All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1)

by Forrest, Lindsey

  They had only his text message: Fire trapped love you.

  Her manager reported that the producers of the show had offered to delay the opening a month, at considerable cost, to give her time. Roger and Terry stayed with her until finally she sent them home, telling them she and Meg were all right.

  She held together, existing beyond thought in a day beyond belief.

  More than anything, she wanted desperately to be alone with her living and her dead.

  She held her daughter in her arms all evening, as she had from the precarious beginning of Meg’s life. For all her new teenage status, Meg was a child who had lost her father in an act of unspeakable evil, and she needed her mother. There was purpose in that, Laura acknowledged to herself, terrible as it was to find any relief at all on this day of days, she found it in being a mother. She cradled Meg in her arms, rocking her, until Cam’s little girl sobbed herself to sleep.

  Then, for hours, she sat in bed beside her sleeping daughter, unable to close her eyes, watching as CNN relentlessly replayed the images – the smoke, the airliner, the fireball, the Pentagon, the falling bodies, the south tower, the rural field, the north tower. She saw the second plane dive to its doom again and again and again; she saw the towers, in their death throes, fall again and again and again. She could not summon the wherewithal to stop watching, even when the small part of her mind that hadn’t succumbed to shock told her to stop torturing herself.

  When CNN reported that a man had been pulled alive from the rubble, she allowed herself to hope until the reports came that the survivor was one of the missing police officers.

  Towards dawn, pictures of the prominent among the missing and the dead began to flash on the screen, and she saw the studio portrait that Cam had used in the last annual report. She stared at him as if at a stranger, not the man she had slept beside for so long. A summary of a life – founder and CEO of St. Bride Data, former Marine pilot, engineering doctorate, inventor, programmer, one of the few cyberspace masters who had flourished throughout the dot-com collapse. Husband. Father. The only member of his party who had not taken the last elevator to safety and a chance to see sunset.

  No one picked up on the newly filed, newly rescinded divorce petition. No one knew that the glamorous Cat Courtney was now a widow. In the enormity of September 11, no one cared.

  The London night had started to lighten, a sliver of light against the horizon, when she heard the line engage – not her satellite phone, recharging on the nightstand, but the data line for her laptop and printer. She trailed through the darkened flat – the flat that Cam’s mother had left her, an unexpected bequest from someone who hadn’t accepted her for years – and found paper lying in the top printer tray. Through the shadows, she saw the blinking light signaling a voice message.

  She forgot to breathe.

  She had checked her voice mail when she had come home, in one last bid for hope. The message, among so many thousands from Manhattan that day, had been delayed in transmission.

  She pressed a button, and her husband spoke from the grave, what some were already calling Ground Zero. Paralyzed, she listened for minutes – ages – eternity – while around him people gasped for breath and begged for help that would never come.

  I did love you, I never stopped….

  The message ended abruptly, long after he had last spoken and the phone had fallen to the floor. It ended with the most ungodly sound that had ever existed on earth – the death cry of a mountain that could no longer stand tall against the heavens, surrendering to the dust from whence it had come.

  The absence of hope, she discovered, lay beyond hell in a vast, icy void.

  After a long time, she switched on the reading light and reached for the fax. The cover sheet showed that someone at Cam’s office, where his admin and senior executives were keeping vigil through the night, had looked up her private number and forwarded the message.

  She looked at the next page.

  ~•~

  ASHMORE & McINTIRE

  Architects and Designers

  RICHARD P. ASHMORE, AIA

  SCOTT N. MCINTIRE, AIA

  FAX TRANSMITTAL SHEET

  TO: Whoever is in charge at St. Bride Data

  FROM: Richard Ashmore

  DATE: 9/11/2001

  NOTE: URGENT! Please transmit to Laura St. Bride ASAP

  Laura—

  I just saw your husband’s picture on CNN – like so many Americans tonight, I cannot sleep, I cannot tear myself away from the TV. I have no words to express my grief for you. I cannot imagine what you are enduring right now. We’ll continue to pray that your husband has survived.

