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

by Forrest, Lindsey

  Oh, but Francie had known. By then, she and Richard had become lovers….

  While her mind wandered, she had stopped paying attention. She refocused on the pair and saw, in horror, that Julie had bolted upright on her horse and was pointing straight in her direction. Dear God, not like this, she hadn’t thought they could see her! She didn’t have to hear Julie’s words to catch the girl’s urgency. Richard looked at his daughter, his brow creasing in consternation – and then – no, no, no! – he turned and stared in the direction of her arm until he stared right at Laura.

  And then he forgot Laura completely, as Julie’s mare reared up and dumped her unceremoniously onto the ground.

  Laura’s breath froze.

  For one terrible moment, Julie lay motionless. Richard reached out quickly to catch the mare’s reins and failed as the mare shied away from him. Laura watched him dig his heel into the hunter’s flank to urge it on after the fleeing horse, and she released a breath she hadn’t even known she held when he caught up with the mare, grabbed the reins, and yanked them sharply to bring the horse under control and away from the girl lying on the grass.

  A second after the horses stopped, he was sliding off his saddle and running across the grass to Julie. Oh, dear Lord, what had she done, was Julie hurt or worse…. She tasted blood where she had bitten into her lip, but she never felt the pain until she saw Julie sit up, shaking her head.

  Richard leaned forward, his arms slipping around his daughter, and then he stopped.

  In one terrible glance, across hundreds of yards, he looked straight at Laura.

  She lowered the glasses and found herself shaking. Oh, what had she done, why hadn’t she waited for him to open the door….

  She went running for her car, slamming open the door, fumbling for the ignition, desperate to leave before Richard Ashmore decided to come find the woman who had nearly killed his daughter.

  ~•~

  She drove restlessly all morning, relearning the roads of her younger life, marking the changes of her lost years. Her old school, the park where she had received her first kiss, the bookstore where she had worked…. She stored up her mental snapshots to mull over the lunch she ate out at the James.

  There, Mark found her. Well, it was her fault, she shouldn’t have answered the call. She listened patiently to his tale of woe. Meg had talked back to Emma again, and Mark, who had already discovered that it was easier to master the universe than to referee between two strong-willed females, wanted her to fix it all. Not now, she thought, not now, but she was inured to responsibility, so she chastised Meg and commiserated with Mark about the trials of living with a rambunctious teenager. While she talked and listened, she looked out over the waters of childhood and let herself bathe in the soft airs of Virginia, and she did not easily remember all the years of exile.

  Finally, she disentangled herself from her two master manipulators and told them in no uncertain terms to work it out and not to call her for the rest of the day. She needed to be alone, to remember that once she had been Laura Abbott, and she had loved the man who had married her sister.

  After a while, she headed west, following the bends of the river, and with one hand on the steering wheel, she fished around in her shoulder bag with the other for the key she had found in her jewelry case.

  Not that it would fit now. Surely her father had changed the locks at some time in the last fourteen years; if not, then Lucy or Diana must have changed them after his death…. She hadn’t a hope that the key still opened the front door of the house where she had grown up, but maybe they had never fixed the window in Diana’s old bedroom, the one with the broken latch and the strong branch a foot away.

  Her father’s house looked cared for, for all that the sign in the front lawn read FOR SALE BY OWNER, with Call D. Ashmore and a phone number below it. Not the number at Ashmore Park, so that must be Diana’s work number. The grass was mowed, the bushes trimmed, the windows clean, and someone had watered the roses Lucy had planted when she was fifteen.

  No hint of death or violence here.

  She parked the Jaguar in the drive, unworried that someone might see her. Even now, the nearest neighbors were at least a mile away. No unwelcome company had disturbed the silence that Dominic Abbott demanded. And such silence! She was used to the muted rush of London traffic, but she heard nothing now but the engine cooling down and a far-away plane trailing above.

  Dominic’s piano had fallen silent forever.

