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

by Forrest, Lindsey

  That matter-of-fact observation knocked the breath out of her. She felt her desperation spilling into her voice. “Please forget I ever said that. Please. I shouldn’t have. I was angry.”

  But he wasn’t finished.

  “Be clear about this, Laura. I do not wish to be Diana’s husband for a day longer than necessary. But,” and he paused, “she is precious to me, she always will be. She’s Julie’s mother. She was the love of my youth. For all that’s gone between us, I’d never want to live in a world without her.”

  She bit her lip, and now she could not look at him. She bowed her head.

  “I am not a violent man,” said Richard, and she heard a roughness in his voice then that let her know that he was not as cool as he appeared. “Violence represents a failure – to use, reluctantly, only if everything else has failed and you have run out of options. I’ve never run out of options, with Diana or anyone else.”

  Not like her, aiming a gun at him. Not like Diana, smashing his face in and knocking Francie into a tree. Not like Dominic, throwing the love of his life into the unforgiving sea.

  “Do you believe me when I say that?”

  “Yes,” she whispered again.

  He gave her a quick, short nod, and the tumult inside her started to subside. And then—

  He said, “All right, Laura. You say you believe me. Why do you believe me?”

  This simply got worse and worse. “You said—”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I said. I told you I wasn’t violent, and I told you I have never wanted to harm Diana. For all you know, I’m standing here giving you just as a big a snow job as Francie did about Monticello – no pun intended. So tell me. Why do you believe me?”

  She saw now the direction of his thoughts. She couldn’t fathom what had brought all this on, why he had thought now to bring up those bitter words. But, she saw, she had struck him right where he was most vulnerable. In his honor. In his integrity. In his confidence that he would always do the right thing.

  She hadn’t had that confidence in herself for eleven years. But she hadn’t spent a lifetime trying to live up to Philip Ashmore, either.

  She stood up; she couldn’t bear to sit below his eye level any longer. She stepped before him, keeping just enough distance. He didn’t want her to touch him right now, but she still had the right – he’d given her that right – to stand face to face with him.

  Not to tell him that she loved him. This, she thought, was what he had meant when he had asked her to stand with him. It mattered more to him that she believed in him.

  “I know you,” she said, and stopped. Not enough, but what could she say? Because you didn’t kill Diana when you had the greatest provocation – when she told you about Julie. Because it’s taken all this time for you to divorce her. Because, in all these years, she hasn’t met with an accident.

  She stared down at her arms, and she had an inspiration.

  “This.” She pulled back the sleeve from her right arm and turned her hand up towards him. In the morning light, the ancient scar was barely visible, only a faint white ridge against her pale skin. “Because, when you were sixteen, you stopped him. You told him, if he hit me again, you’d hit him, but you didn’t. You were taller – you could have felled him with one punch, Richard, but you didn’t. You used your mind against him, you threatened him, and you made him stop.”

  The look on his face was one of pure astonishment. He touched her, one long finger tracing over the scar. “My God. I’d forgotten all about that.”

  “I haven’t.” Laura pulled the sleeve down. “But that’s not all. You could have hurt Di that day with Francie, but you didn’t. Francie told me about it, how you got Di away from her. You could have hurt her,” she swallowed, “any time over the years, and you didn’t. You could have hurt her the day she smashed your face in.”

  She was gambling there. He’d warned her that he would never tell her the particulars, and he didn’t now. Only the merest flicker of his eyes showed that she had scored.

  “She’s not afraid of you, Richard. That says volumes.”

  And, indeed, Diana had laughed at the idea that Richard might want to hurt her.

  “Another thing. Any man who spends years atoning for,” she remembered the open door just in time, and lowered her voice, “what happened – any man who asks for help from a God he didn’t even used to believe in, well, he’s not going to undo all that hard work in order to murder his wife.”

  There. She’d said it, as much as she dared say without touching on Ash Marine. He’d stood there stiffly during her words, but now he relaxed, leaning back against the island, his arms crossed, but, for the first time that morning, his eyes no longer cold against her.

  “Murder,” he said reflectively. “I never mentioned that. Where did that come from?”

  No end to the quicksand she found herself in. “That’s the logical conclusion, isn’t it? But – not you, Richard. I know you. You’d always find a way out.”

  If only she could peer into his mind, find out what lay at the bottom of all this. But his eyes, warmer now, were still shuttered against her.

  She added, “Even though you said you’d beat Cam to a pulp if he were here.”

