All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (2 page)

“Should I put my mother’s name too?”

“No.” He remembered again that it was his wedding anniversary.

Seventeen years, and on this day he was sending flowers not to his wife, but to her younger sister. Diana, lovely, lost Diana…. If he sent her roses now, would she even remember what day it was? Would she rub a petal against that exquisite face and remember the flowers he had sent her during their courtship?

Probably not. She had left off wearing his ring years before.

He still wore his wedding band – burnished gold, worn and shiny from years against his skin, with its faint memory of the spring afternoon when he and Diana had selected their rings. He supposed that most men were not that sentimental about their rings, and he was sentimental about little else, but he still cherished the ring Diana had placed on his finger. He had broken his marriage vows eventually, in the most spectacular fashion, and he had continued to break them sporadically after she left. He would break them in the future. He did not think that he loved his wife anymore or could ever love her again. But he was not ready to remove his ring.

He wondered how she was celebrating their anniversary, half a world away. He wondered who was keeping her company in that pale blue bedroom where he had been most manifestly unwelcome.

No roses. A futile gesture at best, and Diana might not be alone to receive them. He shuttered himself against the old anguish and bought a rose, not for Diana, but for her daughter.

~•~

The overseas operator connected Richard with Lucy just before she left for lunch.

“Well, this is a pleasant surprise,” greeted the second of Dominic Abbott’s daughters, and the only one who did not scourge his conscience. “What’s up?”

He told her. She fell silent for a long, expensive moment, and his mind’s eye saw her staring out her office window over the colonial rooftops of Williamsburg and into the past, a past made painful by the shadows of the two sisters who had left her and the one who had not.

“I can’t promise we’ll go backstage,” he finished. “Julie wants to, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. I don’t want her hurt. She’s been through enough.”

Lucy sounded subdued, a sure sign, for those who knew her, that she was fighting off her own ghosts. “Can you at least send a message? Laurie will talk to you, Richard. She doesn’t have any quarrel with you.”

Loyal and straightforward, Lucy did not suspect that Laura Abbott’s quarrel ran more deeply with him than with anyone else in the family. But how could she? Now that his father was dead, that remained a blackness only he knew.

“I’ll try,” he promised, because she was his dear friend and he knew how badly Laura’s silence had hurt her. “I’ll report in tomorrow.”

“We need to talk anyway. Listen, when you get back, I need some help with Di. I can’t deal with her anymore.”

He squelched the instant irritation. Oh, the damnable obligations and burdens of once-spoken vows:
For better or for worse
. “Now what?”

She hesitated. “Same old thing, I’m afraid. She hasn’t been sober one day since you left.” Her voice faded for a moment. “Please. I know you hate this, and I don’t blame you, but you’re the only one she’ll listen to.”

“I doubt that,” he said flatly. “How bad is it this time?”

“She passed out at the Tavern last night.”

“God!”
What’s happened to you, Diana? Where have you gone?
“Where is she? At her place?”

Alone?

“I haven’t heard from her today. She’s probably still asleep.” Her tone changed; she had finished with Diana. “Richard, if you do go backstage – even if you don’t see Laurie – listen around, okay? People talk. I just need a name. If I can get that, I might be able to find her through Social Security.”

He let her talk on, about checking with UK Immigration and trying again with Cat Courtney’s record company and following up on the leads that had the Cat variously glimpsed in Seattle, Boston, Dallas, Miami. He summoned Julie in to talk to her aunt, and they did not speak of Laura again until he brought the transatlantic call to a close.

Lucy had one last instruction. “If you see her, give her a hug for me, will you? Then turn her over your knee and paddle the hell out of her for doing this to us!”

~•~

He felt on edge now. Julie had lent him her excitement, Lucy her hope and anxiety, but his own feelings encompassed so much more than anticipation of a gala evening on the town. It took him three attempts to knot his tie acceptably, and his fingers were so tensed that he could not insert his cuff links. Diana had performed that for him during their first year, when she still liked being his wife, before Julie was conceived and the world fell apart.

But his thoughts did not linger on Diana, sleeping off her excesses in her secluded chambers. He was keyed up because in an hour he would see
her
, she who had haunted him for ten years. He would be in the same room with her, he would hear her voice, he would look at that familiar, once-loving face. He did not feel like a husband seeking out an errant young sister-in-law, and he knew it.

“Oh, Dad, you look so handsome,” said Julie, when he knocked on her door to escort her. “Too bad you can’t have a real date tonight, instead of just me.”

“And give up taking the prettiest girl in London to the theater?” He smiled down at her. At fifteen, she had all the promise of Diana’s great beauty.

“Well,” Julie pursued, as they took the lift down to the ground floor, “you shouldn’t be with just a kid. You should be going with – with – someone sophisticated and beautiful – someone like Laura. That’s the sort of woman you should date.”

He looked at her sharply – he had a longstanding policy of not discussing his private life with anyone, including his daughter – but Julie had inherited the Abbott acting ability, and she was looking particularly innocent right now. He wondered if Lucy had said anything to her and rejected that thought out of hand. Little in life could be counted on, but Lucy’s discretion was solid. Perhaps this was only another manifestation of Julie’s natural longing for a mother, and so he said nothing to her.

~•~

Cat Courtney.

The Great Cat, a reporter had dubbed her, linking her to that other beauty whose passion for privacy had become the stuff of legend. A merry chase she had led the media these last years, a Cat-and-mouse game played from the safety of a wall of managers and shell corporations. Her New York address was empty, her biography patently false.

Her fans did not care. She drew them from all walks of life, young, old, her own tired contemporaries. Men sensed that she had long since lost all innocence; women recognized her pain. Cat Courtney knew all the anguish of loving a man who looked right through her.