  She stared at the front door, and she felt sick.

  He was dead. They had buried him, his remaining daughters, in some unknown grave that she intended never to visit. She need not worry that he would appear at the dining room window, his cold, remote eyes watching her turn the key over and over in her hand. The sound of the key in the lock could not disturb his reverie, could not wreck whatever strange, atonal chord occupied his mind, could not summon him into the front hall to confront the daughter whose key still worked.

  Someone had seen to that.

  So you’re back, he might have said, if a person unknown had not swung at his head with tremendous force. I’m working, don’t disturb me now…. She walked into the music room, just off the main hall, and the strain in her fingers eased ever so slightly around the key. She slipped it into the pocket of her jeans.

  Oh, this room! Dominic’s refuge from the world, where he mapped out his conducting strategies and wrote that unworldly music that no one wanted to hear. He had replaced his old stereo system, and the musician in her was absurdly pleased to see that. She stepped around his reading chair to the shelves that held his vast music collection, and she was startled to see that he even had bought one of her own CDs. She lifted it out, with shaking fingers, and she saw his jottings among the liner notes.

  Well, she could imagine what he had written; she remembered very well his comments in that unspeakable review. She tucked the CD back into its place.

  She wandered around the room, avoiding the piano where he had died as long as possible, letting her fingers trail over his desk, his reading chair, his stack of once-read Opera News. She stopped at the desk where he had spent so many solitary evenings, planning the next step in his vagabond career, and she picked up the photograph – the only sign that the man who had dominated this room had any human ties.

  Diana, on that unforgettable night when he had conducted her in concert. She had worn her elegant satin wedding dress a second time, and Dominic had paid tribute with the string of pearls he placed around her neck. Richard had taken the picture, probably gritting his teeth as his father-in-law monopolized his bride – or perhaps not. He and Diana had still been happy, still laughing in the glow of their summer honeymoon.

  Just off camera, Francie had been ready to spit nails.

  She put the picture down and sat down at the piano.

  No trace of blood, no lingering remembrance of life seeping away….

  For a moment, she was afraid to touch the keys. What might she not hear – Sit up straight, keep your fingers curved, how many times do I have to tell you, child? Or, more likely, Again! Again! Pay attention! Higher! Higher!

  Everyone in the family knew what Dominic said to his daughters at the piano. Anyone could stand outside the door and know instantly who sat beside him at the keyboard, just from the tone of his voice. For Diana, lovely, blessed Diana, all gentleness and awe; for Lucy, a certain guarded respect – if he ripped up at her, she might just rip right back, and Lucy always had the option of leaving. For Francie, laughter and flirtation; Francie had known from birth how to charm him. But for Laura—

  She leaned over and ran her left hand along the piano leg. There, right there it was – he’d never had it repaired, that gash left when one of her kittens decided that a Bösendorfer made the perfect scratching post. Dominic had been stopped in the midst of his tirade, and she thought he had let the subject drop, but the kittens she had rescued from starvation and nurtured back to health disappeared, and later she found them in the back
fields down near the James. Their necks had been twisted, their bodies thrown away.

  Violence to violence, from a woman flung into the sea to kittens flung into the James, to a man’s life blood spilling away.

  She straightened up now, and assumed the posture that he’d drilled into her. Her hands curved over the keys. She closed her eyes against the memories and played the opening chords of her first hit, the song that Dominic, in his infinite malice, had deemed trite, sentimental, and vastly overrated.

  She played through the entire song, three times, on this piano that someone kept regularly tuned, and several things didn’t happen. No keyboard melted; no laughter rang out in mocking applause; no voice cut through the silence and ordered her to stop.

  The steel metronome that Renée Dane, Countess of Shilleen, had given her lover kept no time.

  His ghost wrapped itself in silence.

  When she finished, she carefully folded the cover over the keys, rose, and went upstairs to her old bedroom.

