All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (24 page)

This is what Richard wouldn’t tell me. This is why Lucy was in the hospital.
Diana continued to glower, even though deep down she had to be scared stiff. The stillbirth must have been harrowing. No wonder he had written that Diana was falling apart – forget al Qaeda, she had been worried about Lucy.

Hers had not been the only September 11 loss, or the greatest.

She drew in a deep breath and held out her hands to both her sisters. Lucy didn’t hesitate but slid her hand under Laura’s fingers; she was shocked to feel how fragile Lucy’s capable hand felt in her own. Diana wasn’t as easy to win over. She pointedly looked beyond Laura’s shoulders, and after a few moments, Laura let her hand drop.

Fine. If Diana wanted to sulk, she wouldn’t stop her.

She stood up and summoned Cat Courtney’s command. “You need to get on home, Lucy. I’ll follow you home, if you’re up to driving.” Lucy nodded, subdued. Laura looked over at Diana, who had reached for her not-quite-empty tumbler. “Give me a call, Di. Here’s my cell number. I’ll be out at Edwards Lake for a while.”

“Edwards Lake?” Diana’s head jerked up. “Out near Richard?”

“Right.” Storm warnings flew in Diana’s eyes again, but she’d had quite enough. “Come on, Lucy, let’s go.”

Her firmness had thrown her sisters. They were eying her cautiously, unsure how to take a baby sister who had seized the moment. The balance of power had shifted again. Lucy obviously still felt unwell; her protestations were mild, and she put up little resistance as Laura packed her into her car. Diana, trailing behind them, kept a strange silence while Lucy settled herself.

“I’ll be right behind you,” Laura said, and Lucy nodded tiredly as she pulled the seat belt around her. “I’m in the silver Jag. Keep me in the mirror.”

“Before you go,” Diana’s voice cut through hers, “I want to know something. Where’s Francie?”

That nailed the coffin of Laura’s patience.

“Diana,” she said clearly, and didn’t care whether her voice carried, whether the patrons now arriving for cocktail hour heard her or recognized her, “this isn’t the time or place to discuss Francie. We’ll talk later.”

She thought she heard “Thank God” from inside the car, but she ignored Lucy. She felt in control now, fixing Diana with all the strength of her stage presence and watching as Diana straightened up and visibly fought her way past the alcoholic mists. She was angry, angry that Diana dared bring Francie up, angry that she had forgotten that Francie could never laugh and argue with them again. Angry because, for this hour, she had not remembered how Diana had won the war.

“No, I want to know now,” Diana persisted. “You don’t want to talk about you, fine, don’t! But I want to know. Where is she? Why did she run away?”

If she hadn’t spent that wild hour mourning on the sands of the Chesapeake, she might have forgiven her. She might have listened to Diana and wondered, she might have seen the questioning in Diana’s face, but she never would have turned on her.

But she had mourned, and now she lost her temper.

“How dare you! Why do you think she ran away? You caught her with Richard that day, you screamed at her like a fishwife, you damn near gave her a concussion, and all this when he’d already broken it off, so you had what you wanted anyway! You tell me, Di, why do you
think
she ran away?”

Impossible to catch those words back, impossible not to see the horror and pain draining her older sister, impossible not to realize, too late, the slamming impact of her anger in the pallor that spread across Diana.

“At long last,” Lucy murmured, almost to herself, but Laura could not turn to her.

“Di?”

She moved towards Diana, but it was Diana’s turn now to retreat, to avoid her touch. She would have given anything at that moment, anything, to draw the pain from her sister’s eyes. Diana said nothing. She only backed up, and backed up, until she stumbled. Then, with what might have been a sob, she turned and ran back into the club.

“Oh, my God.” Laura sagged against the car. “What did I say?”

Lucy said slowly, “Only what no one else has.”

“I don’t understand.” She was shaking in reaction. Somewhere in Diana’s shock and Lucy’s calm acceptance lay some key whose existence she hadn’t suspected.

Lucy drummed her fingers against the wheel. The sound, slight as it was, slivered Laura’s already fragmenting nerves.

