“We all knew,” Laura said, and he closed his eyes for a second in disbelief. “Di told Lucy, and Francie overheard and told me. Don’t worry, none of us ever told Daddy.”
And women worried about men talking. “To get back to Julie,” he emphasized. “I understand the power of teenage hormones. I remember enough to want to shield her – she has her entire adult life for sex. Since Diana made it so public today, I’ll admit that, yes, we were sexually active, and, looking back, my blood runs cold at the risks we ran. It’s a miracle she didn’t get pregnant in high school. If there is one thing I want for Julie – go ahead and laugh, but here it is – I’d like her to break the Abbott tradition and graduate from high school a virgin.”
A moment of silence, and then Laura sputtered in indignation, “I beg your pardon. I was so.”
“Really?” He knew very little about her high school years. He had been a married college student and a father for most of that time; occasionally, he’d heard about her from Lucy or his mother, but in the midst of his disintegrating marriage, he had scarcely paid attention. “I thought you had some serious boyfriend that Dominic made you break up with because things got too intense.”
“I did.” Laura’s body language spoke volumes; she was staring hard through the windshield, her arms folded across the borrowed polo shirt, no longer the laughing, engaging woman of a few minutes before. “And we did not have sex. We fooled around a little, and maybe things got as far as they did with Julie today – although not that fast, I can assure you, but – I don’t care what my father said. I didn’t.” She sounded ready to cry. “And did he take out an ad? How do you know about that anyway?”
He had the appalling suspicion that he’d heard it straight from her twin. “I don’t remember, Laura. That was a long time ago. Don’t sweat it.”
Of course, she didn’t risk a physical relationship. She didn’t fall in love, she hardly allowed herself to date. She was too busy working to save money to run away, and you didn’t see it because you were too busy being a fool with her sister. He added, “I hope Julie will follow your example.”
They lapsed into silence. She withdrew visibly into herself, turning away and staring out the window. They had another twenty miles to Richmond, and the rain was still coming down in sheets, loud and hard against the windshield and moon roof. The glass had started to fog up; he had to switch on the air conditioning, and Richard noticed that she huddled down into herself to keep warm.
Midnight. The airport must be empty by now. He hoped that Meg St. Bride wasn’t scared, that she’d stayed at the car rental counter where they could find her easily.
They drove through a mile of a sudden rainburst, loud splatters against the glass. She murmured something, and he had to ask her to repeat it.
“You shouldn’t say – what you did.” He glanced at her and saw her biting her lip. “I’m not such a great example for Julie. I had sex with Cam the first night I met him.”
Blast. He should have known not to stir up the ashes of the past. “Don’t sweat that either, Laura. You aren’t the first girl to sleep with a guy on a first date.”
She said slowly, like someone in a dream, “It wasn’t a date. He paid me two hundred dollars.”
Thank God, thank God, for that split second prescience of descending disaster. It kept his eyes focused on the road; it kept his hands on the steering wheel; it kept him from running off the road into the ravine below, smashing into a tree, and killing them both. It kept the instinctive wave of blind fury under control and allowed him to marshal his thoughts coolly, rationally.
It did not keep him from wanting to kill Cameron St. Bride, but a terrorist living in a cave had beaten him to the punch.
He made sure that his voice was under control. Let one hint of revulsion escape – let her think for an instant that he stood in condemnation – and she might never open up to him again. “What happened?”
She was silent for so long that he feared that, indeed, she had gone away again. Laura Abbott, he realized, had always had a hiding place inside; no wonder she had appeared serene and uncomplicated for so many years. No wonder none of them had really known her until it was too late.
She said finally, “Everything cost so much.”
He drove and waited. He made himself casual and relaxed.
“I didn’t realize how expensive San Francisco was going to be. It took – it took a week to find a place to live I could afford, and that whole time we had to stay in a motel, and I couldn’t believe how expensive it was.” Of course she hadn’t known. She’d been a kid. “And then the deposit and the utilities – and those had deposits too. Electricity and water – it just all cost so much.”
She sounded bewildered, incredulous, seventeen again and facing adult economic realities for the first time in her life.
“And I’d thought it would be easy to get a job. I never had problems getting a job here. I asked your mother’s friend for a job, and she gave me one at the bookstore. I asked Neil’s father if I could type for him at the court, and he said yes. Everyone wanted me to babysit; people competed for me. But no one – no one would hire me. I was underage, and I didn’t have references. I couldn’t even get babysitting jobs through a service, because I couldn’t give references.”
He stopped himself from asking why Francie hadn’t gone out and hustled herself a job. Francie, he thought grimly, had had other priorities. She had been growing his child.
“Finally,” her voice sounded strange, as though she were trapped in a dream she couldn’t escape, “I told myself to think like a migrant worker. I thought, they keep coming to California, there must be jobs for people without papers. So I looked for one of those jobs.”
She hadn’t worked in the fields, had she?
“I found a night job at a convenience store. I said my name was Laurel Dane, and I – I asked the owner to pay me in cash, so I couldn’t be traced.” The thought of the girl she had been, risking a bullet to the head every night from any hopped-up thief who happened along needing a quick twenty, filled him with horror. “But it just wasn’t enough. I was making less than minimum wage, and the money just kept going out.”
