All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Read Free Page A

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