Tempting Fate
Carla Neggers
In a town of flamboyance, wealth and family feuds, a mystery of the past is about to resurface.Despite her success as a young entrepreneur, Dani Pembroke is a haunted woman. Long ago her mother vanished without a trace, leaving Dani to live with her wealthy relatives, who have their own questionable pasts. Although the residents of Saratoga, New York, gossip that Lilli Pembroke's disappearance will never be solved, Dani is confident that she will find the truth one day.That day draws near when security expert Zeke Cutler arrives in Saratoga. The two join forces in an effort to find out what really happened to Lilli Pembroke. But Dani is unaware that her fearless partner has his own reasons for uncovering the truth…and that their search is putting them on track to collide with a killer who will do anything to keep that secret buried.
Praise for
CARLA NEGGERS
“Neggers’s engaging romantic mystery neatly blends fiction with authentic detail.”
—Publishers Weekly on Tempting Fate
“Carla Neggers is one of the most distinctive, talented writers of our genre.”
—#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber
“When it comes to romance, adventure and suspense, nobody delivers like Carla Neggers.”
—New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz
“Neggers has created yet another well-matched pair of characters and given them a crackerjack mystery to solve—complete with a seriously creepy villain.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Abandon
“Neggers keeps the reader guessing ‘whodunit’ to the end of her intriguing novel.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Widow
“A keen ear for dialogue and a sure hand with multidimensional characterizations are Neggers’ greatest gifts as a storyteller…. By turns creepy and amusing, the story engages on several levels.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Breakwater
“[Neggers’s] skill at creating colorful characters and deliciously twisted story lines makes this an addictive read.”
—Publishers Weekly on Stonebrook Cottage
“Neggers’s brisk pacing and colorful characterizations sweep the reader toward a dramatic and ultimately satisfying denouement.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Cabin
“Suspense, romance and the rocky Maine coast—what more could a reader ask? The Harbor has it all. Carla Neggers writes a story so vivid you can smell the salt air and feel the mist on your skin.”
—New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen
TEMPTING FATE
Carla Neggers
Tempting Fate
Dear Reader,
If you’ve ever been to Saratoga Springs in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, you know it’s a great place to be. I’ve spent many days there enjoying its beautiful Victorian streets and sidewalk cafés, its colorful history, its incomparable mineral springs—and breakfast at the Saratoga racetrack in August is an experience not to be missed.
All these elements are the perfect backdrop for Tempting Fate, a favorite novel of mine that I’m delighted to see back in print—updated, even better than the original! I loved diving back into this story and revisiting its colorful cast of characters and the dangers they face. They’ve stayed with me from the moment they started percolating in my head on a pleasant stroll in downtown Saratoga, and I hope they stay with you, too.
Enjoy!
Carla
www.carlaneggers.com
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
One
Before she could change her mind, Dani Pembroke cut down a narrow side street in downtown Saratoga Springs, New York, and joined the line outside a small theater.
It was a beautiful August evening, the start of Saratoga’s racing season, a tradition since 1863, when, just a month after the bloody Battle of Gettysburg, John “Old Smoke” Morrissey and Cornelius Vanderbilt had brought twenty-six horses to America’s favorite spa for four days of racing. Dani loved the energy, the excitement, that she could feel in town. People jammed the pretty streets, the shops and restaurants were crowded and the sidewalk vendors were out in full force.
The Chandlers would have arrived by now, she thought.
My family.
Dani fought the urge to head up to the restored Victorian house they owned on North Broadway, Saratoga’s “Millionaires’ Row.” She could see if the wraparound front porch had the hanging baskets of pink and white petunias and antique wicker furniture she remembered as a little girl. If the gardens still smelled of summer roses and lilies.
If the place still reminded her of her mother.
For twenty-five years—ever since she was nine years old—Dani had avoided Saratoga in August. Her one searing memory was of watching her mother take off in a hot-air balloon, never to return.
More people fell into the line. The August factor at work, Dani thought. Usually the theater had to scramble for a crowd. But today, a hundred people would pack the house.
Then someone said, “It’s twenty-five years this month that Lilli Chandler Pembroke disappeared,” and Dani felt herself go cold. But she did nothing to draw attention to herself. The theater was showing a double feature of Nick Pembroke’s masterpiece, The Gamblers, and its sequel thirty years later, Casino. The owners had gotten hold of the old posters. The one of The Gamblers showed a smiling, black-eyed Mattie Witt.
She’s so beautiful, Dani thought, staring at her grandmother, a young woman in the picture—dazzling and mysterious with her midnight-black eyes and glossy black hair. Even then, before she’d become a star, her famous mystique was in place. Mattie Witt had made her last movie, given her last interview and abandoned Hollywood long before Dani was even born.
Her grandmother had also been long divorced from Nick Pembroke by the time her one and only grandchild was born. But as reckless as she was feeling, Dani didn’t want to think about her grandfather, a talented, scoundrel Pembroke if there’d ever been one.
Her gaze shifted to the second poster, and her chest tightened at the image of her mother. It wasn’t the original Casino poster. It was the one the studio had made after Nick Pembroke admitted that the unknown young blonde in the movie-stealing scene in the second act was his daughter-in-law, missing heiress Lilli Chandler Pembroke. He’d given her the part when he’d filmed Casino on location in Saratoga the previous August, days before she disappeared.
Her photograph captured not the mother Dani had known and loved and lost, but the woman Lilli Chandler Pembroke had longed to become: vivacious, sexy, independent—someone else. She had a completely different look from Mattie Witt thirty years earlier. Lilli was all Chandler, slender, fair, patrician, pretty but not exotic. She’d believed her destiny was to be the proper heiress, always gracious and elegant, never taking a wrong—a daring—step.
Until her father-in-law had cast her in his comeback movie.
Lilli’s searing performance had helped catapult Casino into the commercial and artistic success Nick Pembroke, who hadn’t done much since Mattie Witt’s defection from his life and work, had needed. Naturally he’d squandered it. No one had expected him to do anything else.
All Dani’s instincts urged her to leap out of the line and keep going, keep walking.
Twenty-five years.
Blood pounded in her ears, but she didn’t move.
She remembered herself at nine, waiting for her mother to come home. She’d sat on a wicker swing on the front porch of the Chandler cottage in her raspberry-smeared white dress, plucking a basket of petunias bald-headed until finally her white-faced father—Mattie Witt and Nick Pembroke’s only son—had come for her. She made him put the raspberries she was saving for her mother into the refrigerator. They’d molded there, untouched.
Dani stayed in the line. She didn’t look like the women on the posters. With her black eyes and short black hair, her strong features and straight, athletic figure—and her supposed recklessness—she was usually compared not to the southern Witts or the blue-blooded Chandlers but to three generations of Pembroke scoundrels. She’d seen the comparisons in the worried faces of her marketing consultants in New York. Through two days of nonstop strategy sessions, reports, brainstorming, even casual meals together, she’d sensed their unasked questions. Had she gone too far? Had she overextended herself? Was there any Chandler in her, or was she, after all, pure Pembroke? Not one Pembroke in the last hundred years had been worth a damn when it came to reliability, trustworthiness, commitment or responsibility.
When people did recognize a trace of her mother, of Chandler, in Dani—in her full, generous mouth or her occasional displays of graciousness—it was commented on with surprise, as if they must have imagined it. Even as a little girl, before her mother had disappeared, a New York gossip columnist had said, “Danielle Chandler Pembroke is not a child meant to have been born rich.”
But she’d taken care of that.
Inside the theater she found a seat in the front near an exit. She’d seen both movies before, but never on the big screen. Never in public.
Sitting through The Gamblers was relatively easy. It was fun, romantic, like watching someone she didn’t know, although she’d visited her grandmother in Greenwich Village just a few days ago. Mattie Witt was eighty-two now and still beautiful, still fiercely independent.
The film’s rendition of Ulysses Pembroke’s life—the murdered grandfather Nick had never known—painted him as a lovable rogue, a well-meaning scoundrel. It skipped his tragic end.
Dani almost left before Casino started.
She’d seen it just twice, both times on television at one o’clock in the morning. When it was released in the spring after her mother’s disappearance, the adults around her all had agreed she should be spared. Nonetheless, Dani had felt the tension between the two sides of her family. Caught in the middle, her father had tried to mediate. Yes, his young wife should have—could have—told her family that she’d taken the role in Casino. But no, his father hadn’t been wrong to offer it to her, to let her be reckless this once, to let her put this one dream into action.
There had been no reconciliation, no understanding. Twenty-five years later, Eugene Chandler remained horrified and humiliated by what he regarded as his older daughter’s betrayal, her underhandedness. He continued to believe that by encouraging Lilli to be something she wasn’t, Nick Pembroke bore at least partial responsibility for her disappearance.
The story of Casino picked up where The Gamblers had left off. It painted a less romanticized, more realistic picture of Ulysses Pembroke, not shying away from how he’d gambled away his fortune at Saratoga’s gaming tables and New York’s stock market, how he’d wanted desperately to do the right thing but always came up short. In Casino he didn’t get the girl, and he didn’t ride off into the proverbial sunset. As in real life, he was shot dead by an anonymous sore loser outside Canfield Casino, now a Saratoga landmark. Three weeks later his wife gave birth to their son on the gleaming ballroom floor of the outrageous mansion he’d built near the Saratoga Race Course. Unable to find a buyer for her husband’s eclectic, unaffordable estate, his widow had stripped it of anything she could sell to make a life for herself and her child.
The last scene in the movie showed her holding her baby as she gathered up the keys to every wrought-iron gate on the property. Ulysses had had two keys made for each gate, one of brass, one of gold. His widow sold off the gold keys.
It was a nice touch—an example of Ulysses Pembroke’s profligacy. For years Dani had thought it pure fiction. She’d never seen hide nor hair of any gold keys.
Until a few weeks ago.
While rock climbing on the old Pembroke estate, she’d run across an old gate key on a narrow ledge. It turned out to be twenty-four-karat gold. And it matched exactly the brass key to the wrought-iron gate of the pavilion at the springs.
Dani had hung both keys on a gold chain. They’d attracted no comments whatever in New York. Her consultants apparently had been more interested in looking into her eyes for any sign she was going off the deep end.
