she’d grown up with, who’d have to take her in.

  He wondered why she hadn’t taken her daughter with her. Story there?

  What a bastard he was. She’d gone home to reconcile with her family, and he was going to open up her life to the world.

  Sometimes, he really didn’t like his job at all.

  Chapter 10: Diana, Smoldering

  I HATE MY SISTER.

  I hate her.

  I HATE HER.

  Standing with him, defending him. The two Ashmores ranged against stupid, pathetic, trespassing Diana. I should have known that, when push came to shove, Lucy was going to prove to be more Ashmore than Abbott.

  The pain of that betrayal is so sharp. I want to scream and curse at her, but I can’t. Because Lucy is probably the one person on earth that I can still count on most of the time to take my side.

  Or at least listen to me.

  So I can’t scream at her. I need her too much.

  ~•~

  I was dying inside the whole time I was circulating, playing the perfect hostess. I knew what they were thinking.

  Sure, everyone was saying hi and how are you and we haven’t seen you for a long time, Diana, and how are things? (Meaning, are they going to arrest you again? How did you get away with it?) I didn’t get away with anything, you cretins. I’m not left-handed. He was hit on the left side of his head. The only way I could have used that much force was to lie across the grand piano and clout him with more force than I’m capable of in that position. Even the damn police finally figured that out. Learn some forensics, for God’s sake.

  But they were also dying to know: What is she doing here? Did
he invite her? Are they going to get back together?

  Does she know about the new girl? Is she going to cause a scene?

  And, of course, hoping I’d do just that. Give them a show. Fuel the gossip about for months to come. Turn his boring, totally predictable soirée into a night to remember.

  Well, I did that, didn’t I? Kill two birds with one stone, that was my brilliant plan. Put him through the wringer, and teach my treacherous little sister a lesson.

  But she taught me one instead.

  ~•~

  This I will not forget. Never, ever believe in that sweet, demure facade. Never, ever forget that Miss Cat Courtney is, first and foremost, the most ruthless of cats.

  And I hate cats.

  I wonder how long she’s been planning that.

  Planning to humiliate me.

  Planning to throw Francie in my face because she thinks I killed her precious twin.

  Which I fucking well did not, thank you.

  The only thing I’ve done right professionally, the only time I made Daddy proud of me, was the time he conducted me for the Tidewater Opera. I worked and worked on “Nessun Dorma,” harder than I’d worked before and certainly harder than I’ve ever worked since. I was pitch perfect that night. I wore Mama’s emeralds, I had the shoulders lowered on my wedding dress, and I looked like a million dollars and sang like ten million.

  So what if Puccini composed it for a tenor? I’m not the first soprano to sing it. I made it my own that night.

  And she took it. She took the one thing I’ve ever managed to do right clean away from me.

  ~•~

  I hate my sister.

  I hate her.

  I HATE HER.

  And you, Miss Cat, know this. I don’t forgive and forget.

  Just ask Mr. Perfect.

  Chapter 11: None Shall Sleep

  THE STORM WASN’T SUPPOSED TO START until midnight, but at nine o’clock sharp, it ripped through the sky, and the heavens opened up.