But he had turned his sights on Laura only because Diana had escaped him.
She gathered her strength. “It doesn’t matter about me. You still sang, Di, even away from him. I remember your concert, you were – oh, my God, you were incredible. Why give that up?”
She caught sight of Diana’s face, hard and withdrawn, and thought that she had never seen anyone so bleak.
“It was yours, it wasn’t his. He had no claim over you anymore. He couldn’t do anything to you. Richard wouldn’t have let him.” She felt a terrible pressure in her lungs, as if she were caught underwater, desperate for air. “Why did you throw it away?”
Why did you throw Richard away? Or Julie?
“Why?” Diana’s voice echoed eerily in the room. “I’ll tell you why. Because it wasn’t mine, not really. It was hers. He saw her in me.” She gave Laura a hard look. “And I guarantee you that he had plans for me that he never had for you. Do you know what he said one night? Do you know?”
Surely Diana could hear the pounding of her heart.
“One night,” Diana stopped and considered, her eyes staring beyond Laura, “one night, the year before Julie was born, he said that eventually I’d take her place. I’d—” She turned her head away, and Laura heard a hard intake of breath. “I’d sing Medea. That was her great role, you know, Daddy said at her best she could rival Callas. He wanted his Medea back. He intended,” and she stopped and looked down, “to get her back through me.”
In her voice, flat and unmelodious, lurked a despairing darkness. The absence of life, love, laughter. Laura couldn’t remember ever hearing such hatred in her life. If she had ever any doubts about the pathology of her sister’s heart, she had lost them now.
“I will never,” said Diana, “sing in public again. He’ll never have that from me. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to make some tea. Want some?”
~•~
Tea did not help the sickness. That glimpse into her sister’s darkness haunted Laura. She moved around the kitchen next to her sister, brewing tea, fixing toast, and nothing helped. Diana seemed not to notice.
In the few minutes before Laura had joined her in the kitchen – minutes that Laura had spent in the powder room, staring at her colorless face in the mirror, summoning up her courage to go back and confront her sister – Diana had helped herself to one of her stimulants of choice. She seemed revitalized, wound up tight, giddy to the point of absurdity. She started talking, and for a long time, she did not stop. She chattered gaily about clothes, about the concert, about her dream vacation driving around Europe – hopping from topic to topic, talking faster and faster. Her words filled the room – empty, nonstop words, spoken for noise, to banish the silent brutal mirror she could not face.
Maybe those volumes of words kept her demons at bay.
Laura tried to listen but slowly tuned out. She’d left Lucy’s office two days before, vulnerable and dissected; now she longed for Lucy’s blunt honesty. She knew where she stood with Lucy. Maybe Lucy did not approve of her, maybe that X-ray vision probed into thoughts and longings best kept hidden, but she spoke her mind. No darkness lingered in Lucy; she was sunlight and health. She was one of the living still, rock-solid, not a ghost trapped in this terrible room.
“One thing, Laurie.” She became aware that Diana was demanding her attention. “You mentioned paying me for the clothes—”
“Right.” Laura shook herself into alertness and glanced around for her purse. “I’ll get my checkbook. How much do you want?”
“No, no.” Diana shook her head for emphasis. “Not money. I’m not that desperate. But you do have something, if you don’t mind – you never went there, it can’t mean anything to you—”
“What?” She looked at Diana in consternation. “What are you talking about?”
“The cottage,” said Diana. “You know, Ash Marine? Daddy’s cottage?”
“What about it?”
“The cottage,” Diana said patiently. “I want it.”
She said slowly, “Why ask me? Didn’t Daddy leave it—” And then, fresh horror flooding through her, “Oh, God, no, tell me he didn’t leave it to me.”
“Are you saying you didn’t know?” Diana didn’t bother to hide her skepticism. “I thought that’s why you came back.”
~•~
He had known. Somehow – how? – he had known.
Across the years, Dominic Abbott saluted her mockingly. Darling girl, of course I knew what the cottage meant to you! Take it, acushla, you earned it, my token of appreciation for nearly destroying Richard Ashmore. And if you destroyed yourself too – ah, you learn to live without a soul, don’t you now?