She touched the keys as she watched the movie. In a performance as enriching as it was painful, the thirty-year-old heiress to the Chandler fortune managed to capture not only the soul of her character—a stunning, tragic singer in late Victorian America, a complex woman of torn loyalties and dreams she herself didn’t dare acknowledge—but also of countless women like her. She bridged the gap between rich and poor, between educated and illiterate, between virgin and harlot.
Lilli Chandler Pembroke tore out her own heart and gave it to every woman in her audience.
To her own daughter.
Yet if millions of moviegoers had their image of the famous missing heiress forged by her one short, unforgettable scene in Casino, Dani’s central vision of her mother was of her smiling and waving from the basket of a hot-air balloon.
She’d looked so happy.
As Dani had called up to the balloon as it lifted off with her promise to save her some raspberries, she’d never guessed—couldn’t have imagined—that she’d never see her mother again.
It was late when the theater emptied, but Saratoga was a late-night town, and the sidewalks were still crowded. Dani cut through Congress Park, past stately Canfield Casino. She wouldn’t have been surprised if she walked right over the spot where Ulysses Pembroke had been murdered.
On the other side of the park she crossed onto Union Avenue, a wide street lined with beautifully restored Victorian houses. The air was cool, fragrant with grass, pine and summer flowers. She passed the historic racetrack, quiet so late at night, its tall, pointed wrought-iron fences and red-and-white awnings silhouetted against the dark grounds.
Soon she came to the narrow, unpretentious driveway and discreet sign that marked the entrance to the Pembroke. Not long ago there’d been no sign, just the crumbling, pitted driveway. No more. Transforming Ulysses Pembroke’s dilapidated house and grounds into an inn and spa had been Dani’s biggest gamble. So far, it looked to pay off.
The biggest miracle, she thought, was that Nick hadn’t sold the property to a mall developer years ago, never mind that she’d threatened everything short of murder if he did. Instead, she’d leased the land from him and revived Ulysses’s long-defunct mineral springs, turning it into a profitable company that enabled her to buy out her grandfather. Of course, Nick liked to claim he’d never have sold out on her. Hadn’t he hung on to the old place, let it be a drag on his finances, for decades? But Dani was unimpressed. Nick Pembroke was a gambler. This time he’d just gambled on her.
Walking up the driveway, she could smell the roses even before she passed the rose garden she’d restored, first on her own, with goatskin gloves and some books on roses, then later with a gardener and landscape architect. The garden was free and open to the public, as Ulysses Pembroke himself had intended when he’d first planted roses there over a hundred years ago.
Beyond the gardens the paved road veered to the right, onto the hillside where she could see the lights of the main house through the trees. It was as big and ugly and ostentatious—and amusing—as one would have expected of someone as grandiose as her great-great-grandfather. The outbuildings were just as unconventional: a sixteenth-century stable the legendary rascal had had shipped stone by stone from Ireland; a Vermont red barn for which he’d had no discernible use; a marble bathhouse with Roman columns. There were two guesthouses and more gardens—informal, formal, vegetable, flower, herb, perennial, annual. Dani had had everything gutted, renovated, spruced up, modernized, restored—whatever was necessary, she did.
Risky, maybe, but what was the worst that could happen? She could fulfill her Chandler grandfather’s expectations and fall flat on her face.
She didn’t follow the road up to the main buildings now. Instead she headed straight along a narrow dirt road, onto a wooden bridge. She could hear the brook below her tumbling over rocks. The dirt road curved sharply to the right and opened into a clearing. In the middle stood her gingerbread cottage. She’d had it painted pink, mauve and purple, planted its front yard with a wild-looking mix of flowers. The area bordered woods that led to the far edge of the estate and Pembroke Springs.
Dani went into the cottage through the front door and shook off the nostalgia that had gripped her since arriving back in Saratoga. She sorted through her mail. There were more cards from friends congratulating her on the opening of the Pembroke, and there were more requests for media interviews. Please, wouldn’t she reconsider her aversion to reporters? Her marketing team had counseled that the judicious, well-rehearsed interview could be good for business. Dani had countered that business was fine.
On the bottom of the pile was the card from her aunt.
She’d been expecting it.
It was burgundy on cream—the Chandler racing colors—and addressed to Miss Danielle Chandler Pembroke, inviting her to the hundredth annual Chandler lawn party next Friday evening.
Dani was always invited. She just wasn’t expected to attend.
Twenty-five years.
She dropped the card into the trash and made herself a cup of chamomile tea, wondering if she should even bother going to bed. She knew she’d never sleep tonight.
“You and your kooky office.”
Dani grinned up at Ira Bernstein from the overstuffed couch in her office at the Pembroke. She’d been at work since dawn; it was now just before noon. She had her feet up on a coffee table of cherrywood and green-tinted glass she’d picked up at a yard sale in the Adirondacks. She liked to think of it as art deco. Ira insisted it was junk.
“Heard you were up prowling the grounds again last night,” he said. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“I was up early.”
“Stealing tomatoes, I understand.”
He did know how to inch close to the line. He was a stocky, healthy-looking man in his mid-forties, with iron-gray corkscrew curls and an unfortunate tendency to undermine his brilliance as the Pembroke’s manager with impertinence if not out-and-out insubordination. Eugene Chandler had personally fired him ten years ago from the staff of the Beverly Hills Chandler Hotel. Apparently Ira hadn’t displayed proper deference toward her grandfather, the chairman of the board. Dani could just imagine. She’d plucked him from a managerial job at a mid-priced chain hotel in Istanbul. He’d instantly fallen in love with the Pembroke.
He was also one of the few people who knew about his boss’s occasional bouts of insomnia. Thanks to Ira, Dani had nearly gotten her face knocked in when he’d set security on her a few weeks ago after a report of a prowler on the grounds. He considered the incident additional proof that he was damn good at his job: nothing slipped through Ira Bernstein’s fingers.
“You can’t beat a tomato fresh off the vine,” Dani said. “Is there something you need from me?”
He smiled, clearly relishing how far he could push and still not have her go for his throat. “Just wanted to let you know that two reporters have been by looking for you.”
“And you told them what?”
“That you’d been in a rotten mood for days—”
“Ira.”
“Took their names and numbers and promised I’d give them to you. I made no promises about what you’d do. However, here you go.” He dropped two scraps of paper on her table. “You can throw them away yourself.”
“Did they want to discuss the Pembroke or the sordid details of my personal life?”
Ira grinned. “There are no sordid details of your personal life.”
The man did grate.
When he didn’t get a rise out of her, he continued. “Both want in-depth interviews covering your professional and personal life in whatever detail they can get.” He waved a hand lightly. “They tried to bribe me for your dress size and brand of perfume, but I—”
“Are you like this with the guests?”
“I’m only cheeky with the people who sign my paychecks. A fatal flaw, I must admit. With guests I’m smooth as honey. Mind if I sit down?”
She motioned to a mission-style rocker she’d found in a dusty store off the beaten track in Maine. Ira groaned—she might have asked him to sit on a bed of nails. Her Pembroke office wasn’t nearly as weird as he liked to pretend. It was an odd-shaped room with twelve-foot ceilings and double-hung windows, its decor reflecting her unorthodox executive style. In addition to her chintz-covered couch and rocker, and maybe art deco table, she had a Shaker jam cupboard, two caned side chairs, a truly ugly brass plant stand in the shape of a screaming eagle and a turn-of-the-century Baldwin player piano she’d found squirreled away in the far reaches of the main house before she’d begun renovations. Since the house had sat empty for so long, she hadn’t been able to save all she’d have liked to, but what hadn’t succumbed to rot—structurally, cosmetically or in furnishings, or to termites, mice or plain disuse—had remained untouched virtually since Ulysses Pembroke’s day. Her architects had been delighted not to have to undo “improvements”—layers of paint, linoleum, wall-to-wall carpeting. Unfortunately that still hadn’t made their job easy or cheap.
“How was New York?” Ira asked.
“Fine.”
“None of my business, eh?” But his gray eyes had turned serious. “Look, Dani—”
“Out with it, Ira. What’s on your mind?”
He sighed. “People talk—and I hear things.”
“Such as?”
“Well, for starters, word’s out that you’re considering the purchase of a company in West Virginia that manufactures glass bottles.”
Dani slipped her feet back into her shoes, purple flats that didn’t go as well as she’d hoped with her straight cotton-knit dress, above the knee, ordered from a catalog and an entirely different shade of purple.
“Are you?” Ira asked.
“I wouldn’t say I was considering. I was just inquiring.”
“You don’t know anything about making glass bottles. Dani—look, I’m no expert on the beverage business, but seeing how the fate of Pembroke Springs and this place are tied together, I’ve been doing some research. From what I can gather, glassmaking companies are a dying breed. They’ve all been bought out by the big guns. This outfit in West Virginia is tiny by comparison. You could lose a bundle.”
“Now you sound like my bean counters.”
She’d listened to them rail about her tight cash flow for two days in New York. She figured that was what bean counters were supposed to do. Since she was a Pembroke, she worried that her tolerance for risk was perhaps dangerously high and expected straight talk.
“Ira, Pembroke Springs uses a lot of glass bottles.”
“I know, but that doesn’t mean you have to manufacture your own. I understand you could save a ton of money if you switched to a stock bottle—”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Brand awareness is the name of the beverage game, Ira. People look for the Pembroke bottles. They’re distinctive and they’re attractive. A restaurant here in town uses our mineral-water bottles for vases on its tables. That’s free promotion. They wouldn’t use a bottle that some mouthwash company also uses.”
“A restaurant sticks daisies into maybe ten Pembroke Springs bottles. Big deal.”
“Pink roses,” she corrected.
“Proprietary bottles are expensive.”
“Yes, they are, but in the long haul, a private design—unique to us—more than pays for itself.”
Ira scratched his head, not on firm ground when talking about Dani’s mineral water and natural soda company. “Look,” he said, “you know, I know—pretty soon everyone else will know—you’re stretched thin. Getting the Pembroke ready has cost you. Now that it’s opened, your cash-flow situation should improve, but before it does—”
“If I have to entertain cost-cutting measures, Ira, I will do so.”
“Guess it’s a good thing you pay yourself less than your housekeeping staff.”
“That’s an old rumor, Ira, and not true. I’m not personally extravagant, I’ll admit. I don’t mind making sacrifices in the long-term interests of my businesses. The Pembrokes have a long tradition of losing their shirts. Thank you, I’ll pass.”