  Don’t feel you need to respond – you have enough to deal with right now. If you need anything, call me. It doesn’t matter what time of day or night. If you need me, I will come to you.

  For the time being, I will not tell your sisters that your husband is missing. Lucy is in the hospital and Diana is falling apart. I will leave it to you to contact them – or me – if and when you feel like it.

  Remember that you have a family here that loves and misses you.

  Always know that you can come home.

  Richard

  ~•~

  She sank to the floor, her legs no longer able to hold her up. She traced her finger across his scrawled name, and then she buried her face in her hands and went far, far away.

  Chapter 4: After

  AS SHE HAD FOR SO LONG, Laura St. Bride did what she had to do. With air traffic grounded in the United States and British flights under restriction, she and Meg waited in limbo for the first transatlantic flight out. Cam’s final message to her had dashed any hope that he might be found alive. They could take comfort from that, his brother Mark said, he had not lived to know the final moments of the tower.

  Five days after a group of fanatics had decreed that their cause trumped his right to live, Laura and Meg arrived at the house in the exclusive community in Collin County, Texas.

  There she found an awkward welcome. Cam’s siblings were unsure how to deal with a widow whose husband had been divorcing her. They didn’t dislike her, but they had never understood her; she did not share their business interests, and her career as Cat Courtney had only placed more distance between them. Only her position as the mother of his only child and her status as his best investment smoothed the way for her. No one wanted to traumatize Meg further or antagonize Cat Courtney by suggesting that Laura not stay at Cam’s house or attend the memorial services.

  Cam had left complicated legal issues. He had not changed his will after he had filed for divorce, and she remained the beneficiary on his considerable life insurance policies. He had named Mark, now CEO of the St. Bride Data companies, as executor, and it was Mark, finally, who assessed her obvious grief at the memorial service, along with Meg’s heartbroken declaration that her parents had been reconciling and the confirmation from the attorneys that Cam had indeed ordered the divorce petition withdrawn, and decided that everything should stand as Cam had originally intended.

  “Look, you were married for – what? Twelve years?” he said, and she nodded. “I know that Cam was no picnic to live with. Believe me, when you see this will, you may wish he’d changed it.”

  Their sister Emma, who had never forgotten that her mother had left the London and New York residences to Laura, objected, “But they were getting divorced. Ex-wives don’t inherit—”

  Mark seemed very much like Cam as he wheeled on her. “He’s provided for all of us. No one’s going to suffer if Laura’s place in the estate stands. And she wasn’t his ex-wife.”

  “I really don’t care. I have enough money,” Laura said wearily. She loathed all this discussion of wills and inheritances; it seemed surreal and venal when bodies were still surfacing at Ground Zero. When she had finally fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion on the night of September 12, she had suffered nightmares of Cam trapped alive beneath the collapsed mountain of steel and rubble.

  Then, in the
midst of the haunting images she could not scrub from her mind, a practical thought occurred to her. She didn’t care about the St. Bride fortune, but she did care about her own creations. Cam had owned the Cat Courtney trademark and the copyrights to her songs. “I still have the rights to Cat Courtney, don’t I?”

  Yes and no, she learned. Cat Courtney, Inc., one of Cam’s privately-held companies, indeed owned all that – but under the terms of the will, all intellectual property went into a special trust to be run by his brother. He had intended to protect his own patents and trademarks, Mark explained, never considering how it would affect her. He had probably thought she would tire of being Cat Courtney long before he died, so it would never be an issue.

  “Oh, my God.” Laura sat down and stared at her new boss. “Do I have anything?”

  “Of course,” Mark said immediately. “You own half right now – you always have. This is a community property state. And the rest of it – well, come on, Laura, I’m not going to interfere with a successful property like Cat Courtney. I do have some ideas that we can talk about when you feel like it.”

