Her performance took on a new depth. One critic, coming back to see if she had sustained her initial performances, wrote that she brought a new prism to one of literature’s great heroines.
In the mornings, after Meg went off to school, she wrote, gradually regaining confidence in her creative abilities. In the early afternoons before she had to report to the theater, she took a leaf from Cam’s book and brainstormed strategy, thinking hard about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. First priority was to get Mark off her back. Then – where to live? Where to raise Meg? Where to take Cat Courtney next? Hard to look to the future yet, she acknowledged, while the past still wrapped its tendrils around her. Somehow, somewhere, she had to find the strength to move beyond Virginia.
Beyond Dominic. Beyond Francie. Beyond… him.
Finally, one afternoon, she took a deep breath, sat down at her laptop, and typed Richard Patrick Ashmore into the search engine. She pressed Enter and knit her fingers tightly together as the search criteria went out across the world.
Thank heavens for the global desire to put everything online! His firm’s web site immediately popped up at the head of the list. A picture showed him on site, conferring with another man over a blueprint, wearing a hardhat. Terrible picture – it showed him only in profile, obscuring his face. He was wearing glasses – had he finally stopped fighting his far-sightedness? The About the Principals page linked to a book he had written on Palladian architecture in Virginia. She ordered ten copies air-shipped to her. He had been one of several architects profiled in another book about restoration architecture. She ordered only one copy. He wasn’t getting royalties from that one.
The profile said that he had one child. So that had been Julie on the phone.
Interesting, she thought, no mention that he was married.
She methodically went through the other hits, filtering out those that didn’t apply, printing those that did. He had amassed a considerable portfolio of accomplishments – restoration projects involving museums, churches, theaters, plantation homes, and even a century-old winery. He had rebuilt the Folly at Ashmore Park and allowed photographs of the exterior to be published in an historic preservation magazine. He had won an award from the Virginia Historical Society. He belonged to the local Chamber of Commerce. He served on the governing board for the private school she and he had attended – now Julie’s? – and the finance committee of the Episcopal church Philip had attended. (Richard had been critical of organized religion – this couldn’t be the same man.) He belonged to a local RC club and owned a share in a co-op airfield. He had attended a fundraiser for a local Republican Congressional candidate. He was an adjunct instructor in architecture at the University of Virginia. He and his partner had gone down to defeat last spring in a local tennis tournament. He had served as executor of his parents’ wills.
He was leading exactly the life he had been destined from birth to lead. Francie had not made any difference.
She found no hits on Julie other than a listing for Junior Cotillion and a brief description of a piano recital at Bruton Parish. So Julie played the piano – a true Abbott. Other than the news reports after their father’s death, Diana showed up only in a report (as Diana Abbott) on a Canadian opera production a few years before and – startlingly – a DUI arrest the previous April. Diana Ashmore and Mrs. Richard Ashmore yielded nothing, and, surprisingly, Lucia Abbott and Lucy Abbott came up empty too. Lucy had been in law school when she’d left home. She had expected to find some trace of her sister’s career.
In the late evenings, after the show, she pored over her printouts. They told her everything but what she wanted to know – had he and Diana stayed together? What had happened to their marriage after Francie? Did he ever think of her?
Did he ever remember…. There be dragons.
She combed back through the descriptions of his projects, and a hyperlink caught her eye – Edwards Lake. The name seemed familiar. She logged onto the Ashmore & McIntire web site and searched through the site for the exact page with the link.
Edwards Lake had its own small web site, advertising itself as a luxury vacation hideaway in the heart of the Tidewater. She mapped it, and then it came back to her exactly what and where Edwards Lake was. A lovely old home, Ashmore Park’s neighbor, whose long-ago owner had refused to sell to Richard’s great-grandfather in the early 1900s when the fortune of the trophy wife, the Great Lakes shipping heiress, was fueling the expansion of Ashmore Park. She took the virtual tour of the beautifully restored interiors, the graceful back terrace overlooking the pool, the quiet, secluded surroundings behind a tall gate – and then she saw the link to the property management company.
Laura printed the page and sent an email.
She did not intend Mark to know anything until it was too late. She wanted all her plans in place before she broke the news to him that she was leaving the show.
~•~
Richard’s book arrived, and Laura pulled a copy from the box and immediately turned to the back flap. She had braced herself for the best and the worst – he was either completely unchanged, or he had gone to seed. What she had not allowed herself to anticipate was that Richard, in his late thirties, might be more devastating than when she had known him.
Something deep inside – an appreciation for a frankly gorgeous man – stirred to life.
She’d had publicity photos done, so it took no imagination to know how this photograph had ended up on the book. The publisher had told him to submit a few pictures – a studio portrait, a few casual photographs – and he had thrown this one in because his mother had taken it. Photograph by Margaret Ashmore. Some female book designer had seen the photo of him leaning against a pillar on the great portico of Ashmore Magna, his hands in his pockets, giving his mother a humoring smile – all 6′5″ of him echoing the long, lean lines of the pillar – and said, “That one.”
He had dedicated the book to Julie. To my daughter, light of my life.