“Francie slept with Richard the spring before you ran away, right?”

She hadn’t thought that anyone would doubt that. But the last few seconds had taught her a tardy caution. “I can’t say—”

“Oh, yes, you can,” Lucy interrupted. “You knew if anyone did, and I don’t think they were particularly discreet. Francie wanted Di to find out, and Richard no longer cared. Oh, he was a damn fool, he never could see that Francie meant trouble, but I will give him credit. He kept his mouth shut. We’ve all suspected, and Di’s asked, and I’ve asked, but Richard has never said anything. Not a word. Ever.”

“No.
No—
”

“That’s right.” Lucy let her absorb the impact. “Di’s never known for sure.”

“Until now.” The thought made her ill.

“Until now,” Lucy agreed.

~•~

The sun set as Laura walked along the far side of the ornamental lake towards Ashmore Magna, out of sight of the Folly. This time, she did not worry that he might catch sight of the silver car from the glints of the dying sun; she had parked the Jaguar out on the public road half a mile down and hacked her way through the gate passwords with only two tries. Why she was behaving like a lovesick girl, she did not begin to justify to herself.

She just wanted to be near him.

This is called stalking, my girl.

The binocular bag bumped along her hip as she skirted the north end of the lake and briefly came into view of the Folly. His car was parked in the front circular drive, and windows shone on the first story, so she had to be careful that he didn’t look out and catch sight of her. She walked rapidly through the front gardens – hard to tell, in the gathering shadows, if Richard was keeping up his mother’s pride and joy – and mounted the steps to the front portico of Ashmore Magna.

The front door was locked, and she had long since lost the key Peggy had once given her.
Take this, Laurie. If you ever need to come over here – for any reason at all – you come. If we’re not home, wait for us.
Peggy putting the key into her palm, and closing her hand around it.
There’s no need to tell your da about this, do you agree?

She wondered where the key had gone. She’d worn it on a chain around her neck, hidden beneath her blouse, for several years.

She did not spare any time for the famous pillar tonight. Instead, she walked to the end of the portico, then walked down two steps and up three to the southern Venetian porch at the side of the house. At some time – probably during the reign of the Great Lakes shipping heiress, the Edwardian trophy wife whose fortune had kept Ashmore Park going for the last century – the Ashmore family had added an enclosed piazza off the master suite, and
that
she remembered how to get into. Richard had showed her one day when it was pouring down rain.

She lifted the handle to the French doors and carefully shifted it slightly to the right, and success! The door swung open. She stepped inside.

Breaking and entering. How many more crimes are you going to commit tonight?

She sat down on a cushioned bench beneath one of Peggy’s hanging baskets and drew a deep breath.

Ashmore Magna. Sanctuary. House of light and laughter and love and safety.

A home built on Philip’s quiet strength and Peggy’s warm Irish lilt and open arms.

She had so many memories here, and across the years, they still warmed her.

When she was ten, Peggy had brought her out here one afternoon and explained to her the changes that would soon happen to her body. Always the nurse, she had taken a down-to-earth approach that Laura had tried to emulate when it came time to tell Meg. A year later, Peggy had judged it time to tell her about sex before she heard the wrong thing from her classmates, and Laura had listened with eagerness and horror – surely no one really
liked
doing that? It was, said Peggy reassuringly, the grandest thing in the world when you were in love beyond all thought. It had occurred to her later, going home, that Richard and Diana must be having sex when he climbed the tree to her bedroom at night.

No doubt that Richard and Diana were in love beyond all thought. But she knew better than to ask Peggy, who would not, Laura thought, have liked hearing that her son was engaging in behavior so risky to his future.

In that master bedroom on the other side of the inner French doors, Diana had dressed for her wedding, her sisters fluttering around her. With the mother of the bride dead, the mother of the groom had drawn double duty, and Peggy had done her part, even though, in retrospect, Laura remembered, her lips had been uncharacteristically tight. That hadn’t kept her from crying when her son walked her to her seat in the front row and then took his place to wait for his bride.

Laura crossed her arms on the window rail and looked out towards Richard’s house.