  He outlined the rest of Cam’s will to her – a third to Meg in trust until she turned 35, a third to her in trust until she turned 35 or remarried, a third to be split among Mark, Emma, and various charities and minor beneficiaries. She and Mark were co-trustees, but he held the controlling vote. The total of Cam’s holdings in his privately-held companies and his portfolio gave the trusts astounding capital, but she had made her own money as Cat Courtney – that, thankfully, had already been in her name, along with the shares of stock Cam had given her and the investments he had made for her.

  The money didn’t concern her. She could take care of Meg by herself.

  The setup of the trusts bothered her. Typical Cam, she thought, and then felt guilty. Leaving Mark in charge showed his complete lack of faith in her. He had never quite grasped that she was no longer the frightened teenager he had met in San Francisco. His child bride had grown up, raised a daughter, made a success of herself, and still he had never trusted her to come in out of the rain.

  She felt uneasy about Mark’s intentions. Cam had certainly trusted him, and she had no reason not to. Still, he now had the power literally to sell her songs out from under her. If the Beatles could lose control of their catalog, then who was she to stop Mark from licensing “Persephone” for antihistamine commercials? With his majority vote, she could not stop him from doing anything.

  That was brought home to her several days after the memorial service, when Mark explained gently that, since Cam had bought the house in the corporation’s name, she had no real rights to it, although he wanted her and Meg always to think of it as their home. Except for her flat in London and the brownstone in New York – and she was not going there, not for a long time – she was now homeless.

  “Are you moving in?” she asked.

  “When it’s convenient for you,” said Mark. “When are you going back to London? You still have that contract to fulfill, don’t you?”

  Laura made up her mind on the spot. She had never been so grateful to her mother-in-law for leaving her the London flat; it was hers outright, and Mark had no say about it. “I want Meg back in a normal routine. She needs to get back to school as soon as possible, and I want to return to work.”

  “I agree,” Mark said, and his casual assumption that he now exercised any control at all over her child shocked her. She had not felt her rights to Meg so in jeopardy since San Francisco. “Don’t worry about anything, Laura. You take care of Meg and write your songs. I’ll take care of everything else.”

  That was what she was afraid of. Whether intentionally or not – and probably not, since Cam had never planned to die in his early 40s – her control freak of a husband had substituted for himself a new protector, one equally prone to think he knew best how she should live her life, and one without his vested interest in her happiness.

  She immediately felt guilty for thinking of Cam as a control freak.

  The headaches began that were to plague her for several months.

  ~•~

  It was a relief to return to London, away from Mark and his helpful suggestions, away from Emma and her uneasy jealousy, away from all the talk of Cam’s estate when no one had officially declared him dead. Away from the fog of fear that hung over her country. People knew fear in London, but they’d had decades of experience dealing with the IRA, and they had learned to live with terror. No one, Terry pointed out, was going to blow up Knightsbridge. “They like to shop at Harrods.”

  Laura settled Meg back into her school and ballet and reported back to Rochester. Her manager had been in touch with her director and voice coach, and they did their best to help by working her to the point of collapse. She had just enough energy left over to be a mother. She couldn’t write or compose – the music that had flowed through her for so long had dried up. For the first time in her life, she experienced writer’s block, and she panicked.

  “It will pass,” said Roger. “Indeed it will, my girl. Give yourself time. You’re processing a jumble of emotions right now – you can’t write with all that chaos inside.”

  Her manager said the same thing, but he must have told Mark, who called within the hour. “You know, Laura, all things come to an end. Have you thought of retiring?”

  The fax from Richard Ashmore was never far from her thoughts, but she pushed it away into a compartment to take out later when she and Meg had begun to recover. Right now, Meg had to be her top priority. Terry gave her the name of a grief counselor, and she left the card on her desk until the night Meg threw her father’s birthday gift at the wall and crumpled in a sobbing heap. The next morning, shopping for groceries, Laura found herself gasping for breath in a full-fledged panic attack. As soon as she stumbled into the flat, she called for an appointment.