You never saw, you never knew, I drifted by, a ghost of a girl….

She had loved him once. She had followed him around, baked his favorite cookies, defended his wilder ideas, smiled bravely when he married her older sister. He stood before the giant lobby poster of her incredible, lost face, and on cue his shoulder began to ache.

Thank heavens for Julie. She exclaimed over the ornate settings of the old theater, begged him to buy her the Cat Courtney bear (long curls, provocative outfit, two emerald glass eyes), speculated on the shadowy figures in the boxes, swore she saw Royalty, and fell into blissfully silent worship when the current James Bond took his seat three rows ahead. He retreated from her raptures by reading Laura’s official biography in the glossy program.

Julie read along. “Is this true, Dad? She’s married to some professor at Harvard?”

“No.” Lucy had checked that out and found it as false as Cat Courtney’s Foreign Service father or her Juilliard education.

“Then why—”

“She doesn’t want us to know, Julie.”

Indeed, Laura plainly did not. Her manager had so routinely met Lucy’s calls with the statement that Cat Courtney had no living relatives that Lucy had long since abandoned that avenue.

“I wonder what she’ll sing,” mused Julie, flipping through her program. She sent him a sidelong glance. “Maybe ‘Francie’?”

“Maybe,” he said with gentle finality. He had no intention of discussing Francie Abbott with his daughter.

Not that Laura’s first single had anything at all to do with the mercurial girl who had illuminated a long-ago spring. “Francie” had been a shining light, a beacon of conscience, and no one who had known the real Francie had ever misread her as Laura so plainly had. Wishful thinking on Laurie’s part, Lucy had said, after they listened in disbelief. Francie brainwashing Laura as usual, Diana had snapped. Dominic Abbott had walked out of the room rather than hear one missing daughter sing the praises of another.

But not even “Francie” had prepared them for the devastation of Cat Courtney’s second single, one of the most heavily promoted releases of the decade: “Persephone,” a song of such startling contrast, such galvanizing energy and passion, underlaced with a strong dance rhythm, that it had promptly sailed above “Francie” on the charts and gone platinum. Critics had enjoyed a field day, speculating about the identity of the dark god and the unexpectedly masculine Demeter locked in mortal combat over the soul of their ultimate prize. Richard Ashmore had heard it first in public and struggled to control his shock at the unerring exactness with which Cat Courtney had dissected his marriage. From then on, he listened to it only under the protective cover of night, away from prying eyes.

One interviewer, at the beginning of her career, had made the mistake of asking her to explain “Persephone” and refused to take “I don’t discuss that” for an answer. Cat Courtney had clammed up and refused to answer any more questions, a move that won her a place on every reporter’s worst interview list. She obviously did not care. Her private life was her own business; her refusal to talk only added to her growing mystique. No one wanted her reality; her fans wanted Cat Courtney, clothed in lace and secrets.

Only her critics, hearing the occasional keen blade of her lyrics, carped that she wasted her talent in fantasy. Only her family, listening in anger and anguish, wondered if Cat Courtney was the reality after all, Laura Abbott the fraud.

“Maybe she’ll see us out here in the audience?”

“No.” He heard the edge in his voice and softened his tone. “She’ll have the footlights in her eyes.”

The second warning bell had sounded. And now the lights were dimming, the humming of the crowd was dying down, the stage was blackening. The first notes of the anthem song from “Persephone” drifted out from the string section, and the percussionists started their slow, steady underbeat.

A slow small light, the blackness breaking.

She stood stage center, a solitary figure against a background of shifting lights. She wore a trademark Cat Courtney costume, a confection of lace and pearls and glittering gold fabric, and the lights caught the sparkle of heavily made-up eyes and the graceful lift of her chin. Her hair, that incredible hair, glistened with interwoven pearls.

He remembered losing his soul in that hair.

“Come home with me,

Down to the deep,

Where heaven and hell meet….”

Her voice seduced and charmed, beckoned and invited, implored and remembered and wept. She lifted her voice in entreaty and need, reached out her hand, asking for love, willing to settle for so much less, as she had always settled. But perhaps, he thought, now she was merely acting, perhaps she had finally found someone to love her.

As he never had.

“Remember

Remember

Remember me for the dreams

I lost in the dark of your heart….”

Memories glimmered of a long-vanished afternoon on the other side of the world: Laura, reaching out in welcome, all her secrets and schemes hidden behind a mouth that answered his own needs, behind a body that ached and melted and echoed his loneliness.

And Diana, he thought as Cat Courtney shook out her great mane, Diana as she had stood before him a few weeks before, offering, yielding, finally granting the desire long ago extinguished in the cold nights when he had reached for her and she had not been there.

“My wish to love you

My wish to seek you

In the silk of warm summer winds….”

Cat Courtney looked pale, he noticed, tired beneath her stage smile. A few months before, ill health had forced her to cancel a concert tour, and a photo of the Great Cat in silhouette at a New York ballet had given rise to a rumor of a possible pregnancy. A false rumor, certainly. Her gown clung to the slender figure she had bewailed as a young girl.

“I like her dress,” Julie whispered. “Is she as pretty as you remember?”

“Prettier,” he whispered back, and looked through the autumnal goddess to the child twenty years gone, a child who had cheerfully given up her Saturday mornings to fly model planes with him, a child who had unabashedly loved him and trusted him never to break her heart.

He glanced at his watch.

“Across the earth,

Across the heavens

I will seek you with my heart….”

Cat Courtney sang for two and a half hours with only one break. By the clock, she gave a satisfying performance; by his heart, it lasted interminably. For the better part of an hour, she accompanied herself on the grand piano for a set of throbbing ballads, one of which summoned such arousing images to mind that he forced himself to think hasty thoughts about his income tax. That song, thank God, sailed right over Julie’s head.