Passion and Scandal (13 page)

In it, Joanna Roberts sat in a gold brocade wing chair, with a younger version of Mary Catherine sitting in her lap. A boy who appeared to be about eleven or twelve years old sat perched on the arm of her chair. Another boy, perhaps fifteen or so, stood by her side. Ethan Roberts stood behind them all, one hand on the back of his wife's chair, one hand on the shoulder of the standing boy, proud patriarch of the perfect all-American family.

"We had that painted a few years ago," Ethan said, noticing that Willow was staring at the portrait, "when the boys were home from the academy during Christmas vacation. That's Edward," he told her, gesturing toward the boy sitting on the arm of the chair. "And my oldest son, Peter. And, of course, you recognize Mary Catherine. She was about three when that was done."

"You have a lovely family," Willow said, wondering if they might be her family, too. A sweet little sister... brothers... She felt Steve's hand settle gently on the small of her back and took a quick breath, tamping down the trembling emotions the thought of a real family evoked. It was too soon to be thinking of them as family.

"You must be very proud of them," she said easily, steadied by the warm hand on her back.

"Yes, I am," Ethan agreed. "Very proud." He turned his head, glancing down the hall to his right. "Alma!" he called impatiently.

A middle-aged Hispanic woman in a classic maid's uniform answered his summons.

"Mary Catherine's dog is in the front yard again," he said, speaking to the maid as if it were somehow her fault. "See that he gets put back in his run. And put her bike back in the garage where it belongs."

The maid nodded.

"I'll expect breakfast out on the deck in—" he glanced at the heavy gold Rolex on his wrist "—fifteen minutes."

The maid nodded again and went outside to fetch the dog and put the child's bicycle away.

Ethan Roberts turned a charming smile on his guests. "This way," he said, motioning them through the living room, toward the wide, multipaned glass doors that stood open to a cantilevered redwood deck with a spectacular view of the distant Pacific.

* * *

By mutual, if silent, agreement the three of them kept the conversation light and inconsequential as Alma quietly and efficiently served an al fresco breakfast of individual fresh fruit salads in chilled bowls and spicy
huevos rancheros.

"You can leave the pot on the table," Ethan said to her as she filled his coffee cup for the second time. "I'll call you if we need anything else."

Without a word, the maid set the coffeepot down on the glass-topped patio table and turned to go.

"Muchas gracias, senora,"
Steve said, thanking her for the breakfast.
"El desayuno estuvo delicioso."

The maid looked up, as if startled to be addressed politely and in her own language, and then smiled shyly.
"De nada, senor,"
she murmured softly, and pulled the glass doors closed, leaving the three of them alone on the deck.

"You speak Spanish," Willow said admiringly.

Steve shrugged. "It comes in handy in my line of work."

"And what exactly is your line of work?" Ethan Roberts asked. "I don't think anyone has actually said."

"I'm a private investigator," Steve said, watching to see how the other man took the news.

"I see," Ethan said, his eyes lowered as he lifted his coffee cup to his lips. He took a small sip, then put the coffee cup down and looked directly at Willow. "The message I got via my campaign manager said you have some questions you think I might be able to answer about your mother."

"Yes, I..." Willow didn't quite know how to put the question to him now that she had the chance. It wasn't an easy thing to ask. "I was wondering, ah... that is..." She took a quick breath and began again. "I guess I should begin by telling you that my mother died when I was a baby," she said, looking at him closely to see how he reacted to the news.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Ethan murmured sympathetically. "I had no idea. When Donna dropped out of sight all those years ago, I guess I assumed that she'd just—" he made a brushing-away motion with one hand "—quit the business."

"Yes, well... I know very little about her and nothing at all about the man who was, or is, my father. I've been trying to reconstruct her life here in Los Angeles before I was born. I know you worked together on television and that you lived in the same apartment building and I..."

"And you're wondering if I can tell you anything about her?"

"Yes." Willow seized on that as a good place to start. "Yes, I was wondering if you could tell me anything about her. Anything at all that you might remember."

