All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (48 page)

He noticed her there, still absurdly wrapped in her blanket and bathrobe, and smiled at her. That smile did two things: it told her that he’d not yet tumbled to Diana’s real sickness, and it broke her heart. But she didn’t resist. He beckoned her to his side, and she obeyed, trailing the blanket behind her.

“You’re all in, Laura. Go on home.” His whisper reached her before she reached him. “Diana looks fine. Don’t tire yourself out.”

She hadn’t expected that. “I can’t. The doctor said not to leave her alone.”

Damn! That got his attention. He bent over Diana, no doubt looking for traces of the illness that demanded such constant supervision. “What’s the matter with her?” And this time, his voice warned, he would not be put off. “What the hell’s going on?”

“She got sick….”

“Sick covers a broad range.” The no-nonsense came through even in whispers. “What hap – good God!” His hand shot out and seized her wrist. “What did you do to your hands?”

She’d forgotten. She stared down at her hands, with their bandaged cuts. “Oh, Max scratched me.”

He took her other wrist and turned both her hands up in his. She couldn’t tell what he saw through the shadows of the room; she couldn’t read the look in his eyes. He’d bent his head slightly over her hands, and for one absurd moment, she imagined him lifting one poor abused hand to his mouth, healing her with the warmth of his mouth—

Richard and I are mated for life.

He dropped her hands and raised his head. God! She shuttered herself instantly against his stare. No telling what he’d seen, what longing she might have let loose into her eyes.

He said merely, “No tuna for Max tonight, I hope.”

“Oh, I forgot, I have to feed Max.” She turned towards the bathroom and the clothes she’d left lying in a heap on the floor. “Richard – she can’t be left alone, the doctor was very specific—”

“I’ll take care of her. Go on home.”

“I’ll be back soon, I promise.” She didn’t want him staying here; she couldn’t sustain the fiction of Diana’s illness for long. “Let me get dressed—”

In her search and seizure, she’d forgotten her clothes. She recoiled at the dampness of her blouse and jeans, still sticky with Diana’s blood. Damn it, she should have washed them earlier, and how was she going to get past Richard in blood-stained clothing?

Very quickly, that was how.

He stood by the window when she came out of the dressing room, and for a moment she might have escaped with her secrets intact. But she made the fatal mistake of hesitating.

He stood silhouetted against the dying day, his hands in the pockets of his pants, his head turned away from her so that he stared out through the sheer draperies at the darkening Atlantic. The shadows followed the planes and valleys of his face, so that the light touched only his mouth, his lashes, the tip of his nose. She saw him, for just a moment, not Prince Charming, not her unattainable knight in shining armor, but a man forced into solitude, a stranger in his wife’s bedroom.

And she lost her chance.

She must have made some small sound, a movement that attracted his attention, for he turned around and the moment shattered. He smiled at her, and she compounded her error, letting that smile draw her towards him, into the faint light filtering in from the east.

“She’s still asleep. Take your time. I’ll stay here until – good God!” The shock in his voice pushed her back. “What in the hell –
blood
—”

“Huh?” was all she came up with, even as she backed off, back into the inviting darkness of the room.

But he followed her, overtook her, his hands closing in on her shoulders to immobilize her even as she shrank back away from him.

“It’s still damp,” and he kept her in place with one hand while his other hand explored the ruined blouse, the soaked jeans. “What happened? And don’t lie about your cat. What did she do?”

“It wasn’t Di,” she managed, too late, as his hands dropped and he walked away.

Diana still slept soundly, so soundly that she never stirred as her husband switched the light on and efficiently swept the covers back from her body. Not the intimacy of a lover, not even the wrath of a justly annoyed husband, but the disinterested movement of a man watching a strange woman in the bed. Diana’s body revealed nothing, and he must have seen all that in an instant, must have seen that Diana had fortuitously hidden part of herself away. He reached under her pillow and pulled out the bandaged wrist.

She saw that first betraying, instinctive recoil.

“It was an accident.” Oh, God, where she found the wherewithal to lie, she didn’t know, somewhere deep inside where she dared not look too closely. “We were moving furniture—”

He turned Diana’s wrist over, studying it, a scientist cataloging a particularly unappealing specimen.