“I’m sure your father and all the rest of them said the same thing,” Ira pointed out.
“I won’t compromise on quality. It’s what we sell. The resort and water and natural soda businesses are highly competitive—the big guys swallow up the little guys all the time. I’m not Perrier or Coke or Club Med, and I can’t pretend to be. But I’m not going to get stepped on.”
Ira leaned forward. “Dani, it doesn’t have to be this difficult. You took on a lot at once. You’re practically a kid still. You’ve got a fortune tied up in equipment at the bottling plant—you’ve expanded into natural sodas and flavored mineral water at an incredible pace. The Pembroke is a valuable asset, but right now it burns cash.”
“All to a good end.”
“Ever the optimist. There is one more thing.”
With Ira, there always was.
“There’s a rumor floating around you’re thinking of selling this place.”
Dani stiffened. “Not true.”
“I know, and ordinarily I wouldn’t even bring it up, but, Dani, if people didn’t smell blood—”
“Ira, I’m a Pembroke. There’ll always be talk I’m on the verge of self-destructing. I’ve been listening to it ever since I told my grandfather he could give my Chandler trust to charity.” Actually her words had been far more to the point, but this Ira Bernstein knew. “I’m not selling the Pembroke, I’m not switching to a stock bottle, I was only asking about the glass-making company. I am not going broke. Anything else?”
Ira shrugged, irreverent as ever. “You could admit you’re lucky to have me. Am I not one of the few people you know in my line of work who’d put up with a boss who flies kites at lunch? Who just two weeks ago was caught by several guests rescuing one of her kites from the tippy-top of an oak tree and asked me—me—to lie to these guests and tell them that no, that wasn’t the owner of the Pembroke but some stray kid?”
“You are, Ira,” she said with a straight face, “one of a kind.”
“But I’ve gone too far?”
She smiled. “You always do.”
When he left, Dani found herself restless, unusually irritated by the false rumors, the constant battle to get people not to see her as a Pembroke or a Chandler, but simply to see her. Dani Pembroke.
“Most people look at this place and see disaster and folly. I see someone’s dream.”
Her mother’s words, spoken in the overgrown Pembroke rose garden just days before she’d disappeared.
At nine, Dani had been confused. To her, dreams weren’t real.
“Sometimes you can make them real,” her mother had said. “Not all dreams, of course. Only the best ones. The ones you cherish most, the ones that come back to you again and again.”
She’d stopped at a crumbling fountain. Her vivid blue eyes had mesmerized her small daughter with their intense yearning.
“It’s far better to have tried to make your dreams come true and failed than never to have tried at all. Longing isn’t enough.”
But what of the people hurt in the process?
Fighting a sudden, searing sense of loneliness, Dani sneaked out through her private terrace so she wouldn’t have to face Ira down the hall. She took one of the brick paths done in Saratoga’s traditional herringbone pattern that snaked through the grounds. In a few minutes the main house was behind her. It was the jewel of the unique estate—lavish, overdone, oddly whimsical. The exterior was a maze of clapboards, shingles, brick, stone and stucco, with bay windows, towers, turrets, porches, balconies and gingerbread fretwork. Inside there wasn’t one ordinary room.
Ulysses Pembroke’s dream. And what had it cost him? What had it cost his family?
Dani made her way back to her cottage, where she quickly changed into a T-shirt, sweatpants and battered sneakers. No need for her full rock-climbing regalia. She rubbed on sunscreen, then headed through her meadow into the woods, bumping into some guests out for a nature walk or exercise run—and one enterprising couple picking wild blackberries. Seeing people enjoying the place lifted her spirits.
She bypassed the Pembroke Springs bottling plant. She could hear the clatter of bottles running through the expensive, automated equipment. The plant was operating at top capacity. Orders were up. Business was great. Why did people think she’d overextended?
Because you’re a Pembroke. It’s what Pembrokes do.
She came to the rocks. By standards farther north in the Adirondack Mountains, they weren’t much as cliffs went. But they gave novices a taste of climbing, and kept her in shape, and a drop from top to bottom wasn’t too terrifying to imagine, although no doubt it could be lethal. After circling a hemlock, Dani jumped off a smallish boulder on the far edge of the vertical rock, then went down to low-lying brush, so that the steepest part of the cliffs were above her. If she’d been doing a climb, it would be cheating. But she had other plans. She walked out on a flat rock and sat down, letting her legs dangle over the edge. Below, at the bottom of the cliffs, were hemlocks and oaks and a path that led around the rocks back up to the bottling plant.
Flipping onto her stomach, Dani worked her body down so that she was pretty much hanging from the flat rock by her arms. Inexpert, but it got the job done. Glancing down, she saw the narrow ledge directly below, where she’d found the gold key.
She counted to three and let go.
Keeping her body close to the rocks, but not so close she’d smack her face, she dropped onto the ledge. It was just three feet wide, but she was small. She fit fine.
She squatted and groped in the dirt, moss, dead leaves and doomed seedlings for anything interesting, any clue as to how her key had ended up there. Finding it had been a pure accident. At first she’d thought it was just an old key. Only afterward had she realized what it was. This was her first opportunity to return to the ledge, and she took her time and examined every inch of it in case she’d missed something.
But she hadn’t. There was nothing.
How had the key gotten there?
She imagined Ulysses and his practical wife arguing, imagined her urging him to concentrate on saving and investing instead of throwing his money into idiotic things like gold keys.
Dani could see her great-great-grandmother flinging the key off the cliffs.
Probably there was a more ordinary explanation. Or, at least, a less dramatic one.
Getting back up from the ledge without her gear proved easier than she’d anticipated. There were good handholds and toeholds, and she hoisted herself up in no time. But it was a warm afternoon, and she hadn’t slept much last night. She was sweaty, and as she sat on a boulder to catch her breath, she could feel the ache in her legs.
“Miss Pembroke?”
Dani whirled around, immediately recognizing a young local reporter at the top of the cliffs. A camera dangling from her neck, she apologized for startling Dani and explained she’d been assigned to do an article on the Pembroke and Pembroke Springs.
“No one will talk to me,” she said. “I just tried to interview the plant manager, but he said he can’t talk to reporters, and I noticed you walking over here.”
“He can’t. It’s nothing personal—mineral water is an extremely competitive business, and we have to watch ourselves.”
“Oh. That’s what he said.” She licked her lips, looking awkward, which, Dani had come to discover, was unusual in a reporter. “Would you mind…I know this is short notice…could you answer a couple of questions? I’ve done my homework. I’ve read everything I can find on you, your family, the estate—I won’t ask you questions you’ve been asked a million times before.”
Dani squinted up at her. “I won’t talk about my mother.”
“Oh, I assumed that. You never have—and it’s old news.” She blushed. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to sound callous.”
“It’s okay. What’s your name?”
“Heather. Heather Carey.”
“You could use a break?”
“I sure could. My boss says I’m not aggressive enough.”
She wasn’t, but sometimes aggression wasn’t what got the story.
Dani knew she wasn’t dressed for an interview. And she wasn’t prepared. She hadn’t gone over possible questions and answers with her staff. She hadn’t gotten their advice, their consent.
Heather Carey had climbed down to the flat rock. She was small, thin, no more than twenty-five. “That’s an interesting necklace.”
Dani glanced down at the two keys. They were heavy for a necklace, and it had been stupid to wear them rock climbing. But how could she resist? “Have a seat.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
Clearly Heather Carey didn’t believe her luck.
Ninety minutes later Dani arrived back at her cottage with no regrets. Before she showered—before she called her PR people and confessed what she’d done—she dug out a pen and a sheet of Pembroke Springs stationery.
Whistling, she jotted a quick note.
It may or may not have gotten Emily Post’s stamp of approval, but it did graciously—even cheerfully—indicate her acceptance of the invitation to the annual Chandler lawn party.
Two
As he eased into the pilot’s chair on the flybridge of his restored 1955 Richardson all-wood cabin cruiser, Zeke Cutler felt the fatigue and tension of the past three weeks subside. He was home again. Or as close to home as he expected he’d ever get.
Crescent-shaped San Diego Bay glistened in the late-day sun, and he had just enough left in his fifth of George Dickel to fill his glass. Which he did. Slowly. Savoring the sound of splashing Tennessee bourbon and the feel of the wind and the peace of being back on his boat. He had two weeks. Two weeks of fishing and sleeping and watching the waves and the sunset before he had to tackle his next job.
His last job he’d just have to put out of his mind. He’d spent two torturous weeks teaching a group of self-centered, greedy, unscrupulous executives how to stay out of trouble and, should reasonable means of prevention fail, how to get out of trouble. “Trouble” meaning anything from a simple street mugging to international terrorism. These particular individuals, however, reminded Zeke a bit too much of the last group of white-collar thugs he’d handed over to the police. He really did like being able to tell the good guys from the bad guys without looking too hard.
But life wasn’t that simple.
Security consulting didn’t used to be so complicated. Like everything else, it had gone high-tech, which had its points, except the bad guys had gone high-tech, too. They had high-tech security systems and high-tech communications systems and—his favorite—high-tech weaponry. Too much high-tech weaponry for Zeke’s tastes.
He swirled the George Dickel around in his mouth and swallowed. He’d eaten green chili at a distinctly low-tech Mexican restaurant, and his stomach still burned. The bourbon and Southern California sun didn’t help. He closed his eyes. For half a cent he’d dive into the bay.
“If I was a bad guy and wanted to kill you,” Sam Lincoln Jones said nearby, “you’d be dead.”
“Not unless you had a grenade launcher and fired off down on the dock.” Zeke opened his eyes and grinned. “I saw you coming, Sam.”
Sam grinned back at him. “Guess I’m not easy to miss.”
That he wasn’t. Sam was four inches shorter than Zeke’s six-one, but, at two-twenty, thirty pounds heavier. They were both solid; seldom was either accused of being handsome. Many shades darker than Zeke, Sam had had his nose broken at least three times too many, but he liked to say Zeke had come into the world with a grim face. They’d both entered their profession through the back door, Sam with a doctorate in criminology and a yearning to get out of the ivory tower he’d worked so hard to get into, Zeke with a host of dead dreams and a yearning never to get caught up in a dream again. They’d met ten years ago over the corpse of a mutual friend. Together they’d found his killer.