He stared hard into the night. While Laura had been putting her life in danger, he’d been reporting to the firm, at long last a working architect. True, he’d wrestled with guilt and self-loathing, and, true, he’d gone home every night to a justifiably angry woman, but he had never doubted that he would live to see another day.
“I found a day job working for a man – he ran a crew of women who cleaned motels. He paid me under the table too.” She had slipped away from the present. “Your mother trained me. I know how to clean, and he didn’t care about references.” She looked over at him dimly. “Do you know most people don’t leave tips for maids? You tip a bellhop for bringing up your bags, and you tip a waiter for delivering your food, but you don’t tip the woman who cleans the bathroom for you every day. We’re the invisible ones.”
Bile rose in Richard’s throat. This lovely woman, with her delicate skin and her glorious voice, had scrubbed strangers’ toilets to survive while, across the continent, he had shopped for a new car and watched Diana go into a decorating frenzy. He leveled his voice. “I won’t make that mistake again.”
“I always leave an envelope for housekeeping.” Laura looked off into the distance. “Twice as much as I leave for anyone else. I know how hard those women work.”
He remembered in relief that he had left a tip for housekeeping on his last business trip.
“No matter what I did, though, it just wasn’t enough. I got down to my last thousand fast, and it was really rainy that summer, I got this bronchial infection I couldn’t shake off. And I didn’t have insurance, so I had to go to one of those doc-in-the-box clinics, and even that,” she shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. He switched off the air conditioning. “That cost a fortune. I missed a couple of nights at the store, and he fired me.”
Insurance. She and Franci
e had had no health insurance. How had they paid for Meg’s birth?
“So I needed something that paid better.” She swallowed. She clearly found this painful to remember, and he wondered why she was telling him now. Maybe, in all these years, she’d had no one to tell. “I still had my day job. At one of the motels – it was one of those suite places, not fancy, you know, a place for businessmen – I looked on the employment board. I thought maybe I could work the night desk. And I saw this ad – they had this club next door, and they needed a singer.”
She drew a breath. “I went and auditioned,” and her voice went flat. “The club manager knew, he knew right away, he wasn’t about to let me get away, he said I was the best thing that had ever walked in the door. But he couldn’t hire me. They had a minimum age of 25 for the job. So he took me aside—”
He had a nightmarish vision of Laura Abbott on a casting couch.
“He told me where to get fake ID.” She still sounded flat, no emotion, no inflection. “He told me to go make myself 25, and I’d have the job. He said he’d pay me under the table, plus he said the men who came in the club would give me tips. So that’s what I did. I—” She stopped. “I pawned the watch your parents gave me for my graduation, and I used the money for fake ID.” Her voice trembled then. “And I never got it back. Your parents gave me that watch, Richard, and I sold it.”
For the first time, she sounded on the verge of tears. Richard looked down at her left wrist; she wore a simple gold watch that had probably cost the universe. He said quietly, “They wouldn’t have minded. They’d have wanted you to have the money.”
He had designed a suite – watch, ring, necklace, and earrings – for Philip to give Peggy on the fiftieth anniversary that had never come. He would have buried the pieces with his mother had they come back from the jeweler in time; he’d thought later to save them for Julie. The watch was delicate and feminine; it would look lovely on Laura’s wrist. Peggy would approve, and Julie need never know.
Laura didn’t seem to hear. “I made myself 25. I went to the makeup counter at a department store, and I asked the women to show me how to make myself look older and more sophisticated. I had to supply my own costumes, so I went to a thrift store and found a couple of old prom dresses.” He heard a note of pride in her ingenuity. She’d made her own haute couture. “I stayed up for two nights to add sequins and beads so I would sparkle – the manager said if I was going to sing those smoky songs, I had to look the part. Then he said – well, he guessed I didn’t want to use my real name, and he suggested I come up with something more provocative. So I called myself Cat Colby.”
He saw the first sign for Richmond. “Why that?”
“I’m a cat person. Cats are very mysterious. And,” she sounded a little embarrassed, “the Colby came from one of those nighttime soap operas.”
He had to smile at that. “Thus was Cat Courtney born.” And, somewhere in this hazy time frame, so had someone else. “So what was Francie doing with herself this whole time?”
“Oh,” she said vaguely. “Stuff. Francie was doing stuff.”
He wondered if any means existed, all these years later, to track down the details of Meg’s birth. Only one person alive knew, and she clearly didn’t want to talk about it. He saw, from the corner of his eye, her hands moving restlessly in her lap – a sign that his question had disconcerted her.
“So how did Cat Colby fare?”
“Oh. I did okay.” She relaxed, warmer, more connected with him. Hadn’t anyone ever let her talk about this early part of her career? Of course not. She’d spent years avoiding the press, and no wonder. She had never wanted anyone to trace her back to the singer in a nondescript club in San Francisco. “It was a great training ground. I tried different moves and personas – I experimented to see what worked and what didn’t. Depending on my tips, I could tell what people liked. And I – I made out all right, which was good, because I missed some days at my cleaning job, and I got fired from that too.”