Pain burst behind her eyes.
Diana was looking at her curiously. Laura said, “Did he give a reason why? He hadn’t seen me for years – he didn’t know where I was—” Oh, yes, he did. Cam was paying you off. Was that it, Daddy? Did Cam strike some kind of deal with you?
“How would I know?” said Diana. “He didn’t say anything to me.”
If Daddy knew, did Cam know? How in the name of God did Cam find out?
She forced herself to speak. “Did he leave Francie anything?”
Diana shook her head. “Not that I know of. Nothing that’s mentioned in the will.”
So Dominic had known that Francie was dead. He had preserved documents for Laura, because he had known definitively that she was still alive. But Francie’s birth certificate, her passport – all that was gone. He had discarded those; he had known they would never be needed again.
Laura stared down at her jeans, her ring finger worrying a frayed thread. “I don’t want the cottage, Di. It’s yours. What do I need to sign? Should I talk to Lucy?”
“I don’t think it’s that simple.” Diana’s curiosity had retreated. She poured herself another cup of tea into their grandmother’s old Limoges china. “I think there’s something about if you don’t want it, it goes to your children. I remember Lucy saying that we couldn’t just file abandonment papers, because you might have kids.”
Under the nausea, she felt consumed with fury. Had Cam told Dominic about Meg, or had that just been a lucky shot in the dark? “I’ll talk to Meg’s trustee.” And if I find out Cam told Daddy about Meg, I will go spit on that memorial stone. Both of them. “I’m sure we can decline the cottage for Meg.”
“Great.” Diana’s face brightened. “I’ve always liked the place. Very private and peaceful.” She arched an eyebrow. “Let’s just say I’ve got a lot of sentimental attachment. When Richard turned sixteen—” She stopped. “Never mind. That was a magical night. I’ll never forget it, and I bet he won’t either.”
I’ll just bet. She stared hard into her tea cup, fixing on an errant tea leaf, focusing all her anger into that floating little speck. The nausea had receded, the anger had flooded back, recalled by Diana’s light tone and fond memories of sexual surrender to a young man her sister would have killed for.
Had tried to kill for.
As quickly as that, she felt something go cold and still inside. The memories of the house vanished into the ether, and she remembered why she had come.
She put her tea cup down and looked Diana straight in the eye.
“How can you possibly talk like that? Aren’t you sorry at all about Francie?”
“Francie?” Diana’s face altered, shadowed, darkened. She too put her cup down, and Laura noticed, with a clarity born of rage, that the cup rattled as she set it into its saucer. “What’s she to do with this? And why are you bringing her up, anyway? You know I don’t like to talk about her.”
“Oh, I know you don’t.” The tide of rage began to ebb in its turn, leaving the sands of her emotions cool and open. She felt very much in control. “Too bad, Di. Maybe you don’t remember, God knows what you’ve been putting in your system, but Francie died out there. And you feel a sentimental attachment to the cottage? How can you feel sentimental? Don’t you feel any guilt at all?”
Diana had go
ne pale under the force of attack, her eyes sunk back, her lips open with no words, no defense. Her voice was the merest breath. “I don’t understand – Francie died out there – how—”
“Oh, don’t lie, please!” She was fed to the teeth with lies. “I know what happened.”
For eleven years, she had waited to see the guilt on Diana’s face. That late afternoon, Francie and Diana had met on the shore of the Chesapeake, and the wrong sister had lived. Francie’s killer sat there now, her face still seized with shock, and Laura felt the first breath of doubt. She saw no guilt, only Diana pulling herself together after the surprise attack, a straightening of the shoulders, a forcing of dignity to her lips as she said, “What are you talking about? Lucy said she died in some plane crash in Texas.”
“My mother-in-law died in that crash, not Francie.” The doubts rose up now in siege. “The call, Di. Francie called you from the cottage. August, eleven years ago.”