The rest of the photographs in the book, attributed to the author, featured Palladian architecture. Laura read it cover to cover and learned more than she had ever wanted to know about Jefferson’s interest in Andrea Palladio and the five-part Palladian plan he had adapted for Monticello. Monticello. Richard had promised to take her there once, but it had been Francie instead who had gone up the mountain with Richard that snowy day, while Laura covered for her at school. Later that night, she’d listened, anguished, as Francie made a long, emotional tape for Richard about the way she had felt when he had made love to her in the Monticello forest.
February. She held up her fingers and counted. That fit.
For the first time in her life, she desecrated a book. She carefully cut the picture of the author from the back flap and placed it inside the engagement book she always carried with her. Then she hid the books underneath her bed where Meg couldn’t see them.
~•~
In March, Laura took a few days off from Rochester, and she and Meg met Mark and Emma in Manhattan to view Ground Zero on the six-month anniversary. By now, they had accepted that Cam’s body would never be found; the DNA samples they had provided had failed to match so far. This was their pilgrimage to his gravesite.
The St. Brides were a VIP family. The four heirs had set up a relief fund for families in the north tower, and St. Bride Data had donated services and consultants to restore data lines around Ground Zero. The mayor met them in the private viewing suite to shake hands with Mark and convey his condolences to the family. Because they had requested privacy, they did not encounter any press.
They were left alone to view the devastation.
From twenty stories above, Laura looked down into hell. Impossible to believe that mountains had stood here, reaching to the heavens. The hole in the earth was filled with absence.
To an unknowing eye, Ground Zero resembled an ordinary construction site, with trailers on the site, cranes lifting huge pieces of steel, heavy equipment beeping as it backed up, and worke
rs shouting to each other. But, even after the concerted cleanup and recovery effort of six months, rubble and burned steel lay in organized, twisted mounds in the crater. Front-end loaders cleared debris from a small hill of ash and broken stone, spreading it thin on the ground. Rescue workers in bright orange vests, bundled against the early spring chill, raked through the material. It took her a while to realize what the men, who seemed to sift through even the smallest particles, were looking for.
That Cam might still be down there was too terrible to contemplate.
They had no words. Mark kept his arm around Meg’s shoulders, and Emma, animosity briefly laid aside, clung to Laura. No one wanted to stay; no one wanted to leave. They owed it to Cam. They could escape this. He could not.
The chill wind was whipping around the streets when they descended to walk around the chain link fences. They stopped to look at the makeshift memorials, flowers and teddy bears and hand-lettered signs each mourning a loss. Handbills with faces – Missing! Last Seen 78th Floor, 2 World Trade Center – still papered every available surface. Nearby, street vendors hawked flag pins and World Trade Center pictures. People were even taking pictures, but in silence, as if at a sacred ground.
They had not posted a picture of Cam. He had been one of the confirmed victims from the first night. Maybe they had been lucky in that, Laura thought, and heard her thoughts echoed when Mark said quietly beside her, “At least we didn’t have to wait. We knew.”
Later that evening in Laura’s brownstone, Emma settled down to paint Meg’s nails, and Mark asked Laura to go for a walk. The evening was clear and cold, and here on the Upper West Side, life went on as it did not at Ground Zero. People hurried by, taxis honked, the sounds of urban life filled the air. Even here, though, the great city seemed muted, remembering.
Two rays of light, representing the lost towers, speared the night sky, bouncing off the heavens.
Bundled against the cold, Mark and Laura turned in silent agreement towards the park, walking towards the lake. Among the trees, they lost sight of the rays of lights, and Laura sensed that Mark relaxed once the trees obscured their view of lower Manhattan. Street lights shed a wintry glow on the park paths, and remnants of a days-old snow provided some light. Very few people were venturing out in the park tonight.
Silence surrounded them, a glissando sliding from peace to the underlying sounds of the night.
They had walked for almost twenty minutes when Mark spoke. “I’m parting company with everyone else. I think it’s an excellent idea to leave the show.”
Laura looked at him, startled. She hadn’t planned to tell him yet, but, of course, Dell had reported to him. “You do?”
“Sure. Are you warm enough?” He moved a little closer to her as they walked. “You’ve been working hard, Laura, too hard. Although I must say you’ve lost that brittle look that you had last fall – you don’t seem quite so fragile now.” She hadn’t thought of herself as fragile, and her heart sank. She’d called on all her reserves of strength, and the remaining St. Bride male still thought she might fall apart at any minute. “When does this tour start?”
“September 15 in Copenhagen. Two shows every week, a couple of hard weeks with three, and there’s a really bad week in Australia and South Africa.” She concentrated on keeping pace with him. “Finish up New Year’s Eve in London.”
“And nothing else planned?”
“No.” She felt uneasy about where this might be heading. “I want to do some writing – not just songs, either. I have a book idea I want to develop.”
“Are you going to stay in London?”
Oh, now they were getting down to it. She stopped and forced him to stop too. “What are you getting at, Mark?” And when he said nothing, she said urgently, “I don’t want to dance around with you. What do you want?”
“I want you and Meg to come home.”