  Not just hers alone. She lingered in the doorway, and nothing had changed. The bulletin board where she and Francie had tracked their lives had gone, and the desk where she had written her first lyrics was swept clean, but nothing else seemed changed from her last summer morning in this house. The same gingham bedspreads – not her taste, but she had given in to Francie – the same knitted afghan, the same toss pillows that she had hugged night after night, muffling her anguish as Francie confessed the harrowing details of her revenge on Diana.

  He had left the one picture she hadn’t taken with her: the four sisters on that last Christmas, Laura and Francie standing together in matching sweaters, high school seniors on the brink of their lives. She had come to hate that picture; it had marked the breakdown of their lifetime of solidarity. A few days later, Francie had begun her revenge against Diana, effectively isolating her twin in the process.

  Twins, they’d called themselves, she and Francie, after someone referred to them as Irish twins. They were a year less a day apart, but they passed for twins, and a childhood bout of rheumatic fever had kept Francie in class with her. They’d behaved as twins, too, dependent on each other, confiding in each other, each living in the other’s life. A year less a day, only that separated them, but it had been enough. Enough that Dominic Abbott treated Francie with loving indulgence, the child of his reconciliation with his great love, enough that he looked upon his fourth daughter as an encumbrance whose birth destroyed the fragile bonds between her parents and who was, after all, another mouth to feed. Enough that Richard Ashmore submerged his deep unhappiness in Francie and still treated Laura as his adoring young slave. Enough that Cameron St. Bride knew right away who would make him a malleable, submissive wife—

  Enough! She brushed her hand across her eyes. She had no business crying. If tears were going to loom every time she remembered Francie, she had best go back to London immediately. She couldn’t spend the summer weeping at every turn.

  She turned away from the door and ran her hand along the fabric-covered wall towards the staircase. Then, of course, she stopped at one door, because she couldn’t resist; she had to see if he had changed this room too, if he had kept it as much a shrine as he had Francie’s.

  Unbelievable! The man must have spent these last years living in the past. He’d decreed early on that Diana, as the oldest daughter, was entitled to the bedroom suite with the private bathroom and the fireplace and the window seat, and Francie would inherit the room when Diana left for school. But Francie had elected to stay in the back of the house out of Dominic’s hearing, so Diana’s room had been left inviolate.

  Except that someone had been dusting it. She traced a finger across the dressing table and came away clean. Come to think of it, the piano had looked pristine, and the entire house lacked that dusty smell of abandonment. She’d seen no sign that anyone was living here – still, if someone came in….

  She turned around and looked into Richard Ashmore’s eyes.

  Not really, of course. Just another picture (and, she hoped, the last one – it was more upsetting than she had anticipated, glimpsing the past in unexpected corners like this), but this picture was special. Richard and Diana at their engagement dinner, young and glorious, laughing at each other with the familiarity of long-time lovers, never doubting for a second that they would look at each other with the same passion in fifty years.

  Laura Abbott took the picture in her hand and sat down at the dressing table and let her dreams slide into her thoughts.

  Richard. Richard….

  Still learning to handle that incredible height. Thick dark hair that he had worn short enough (barely) to please his father and long enough to infuriate hers. Slate blue eyes and lashes that any girl would have killed to possess, and an easy smile in evidence all the time. A kindness that rescued Laura from Dominic more than once, and a blind infatuation that kept his heart trained on Diana, lovely, lucky Diana, and blinkered his eyes against the one who really loved him.

  He’d known all about that broken window latch. He had broken it himself when Dominic became aware that his crown princess had come home once too often with her blouse buttoned wrong. For the first and only time, Dominic disciplined Diana, grounding her for two weeks, and that only motivated the two lovers to circumvent that restriction with a vengeance. Diana locked her door, Richard climbed the tree, and Dominic composed in oblivious peace at his piano, unaware that his fast dominion over his best-loved daughter was nightly broken by the ardent worship of a young man’s body.