Francie had made the call in front of her, claiming that she wanted a witness, coaxing Diana to meet her at the cottage, a meeting of reconciliation. A meeting that she did not intend Diana to survive…. All the time Francie had talked, she had fingered the handbag where she kept her small automatic, the gun Cam had taught her to use because she lived alone….
“She wanted you to meet her out at the Ashmore cottage. You were supposed to meet at two, I think, to talk things out so she could come home.”
Her eyes flickered. “So you must have been there.”
“She wanted me there when she made the call.”
Diana made a motion towards her cup, blindly, as if she couldn’t see it. “Of course I remember that. I was stunned when she called out of the blue like that – she didn’t say you were with her.”
“I wasn’t going to meet with you.” Francie had “repented” of her plan to kill Diana after Laura had threatened to go to Cam. Okay, you don’t trust me, come with me! Of course I won’t do anything to her. I’m not a monster…. And when Laura dragged her feet about the trip, hoping Francie would change her mind: I need you, Laurie, you’re my balance, my conscience…. But that morning, Francie had firmly nixed her offer to mediate with Diana. I’ll go by myself…. No, don’t come with me. We’ll discuss Richard. You’ll like him better if you don’t hear what I have to say. Just wait for me here…. I’m just going to talk to her. Honestly, Laurie, I promise! Would I have asked you along if I was planning anything? Look, have some tea, I’ll be back soon….
“I didn’t see her.” Diana’s lips were barely moving; Laura had to lean in close to hear her. “I – I had an appointment that morning, and then I went looking for Richard—”
“She went out to meet you—”
“Then – when I couldn’t find him – well, I thought, maybe she called him too, maybe he went out there to her—”
“No, he wasn’t there, she never called him, I’d have known—”
“I have the worst luck with cars – I had a flat tire, and I didn’t know how to fix it, and you know there’s not much traffic out there. I had to walk a couple of miles in the hot sun to find a phone to call the auto club.” Her mouth trembled. “You don’t believe me, do you? I can see it on your face, you don’t believe me—”
“She never came back, Di! She went out to meet you, try to make up—”
“She never came back?”
“It got late in the afternoon. I needed her.” The fever rising, the sun sliding down towards the horizon, the shadows elongating into the worst nightmares, the wind rising through the shattered windows, the baby dying in her womb. “I finally went looking for her, and I found her in the cove.”
She lay, half-turned on her back, her right arm flung out with her head resting on it. From a distance, she looked like a sunbather in a painting, but Francie would never again turn to greet her, never again smile lazily and pat the sands invitingly. That sundress might once have been white, those arms might once have lifted towards a young man in ecstasy. But not ever again. Francie had fought hard for her life, and she had lost.
“The cove!” Diana finally heard her. “Good God, did she drown?”
“No,” said Laura. “Someone cut her throat.”
The shadows touched this room, this room cleansed bright only a few minutes before by camaraderie and music. Horror brushed them now, horror lived with for eleven years in remembered moments, in dreams, in all the lies Laura had told her husband. It swept over Diana, and the darkness covered her, claimed her like a bride.
“You think I did that.”
“Yes,” Laura said, “I do. Who else?”
“You think – you think I killed her. You think—” and Diana breathed in hard, even as her eyes died— “you sit there, right across from me—”
“Di.” She could barely speak.
“You think—” and Diana swallowed for control, and her voice escalated— “you think I went out there prepared, with a knife—”
“No, she had the knife, she must have—”
“And she turned her back on me, or I came up behind her, and I grabbed her by the hair so she couldn’t move, and even with her screaming and fighting, I slit her throat – oh, God, all that blood, the jugular is full of blood – and you think I killed her—”
“I did think it, Di.” She managed only a whisper. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
She had never seen eyes like that, remote, washed clean of all light and life. Diana moved, jerkily, like someone rediscovering how to walk; the movement pulled her up and across the room, back into the realm of the living. Laura dug her fingernails into the leather arm of Dominic’s chair and watched Diana standing over the piano, staring at the keys, her hands flitting across their ivory gloss in search of memory and remorse.