A few years later, in front of the same mirror, Peggy had hemmed one of Diana’s dance dresses for her so that she had something to wear to her junior prom. She hadn’t planned to go – she had been so shy that boys tended to overlook her – but at the last moment, the equally shy Neil Redmond had asked her out. His mother was one of Peggy’s garden club friends, and the moms had cooked it up between them. Peggy had helped her get ready, showing her how to put her hair up in a French twist, and Philip had taken her picture, knowing that Dominic would never think to do so.

When she and Neil had continued to date that summer, Peggy had taken her aside to remind her that premarital sex was a sin and she should wait for her husband on her wedding night when it would be right in the eyes of God.
Oh, Peggy, what a total hash I made of that.
She had been mortified; the weekend before, she had let Neil slip his hand inside her bra. And she had felt put upon. Her sisters hadn’t obeyed the rules, so why should she?

Two days before she left home, she had come to see Peggy for the last time. Philip had been on rounds at the hospital, so she had missed him, but at least she and Peggy had shared one last cup of tea.

She wished – oh, how she wished – that her last words to Peggy had not been a lie.
I’ll be over next week to help you plant the hyacinths.
Knowing that, by that time, she would be a continent away.

I miss you, Peggy. I wish – I wish you could know your granddaughter.

Richard ran across her line of sight, about fifty feet away.

She pulled back into the shadows, although of course he couldn’t see her. It was too dark in the piazza, and he wasn’t paying attention anyway. She trained the binoculars on him. He was jogging, judging from the running shoes and headphones, following the drive around the lake. And, the wicked part of her couldn’t help noticing, he looked just as good from the back as he did from the front.

So he still ran. He had run track in high school. The basketball team had tried to recruit him, but Richard had preferred a more solitary sport that did not interfere with his studies.

He disappeared around the curve of the lake.

The stars began to appear in the indigo of the twilight.

She still remembered all the constellations. Long ago midnights, she and Richard had accompanied Philip down to the James for stargazing; Diana, refusing to face the mosquitoes, had gladly ceded her place to Laura, and Francie had not been invited. Through the lens of the telescope he and his father had built, Richard had shown her worlds – lunar craters, rings of Saturn, sister stars of the Pleiades, galaxies pin wheeling through space….

Such a rich texture he had, even as a boy. Whether it came from a youth steeped in the history of a family living on the same land for three hundred years, or from the books that he read so passionately, he had grown up like no other young man she had ever known. The social recognition his looks and intelligence might have won for him from his peers, he had shrugged away; he had devoted himself to Diana early on, and the time he spared from her and his studies, he spent in developing a rich inner life. He’d bypassed normal teenage activities to build his telescope, learn to fly, sketch the old houses to determine the secrets of their structures.

He’d developed ideas that did not always sit well with his elders. Early in his teens, the erstwhile altar boy had stopped accompanying his parents to church, declaring that God had walked away from the universe. Peggy had been horrified for fear that her boy was going to hell; Philip, amused, said it was mild for teenage rebellion; Dominic had said darkly that godlessness was no more than he had expected of
that boy
. Later, a brief infatuation with the philosophies of Ayn Rand had provoked outright laughter from Philip. His plan to take Diana backpacking in the Smokies before he left for college had caused such uproar from all the parents, who were afraid that they would run off and get married, that Diana, no athlete, had happily waved her boyfriend off on his adventure and stayed home.

An explorer of worlds, of the inner universe. Once, fresh from reading
The Fountainhead
, she’d told Richard that she fancied him as Roark. Richard, always the straight arrow, had laughed and said that he hoped she didn’t think he had a superman complex. Of course, she never told him that she saw herself as Dominique. What if he’d laughed? Worse, what if he’d remembered the famous bedroom scene that had so thrilled her that she could practically recite it word for word?

She would have been humiliated beyond salvage.

She waited a long time before he ran by again.

By the time he emerged from the trees and paused on the steps to the Folly, fingers against his jaw to measure his heartbeat, it was completely dark. She saw light when the front door opened briefly, and knew that there was little chance he would see her the rest of the evening. It was safe to go closer.