  “I still would,” said Richard, and added dryly, “That’s not necessarily violence, Laura. It’s a language men use to get a point across to each other. He’d have known precisely why I did it, and he’d have been just as eager to do it to me. Call it two stags battling for dominance, to determine who rules the forest. We’re not that far, any of us, from a world where only the fittest survive.”

  She had never seen Cam lift a hand to anyone, although he had, more than once during Emma’s second divorce, expressed the frustrated desire to knock his erstwhile brother-in-law to the ground. A desire, she saw in a flash, born of the same urge to protect that fueled Richard’s anger against him.

  They were far more alike, these two men of hers, than she had admitted.

  She moved away from him, back to the other side of the island. She felt comfortable there, standing in a familiar setting, preparing to do a familiar task. This must be why men always liked to sit behind a desk, to give themselves space and authority, to make others come to them. And, sure enough, he turned around to face her.

  “You’re probably right.” Laura picked up a stirring spoon and started to fold the ham into the bowl of egg yolks. “Although Cam would have tried to buy you off first, or put you on a stipend, the way he did with Daddy. He would have—”

  “What?” He sounded stunned.

  “He would have tried to buy—”

  “No. The other. What stipend?”

  The urgency in his voice took her aback. “He paid Daddy a stipend – maintenance money, I guess. Five thousand a month for years. I found the check stubs at the house last week.”

  Richard stared at her. She added nervously, “I asked Mark, and he said Cam had told him I wanted to make sure Daddy was all right – which I never even thought about, I guess I should have. They sent him a check every month.”

  He seemed deep in thought. Then, “You saw the check stubs?”

  “Yes, I have them. They’re in one of the boxes we brought over. Richard—”

  “Show me.” It was not a suggestion.

  She nodded, and he led the way into the front library where, the afternoon before, they had stacked boxes of her books and CDs. She pointed to the box she had retrieved from Dominic’s house the week before. “That one.”

  Richard removed two boxes of books sitting on top, lifted the sagging box of records that had rained down on her in Dominic’s closet, and put it on the writing desk. She sat down – she wished she could quell the nervousness she felt, but why was he acting so strangely? Why did he care if Cam had chosen to spend his money on Dominic? – and pulled out some of the checks. “Here. There was one every month from Cam’s personal account.”

  He leaned over her shoulder. “What is SBFA?”

  She told him, an
d wanted to wince at the look on his face. What a spoiled, pampered bunch he must think the St. Brides. “I’ve pulled my accounts out of the group,” she added hastily, and he didn’t need to know when. “But Cam – well, he was so busy, and—”

  Richard picked up a check. “From his personal account? How is it you didn’t see these?”

  He naturally assumed that, like most married couples, she and Cam had shared their finances. “We had a household account. He kept his own accounts – I had my own too. I didn’t have access to his.”

  He kept his thoughts to himself. “How far back do these go?”

  Laura rifled through the checks. “Mark said it started around the time of the IPO. That was in March 1995.”

  He held out his hand. She waited while he put the checks in order and then studied them, going through the stack one by one. What was he thinking? Why was he so interested?

  She decided that she was entitled to ask. “Richard – what is so important about these checks?”

  He sat back in the leather reading chair and looked at her thoughtfully. “I remember thinking a few years ago that things were looking up for Dominic. The house didn’t seem quite so rundown. He bought Diana’s Mercedes, and he gave her the down payment on her condo.”

  She hadn’t even considered that Diana couldn’t afford that car and that condo on her own. She felt a wave of shame. That was the problem with having money for too long; she’d forgotten how most people lived. She’d taken it for granted that, of course, Diana could buy anything she wanted.

  “And he came up with half of the fee when she went to rehab – she’d asked me, but we had moved into our new offices, Julie was having some orthodontic work done, and money was tight.” He rubbed his chin. “So Dominic was getting money from your husband. I wonder why.”

  Laura shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “He didn’t have much when he died – a few investments, but he must have been spending virtually everything he got. I helped Lucy out with the estate costs, and I know Diana’s desperate to sell the house before the next round of property taxes.” He looked off beyond her shoulder, thinking aloud. “I wonder where the money went.”

  She couldn’t follow his train of thought. She gathered up her courage and said, “If Di needs money for the taxes – I’ll be glad to help out.”

  He glanced at her. “Diana will be fine for money as soon as she comes to her senses about the divorce. That’s kind of you to offer, Laura, but until the divorce is final, I’ll take care of that for her.”

  No words could have more decisively shut her out. This is none of your business. Stop throwing your money around. She nodded and looked down at her hands and wondered how, in twenty-four hours, they could have come so far from the man who had said, Let me do this for you.