“Don’t know why this old tug hasn’t sunk into the bay by now,” Sam said.
“Because it’s a classic, and like all classics just gets better with age. I’d offer you a drink, but I emptied the bottle. What’s up?”
Sam withdrew a pale pink envelope from the back pocket of his tan linen pants. He had on a mango-colored polo shirt. Zeke felt underdressed in his cutoff shorts, and it was his damn boat.
Sam said, “Letter from home.”
It would have come to their shared postal box in San Diego. Given their profession and peripatetic lifestyle, such things as home and office addresses made little sense. They took turns checking the box. They were independent specialists but worked together on and off. Most of their communications were handled by telephone and computer, with the occasional need for a fax machine or courier. Neither received many letters. Zeke had never received one from home. He’d left for good twenty years ago, at age eighteen. His parents and his only brother were dead, and there was hardly anybody he knew left in Cedar Springs, Tennessee. His hometown and the kid he’d been there were just a part of his dead dreams.
Sam discreetly knelt one knee on the polished mahogany bench in the sun and looked out at the bay. Zeke tore open the delicate envelope. Inside was a folded newspaper article and a single pink page, with Naomi Witt Hazen embossed in tiny script at the top. He tried not to react. Seeing her name, his hometown, was like having the fading shreds of a dream stay with you as you woke up, making you unsure of what was real and what wasn’t.
It was like getting a letter from home when you’d almost talked yourself into believing you no longer had a home.
Like everyone else, Zeke made no claim to understand Naomi Witt Hazen. She always used all three of her names, as if she could be anything she wanted to be—a daughter, a wife, a widow, a Witt, a Hazen. An ordinary woman. Zeke only understood that he owed her. She’d helped save his soul if not his life. He was glad she was still alive, although she could have been dead for all he’d have known. There was no one in Cedar Springs who’d have thought to tell him otherwise.
Tilting back in his pilot’s chair, he read her letter first.
Dearest Zeke,
I know this letter will come as a surprise, and perhaps not altogether a pleasant one, but I don’t know where else to turn. Please come home, Zeke. I need your help. I’ll explain everything when you get here.
Yours truly,
Naomi Witt Hazen
Zeke refolded the letter and tucked it back into the envelope. “Guess I won’t be spending my time off fishing.”
“Anything I can do?” Sam asked. There was no urgency in his tone, no desire or need to help; he was just asking a question.
Zeke shook his head. He unfolded the newspaper article. The Cedar Springs Democrat had picked up a story on Pembroke Springs and the Pembroke, a new spa-inn, and their owner, Dani Pembroke. Mattie Witt’s granddaughter. Mattie was Naomi’s older sister. She hadn’t stepped foot in her hometown in sixty years. Nonetheless, people there kept track of her.
Dani Pembroke was described as an entrepreneur and “former heiress.” Apparently she’d thrown her inheritance into Eugene Chandler’s face when he’d suggested she drop the Pembroke from her name after he’d fired her father as vice president of Chandler Hotels. She’d built her mineral water and natural soda business from scratch, without one nickel of Chandler money. Zeke was unimpressed. She’d had the famous name, she’d had access to a world-famous mineral spring through family, and she’d known she could go crawling back to her rich granddaddy if worst came to worst. There was no “from scratch” about what she’d done.
Why had Naomi sent him the article? It wasn’t the first piece written about a Chandler or a Pembroke.
Then he looked more closely at Dani Pembroke’s picture, past her black eyes and resemblance to Nick Pembroke that had first caught his attention. He focused on the two keys dangling from her slender neck. The caption said one was brass and one was gold. She’d found the gold one while rock climbing near the Pembroke Springs bottling plant.
Zeke swore under his breath.
“You going home?” Sam asked.
And here he’d been thinking he’d just come home. Zeke smiled sadly, staring at Dani Pembroke. “I reckon so.”
Zeke flew to Nashville the next day, and by the time he got to Cedar Springs, Naomi Witt Hazen had a peach pie in the oven and sun tea poured in a tall clear glass.
“It’s good to see you, Zeke.” Her voice was melodic and genteel. “I knew you’d come.”
He hadn’t known himself. “I’m glad you knew.”
In her inexpensive turquoise suit and walking shoes, Naomi looked even tinier than Zeke remembered. Her hair had gone from deep brunette to a soft, pure white, but it was curled the same as always, in a lady’s do, short and neat. Although she never told anyone her age, everyone in Cedar Springs knew she was seven years younger than her famous sister Mattie. That made her seventy-five.
She had Zeke sit in the front parlor on the antique sofa her father had always insisted came from the Hermitage, the Nashville home of Andrew Jackson. Jackson Witt had been the richest man in Cedar Springs. He’d owned the woolen mill where Zeke’s father and mother and brother had worked and had been a benefactor in his small town in the rolling hills east of Nashville. He’d died before the New South had made its big push into his corner of Tennessee. Cedar Springs was no longer the town in which Zeke had grown up. Farmland had been divided up into estate lots for huge brick houses, and old farmhouses and chicken coops bulldozed. Streetlights had gone in, as well as fast-food chains and discount department stores and vast supermarkets. Nobody shopped on the square anymore. West Main had been widened and built up, most of its houses converted into apartments and beauty shops and carpet stores and real estate offices. Naomi had once said her house, a beautiful Greek Revival but no longer the biggest and fanciest in town, would make a nice funeral parlor.
The oven buzzer sounded, and she started toward the kitchen.
“Let me help,” Zeke said.
“No, no, you just sit here and let me wait on you.”
He’d known that would be her answer. “You don’t have to.”
She smiled. “I know I don’t have to. I want to.”
Zeke didn’t argue. In Naomi’s world he was her guest and a man, and it was her responsibility—her pleasure, she’d say—to wait on him. She rushed off to the kitchen, playing the proper southern lady. Zeke knew better. Jackson Witt’s younger daughter usually managed to do as she pleased, afterward working her actions into her belief system. Like her scandalous affair with Nicholas Pembroke, her sister’s husband. It had lasted less than a summer but had cost her. It left her marriage to the vice president of Cedar Springs Woolen Mill and her reputation in her hometown in shambles. And it prompted her father to disown her, just as he’d disowned Mattie when she’d run off with Nick Pembroke more than twenty years earlier. Thenceforth, Jackson Witt maintained he had no daughters. Zeke had never liked nor understood the stern, uncompromising old man, but he’d never once heard Naomi complain about him, no matter how cruelly he’d treated her.
She returned from the kitchen with a blue willow plate of her steaming, incomparable peach pie. She’d put a fat scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. “I’m not having any,” she said, handing him the plate. “I have to watch my sugar.”
Knowing she wouldn’t talk until he’d finished, Zeke downed the pie quickly, its filling juicy and as sweet as his best memories of growing up. A ceiling fan whirred, keeping the room remarkably cool. The parlor hadn’t changed. It was dark and crowded, with small, framed oval photographs of Jackson Witt and his long-dead, delicate, prim wife hanging above the marble fireplace. There were other photographs, of elderly cousins, friends, mill executives, but none of the dazzling Mattie Witt or the filmmaker she and her sister both had loved. None of Mattie’s only son, none of her long-missing daughter-in-law, none of her only granddaughter.
Zeke finished his pie and tried the sun tea, cool and smooth and, like the pie, tasting of the past.
“You’re not an easy man to locate,” Naomi said without criticism. “Is that by design?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose in your profession discretion is a matter of life and death.”
He smiled, or tried to. “It can be.”
“Do you ever wish you hadn’t left home?”
“No.”
And he wanted to ask her, but didn’t, if she’d ever wished she had left. After her affair with Nick, she’d returned to the house of her birth and childhood. Her husband had refused even to speak to her again, or to divorce her. She’d nursed her ailing father until his death from cancer. Through those eleven years, Jackson Witt had paid her a wage and referred to her as his live-in housekeeper. She’d even had to eat in the kitchen while he ate in the dining room. To Zeke’s knowledge, Naomi had never complained nor given in to any temptation to try to drown the old bastard in the bathtub. She’d saved the meager salary he paid her and, after his death, bought the Witt house with her own money. Her first order of business had been to get rid of the rosewood bed in which her grandfather and father had died. She and Zeke dragged it down to the flea market and sold it to the first comer for thirty dollars. It was probably worth a hundred times that much, even then, but Naomi, determined, had told Zeke, “I won’t be the third generation of Witts to die in that bed.”
With her warm, dark eyes fastened on him, Naomi Witt Hazen suddenly looked old and sad. “Zeke, I know I could have told you everything in my letter, but I wanted to see you. You look well. Are you happy?”
He thought of the sunset sparkling on the blue waters of San Diego Bay. “Sure.”
“You’ve never married.”
“Wouldn’t work in my profession.”
“I’ve always thought you’d make a fine husband and father.”
Not with the dead dreams he carried with him, not with the life he led. But Zeke didn’t try to tell Naomi she was wrong. He liked having someone think those kinds of things about him; he could almost believe they could be true.
She twisted her fingers, gnarled with arthritis, in her lap and lowered her eyes. “Zeke, I—” She looked at him. “I need you to go to Saratoga Springs, New York.”
Automatically he felt himself falling back on the training and discipline that had sustained him through years of dangerous work. He had expected something difficult and painful. Yet even with the article on Dani Pembroke, he’d talked himself out of believing it was Saratoga. He’d imagined Naomi telling him she’d developed colon cancer like her daddy and wanted him to see to her funeral, to selling the Witt house and its contents. But he’d seen the keys around Dani Pembroke’s neck, and deep down he’d known what Naomi would ask.
“Go on,” he said.
Naomi’s cheeks reddened. “This is much more difficult than I’d anticipated. I—Zeke, I’m afraid there’s something I’ve never told you.”
That didn’t surprise him. He’d always believed Naomi Witt had neglected to tell anybody—least of all him—a great number of things. He took another sip of iced tea and set the glass carefully on a coaster decorated with irises, the Tennessee state flower. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, needing to get this done.
