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

by Forrest, Lindsey

  “You can stay with me. Or – because you do get some say – you can go live with Mark and Emma in Plano until you are 18. I don’t like that, I don’t want you to, but it is your option.”

  Meg gnawed at her lip.

  “I want you to live with me, but we’ll have to live here. Not only because of Richard, although, I won’t kid you, he’s a huge factor. It’s Lucy too. She’s my sister. She’s going to have a baby – your cousin. I don’t want to miss out with that baby the way I’ve missed out with Julie, who, like it or not, is my niece. I want my family around me, Meg. I haven’t been with them for a long time. I want to be with them now.”

  Meg nodded and managed not to look at her.

  “If you choose to live with me, then where I go, you go. The bottom line is, I’m your mother and I get to make those decisions. I’ll try my best to make it a smooth transition for you, but this is how it’s going to be, so make your choice and live with it. You can move easy, or you can move hard, but one way or the other, if you choose to live with me, you’re moving.”

  Another nod.

  “You can have Cindy up here to stay with you, and you’ll make new friends. I know you, Meg, if you put your mind to it, you’ll be the most popular girl in your class in no time at all.”

  “I got a question.” Hallelujah. Her daughter still had a voice.

  “What?”

  “If I can’t go home, then what are we gonna do—” Meg pressed her lips together hard. “How can we bury Dad?”

  Laura met her daughter’s eyes, holding back the tears. “I don’t know,” she said. “Your father did not name me executor, so I don’t know what rights I have. I have to find out. Mark will probably play hardball on this, so I have to warn you – we may not get to go to your father’s funeral.”

  “You know,” said Meg, “that’s gonna make Mark look real bad. If it gets out, I mean.”

  Laura picked up her laptop bag and swung it over her shoulder. “How would it get out?”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Cameron St. Bride’s daughter. “Stuff happens.”

  ~•~

  It was Sunday morning, and so it took a few hours for the spark to catch. Only a few readers at first, who read, shrugged, and moved on. In mid-afternoon, the gossip columnist for a Boston daily read it and thought it was juicy enough to quote on her paper’s web site.

  On that Sunday afternoon, people who normally surfed the web out of sheer boredom were returning home from the long holiday weekend. They had other things to do – unpacking, cleaning up, fixing dinner, watching TV, returning phone calls. Not until the news ended at 11:30 on the Eastern Seaboard would the usual surge of late-night web surfers commence.

  ~•~

  “Does the name Windy Gomerberg mean anything to you?” Lucy asked.

  “What?” On the other end of the line, Richard seemed distracted. She heard Laura’s cat meowing at him. “Who’s that? A cartoon character?”

  Lucy leaned back on the sofa in her sitting room. Finally, after spending the afternoon digging around in her files, searching the Internet, and making numerous calls, she had a chance to relax. “In 1997, she rated a mention in a story about celebrity look-alikes in a weekly newspaper in Tacoma. You know, the guys who show up as Elvis at bar mitzvahs. I talked to the reporter, and she remembers Windy very well – not Wendy, either.”

  “People name their kids anything.” She heard a cabinet close. “Go on.”

  “This woman says Windy Gomerberg was the spitting image of Miss Cat Courtney. She says the likeness was uncanny – not just the usual surface resemblance. And she was also,” Lucy paused dramatically, “a fraud.”

  “Why so?” Was he running a can opener? He added, “Other than the name?”

  “This woman met her in a downtown club. There’s a big music scene in Seattle, and our girl Windy seems to be a devotee of alternative music. She went to some pains to convince the reporter she was just off the truck from the country – used lots of ‘aint’s’ and pretended not to know what a Long Island tea was. But Windy made a strange remark about the lead singer – said he was singing out of a head register instead of a chest register – not something most people would even know. She was also wearing Jimmy Choos.”

  Silence, or at least, no reaction. She heard strange sounds in the background. “What are you doing? Are you listening?”

  “I’m feeding Max. Hold on.” A few seconds, and then he came back on the phone. “All finished. I’ve got temporary custody of this cat.”

  “You? Where’s Laurie?”

  “West Virginia.”

  “What? I told her to stay put.”

  “Long story. I’ll send you her new number.” His voice signaled that he did not want to talk about it, and Lucy’s eyebrows shot up. “Continue. I take it Jimmy Choos are something no fresh young thing from the country would normally wear?”

  “They’re extremely expensive shoes. So the reporter figured she was being had. She even thought maybe this was Cat Courtney trying to throw her off the track. But then something convinced her Windy and Cat were not one and the same.” She hesitated.

  “Luce, cut to the chase.” He sounded tired. “I’ve been gone all day, and I need to get some work done. I don’t have time for games.”

  Oh, she would have given a great deal not to tell him this. He had been dead on in his assessment of Francie. “While they were talking, Windy moved her hands. She was wearing a shiny new wedding ring. She was also wearing a loose bracelet, and when it moved, the woman saw cut marks on her left wrist. They were faded, maybe a year old.”

  His shock emanated across the line. She wished – how she wished! – that the reporter had kept that detail to herself.

  “I know, Richard, I know.”

  He said slowly, “For once I would prefer not to be right.”

  She hurried on. “She also figured Miss Windy was trying a little too hard with the corn-pone for someone caught up in a coincidence. She asked for a picture, and Windy walked off. And that was the last anyone ever heard of Windy Gomerberg.”

  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 sho
wed 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.”