Diana’s fingers slashed across the keys in a jarring cacophony of tangled chords.
“I didn’t kill her.” Diana spoke to the keys. “I never saw her that day.”
“You’re lying.” Laura forced the words out. “You just stood there and described what you did.”
“Electra.” Laura saw the scene then on her mind’s stage. “Strauss. Orestes nearly decapitates Clytemnestra while Electra watches. Daddy directed up in Canada a few years ago, and I worked in production. We had to stage it like that. You can’t cut someone’s throat any other way.”
“You’re lying.” But her mind raced into new corridors: who else? who else?
Diana turned her head and looked straight at Laura.
“Who are you?” she said, and now her voice seemed stronger. “What kind of person are you if you believe I did that to her? How can you be in the same room with me, and believe that I could do that to my own sister?”
“You’re my sister.” Laura’s turn to whisper. “And – to be honest – it’s very tough.”
Diana gave a short, mirthless laugh, and sat down at the piano. Her hands brushed the keys again and swept into a strange, atonal melody, one of Dominic’s. The music took her over like a master: unearthly, as empty of feeling as Diana herself, sparkling with all the cold inhumanity of a jewel.
My God, maybe she didn’t. But the way she talked—
And above her thoughts, rising and falling with the notes, Diana’s voice, saying, “Tell me what happened.”
“I saw Francie lying in the cove.” The music helped her, removed her from the immediacy of this room, this scene. Memory glistened like a painting she had once seen, long ago, in a far-off museum. “I wasn’t seeing straight, I felt faint and strange – she drugged me, you see, she didn’t want me coming after her to stop her—”
“Stop her from what?” Diana ran her fingers up an arpeggio.
“Don’t you know?”
Are you telling the truth and you weren’t there – or don’t you remember? Have you blown your mind so completely?
Are you mad, Diana?
“Laurie?” Diana had stopped playing; her hand whipped around to grasp Laura’s arm with unexpected strength. “Stop her from what?”
She sa
id nothing.
“Laurie!” Diana’s hand had started to shake. “Tell me! You know. I can see it in your face. She wanted to meet me. What was she planning, why did you need to stop her—”
And she saw the truth then.
Diana whispered, “You said she had a knife.”
She felt fragile and unreal in Laura’s arms, as though the slightest touch might cause her to crumble into dust. She did not cry. She did not break down the way a sane woman might have, faced with the knowledge that her own sister had intended her death.
Then, somehow, she managed to pull away. “Then what happened?”
My God, I am cold, I am so cold. There’s nothing in you, Di, only brittle ice. No wonder Richard left you – but you, my poor sister, you can’t leave.
“I tried to get to her.” Laura found herself shaking, and her voice shook with her. “I kept hoping – I couldn’t believe my eyes – and then I got closer, and I knew she was dead….”
“And you didn’t call for help?”
Oh, cool, cool Diana. Nothing touched her, did it? “I didn’t – touch her, I don’t think I did, nobody could be alive after that. Her dress looked like she was in a slaughterhouse. All that blood—”
Diana said bloodlessly, “That must be a terrible memory.”
She swerved on her sister then. “I don’t have a memory. I talked to a doctor about it, because I only remember bits and pieces. She drugged me so badly, Francie did, to keep me from interfering, she gave me some sort of hallucinogen, I started to miscarry, my skin felt so hot.” Her throat closed up. “Nothing’s ever come back—”
And in the midst of dimming memory, Diana asked, “So how did you get away?”
Here, finally, the dark center of the horror. If Diana had held the knife, she herself had surely plunged it in. The void of her heart lay gaping open now, the wound made by her guilt, weary from the denial of eleven years.
“I left her there.” And now her voice didn’t tremble; her hands didn’t shake. She took vague pride that her composure matched Diana’s. “I don’t know how I got off Ash Marine, I don’t remember leaving, but I did. I didn’t take our car, I must have walked – the state patrol found me, and I was bleeding so badly they airlifted me out to a hospital. I left her there, I never even touched her to see if maybe she was still alive, I left her there to die—”
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 33