Silence between them. She saw in his face not Cam’s handsome, broad features, not Richard’s Black Irish splendor, but a plain man used to playing second fiddle, forced by circumstance to step into his legendary older brother’s boots. She saw weary resolution, and she realized in that moment that Mark was far more serious than either she or Roger had thought.
She had to tread with care. “I never planned to make London my permanent home. This is my country – I don’t want to be an expatriate, and I know Meg wants to go to high school here. I don’t think she likes this ballet master that much; she wants to go back to her old teacher. I may contact a broker, see what’s on the market.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he said before she could finish speaking. “You can move back home.”
She forced cheerfulness into her voice. “We can’t impose on you, Mark. You don’t want your widowed sister-in-law living with you, cramping your style! And Emma runs that house better than I ever did, she has the knack – believe me, it won’t work for two adult women to live under the same roof! She has her own ways of doing things, and I’d just get in the way. No, I’d prefer to have my own place.”
That ought to be well-nigh unanswerable. He looked uncomfortable. “Em doesn’t dislike you.”
“No. But I’m not her favorite person.” He started to say something, and she shook her head. “It’s all right, Mark. She and I are very different, and I know she thinks I could have been a better wife to Cam. She’s loyal to both of you. No, I’ll look in one of the gated communities, find a house where I can have a studio. We won’t be that far away.” And it would be hers.
“We can talk about that later.” So Mark was going to shelve it until he could marshal arguments against it, humor her until he judged the moment right. She suspected he had a timetable all worked out; she probably had six months of respite until the first anniversary. “To get back to your plans after the tour – you’ve had a good run as Cat Courtney. You’ve proved what you set out to prove, and you certainly don’t need to work. Have you thought about retiring to family life and leaving it all behind?”
Oh, dear Lord, was he going to accelerate the timetable? She decided to answer him at face value. “Well, I think staying home to be with Meg qualifies as family life. Plus—” he deserved this, the idea Cam had finally been willing to consider— “she’s going to be fourteen, she’s growing up – I may adopt a couple of kids.”
The shock on his face showed that he hadn’t seen that one coming. He stared at her, and she thought how strange it seemed to look at Cam’s eyes in Mark’s face on her own level. Cam had been much taller – almost as tall as Richard, though she mustn’t think of that – but Mark was her height. Mark couldn’t dominate her with his height as Cam had.
“I’d counsel you not to rush into anything,” he said finally. “You may want to marry again, and that might stand in your way. No,” he held up his hand against her automatic protest, “it’s true. Not many men care to deal with children who aren’t their own.”
She kept silent, thinking of the man who had given the lie to that.
“Besides,” he said, “if you want more children, Laura – you can have your own.”
She had walked right into this. She cursed herself even as they looked at each other, and she knew that now she couldn’t stop him. Her show of independence had alarmed him. He was moving up his timetable, and she was going to have to tell him what she had planned, and this day that had already been difficult enough was about to turn brutal – all because she’d blurted out her splendid idea prematurely.
He put his gloved hand on her shoulder, and through the layers of coat and sweater, she felt his touch. It brought him close to her, and she had to fight the instinct to retreat. “I’m not my brother, Laura. I don’t have his problems. If you want more children – that would not be an issue.”
She felt the blood drain from her face.
Cam had told him. Cam had told him the secret that they had agreed must always remain between them. Cam had jeopardized – but no, he had adored Meg, he would never have done that. Mark couldn’t have meant wha
t she thought he’d said. It was impossible.
Mark saw in her face the shock, fear, doubt, and in the next second, he dashed her brief hope. “He told me some of it years ago,” he said. “And he left a long letter for me with his will.”
“Oh, my God.” She lifted her hand to her mouth, and, despite the cold air, she felt hot tears filling her eyes. She remembered Cam smiling with pride at the adoption hearing, Cam carrying Meg around on his shoulders at her first birthday party, Cam and Meg waving on their way to a baseball game, Cam never indicating in any way that he didn’t think of Meg as his own.
Why would he have ever told anyone?
Laura forced herself to look at her brother-in-law, this man who now held frightening power that had nothing to do with trusts or Cat Courtney, Inc. “What do you want, Mark?”
But she had misread him; he wasn’t thinking of Meg at all. He said gently, “I want you, Laura. I know it’s too soon, but I thought you should know.” He gave a small laugh. “I want to be first in line.”
Oh, no. The words were out in the open now, where they had a life of their own. Her third proposal in three months, and as loveless as the other two. Perhaps more so – Roger and Terry at least had her best interests at heart. She turned away abruptly and walked over to a bench.
Mark followed her. “This can’t come as a surprise to you, Laura.”
Her head started to ache. “No. No, it doesn’t.”
“I know you don’t love me.” She sensed he was choosing his words carefully. “Until Cam died, you and I never really talked or spent much time together. He liked to keep you to himself – he never was one to let anyone else play with his toys. Frankly, I always thought that was going to backfire on him, but when it came to you, no one could tell him anything. When Cat Courtney took off – well, you know how he reacted. It was fine for you to have a little success, but only a little. I know,” he stopped for a moment, “I know you resent the trust setup. It wasn’t my idea, believe me. I have enough to do running the companies without having to shepherd these trusts around.”
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 7