“Zeke, before your brother died…”
But she stopped, biting her lip, and in her watery eyes—Zeke didn’t know if the moistness was from tears or age—he could see not only loss and disappointment but also anger. For all she’d had done to her, for all the pain and anguish and betrayal she’d witnessed and perhaps even committed, Naomi, in Zeke’s experience, had never expressed any anger over her lot. She would say anger was an unladylike emotion. Fits of temper weren’t proper for a well-bred lady. And yet Zeke could see it bubbling to the surface, choking for air, for renewed life, even if she refused to acknowledge its presence.
She cleared her throat and looked away for a moment, then continued in a strong, controlled voice. “Before Joe died, he sent me a letter. I’ve never shown it to you—to anyone. It didn’t say much. I can’t tell you he knew he was going to die, I can’t say there was any sign he was going to do any of the things people said he did.” She paused, the moistness—the tears—filling her eyes. “He enclosed a picture. I should have shown it to you before now, Zeke, but I never have.”
With a trembling hand she opened the frayed Bible on the marble end table beside the Andrew Jackson sofa and withdrew a color snapshot. She was breathing rapidly, and Zeke was afraid she might faint. He leaned forward, taking the snapshot from her so she wouldn’t have to move.
It was one he’d never seen before, but he immediately recognized the place, the time, the two women.
Saratoga Springs, New York.
Twenty-five years ago.
Mattie Witt and her daughter-in-law, Lilli Chandler Pembroke.
Joe had taken their picture. They were in the basket of Mattie’s hot-air balloon, just as it had started to float onto the evening winds. It had been Lilli’s first time up. In her expression, frozen for all time, was that mix of fear and excitement Zeke remembered as she’d watched the huge balloon inflate. She’d wanted to go and didn’t want to go. Joe had offered to serve as their chase team. But Mattie had told him no. She and Lilli would just ride the winds for a while and see what happened, and find their own way home.
Looking at Lilli’s fearful, exuberant smile, her tawny hair caught in the wind, Zeke saw how young she’d been, and how unsure of herself. For Lilli Chandler Pembroke, going up in a balloon with her eccentric mother-in-law instead of playing the good little heiress at the Chandler lawn party had been a monumental act of rebellion. Mattie Witt stood beside her in the gondola, looking as tiny and independent and heart-stoppingly beautiful as Zeke remembered.
After her balloon ride, Mattie had told Joe that she couldn’t go back to see her father before he died or the sister she’d left behind decades years earlier.
An hour later, he and Zeke were on the road back to Tennessee.
“I don’t understand it,” Joe had said as he and Zeke headed home in defeat. “I’d go through hell and back for you, and she won’t even go home to see her only sister and dying daddy. I know he’s not an easy man, but he’s her father. I just don’t get it.”
That was Joe Cutler. He hadn’t understood why people couldn’t get along. All they had to do was put their minds to it and it’d happen.
And he did go through hell for Zeke. He just hadn’t come back.
Zeke saw the gold key hanging from Lilli’s alabaster throat, remembered it. Even for a wealthy Chandler, it had seemed exotic and extravagant. Yet Joe had given it to her.
He made himself look up from the picture. “It doesn’t have to be the same key.”
“But it could be,” Naomi said.
And if it was, the next question would be how it ended up on the Pembroke estate for Lilli’s daughter to find all these years later. If it had anything to do with Lilli’s disappearance. If Joe was involved, had known something—if he’d done something.
“I have to know the truth, Zeke.”
He remained silent and still, hot liquid pain coursing through him. He had to repress his physical reaction and concentrate on the situation at hand. He had to be the cool, distanced professional. He had to ask himself the tough questions. Not just about his brother, but about Naomi herself. She was a woman he’d known and trusted all his life, but he forced himself to ask if the years of loneliness and abuse had finally driven her over the edge and he was being sucked along with her, just by being back in Cedar Springs, back under Jackson Witt’s roof.
But there were never any saner eyes than the ones that held him to his seat.
There was more. He could tell. But he didn’t prod her. Experience had taught him patience. Rush people and they could panic and make up things. Let them think. Choose their words. Hide what they wanted to hide. Sometimes it worked better if they had control. He could learn more about what was really at stake and what wasn’t.
Naomi withdrew another envelope from her Bible, handed it to Zeke. “Joe sent this to me with the picture. He asked me to hang on to it and not open it.” She smoothed her skirt with her unnaturally bent fingers. “I didn’t, until I saw the picture of Dani Pembroke wearing that gold key.”
Her eyes were lowered, and Zeke pulled a yellowed sheet of typing paper from the envelope and unfolded it. There were four lines of type:
Don’t underestimate me. The whole world will know Lilli Chandler Pembroke isn’t the perfect heiress she pretends to be. But your secret is safe with me if you pay up tonight.
Zeke didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to.
“I’m not asking you to be a hero,” Naomi Witt Hazen said softly. “All I’m asking is for you to be that brave, levelheaded young man I once knew who so badly wanted to do some good in the world.”
As if it were so easy. As if the kid Zeke Cutler had been—so filled with energy and optimism and determination—mattered anymore. He’d failed and changed in ways he didn’t want to examine and maybe didn’t want Naomi to know, although he could see she did.
She collapsed back against the soft cushion of her chair. In her look of fatigue and near despair was the impact of the years, of the losses she’d endured and the choices she’d made. “I believe in you, Ezekiel Cutler.” She sounded worn down, as if that was the last belief she held and now even it was being challenged. “I believe in you even if you don’t believe in yourself.”
He couldn’t meet her eye. He’d faced death as recently as six weeks ago and now couldn’t look at the old woman who’d always been there for him.
“Will you go?” she asked.
Before he’d opened her letter in San Diego, he’d have said he’d put the past behind him. Now, sitting in the dark Old South parlor, Zeke knew he’d only been sidestepping the past, one land mine at a time in a field of hundreds, always aware, somewhere in the recesses of his mind, that his next step could blow him and those around him—anyone left he cared about—to pieces.
He jumped up, unable to sit another second.
As he started across the threadbare Oriental rug, he saw in Naomi’s face the fear that Zeke Cutler would fail her as so many others before him had.
“I need to think,” he said.
And he walked into the entry and out the front door, onto the porch and into the heat and glare of a Tennessee summer afternoon.
In the shade of the oak trees Jackson Witt had planted almost a century ago, Zeke walked down West Main, where the memories were as pervasive and unavoidable as the summer heat. He could see himself and Joe, shirtless and barefoot, on their way home from swimming in the creek. As a boy, Zeke had never even noticed the heat. Now he could feel the humidity settling over him, could smell the exhaust that hung heavy in the oppressive air. He was aware of the constant hum of traffic on a street where dogs used to lie in the sun on warm mornings.
The memory came at him sideways, fast and silent, catching him defenseless.
It was a hot, still afternoon, like this one, twenty-five years ago.
Naomi’s husband, Wesley Hazen, had dropped dead of a heart attack at his office at the woolen mill, on the same day his estranged wife had finally talked to her father—who for the previous ten years had maintained he had no daughters—into seeing the doctor about his stomach trouble. Doc Hiram referred him to a cancer specialist in Nashville. The old man refused to make an appointment. His father had been born in Cedar Springs and died there, and that was good enough for Jackson Witt. How long was a man supposed to live? Joe Cutler had driven him to Doc Hiram’s office on account of Jackson Witt’s being too sick to drive himself and too stubborn to ride in a car with Naomi.
When he got back home, Joe told Zeke what had happened. Zeke was thirteen and knew that Jackson Witt wasn’t the benevolent old man most people in Cedar Springs pretended he was. He had started Cedar Springs Woolen Mill to provide jobs for the impoverished people of his town, a market for its farmers’ wool, opportunities for its children. Back then it was the biggest employer in town.
“So Mr. Witt’s going to die?” Zeke asked.
“Not right away.”
“What’ll happen to Mrs. Hazen?”
“I expect she’ll go on pretty much the way she’s been going. Truth is, she’ll be better off with him gone.”
Joe was eighteen and worked the graveyard shift at the mill. He still lived at home, in their little one-bedroom, uninsulated house northeast of the square. He gave half his paycheck to their mother to help out, covered his own expenses and banked any left over. Someday, he’d told Zeke, he’d leave Cedar Springs, maybe go to California. He said he didn’t plan to work the graveyard shift at Cedar Springs Woolen Mill the rest of his life. But right now his mother and Zeke needed him, and he’d stick around.
After taking Jackson Witt to the doctor’s, Joe, who hadn’t been to bed since getting off work at seven that morning, turned on the baseball game and sacked out on the couch. When Emmy Cutler came home from her shift at the mill, she got him up and called Zeke in from playing ball and told them Wesley Hazen was dead.
“He had a heart attack right at his desk.” She looked tired, as she almost always did. She was a thin, dark-haired woman who’d once been pretty. “He went quick. Now, I want you boys to go into town and get a dress coat and tie. I’ll iron your good white shirts. There’ll be calling hours probably the day after tomorrow, and then the funeral. I want you both to go.”
“Mother,” Joe said, “we can’t afford new coats.”
“I’ve got some money put away. You take it and go on. Wes Hazen and Jackson Witt gave me a job when I needed one. I was a widow with two small boys, and I don’t know what I’d’ve done without the mill. Don’t matter what anybody else says about Mr. Hazen, we’re going to pay our respects.”
Joe was adamant. “If a clean shirt’s good enough for church, it’s good enough for Wes Hazen’s funeral.”
Emmy Cutler was equally adamant. “You listen to me, Joe Cutler. If I have to get in the car and drive to Nashville myself and buy you two coats, then that’s what I’ll do. By this time you boys ought to know when I mean business.”
Zeke hadn’t said anything, but he was used to their mother lumping him and Joe together. She went into her bedroom and came back with a bunch of twenties in a rubber band.
“I’ll bring back the change,” Joe said.
“There’d better not be much. I won’t have people in this town saying I wasn’t grateful for what Wesley Hazen did for me.”
Joe’s eyes darkened. “Like what? Work you half to death at sweatshop wages—”
“I won’t have that kind of talk in my house. There’s never been a Cutler too proud to work. Now, you take your brother and go. Zeke, make sure he goes to a decent store. I want you coming home with proper coats and ties.”
Zeke nodded but made no promises, not where his brother was concerned. Joe didn’t listen to him any more than he did anyone else. When it came to their mother’s sense of right and wrong, however, Joe usually relented. They went to Dillard’s, but Joe hunted up a couple of khaki coats on the clearance racks that looked good enough to him. Since they’d been instructed not to come back with much change, he bought their mother a bottle of perfume and a pretty scarf and took Zeke to the local diner for a piece of chess pie.