“The mirror broke.” He hadn’t cut in, told her brusquely to stop lying, and he would have, surely, if he hadn’t believed her. “The glass cut both of us, but Di got hurt worse – she needed stitches—”

“Go home, Laura.”

Diana had chilled her; his voice now stripped her. He finished examining Diana’s wrist and laid it down gently; Diana might not have been attached to it, for all that it invaded her slumber. He hesitated a moment before he drew the comforter over her again, maybe studying her with the dispassionate eye of a man finding a strange woman sleeping in his bed, maybe seeing his bride, fragile, lovely, as she had once lain waiting for him.

A bride already destroyed by her own father.

Laura said faintly, “We can’t leave her alone.”

“I won’t.” He didn’t look at her; his eyes never moved from his wife. “Go home.”

She moved vaguely towards the door, the smell of the blood on her blouse assailing her, the means of the escape she had not taken earlier opening up before her. The hallway, the living room, the door beyond, away from this man trapped on an unlovely carousel with his ice princess – and she’d almost made it to freedom at the front door when he said wearily behind her, “We’ll talk later, Laura. I’ll come as soon as I can find someone to stay with her.”

~•~

Laura had forgotten, and Richard had not reminded her, that her car was still parked miles away in front of her father’s house. The gathering darkness covered her, so that the taxi driver couldn’t see that his bedraggled passenger looked like a fugitive from a mass murder. She tipped him liberally to run the meter in front of Dominic’s house as she closed it up, and he stayed to help her when she ran back upstairs to fetch the boxes of Dominic’s financial papers.

She remained strong until the nightly call came from Texas.

“Mom!” cried Meg in alarm, when Laura reacted to the sound of her voice by bursting into tears. “What’s wrong? Are you okay? Mark, come here! Something’s wrong with Mom!”

“It’s nothing,” Laura found herself explaining to Mark, in between sobs. “I felt homesick all of a sudden—”

I almost killed my sister this afternoon.

“I told you so,” said Mark briskly. “Let me know when you’re packed. I’ll send the jet up.”

“No.” Oh, not tonight of all nights! “I
need
to be here. If I come back now, it’ll be like I couldn’t handle it, and I can, I can, that’s not what—”

“No,” he said with no trace of sympathy, “you’ll be showing the first sign of good sense in months. Give up, Laura. Nothing good ever comes of stirring up the past. Have you seen that man yet?”

“You know what, Mark?” She couldn’t take this anymore. “Not everything that happens around here is Richard’s fault! You don’t even know him, and you have no call, Mark, no call to say anything. I don’t want to hear another word.”

I am defending a man I’ve believed guilty for eleven years.

And if he was guilty, I no longer care.

Only Meg’s reappearance on the conference line shelved what promised to devolve into another tense discussion. Mark left mother and daughter alone, and Laura took comfort in Meg’s chatter about ballet class and algebra tutoring and her running battle with Emma, who had cracked down on Meg’s choice of low-rise jeans. Meg was everyday, real life, sunlight in the darkness Diana had cast, and Laura drew strength from her daughter’s laughter and nonstop patter. Max, too, lent comfort. She had thrown her bloodied clothes in the washer and put on her old bathrobe, and he curled up on her terry-clothed lap and purred loudly against her arm.

When Mark finally dragged Meg off the phone, Laura expected him to resume the interrogation, but he surprised her. Maybe the day had worn him down; maybe her show of resistance had knocked the fight out of him. He said merely that he’d check up on her the next day and to call if she got lonely again.

She remembered, too late, that she had questions of her own. He had signed every one of those checks.

She didn’t stir from the sofa, not even to switch on a light in the darkness. She couldn’t tell the time; she thought from the embers of the sunset that it must be late. Max, snoozing on her lap, seemed in no hurry for dinner, and she slouched down into his fur and let herself retreat into her thoughts.

She wondered if Diana were still asleep.

She hoped so. Diana shouldn’t see Richard until she felt stronger. Strange, that she didn’t fear for Diana’s safety, but he hadn’t killed her when she’d made her terrible confession before Julie’s birth, when the desire must have ridden well nigh irresistible. And Diana had survived Ash Marine, survived to sign that document handing Julie over a week later.

