of which ran terribly well, and Rachel-Ann had her BMW, not to mention the rusting hulk of the Dusenberg that had once belonged to Brenda de Lorillard’s doomed lover, and the cost of equipping the entire building with automatic openers was prohibitive, especially considering that the wood framing was in a state of rot.
Jilly started up the gravel pathway to the house, letting the blessed stillness wash over her. There was something to be said for lack of money. The estate was so overgrown that the palm trees provided soundproofing from the city that surrounded them, making it an oasis of peace and safety—a perfect sanctuary. At least, until Rachel-Ann went off the wagon.
There were only a few lights burning in the house as Jilly climbed up the wide, flagstoned terrace, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She’d have the place to herself, at least for a few hours. That was all she needed, a little time to think through what had happened, to devise a new plan to help Dean.
In the meantime she was starving. She headed straight back to the huge old kitchen. She sat down at the twelve-foot-long wooden table and ate two containers of yogurt with a silver serrated grapefruit spoon from Tiffany’s, then followed it with a peanut butter sandwich on a cracked Limoges dessert plate. She’d have to go food shopping tomorrow—there wasn’t much left. Rachel-Ann seemed to subsist on sweets when she was clean and sober, and Dean was always on some strange diet or other. Which didn’t keep the two of them from suddenly emptying the refrigerator and cupboards of anything remotely interesting when the mood struck them.
Jilly set her plate in the old iron sink, then headed toward the back of the house where her brother kept his separate apartments.
She knocked, but there was no answer. Pushing the door open, she was, as always, assaulted by the room. Dean had claimed the servants’ wing because it was relatively unadorned with the Mediterranean kitsch that flowed through the rest of the house. He’d had the walls knocked down, everything painted white and then buffed into a glaring, glossy sheen. The furniture was sparse and modern, and Dean lay facedown on the bed. The only light in the room came from the computer monitors—Dean always had at least two going at a time.
She moved quietly to his side, looking down at him tenderly. Dean had his air-conditioning unit on high, but she didn’t make the mistake of turning it down, nor would she be fool enough to touch the computers. She simply covered him with a blanket, wishing things were different, even if she wasn’t quite sure what she’d change.
She left him in his sterile, frozen cocoon, moving back into the dark, decaying warmth of La Casa de Sombras. The House of Shadows. Except that it sometimes seemed as if Dean’s stark, white room held the most shadows of all.
3
Zachariah Redemption Coltrane was a child of the sixties, born in the middle of that turbulent decade. His name had been an albatross around his neck until he was thirteen, and yet it had been the least of the various crosses he’d had to bear. At age thirteen and a half he’d been almost six feet tall, everyone he cared about was dead, and he’d taken off into the world he’d already learned was cruel and hostile, changing his name to Zack. That is, when he bothered to use his real name at all.
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 every intention of asking politely.
His father used to tell him that his half-Irish mother had “the sight,” a curse Coltrane wondered if he’d inherited. He’d looked at his father one day and known he was going to die. Unfortunately he hadn’t known how soon it would happen.
That sight had reasserted itself the day he’d bluffed his way into Jackson Dean Meyer’s office, no mean feat given the layers of protection that surrounded the old man. He’d taken one look into his clear, calm eyes and known that this man had murdered his mother.
Of course Meyer had no earthly idea who Coltrane was. Nor did he care. But Coltrane was gifted at giving people what