"I remember her quite well, actually," he said. "She was a stunning young woman. Really quite spectacular looking." He smiled across the table at Willow. "You resemble her a great deal."

Willow smiled back but made no comment. She resembled her mother slightly, around the eyes, but no more than that. To have Ethan Roberts say otherwise smacked of an insincerity that made her uncomfortable in some indefinable way, as if he were flattering her for a purpose.

"How
well
did you know Donna Ryan?" Steve asked bluntly, impatient with all the fancy tap dancing around the subject. He knew Willow was trying to handle the whole thing as diplomatically as possible, tactfully working her way toward the real question, hoping Roberts would bring it up himself and save her from having to ask it. But Steve had the deep-down gut feeling that if they waited for Roberts to bring it up, they'd wait forever. The man had the natural caginess of a born politician, unwilling to be the first to broach a potentially unpleasant subject.

"Did you date her?" Steve prodded, wanting to see how the other man would reply to a question they already knew the answer to.

"Date her?" Ethan said, as if there were some doubt as to what the word meant. He shrugged. "I guess you could say I dated her."

"You guess?" Steve didn't even try to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

Willow shot him a look across the table, silently censuring him for his bluntness, but he ignored her.

"Either you dated her or you didn't," he said. "Which is it?"

"The studio arranged for us to go out two or three times. Publicity," Ethan said, and paused to sip from his coffee cup again. "Studios still did things like that back then and actors went along with it. Especially young actors just starting out in the business. Your mother—" he smiled at Willow as he set his cup back down"—was, as I said, a stunning young woman. The studio heads thought it would be good for both our careers and the show if we appeared to have a personal relationship. It was business."

"According to the manager at the Wilshire Arms, you were the one who told her about the vacancy in the building," Steve said. "Was that business, too?"

"I knew she was looking for an apartment. One was available in my building. It was as simple as that."

"Jack Shannon remembers it a little differently," Steve said, watching the other man carefully, hoping for a reaction to the name.

"Jack Shannon?" The flare of surprise in his eyes was quickly hidden behind a pleasant smile. "Now that's a name I haven't heard in a while, although I have seen his by line in the
Times
of late. How is ol' Jack?"

Steve ignored the question. "Ol' Jack said you used to brag about going out with Donna Ryan. That you made sure everyone in the building knew about it."

Ethan's smile died. "It's quite possible that I did," he said, his gaze gone cold and steely as it met Steve's across the table. "I was a young man, unattached at the time. She was a beautiful young woman. I may have cherished certain—" he glanced at Willow as if to apologize for what he was about to say "—lustful thoughts in that direction. They were completely unreciprocated, I assure you."

"Then you didn't sleep with her?"

"Sleep with her?" Ethan Roberts managed to look outraged, insulted and innocent, all at the same time. "No. Definitely not. I don't know why you'd even suggest such a thing," he said to Steve, "especially in the presence of her daughter."

"Because we thought that, maybe, I might be
your
daughter, too," Willow said.

"My
daughter?" Ethan Roberts looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. "No, I..." His eyes hardened. "If this is some sort of blackmail scheme, you can forget it." He pushed back from the table and stood, righteous indignation and outrage in every line of his body. "Get out of my house before I call the police," he ordered them. "Now."

Steve reached over and put his hand on Willow's arm, stopping her from rising from her chair. "Take it easy, Roberts," he said, his voice deliberately lazy. He knew a bluff when he heard one, and the threat to call the police had been just that. A bluff. "This isn't a shakedown. My client isn't after money or publicity. If she was, she'd have already gone to the papers with this. All she wants to know is if there's any possibility you might be her father. Any possibility at all."

"I told you. No. No possibility at all. None whatsoever."

"All right." Steve nodded agreeably. "You're not her father." He waited a beat. "Do you know who might be?"

"How would I know something like that?"

"You worked on the same television show. Lived in the same building. Shared some of the same friends. It's conceivable you might have known who she was involved with back then." He glanced over at Willow. "Show him the pictures," he said to her.