When they got back home, Joe gave their mother her change and her presents, then said he’d go to the bank in the morning and pay her back for his coat and tie. Emmy Cutler said he was impossible; then she hugged him.
Over five hundred people attended Wesley Hazen’s funeral, and Joe muttered to Zeke that he’d bet nobody would have noticed if they hadn’t worn a coat and tie. Their mother had on her new scarf. Zeke looked around and saw Naomi sitting in back with the lowest-paid workers from the mill. She had on a black suit and a black hat with a veil. Her face was very pale, and she looked tiny. She hadn’t lived with Wesley since she’d run off with Nick Pembroke ten years earlier.
Her father was up front with the Hazen family and the mill management. He never looked back at Naomi.
“I’m going back to sit with Mrs. Hazen,” Zeke whispered to his mother. Emmy Cutler looked pained; she didn’t tell him yes, but she didn’t tell him no, either. So Zeke sneaked to the back of the church. Naomi smiled at him. It was a sad, soft smile, but at that moment Zeke knew she didn’t mind being an outcast. It was the only way she had of being who she wanted to be.
That night Joe Cutler announced over supper that he was heading to New York to find Mattie Witt and tell her that her daddy was dying. Zeke expected his mother to argue with him. From the look on his brother’s face, he guessed Joe expected the same thing.
But Emmy Cutler surprised her two sons. Or maybe she just knew Joe. Dipping her spoon into a bowl of redeye gravy, she said, “You do what you think is right.”
“Can I go, too?” Zeke asked.
His mother put the spoon back into the bowl. She hadn’t gotten any gravy. Her eyes misted over. “That’s up to your brother,” she said.
“Won’t you need him here?” Joe asked.
“I reckon it’s time I started learning to do without you two boys. Now you go on and make up your own minds about what you need to do. I’ll be fine.” She folded her hands in front of her plate and looked at her sons. “I have just one request.”
Joe nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You ask Naomi Hazen if she wants you to go.”
“It’s Mr. Witt who’s sick—”
“And it’s Mrs. Hazen who’ll have to live with the consequences of what you do—whether her sister decides to come home or whether she doesn’t.”
So that evening Joe and Zeke walked over to West Main Street, and Naomi met them on the porch and she didn’t say she wanted them to go to New York and she didn’t say she didn’t want them to go. Which was good enough for Joe. The next morning he and Zeke packed up his Chevy and headed north.
As he walked on the cracked sidewalks of his childhood, Zeke could hear Joe’s laugh, and for the first time in years it sounded real and alive and immediate to him. It was as if his brother were there with him, not as the man he’d become—a man Zeke didn’t know—but as the boy he’d been, another boy’s big brother, idolized and imperfect.
He’d come to the West Main Street branch of the Cedar Springs Free Public Library. Jackson Witt’s father had donated the land for the building not long after he’d helped the town establish a pure-water supply after an outbreak of typhoid fever in 1904. Jackson himself had left the library a hefty endowment. The dirt wasn’t settled good over his grave when Naomi carted down the oil portrait he’d had painted of himself and donated it to the library, not, Zeke had always felt, out of generosity, but because she couldn’t stand to keep it hanging in her house.
Inside, the library smelled as it always had, of musty books and polished wood. Zeke found himself glancing around for a gawky kid in jeans and dangling shirttail, looking to books as a way out of his poverty and isolation. Go for it, Joe had always told him. Do some good in the world.
He had wanted to.
“May I help you?” the middle-aged woman behind the oak desk asked. She sounded tentative. Zeke suddenly realized he must look even more tight-lipped and grim than usual. And hot. The air-conditioning was set a notch below sweltering.
He tried to smile. “Thank you, but I can find my way.”
A hint of his old middle Tennessee accent had worked its way into his voice. The woman seemed somewhat reassured. He went to the local-history section, just across from Jackson Witt’s portrait above the fireplace. On one shelf were a Bible signed by Andrew Jackson and a pair of boots reputedly worn by Davy Crockett. Below them, in a locked glass box, was the red-feathered hat Mattie Witt had worn in The Gamblers. Some newcomer to town had bought it on auction and donated it to the library. There was also a copy of two unauthorized biographies of her famous sister.
On the bottom shelf—Zeke had to kneel—was the flag, properly folded, that had draped Joe Cutler’s coffin. Naomi had taken it after the funeral when Zeke didn’t want it.
He rubbed his fingers over the coarse fabric.
Twenty years later, and he still missed his brother.
“We’re not like other folks, brother. We never will be.”
Even in Cedar Springs the Cutler brothers hadn’t been like anybody else. They were a couple of country boys whose daddy had died when a tractor fell over on him when Zeke was a year old, and whose mama did the best she could, working overtime at the mill.
After Saratoga, Joe had enlisted in the army. After he shipped out to basic, their mother cut herself so badly on the card machine at the mill that she’d bled to death before Doc Hiram could get to her. He’d cried when he told Zeke, who’d just turned fifteen. Joe came home on emergency leave but went back, convinced the best way—the only way—he could help his younger brother was to stay in the army. Zeke went to live with a second cousin, and Joe wrote to him every week; every week Zeke wrote back, and Naomi Hazen and Doc Hiram were there for him, too, all through high school.
He’d failed them all. Joe, Naomi, Doc. And himself.
Two weeks after Zeke had started Vanderbilt on scholarship, Joe Cutler was killed in Beirut. He was just twenty-three years old.
On the shelf next to the flag was the slim volume that had come out after his death. Zeke picked it up. The book had won a Pulitzer Prize. It was the story of a solid southern boy who’d become a soldier with good intentions, then was “corrupted,” transformed by a system and a world he didn’t understand. The book explained how Joe Cutler had taken a stupid risk, disobeyed orders and got his men and himself killed. He hadn’t lived up to his own expectations of heroism. His story was all the more searing and memorable for its banality, depicting an ordinary soldier who’d lost faith in his country, his men, himself.
Had that downward spiral started in Saratoga?
Quint Skinner, the man who wrote Joe’s story, was himself an army veteran and had served with Joe, considered him a friend. Skinner had tried to interview Zeke at Vanderbilt. They’d ended up in a fistfight, and not long after Zeke quit Vanderbilt altogether.
Worse was giving up the dream he’d had of his brother, the dream of what he’d wanted to do for Joe when he came home, of repaying him for all he’d sacrificed. How he’d wanted them to be real brothers again. But maybe that was every brother’s dead dream.
The book’s presence on the library shelf next to the flag had to be Naomi’s doing. She’d believed in Joe Cutler as much as Zeke had, and maybe she still did. But he could hear her say she also believed in truth and fairness.
On his way out, Zeke stopped at a big clay pot on the library steps and plucked a marigold, its orange color as deep and dark as the center of a Tennessee summer sunset. He wondered if somewhere beyond the subdivisions and fast-food chains two brothers were out on the creek fishing for their supper, waiting for the sun to go down so they could light their campfire and tell ghost stories and pretend they wanted to be men.
He climbed the steps onto Naomi’s front porch. She was in a rocking chair, crocheting as she watched the cars go by. She glanced at him but didn’t say a word.
He tossed the crumpled marigold blossom over the porch rail. His shirt had stuck to his back, and he picked up the picture and the envelope with the blackmail letter in it and tucked them into his back pocket.
“I shouldn’t have written,” Naomi said.
“You did the right thing.” He tried to smile to reassure her but couldn’t. “I don’t know if there’ll be anything there for me to find at this late date, but I’ll go to Saratoga.”
She started to say something, stopped, and finally just nodded as she slowly, almost painfully with her gnarled fingers, continued to crochet.
Three
Mattie Witt could feel the high ozone levels of the summer city air in her sinuses as she sat on the front steps of her Greenwich Village town house. Her whole face ached, even her teeth. New York was so damn hot in August. She’d read that in the old days people from the southern end of Manhattan would come to Greenwich Village during the summer to escape yellow fever. At least that was no longer the case.
She neatened her skirt around her knees. Her long, loose broadcloth dress reminded her of long-ago summers in Tennessee, when the heat—there’d been no air conditioners and precious few fans—had never bothered her. The warm brick step ground into her bottom. She walked forty-five minutes every morning but at eighty-two didn’t have the muscle tone she’d once had.
Across the street a woman chatting with the mailman spotted Mattie and waved. It was an effort, but Mattie waved back. Normally by late afternoon her front steps would be crowded with friends and neighbors, indulging in the time-honored Greenwich Village tradition of stoop-sitting. Today they seemed to sense her need to be alone and stayed away.
The woman went through her courtyard to the back entrance of her building. The mailman continued on his way. In the many years since Mattie had left Hollywood and moved east, she had come to love the crooked tree-lined streets of Greenwich Village, with their brick town houses and lamplights and long history. She appreciated the variety of people there—artists, actors, writers, doctors, bankers, garbage collectors, drunks, nurses, students, secretaries—and the tradition of tolerance, independence and nonconformity. Everyone knew her, the aging movie star who’d introduced generations of Greenwich Village kids to the fun of kite flying. It was no big deal that she was a film legend. There were other legends in the neighborhood.
But in her heart, no matter what she did or where she went or how long she stayed away, home for Mattie would always be Cedar Springs, Tennessee.
She could feel the warm air on her face, the pressure of her inflamed sinuses.
Dani, Dani. What am I going to do?
Her granddaughter’s sheer, stubborn, incorrigible Pembroke nature worried Mattie. Dani would have to find out where that damn key had come from, how it had gotten onto the rocks.
But perhaps she should.
One of Dani’s friends in New York had stopped by with the article on her and Pembroke Springs and groaned as she’d handed it to Mattie. “Couldn’t she have taken a shower first?” But overall it was a good piece. Dani was as unpretentious and as totally honest as ever. Maybe she wasn’t as smooth and as prepared as she could have been, but her energy shone through every quote.
But those gate keys…
Feeling stiff and old, Mattie climbed slowly to her feet. She had to use the rail. She went back inside, where a ceiling fan, much like the one she remembered in her father’s house in Cedar Springs, helped keep her front room cool. She’d pulled the drapes to keep out the hot sun. The room seemed dark, crowded, too much like the Witt front parlor on West Main Street a thousand miles—a thousand years—away. Mattie concentrated on the roses and Prussian blue of her decor, colors her father would never have chosen. She caught her breath before going upstairs.