He heard an evasion in her voice and pegged it to Meg’s birth. She must have missed some time while she tended to Francie and Meg.
“But – it still wasn’t enough. There was a limit to how much I could make, even with tips. I mean, we didn’t get the rich guys in there, we were just a middling kind of place. I did get a little write-up in an underground paper, and that brought people in, but,” she sighed, “no music producers, nothing like that. So,” deep breath now, “in October, November, around then, I – I had some expenses, and I broke into my reserves. I took my mother’s jewelry and started pawning it.”
Ah, yes, the famous jewelry theft that had stunned Diana, who had assumed that her mother’s jewelry belonged to her. October – that made sense for a September birth. The hospital bills would have started arriving right about then. Probably no way to find out what that had cost and reimburse her – not that Laura St. Bride needed the money now.
“Have you ever pawned anything?” she asked.
“No. No, I haven’t.”
“You don’t get very much. When you think what that jewelry was worth – it was pitiful how little I got. But it was something, at least, it helped for a few weeks. Then in December—”
She stopped abruptly. December. Meg would have been three months old. Francie should have been back on her feet by that time. “What happened in December?”
“Just some stuff.” Definitely connected with Meg and Francie, then. “December is really a bad time for business travel, and tips were down, way down. And – and I was thinking maybe I should move somewhere that didn’t cost as much, but it takes money to move, and the heating bills were just – it was cold and wet. And then one night – one night, I was singing, it was raining hard outside, like now, and hardly anyone was there, maybe two or three people. And Cam walked in.”
St. Bride was finally making his appearance. They’d married in the middle of January, so she had known him only a month.
“He ducked in because the rain was so hard outside. I noticed him right away because—” she paused for a long moment— “he was tall, like you, and he – he had such a Viking look to him. You could have plunked him right down in the middle of Wagner. He really was the best-looking man. He’d been at a software engineering conference at the fancy hotel down the street – he was getting his doctorate at Stanford then – and – well, he was different from the usual guests.” Her voice dropped, a little dreamily. She had had strong feelings for St. Bride, as he had suspected. “And he saw me, that was for sure. He took a table close in to the piano, and he never took his eyes off me. And when I finished my set, he came up and – he put a twenty in the tip jar, and – he asked me to dance.”
He made his voice neutral. “You were attracted to him.”
“Yes.” She looked over at him, her eyes half-closed. “It was part of my job to dance with the men if they asked. I didn’t mind, it – encouraged them to tip. I was so grateful you had taught me to dance. Cam wasn’t a good dancer – he was breaking the rules that night – so we just—” another hesitation— “drifted around, and then he asked me to have a drink with him. Another rule broken, you see. He was really off balance. And I did.”
Chardonnay, undoubtedly.
“When he paid for our drinks,” she drew another deep breath, she was nervous, “I couldn’t help noticing – he had a lot of money. I mean a lot. The waitress had to break a hundred for him. His family had an investment bank. And – and he liked me. Believe me, after four months at the club, I knew when a man liked me. And he stayed. I had to sing two more sets, and he sat there the whole time, watching me.”
He wondered if he should stop her, if she would regret telling him in the light of day. She was now approaching the critical point in her story, and they were only fifteen minutes away from the airport. But he sensed in her a deep longing to confess, to receive absolution for the wrong she perceived she had done. He’d harmed her enough; he’d made her San Francisco adventure, when she should have breathed eas
ier, free of her father, a living hell. He’d thrown adult worry and responsibility on a girl too young to bear the burden. He owed it to her to listen.
“When the club closed,” she was drawing shallow breaths every few words, “he – he asked me if I would like to get some coffee at his hotel. And – I wasn’t dumb, I knew what he was thinking might happen. And I thought – I thought,” she swallowed hard, “if he liked me – if I did what he liked – he might give me some money. So I said, ‘Why don’t we go to your room and have some wine sent up?’ – and – and he thought that was a splendid idea.”
I’ll just bet he did.
“How old was he?” he asked abruptly.
She didn’t seem to find the question strange. “He was thirty. Don’t worry. I was eighteen by then. It was legal.”
Thirty. And she’d been made up to look like a woman of 25, singing smoky songs laden with sexual innuendo. St. Bride must not have had a clue.
Another thought hit hard. What St. Bride must have thought – what any man would have thought – was that a woman that age did have a clue.
He shifted into engineer mode – logical, scientific. The more he treated this as an experiment gone awry, the more likely she was to get through her story. “So you went to his hotel.”
She nodded. “We were in the elevator, going up, and he was kissing me, and he touched me – it felt – it felt really good.” A girl who had worked instead of dating, who should have been enjoying attention from the boys on campus, defensive because she had enjoyed a man’s touch. She loved being touched and stroked; she cuddled like a baby kitten. “He asked me if I liked it, and I – said yes, and he said, ‘Come upstairs with me, Miss Cat Colby’ – and then I—”
She buried her face in her hands.
“I asked him what he wanted, flirtatiously, you know, like I’d done this a hundred times before. And he said he’d really like it if I went—” He filled in that blank for himself. “Then we got to his room, and – I did.” She gulped. “What he said.”
All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) Page 29