He sighed. “I suppose it is,” he agreed.

Ivy’s eyes widened as a waitress arrived with club sandwiches, set the plates down and left. “Mitch, you wouldn’t—you’re not planning to write a book about Rosamond Dallas, are you?”

Mitch recalled his telephone conversation with his agent that morning and sorely regretted mentioning that the house he’d just bought had once belonged to the movie star. Ivan had jumped right on that bit of information, reminding Mitch that he was under contract for one more book and pointing out that a biography of Ms. Dallas, authorized or not, would sell faster than the presses could turn out new copies.

He braced both arms against the edge of the table and leaned toward his sister, glaring. “Why would I, a mild-mannered venture capitalist, want to write a book?”

Ivy was subdued by the reprimand, but her eyes were suspicious. “Okay, okay, I shouldn’t have put it quite that way.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Are you writing about Shay’s mother or not?”

Mitch rolled his eyes. “Dammit, I don’t know,” he lied. The truth was that he had already agreed to do the book. Rosamond Dallas’s whereabouts, long a mystery to the world in general, were now known, thanks to the thoughtless remark he’d made to Ivan. Mitch knew without being told that if he didn’t undertake the project, his agent would send another writer to do it, and unless he missed his guess, that writer would be Lucetta White, a barracuda in Gucci.

Lucetta was no lover of truth, and she made it a practice to ruin at least three careers and a marriage every day before breakfast, just to stay in top form. If she got hold of Rosamond’s story, the result would be a vicious disaster of a book that would ride the major best-seller lists for months.

“Shay’s husband was a coach or a teacher or something,” Ivy said, jolting Mitch back to reality. “He was a lot older than she was, too. Anyway, he embezzled a small fortune from a high school in Cedar Landing, that’s a little place just over the state line, in Oregon.”

“And?”

“And Shay was pregnant at the time. She found out at her baby shower, if you can believe it. Somebody just walked in and said, ‘guess what?’”

“My God.”

“There was another woman involved, naturally.”

Mitch was making mental notes; he would wait until later to ask his sister what had prompted her to divulge all this information. For the moment, he didn’t want to chance breaking the flow. “Does anybody know where they are, Shay’s ex-husband and this woman, I mean?”

Ivy shrugged. “Nobody cares except the police. Shay received divorce papers from somewhere in Mexico a few weeks after he left, but that was over six years ago. The creep could be anyplace by now.”

“Who was the other woman?”

“Are you ready for this? It was the local librarian. Everybody thought she was so prim and proper and she turned out to be a mud wrestler at heart.”