  After several sessions, Meg began to regain some of her sunny nature, remembering her father without obsessing about his death. One day in late October, she found enough of her old self to talk back to her mother, and Laura had never been so glad to see her daughter serving up attitude. You just don’t get it, what’s the BFD, were welcome, familiar words.

  Laura spent several hours putting Meg’s music box back together, her head aching, wishing she could piece their lives back together as easily.

  Meg mourned honestly, and so she recovered faster. She joined a group of teens who had also lost parents in the attacks – nearly a hundred Brits had been among the victims – and she had friends to talk with, email, and IM about her feelings. Her friends from home rallied around her; she spent the greater part of each evening on the computer chatting with them. Learning to use her position as Cameron St. Bride’s only child, she insisted on being included in the engineering chair that St. Bride Data endowed in Cam’s name, and she asked to participate as a full donor when the family created a relief fund. Before Laura’s eyes, the willful, demanding child of September 10 began to mature into a more sensitive and thoughtful young woman – but, more than once as the autumn wore on, Laura woke up to find that Meg had crawled into bed with her.

  September 11 was a terrible way to grow up.

  Meg, at least, had her peers to talk to. Laura found herself isolated, her anxiety only increasing over time. The wall she and Cam had erected between Cat Courtney and Laura St. Bride meant that few people in London knew that she had lost her husband, and the people she had known in Texas did not know where Laura St. Bride had gone. Both Roger and Terry had told her to call any time she needed them, but they were busy and she shrank from the idea of burdening them with her grief.

  This was the time, if ever, that a woman needed her sisters.

  But the sister she’d been closest to had been gone for ten years. She’d never been that close to Lucy and Diana.

  Cam’s sister Emma didn’t even want to acknowledge that Laura had a right to grieve.

  She told the counselor about her headaches and the panic attack, only to hear that her re
actions were normal. Many of his American clients were suffering from sleeplessness and anxiety. It would pass, he said, gradually the shock of seeing her husband die before her eyes would fade, and she would think more about the good days of her marriage than about its end. She couldn’t admit the truth, that mixed in with all her grief and horror was relief that the marriage, with all its heartache and failure, was over.

  She couldn’t tell him her conviction that the headaches were God’s way of punishing her for never loving Cam enough.

  The Atlantic shielded them after the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the financial holdings of the wealthier victims. Cam, it turned out, had the unenviable distinction of being the richest man to die in the attacks, and since most of his holdings except for St. Bride Data had been private, the appetite of the financial reporters was only whetted for the probate proceedings. To buy time and privacy, Mark held off filing the inventory that could expose Cam’s 100% ownership of Cat Courtney, Inc.

  “I can’t delay this forever,” he said in one of his daily calls. “I filed a preliminary inventory, but eventually I’ll have to file the full document, and the press will be all over it. The company gets calls every day about his will.”

  “I know,” Laura said wearily. Did it really matter now if anyone knew who Cat Courtney was? Did anyone care? Daddy was dead. Richard knew, and by now he had certainly told Diana and Lucy. The years of running had ended the moment the airliner had slammed into the north tower. “Just – please keep them out of my hair as long as you can. I don’t want Meg exposed to that. She’s been through so much – she’s doing so much better.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he said. “How are rehearsals going?”

  On opening night, Mark crossed the Atlantic to accompany Meg to the theater. As Cam had predicted, Laura dazzled as Jane, stunning even those critics who had carped that Cat Courtney never quite connected emotionally. She reached deep down inside herself to illuminate Jane’s wretched childhood, bringing up chilling memories of Dominic Abbott at the piano for her lessons. She fueled the adult Jane’s attraction to Rochester by remembering her own reaction to Cam in San Francisco. In Jane’s passion, she mirrored that long-lost afternoon – she didn’t want to think about that.