If Diana had been there at all.

She resisted remembering her words to Diana, words that had put the dagger into Diana’s hands. Words that sparkled now before her, in all their malice.

She hadn’t considered Diana at all, in that moment when she’d struck back, eleven years too late, to avenge Francie. She considered her now, Diana who might have lied when she’d said she had never seen Francie that day, Diana who might have told the truth about the flat tire and the keys she’d picked up from Ashmore Park.

If Diana had lied – if she’d lied, or blanked the entire memory from her mind – how much must that burden have weighed, all these years? And the memory of Francie coming at her, murder in her eye – had that haunted Diana in her dreams?

Had it driven her mad, driven the memory straight out of her mind?

But if she had not lied, then another person, unseen, had crept up behind Francie.

And if Diana had not killed Francie – if Richard had not lured Francie on – if she, Laura, had blamed them both unjustly for eleven years—

Then she had done her sister and her love a terrible wrong.

And she’d not only finished Francie’s murder by abandoning her dying twin, but she’d helped the murderer walk away forever.

~•~

An hour passed, maybe more, before Richard came to her.

He forestalled her immediate question with “Any coffee?”

She inspected him from the corner of her eye while she started hot water boiling and set out cream and cookies. He looked tired, withdrawn, as he loosened his tie and draped his suit jacket over the chair. She remembered that he’d been in Charleston on business earlier, before Julie’s message summoned him back. “How did your trip go?”

“What?” He looked startled, as if he’d forgotten her presence. “Oh, fine. We’re going to contract to restore and expand an old subcathedral. It’s diocesan money, and everything has to be approved up the church hierarchy all the way to Rome, but at least it won’t fall apart.” He accepted the steaming cup she held out to him. “Ah, thank you, Laura.”

He’d drained one cup and asked for another by the time her tea steeped properly. She joined him at the table, and fell uneasily into his silence. The coffee apparently wasn’t reviving him; he was stirring it endlessly, his hand cradling his temple, exhaustion around his eyes.

She finally asked about Diana.

“She’s not alone. I called a nursing service, and they sent someone over.”

“Good,” Laura said faintly, and tried to repress a shiver of reaction. “Richard, I – I’m sorry about what happened, really I am.”

He said quietly, “I didn’t know that you had anything to be sorry about.”

She hadn’t seen that coming. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again and took refuge in a swallow of hot tea.

“Diana tried to kill herself about six years ago.” His voice held all the interest of yesterday’s news, but she knew better now. “We were in the middle of a shouting match about – well, never mind, it’s private, but suffice it to say that we were having another interminable discussion about our marriage. It was – ungodly, to say the least. I turned my back and—” He stared into his mug. “What happened today?”

She thought of Diana’s blood spilling onto the carpet, splotching the gold dress, and papers coldly spelling out the destruction of a marriage. Diana, sobbing that she had given up this man for her father.

She said faintly, “I can’t. Not right now.”

Above her bowed head (her turn now to seek sanctuary in the bottom of her cup), he said quietly, “If it helps, I can assure you that Diana was in control today. I looked at her wrist. She slashed herself sideways, didn’t she? That’s not the way to do it, and she knows it. She demonstrated for me one time, laughing as if it were all a game. She was playing with you, Laura, she wanted attention. Tell me what happened.”

She barely managed, “She was
playing
… she bled, she bled all over the place. And you’re saying she didn’t mean it?”

“No.” No resisting the gentleness underlying his firm voice. “Don’t torture yourself, Laura. I intend to talk with her when she wakes up, and I promise you she’ll admit the truth. But I want to know. What brought this on?”

She swallowed once, hard. “We were talking—”

“What about?” Quiet, inviting, seductive.

“Daddy.” She turned her head nervously away. “We tried on some old clothes that belonged to my mother. Daddy’s will.” She couldn’t bring herself to mention the cottage, not to him. “Lucy’s baby – Di’s mad at her for getting pregnant. Some trip Di wants to take driving around Europe—”

You and how you’re mated for life.