Shadows At Sunset - Anne Stuart [11]
Odd, how some family histories were straightforward and others seemed like the stuff of legends. From his great-aunt Esther’s bitter-toned stories to his father’s whiskey-soaked reminiscences, he could never tell what was truth and what was fantasy. How his mother had died, or what her real name was. He only knew her as Ananda, and his memories were of light and laughter and the sweet, acrid scent of marijuana floating in the air. They’d lived in a castle, he thought, and there had been dragons and danger and his mother was a lost princess.
But that was before she’d been murdered.
He couldn’t really remember a time when he hadn’t lived in that dreary little house in Indiana with his drunken, defeated father and his tart-tongued great-aunt. Couldn’t really remember the magical place, or the princess who’d been his laughing mother. And no one would ever tell him about her.
Great-Aunt Esther had died first, eaten up by cancer. His father had followed, breaking his neck in a drunken fall. And Coltrane had taken off before Social Services could get their hands on his rebellious, thirteen-year-old hide, bumming his way around the country as he grew into manhood.
He’d ended up with an education despite himself, more a fluke than a plan. Lawyers made money, lawyers manipulated the system, lawyers were the scum of the earth. It seemed a perfect career for him, once he got tired of living life on the edge.
He’d been in New Orleans, working as an assistant district attorney prosecuting the lowest of the low and doing a piss poor job of it, with no knowledge of his real past and no interest. He’d put it behind him, including the vague memories of his long-lost mother. He didn’t know what prompted him to pick up the magazine the first place—he had no interest in Southern California or haunted mansions or the excesses of the young and beautiful.
But for some reason he’d picked up L.A. Life, thumbing through the pictorial on scandal sites of the century, and he’d stopped at an old, grainy newspaper photo, staring at his mother’s face. Back in the 1960s, a ragtag band of Hollywood street people had been arrested for trespassing on the deserted grounds of La Casa de Sombras, and his mother had been one of them. He couldn’t tell if his father was in the photo or remember if he’d ever been in L.A.—it was his mother who’d stood out, young and luminous even in black and white.
No one had bothered to prosecute and the interlopers had simply gone back to make their home in the ruined mansion in true sixties communal brotherhood, thereby hastening the decline of the historic property and sending the wealthy neighbors into apoplexy. And the Ivy League dropout, whose family owned La Casa, joined them.
That was how he’d found Jackson Dean Meyer, the first name he’d come across from that turbulent time that had ended in the loss of his mother. He’d learned early on not to ask questions of his family—his father would start to weep and drink even more heavily, and his Great-Aunt Esther would tell him to shut his mouth, accompanying the admonition with a crack across the face. She had mean, hard hands for such an old lady, and she’d died before he got bigger than she was and could stop her. Before he could find the answers to his questions.
But once he had a name, it had been easy enough to track down the black sheep. Jackson Dean Meyer had mended his ways, gone back to Harvard, acquired a graduate degree, three wives in reasonable succession, three grown children from his first marriage, one of whom was adopted, and two young ones from his third.
And control of a billion-dollar investment and development firm. He’d done well by himself, but then, he’d started off with several advantages, including a wealthy family. The house where he’d once dabbled in communal living now belonged to the children from his first marriage, and the old man lived in modern luxury in an estate in Bel Air.
Coltrane knew he was the man who would hold the answers to his past, to what happened to his mother, and Coltrane had