In her small feminine bedroom she sat on the edge of her four-poster bed. A lace-curtained window overlooked the hidden garden behind her town house, where she spent many peaceful, solitary hours among her roses, hollyhocks, morning glories and asters. She had a good life here. Few regrets.
She opened the old Bible on her bedstand. Even before she could talk, her father had taught her his favorite psalms. She remembered them all. They were a part of her. On dark nights they’d come to her, sometimes in her mother’s almost-forgotten voice, or Naomi’s, even her father’s. Never in the voice of the child she’d been. It was as if that girl had never existed.
With a trembling hand she set aside the obituary of her father from the Cedar Springs Democrat that Joe Cutler had sent her, and the letter she’d received from his commanding officer telling her of Joe’s death three years later, because Joe had asked him to. That was before Quint Skinner, that snake, had written his book.
She came to the photograph Joe had taken of Lilli and herself going up in the balloon that warm, clear August night. “I thought you’d want it,” he’d written.
Mattie switched on her clock radio, just to have something to listen to. Frank Sinatra was singing.
“There’s nothing romantic between Nick and me,” Lilli had assured her mother-in-law during their balloon ride over Saratoga. “I’m not infatuated with him or anything like that—it’s just that no one understands me the way he does.”
Mattie had known exactly how Lilli felt, and she’d tried so hard to explain. “Darling, it’s not that Nick understands you—it’s that he’s willing to let you be whoever you want to be. He demands it. He’s a rare man in that he has no expectations of you whatever.”
On the flip side, Nick had no expectations of himself, either. For a woman who’d based her goals and ideas on the expectations of others—parents, husband, society—being exposed to Nicholas Pembroke’s talent and vision and enthusiasm for life, his love of freedom without responsibility, could be an enormously liberating and intoxicating experience. But there were costs. Always there were costs.
For Mattie, those costs had been her home and family. To be free, she’d had to leave them behind all those years ago. There had been no opportunity for compromise, no possible middle ground. Yet even after six decades, the pull of home and family on her remained strong. Every day something would catch her off guard and trigger a memory of her stern father, of her dark-eyed little sister, of the people and oak-lined streets of Cedar Springs. Mattie didn’t regret her choices. She treasured her independence, her good years with Nick, their son, the work she’d done, the life she’d made for herself in New York. She’d had time to put the costs of her freedom into perspective.
Had Lilli discovered, too late, what those costs would be for herself?
Frank Sinatra stopped singing.
Mattie stared at the photograph. At Lilli’s smile. At the gold key hanging from her neck. Joe had given it to her.
How had it ended up on the Pembroke estate for Dani to find so many years later?
“Nicholas Pembroke is an extraordinary man,” Mattie had told Lilli. “I’d be a liar if I tried to tell you otherwise. The good Lord only knows where I’d be if he hadn’t decided to go fishing in Tennessee way back when. But, Lilli, Nick can’t save himself, much less anyone else. Darling, I know what it is to want to be free.”
“At my age you were already a legend.”
Mattie had tried to explain. Her acting had had its rewards, but fame was a strange thing. Mattie wasn’t famous to herself, but to other people—people she didn’t even know. She couldn’t get inside their heads. Back at the height of her fame, she’d disguised herself and sneaked into a theater playing one of her films, but still couldn’t get inside the minds of those strangers watching her and be a part of her own fame. And Mattie had realized she was only herself. She wasn’t what other people thought of her.
Lilli had shaken her head, as if at her own shattered dreams. “I’m thirty, and I’ve done nothing at all with my life.”
Which wasn’t true. Lilli Chandler Pembroke had given as much of herself to her daughter and husband as any woman could be asked to give. She was a tireless volunteer, a wonderful sister, a devoted daughter. She managed a large apartment in New York and a house in the country, and had taken over as Chandler hostess admirably since her mother’s death. But she’d wanted more. And who was Mattie to tell her she couldn’t have it?
Aching and tired, more depressed than she’d felt in years, Mattie replaced the photograph in her Bible. She’d never shown it to anyone, not even Dani. Few people knew about Joe and Zeke Cutler’s trip to Saratoga that summer. Certainly not her granddaughter. Mattie hadn’t told her. Nor had she ever sat Dani down and explained about the little sister she’d left behind in Tennessee, the half-crazy father who’d died a long, tortured death. About her own ambivalent feelings about her hometown and her childhood there.
Dani would be surprised and hurt. She thought her grandmother had no secrets from her.
The problem was, she had too many.
Four
With her bare feet propped up on the teak umbrella table in the garden behind her gingerbread cottage, Dani regarded Sara Chandler Stone with reasonably good humor. “Tell me, Sara, have you ever been on Pembroke property before?”
Her aunt didn’t answer. So far she hadn’t said much. She’d slipped into the garden while Dani was enjoying a bottle of Pembroke Springs Mineral Water after a late-afternoon stint of weed pulling. She’d offered Sara a bottle. Sara had refused politely. She was a tall, slender woman, with tawny hair cut into a classic bob and pretty, rich blue eyes and a slightly uptilted chin. She’d just come from the races and had on a raspberry-flowered dress, very feminine, with raspberry heels and a long raspberry scarf tied around her straw hat. Dani herself had on gym shorts and a T-shirt. But her aunt—her mother’s younger sister—was the quintessential Chandler heiress, everything her niece made no attempt to be, couldn’t have been even if she’d tried.
“I received your note.” Sara was as icily polite as only a Chandler could be. “You really are coming tomorrow?”
“I really am.”
“Well, that’s wonderful, of course. We’re delighted. I only hope—” She smiled, cool and gracious. “You do understand how much the hundredth anniversary of the running of the Chandler Stakes means to Father.”
“And seeing how Mother ruined the seventy-fifth by so inconveniently disappearing, I’d better not make a scene.”
Sara reddened, inhaling sharply. “I didn’t mean that.”
Dani felt a stab of guilt, having forgotten—or simply not consciously reminded herself—that hers wasn’t the only loss, that her aunt had lost a sister. She dropped her feet to the stone terrace, warm in the afternoon sun. “I know you didn’t. Don’t you want to sit down?”
“I can’t stay—we have a dinner party this evening. I just wanted to be sure that the note was in fact from you, that it wasn’t some sort of cruel practical joke. This is such a sudden change of heart on your part—although of course we welcome it—and I know you’re very busy.” She paused, looking around at the cracked marble birdbath that stood in the midst of the myrtle, at the hundreds of marigolds Dani had planted. There were perennials, flowering shrubs and trees, herbs, more annuals, all enclosed by a tall Victorian wrought-iron fence. “I saw the article on you.”
Dani winced, taking another sip of her mineral water. The bottle was a handsome proprietary design of evergreen-colored glass, with a distinctive long slender neck and an ornate P engraved on one side. The label was a design Dani particularly loved: a red kite floating above a pine grove. Eugene Chandler—her grandfather, Sara’s father—considered her use of Pembroke for her profitable, visible company just one more example of his only grandchild’s thumbing her nose at him.
“I didn’t mention you or Grandfather,” she said. “Or my mother.”
“You didn’t have to. Any article on you will dredge us up no matter what you say or don’t say. Having all that…history come out now is painful.”
Dani refused to feel guilty. The interview had been on the spur of the moment, and she wasn’t supposed to do anything on the spur of the moment. She had too many responsibilities. She was half Chandler. She had a missing mother. Even Ira Bernstein had offered his two cents, threatening to take up a collection to buy her new sneakers. Her sneakers hadn’t even been in the photograph of her. “The holes,” he’d said, “were implied by the rest of your ‘outfit.’”
There was no pleasing anyone anymore.
“It’s not as if our ‘history’ isn’t already on people’s minds,” Dani said. “It’s the hundredth anniversary of the Chandler Stakes, the twenty-fifth of my mother’s disappearance—people will talk, even if we don’t.”
Sara straightened. “I’m not a fool. I might not run a company, but that doesn’t mean—” She stopped abruptly, replacing the demure stance, the stiff, polite smile with the look of a well-bred Chandler. “Let’s not argue. Father’s delighted you’re coming tomorrow—Roger is, too.” Her smile broadened at the mention of Roger Stone, her husband, and seemed genuine. “So am I.”
Dani almost believed her.
After her aunt left, Dani didn’t return to her flower beds, but propped her feet back up on her umbrella table and contemplated the blue sky, felt the cool afternoon breeze against her skin. Something must not be quite right in her head, she thought. Otherwise she’d have told her aunt that she’d changed her mind and wouldn’t be attending the annual Chandler lawn party tomorrow night after all.
“Dani, you back here?”
She recognized Kate Murtagh’s voice even as her six-foot-tall, blond, gorgeous friend barreled through the gate at the far end of the garden. Kate marched up to the stone terrace. She had on an inexpensive chambray dress, her long hair held back with a jade-and-rose-colored scarf; she didn’t even have to work at looking stunning.
“Do I take it from your auntie’s stiff-upper-lip exit that the rumors are true and you’re going tomorrow?”
Dani shrugged. It didn’t surprise her there were rumors or that Kate Murtagh had heard them. She was one of Saratoga’s most sought-after caterers. She’d even landed the Chandler lawn party for the first time, in spite of her long friendship with Dani.
“It’s going to be all over the gossip columns, you know,” Kate said. She was clearly on one of her tears. “Are you prepared for that kind of publicity?”
“People will say what they say.”
“Oh, indeed they will. In my opinion—” not that Dani had asked “—things have gotten too quiet between you and your grandfather. You’d rather have him fighting with you than not paying any attention at all.”
Dani deliberately didn’t answer. Everyone, including her friends, seemed to have a theory about her relationship with her mother’s family.
Kate sighed. “What’re you going to wear to this shindig?”
“Is that the real reason you’re here?”
“You know you can’t be trusted to pick out a party dress on your own.”
Dani laughed but was already on her feet, leading Kate through the back door into her cottage’s small, charming kitchen. As always, her friend had to take a minute to shudder. “I have nightmares about this kitchen.”
“You just have unrealistically high standards.”
“Like a fully functional stove and a refrigerator that postdates Donna Reed?”
“Picky, picky.”