Willow reached down and picked up the slim beige leather shoulder bag she had wedged between her hip and the arm of her chair. Opening it, she pulled out the five pictures taken of her mother and her friends at the Wilshire Arms and handed them to Ethan Roberts.

"And the card," Steve said.

Willow handed that over, too.

"Neither you nor Zeke Blackstone has changed beyond recognition in twenty-five years," Steve said, watching Ethan's face as he sat back down and began to thumb through the photographs. "And the Wilshire Arms was easy to identify, especially since I drive by it a couple of times a week. Once we had that, it was easy to find out the names of the other two guys in the pictures. The manager at the Wilshire Arms said he was pretty sure both you and Eric Shannon had dated Donna but he didn't know how serious it was in either case." He paused, waiting and watching while Ethan opened and read the greeting card. "I take it you didn't send that to her?" he said when Ethan laid the card down on the table.

"No." Ethan shook his head. "I didn't." He looked back down at the photographs, shifting them around on the table with the tip of one finger. "Maybe Eric did."

"Maybe." Steve shrugged. "But with him being dead and unavailable for comment it would be kind of hard to prove either way," he said, so callously that Willow's eyes widened in surprise.

Steve gave her a small admonishing shake of his head that kept her quiet.

"The manager gave us quite an earful," he went on easily, probing for a reaction. Any reaction. "All the gory details about the night Eric Shannon committed suicide, along with some cock-and-bull story about a ghost in a cursed mirror."

"I'd forgotten about the mirror," Ethan murmured, still looking at the pictures.

"Mueller claimed you'd seen something in it, too."

Ethan looked up then. "Mueller's got a screw loose," he said flatly, a hint of anger in his tone.

"No question about that," Steve agreed, wondering at the vehemence of the other man's response. Aside from his outburst when he accused them of blackmail, it was the strongest reaction they'd gotten from him. "Jack Shannon said pretty much the same thing about him. He also said he and his wife both saw something in the mirror themselves," Steve added, trying to find out if the reaction had been in response to Mueller or the ridiculous story about the mirror.

"Faith Shannon said it changed their lives," Willow added, immediately sensing what Steve was up to and trying to add fuel to the fire.

But Ethan Roberts wasn't giving them any more. "I always thought Jack went a little crazy after his brother died," he said, his politician's mask hiding every emotion except a kind of wry amusement. He gathered up the pictures and the card, and handed them back to Willow. "I'm sorry," he said. "I can't tell you any more than you already seem to know."

Steve shrugged, as if he'd expected that answer, and rose to his feet. "We knew it was a long shot," he said, stepping behind Willow's chair to pull it out for her. "A handful of pictures and a greeting card signed with the initial
E
aren't a whole hell of a lot to go on. Twenty-five years make for a long, cold trail. I told Willow that when she hired me."

"I'm not giving up hope just yet," Willow said, taking a moment to tuck the card and pictures back into her purse before she, too, rose to her feet. "There's still that box of stuff Mr. Mueller gave Jack from apartment 1-G. There might be a letter or pictures or maybe even a journal of some sort in there. Jack did say his brother was a writer, remember," she said brightly, smiling up at Steve like the bird-brained bimbo he knew she wasn't. "And we haven't talked to Zeke Blackstone yet. He might know something that will help." She settled the strap of her purse over her right shoulder and held out her hand. "Thank you for your time, and for breakfast, Mr. Roberts," she said briskly. "I'm sorry if we inconvenienced or upset you in any way."

"Not at all," Ethan said smoothly. "I'm only sorry I couldn't be of more help to you myself." He escorted them to the glass doors that opened onto the deck, stepping into the house ahead of them to tug on the embroidered bellpull that hung just inside the door. "Alma will see you out," he said, as the maid appeared in answer to his summons. "I have some calls to make."

They followed the silent maid through the living room and across the foyer to the front door where Steve paused, turning to speak to her in soft, sibilant Spanish.

The maid looked over her shoulder, toward the hallway where Ethan Roberts had disappeared, then turned back and answered Steve's question with a rapid flow of words.