  But, of course, there he had been the one to give, the one to whom she had to turn for support. Richard, she had the sinking feeling, was going to have a huge amount of trouble with her money.

  He gathered up the rest of the checks. “I want to make copies of these,” he said, and waited for her to nod acquiescence. “I’ll get them back to you later today.”

  “It’s okay. I don’t need them—” she started to say, and he cut across her words.

  “And that’s another thing, Laura. Don’t accept this. You need to ask why your husband gave Dominic this money. He doesn’t strike me as the type to do this out of the kindness of his heart.” He was watching her – observing her. For what? “I realize sixty thousand a year might have been pocket change to him, but that was still a lot of money. You need to figure out what relationship those two had to make these—” he nodded at the checks in his hand— “a monthly event.”

  The first thought that sprang into her mind – product of reading too many mysteries – was blackmail. But Cam and Dominic had never met, and what Dominic could have blackmailed Cam about, she couldn’t imagine. She had been their only connection, and by the time of the IPO, she hadn’t known anything about Dominic for years.

  She was tired and tense, and she vented her frustration now. “This is – awful. I don’t know why these checks are so important. I don’t know why you asked me those questions. I feel like I’m on trial here, and I don’t even know why.”

  He said nothing. Then, “You’re not on trial. I know this has been difficult, but we needed to clear these things up between us. Look at me, Laura.”

  She looked up.

  “I don’t like secrets,” he said. “If I learned one thing from being married to Diana, it’s that the unspoken things get you into trouble. She and I would have fared much better – we probably wouldn’t have gotten married – if we’d ever talked things out instead of papering over our issues. You and I aren’t going to make that mistake – so this might not be the end of the painful talks.”

  He touched the scar left by Dominic’s belt so long ago, and she wanted to melt. “I know I’m bad about that – keeping stuff inside. I’ll try to do better.”

  “You’re not alone,” said Richard. “I’ve heard enough complaints from Lucy all these years.”

  She nodded.

  “I asked you if you believed I tried to harm Diana – or wanted to – because, until a week ago, you clearly felt very hostile to me. With reason, I’ll grant you, but still—”

  She felt on the verge of tears, unable to take back those hateful words. “But this week – surely you know, Richard, how much I respect you, how much I look up to you—”

  He shook his head. “I still wanted to know,” he said. “We needed to clear the air.”

  She gathered up her courage. “What – what if I’d said yes, I thought you’d wanted to—”

  “I wouldn’t be happy.” His tone was blunt. “But we’d get past it. Nothing is irretrievable.”

  Laura held her breath.

  He paused – for what? For her to say, Oh, God, yes, I did, and I am so sorry? But he didn’t allow the silence to fall heavily between them.

  “One more thing.”

  She couldn’t deal with anything else. She wrapped her arms around herself.

  “What about those omelets?” She heard a deliberate attempt to lighten up. “I’m starving.”

  But even the omelets turned out to be part of this disastrous morning. Max had helped himself to the bowl of eggs, and she had to start all over.

  ~•~

  “I want those checks,” said Lucy.

  “I’m emailing them now.” Richard attached the scanned images and sent the message to her work email. “She doesn’t know why St. Bride paid Dominic, but it’s a sure bet he got pressure from either Dad or Francie.”

  He had to pitch his voice low. After breakfast – where both girls had surprised them by being cordial, if blatantly insincere – Laura had borrowed the Lexus to run errands, all but running out the door in her haste to leave. No woman had ever been more eager to go to the grocery store. The strain between them had not dissipated, and for that he felt a heavy regret. He’d thought it crucial to bring the night’s dark discoveries into the light – as much as he could without tipping his hand about Francie’s miraculous resurrection. But he’d cast a shadow on Laura, who’d had more than enough to deal with in the past two days, and he’d ruined the progress she had made towards feeling safe with him.

  Even with her absence, he did not have the house to himself. Julie, all sweetness and light over breakfast, had gone up to her bedroom to pack for camp. Max had taken over his favorite easy chair. Meg was camped out on the sofa only yards away, headphones plugged in her ears, feet on the antique coffee table, fingers tapping on her laptop. He didn’t trust the efficacy of those headphones.

  “I’m inclined to think it was Dad.” On the other end of the line, Lucy sounded distracted. “But you know, I wonder if Dominic knew something after all. If Francie has her documents, then someone had to get them from him, and wouldn’t he have asked questions?”

  “Likely.” Lucy had put on her detective hat again – precise
ly 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.