  Diana’s sisters kept her secret for her, Lucy because she despised Dominic, Laura because she thought it thrillingly romantic, Francie because she liked having something to hold over Diana’s head.

  Richard had been seventeen, Diana six months younger. Two years later, one June afternoon, Dominic had conceded defeat and reluctantly handed over his darling to the usurper. How perfect they had seemed, Richard and Diana, he so tall and tanned and laughing, and she shining and sweet and frail in her wedding gown! Prince Charming and the princess he had awakened to life, the perfect ending to a perfect fairy tale.

  Oh, but the prince never saw the lady in waiting; the currents of time that decreed that six years would always separate them had swept him out of Laura’s reach. So she accepted coming in last, she was used to it, and she settled for his affectionate hug as he took his turn dancing with his new sisters-in-law.

  Diana smiled graciously in her indubitable triumph; Francie sulked bitterly in a defeat she clearly considered temporary. Honestly, Lucy snapped after being shoved out of the bridal bouquet’s path, Francie seemed not to comprehend that the battle was finished. Richard was gone. He had taken himself out of circulation the first time he met Diana, when he was eight. Of course, she said, ignoring Francie’s glower, he ought to have put an end to this long ago, but he was so head-over-heels with Diana that he didn’t realize that he had ever served as a battleground.

  By that last afternoon, though, he knew. By that last afternoon, he bore the scars of the war, he knew the guilt of being the prize in a contest of blood, and he was not inclined to give quarter to any daughter with Dominic Abbott’s eyes.

  By that last afternoon, he had declared his own war.

  The last time she saw him…. No. There be dragons….

  She placed the frame gently on the table and looked around one last time, and she wondered again about the lack of dust and the sign out front. Was Diana living here? But no, Richard still lived at Ashmore Park, she’d seen that clearly…. Were he and Diana still together? She didn’t know. All her research hadn’t told her if their marriage had survived. She knew nothing about them at all.

  She gave Diana’s royal bedchamber one last look and headed downstairs.

  She was at the door when one thought stopped her.

  When she’d made the decision to come home, she’d blithely assumed that she’d have no trouble contacting her sisters. Of course, she could always return to Ashmore Park, but she’d already fizz
led at that, and she hadn’t the courage for a repeat performance, at least not today. She had Diana’s number now from the sign, and she had all of Richard’s numbers from his fax, carefully tucked away in her shoulder bag. Lucy, though, elusive Lucy – she’d found no listing for Lucia Abbott, and it hit her then, only then, that of course Lucy had married and changed her name.

  Of everyone, she preferred to face Lucy.

  She gave herself no time to think. She marched back into Dominic’s music room and straight over to his desk, where surely he must have kept an address book or a telephone list or something that could help her find Lucy. She laid her purse and keys down on the blotter, and two things happened.

  The telephone rang, for one.

  The noise startled her, and her heart began to beat faster. Absurd, of course, as if a telephone could hurt her, and she knew that even as she counted off the rings and waited for it to stop. Strange, that no one had disconnected the phone, but then – and the answering machine switched on, and her father’s cold, remote voice, dead these last months, advised that he could not answer the call and issued a completely insincere invitation to leave a message.

  Terrible enough to hear her father’s voice, but that was not the worst of it.

  “Diana.” She had never forgotten that voice, clipped and cool and very angry. She would remember the sound of it in her last thoughts. “If you’re there, pick up the phone.”

  She didn’t, of course. She stood there and listened.

  “I don’t know what the hell you were playing at this morning, spying on us, but you scared the devil out of your daughter. If you have something to say to me, call me, and we’ll talk. Otherwise,” he paused, and his voice lost a little of the edge, “don’t pull a stunt like that again.” Another pause. “I assume that you’ve bought yourself a Jaguar. You’d better call me, Di, that’s a hell of a car to take care of. And, for God’s sake, change the message on the phone.”