All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (12 page)

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 fizzled 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.”

He hung up.

How long she stood there, staring down at the offending machine, she couldn’t have guessed. The tape whirred on for a few seconds, and then disconnected, and a red light flashed at her. That woke her up, and she reached for the erase button, because Diana must never hear that message. Her fingers hovered over the unfamiliar buttons, and she depressed one to erase just as the man spoke.

“A Jaguar. Are you the guilty party?”

The man spoke quietly, gently, as if he did not want to frighten her, but the effect on her already stretched nerves was inevitable. She jerked around, one hand sweeping her keys to the floor, the other hand going instinctively to her throat.

He didn’t look threatening, certainly, standing there in the hall doorway. He looked like any nice, quiet man with graying brown hair, a conservative suit, and a hand that still bore the imprint of a recently removed wedding ring, and he didn’t have an ax on him. He didn’t leer, he didn’t look dangerous – but, nonetheless, she was a woman confronted by a strange man in a deserted and isolated house where her father had been murdered, and she reacted accordingly.

“Stay where you are.” Thank heavens for Cat Courtney’s cool under pressure; Laura St. Bride certainly needed her now. “Don’t you move one step closer.”

Too bad her voice squeaked on that last word.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he assured her, and held up his hands to show that he was harmless. “It’s all right, I promise you.”

Her heart was pumping blood wildly below her throat. “How did you get in here?” And, when he forgot and shifted from the door, she said sharply, “Stand right there! I don’t know who you are, and until I do, you stay put.”

God, what could she use as a weapon? Was the metronome close enough?

“Okay.” He leaned back against the door jamb, and then she felt foolish. Whoever he was, he
did
look harmless, and she could see perfectly well that he had a key in his hand. He probably had more right to be here than she did.

She saw, too, that he had recognized her.

“Relax, Miss Courtney,” he said, after an agonizing moment of silence during which she realized that he blocked the only exit. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She could think of nothing to say but a futile “Don’t call me that, please. That’s not my name.”

He looked surprised. “Whatever you like. I’m just pleased to meet you.” He held out his hand. “Kevin Stone. I’ve been a fan for a long time.”

Now she felt more than foolish. “You’ve got a key. How did you get it?”

Did she imagine it, or did he hesitate there, just for a second, before his hand dropped? “The owner gave it to me. I’m her lawyer.”

“Oh.” Worse than foolish, downright humiliated. Diana’s attorney, so he probably knew Richard, and wouldn’t he have an interesting story to tell? She hadn’t a hope now that Richard wouldn’t find out who had spied on him, unless Kevin Stone forgot what he had overheard.

Vain hope, indeed. “I take it,” he said, fighting off an amused smile with little success, “that you’ve been out to Ashmore Park? What did you do to put our good friend Richard in such an uproar?”

If she had learned one thing from Cam during their marriage, it was the fine art of brazening it out when you got caught. She took her time answering, first relaxing the fine tension between them by leaning back against Dominic’s desk and scuffing her shoe against her keys. She pitched her voice to a low, confiding tone and looked him straight in the eye.

“I spied on him.”

“Really?” He didn’t bother to hide his surprise. “And why, may I ask? Richard wouldn’t let you in? Or is something wrong with the doorbell?”