“And counters,” Kate added.
“The kitchens at the inn are state-of-the-art—”
“So?”
Dani pushed through the dining room, hoping to circumvent one of Kate’s lectures on how she should scrimp a little more on her companies and a little less on herself.
“I don’t know how you live like this,” Kate grumbled, following Dani upstairs.
She’d kept the small back bedroom she’d used during stays there as a child, leaving the larger front bedroom for Mattie’s increasingly rare visits. Its leaded-glass windows and view of the garden made up for its size and meager furnishings. Dani had cleared out the junk and old furniture that had gathered over the years, then painted the walls a fresh white. She’d added an antique chestnut bureau and a cherry bed she’d covered with a flower-garden quilt and an old woolen blanket from a mill in Mattie’s hometown in Tennessee.
Kate immediately went to the closet, giving an exaggerated groan when she opened the door. “Is this it? Don’t you have stuff in other closets in the house?”
“No.”
“What about your apartment in New York?”
The biggest closet in her three-room apartment was half the size of her one here. Kate had never been to her apartment. She hated New York.
“It’s bursting with gowns and furs,” Dani said, straight-faced. “I have entire drawers filled with diamonds, sapphires, silk scarves—one whole closet just for shoes.”
Kate scowled over her shoulder. “Very funny.”
With a brave sigh, she plunged into the closet. Dani flopped down on her bed, convinced that Kate, with her unerring sense of style, would come up with something. She could turn heads in a five-dollar flea-market rag.
There wasn’t a sound from inside the closet.
Finally Kate emerged with static hair and a grim look. “It’s bad,” she said.
“Sometimes I wish I were as rich as people think I am.”
“You could have been. It was your idea to tell your grandfather to shove your Chandler trust up his rear end.”
“I wasn’t that blunt.”
“Doesn’t make any difference. The way the Pembroke’s going and with mineral water and natural sodas all the rage, you’ll be rolling in money before too long. Which will no doubt drive you crazy, and you’ll buy some moribund company to gobble up your cash.”
“Have you been talking to Ira?”
“You always need a challenge in front of you. Worse thing for a Pembroke is to have everything he or she wants.” She waved a hand. “Anyway, money isn’t the reason you don’t have anything to wear tomorrow. Much as you’d like to pretend otherwise, you’re no pauper. The only reason you don’t have anything to wear is because you won’t buy anything. When’s the last time you wore an evening gown?”
“The works?”
“Yeah, the works. Floor-length, jewels, hair done, heels, gloves.”
“I don’t do gloves.”
“Come on. When?”
Dani sighed. She remembered. Oh, Lord, did she remember. “Five years ago. On December sixteenth, to be exact.”
Kate stared at her, annoyed.
“No, I’m serious. It was Beethoven’s birthday. I had a date.”
“Well, then, no wonder you remember.” Her sarcasm was a none-too-subtle slam on Dani’s notoriously inactive love life. “Where did you go?”
“To a charity ball, of all things. Unfortunately I didn’t get the details on where it was and who was throwing it. I almost croaked when this guy drove right up to the New York Chandler.”
“Granddaddy and Aunt Sara were there?”
“Bejeweled and not expecting me.”
“They kick you out?”
“That would have been too crass. They were sickeningly gracious. Turned out my date—unbeknownst to me—worked for Chandler Hotels. He was new in town, brought in from Hawaii, and was unaware of my relationship with that side of my family. Thought I was his ticket to the top. Little did he know.”
“So that’s why you now have guys submit their résumés before you’ll go out with them.”
Dani shot her friend a look. “The man was a heel, Kate.”
“Yeah, well, heels do exist.” She got back to the point. “But you did wear an honest-to-God evening gown?”
“Black velvet with sequins. Low-cut. Very expensive. Even my grandfather approved.”
Kate looked as if she was trying to picture it. “Still have it?”
“Somewhere. I keep it around as another reminder of what being a Chandler and a Pembroke’s all about.”
Ever pragmatic, Kate said, “Well, velvet’s too heavy for August anyway. Why don’t you go into town and buy something. Little dresses are always in. Come on, Dani. You know clothes. You just don’t like to spend money on anything you might wear for fun. And—as you well know—you wear little dresses all the time. Just make it short and close-fitting and over forty dollars and you’ll be a hit. You’ve got a flat stomach and great legs.”
Dani frowned. “I don’t have time for a full-fledged shopping trip before tomorrow. Isn’t there something in there I could dress up?”
“No.”
“You could have hesitated.”
“Look.” Kate wasn’t about to give up. “Why not rent a dress. People do it around here in August all the time.”
Dani jumped off the bed. “I must have been crazy to accept that invitation, but I refuse to back down now, just on account of not having anything to wear. Don’t you have something you could lend me?”
“You’d look like a little kid dressing up in her mother’s clothes.” Kate winced at her faux pas, as if Lilli Chandler Pembroke had disappeared yesterday and not twenty-five years ago and all Dani’s wounds were still raw. It was a reaction Dani often received, even from her best friends. “I’m sorry—I know tomorrow won’t be easy for you.”
“Forget it. Actually, you’ve just given me an idea. I knew I could count on you. See Ira before you leave for a bottle of champagne. Your choice. You and your people will deserve to celebrate after pulling off tomorrow night.”
“Thanks,” Kate said. “Believe me, we’ll need to unwind. Your auntie’s a great big pain in the butt, if you’ll pardon my saying so—but she’s ever so sweet. Kills you with a look and twenty polite demands, if you know what I mean.”
“A Chandler lady never raises her voice.”
“No wonder you don’t fit in with that crowd.”
“Shouldn’t you be julienning zucchini or something?”
But Kate’s expression suddenly turned serious. “Dani, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
She smiled. “No.”
“Look—”
“It’s okay, Kate. I don’t know exactly why I’m going this year. It’s true my grandfather and I have maintained an undeclared cease-fire in the last few years—mainly by each pretending the other doesn’t exist. But it’s August in Saratoga, and I’m here. I can’t ignore that I’m half Chandler.” She paused. “Neither can my grandfather.”
Kate stared at her for a few seconds, then threw up her hands. “Go for a little dress. You’ll look great.”
Not long after Kate left, Dani headed to her attic and pulled the string attached to the naked seventy-five-watt bulb at the top of the steep stairs. The air was hot and musty, the rough wood floors crowded with old kites and abandoned projects, college textbooks on subjects she barely remembered taking and a thousand-piece puzzle of a castle in Germany she and Mattie had put together one rainy July weekend. There was a vase she’d made in the first grade from an old liquid-detergent bottle for Mother’s Day; she had no idea how it had landed in Saratoga.
It was an attic of memories, but most attics were.
Pushing past overflowing cardboard boxes, she knelt on the dusty floor in front of a huge old Saratoga trunk. It had belonged to her great-great-grandmother, the intrepid Louisa Caldwell Pembroke. She’d been a survivor. Just twenty when she’d married Ulysses, she’d never been a real part of the extravagance—the notorious capitalistic excesses—of Saratoga in the last decade of the nineteenth century. But she’d fallen in love with a gambler, had known Diamond Jim Brady, the onetime bellhop who’d become a millionaire, and Lillian Russell, the voluptuous singer whose cocker spaniel Mooksie had a collar made of diamonds and gold. Louisa had been in Saratoga when Joseph Pulitzer sent Elizabeth Cochrane—“Nellie Bly”—to the upstate spa to write her famous exposés for his New York newspaper. One had been on Ulysses Pembroke’s oddball, money-eating estate.
The Saratoga trunk was now a valuable antique. Train conductors had despised their curved lids because they made stacking them difficult.
Dani threw open the trunk. On top was the frayed, moth-eaten fox stole Mattie Witt had worn in The Gamblers. It’d probably sell for a fortune. Gently pushing it aside, Dani dug through layers of dresses, scarves, old shoes, gloves, crushed hats. Things from Mattie, things from her mother. She felt the tears on her cheeks and angrily brushed them away. She had no business crying. The past was the past. She’d carved out a niche for herself separate from the self-destructive Pembrokes, the celebrated Mattie Witt, the lost Lilli Chandler Pembroke. She’d moved forward with her life and had learned to live in the present.
She’d learned to stay out of attics.
Refusing to knuckle under to self-pity, she got on with her task.
Deep in the trunk, she found the dress.
It was red and sleek and perfect. Mattie had worn it in Tiger’s Eye, the movie that had transformed her from an overnight sensation into a star.
Dani dug even deeper and produced the ostrich plume.
Rolling back on her heels, she held it up to the dim light. I must be out of my mind. Dyed red to match the dress, it was an integral part of Mattie’s glamorous look. Dani had never in her life worn a feather in her hair.
It’s my Pembroke genes. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
And she couldn’t stop herself.
The plume was squashed from having been stuffed in the trunk, but otherwise in good shape.
Would anyone at the Chandler lawn party recognize it?
Oh, yes.
In her unforgettable scene in Casino, Lilli Chandler Pembroke had worn Mattie’s ostrich plume. Nick had said she’d meant it as a tribute to her mother-in-law, a symbol of independence and freedom to Lilli and to millions of women.
Maybe Kate was right, Dani thought, and she ought to dust off her checkbook and go to town and buy a dress.
If no one else recognized the dress Mattie Witt had worn in one of her most famous roles, the feather she and Lilli both had worn, the Chandlers certainly would. And they’d know—as perhaps Dani meant them to know—that it was yet another of her attempts to force them to confront their image of who she was. To remind them she’d always fight that image. To show them she was determined, and would remain determined, to be herself.
She closed the lid of the trunk and rose stiffly, then pulled the string on the lightbulb and carried the dress and ostrich plume downstairs. She got a hanger from her closet, shook the dress out and hung it on a curtain rod in the bedroom window. Perhaps the clear light of day would make her change her mind.
It’d have to be cleaned. And she’d have to buy shoes. Preferably red. No. Definitely red.
She could wear her gold key with it. Maybe the scarred old brass one, too.
Eyeing it, she debated. Had the clear light of day helped her change her mind?
Nah. It was a great dress.
As far as Zeke could tell, the Pembroke “experience” could be anything from quiet, healthy luxury with a nutty twist to something approaching marine boot camp.
He didn’t care. He just wanted his experience to be brief.
He’d been put in a small room on the third floor with twelve-foot ceilings, a window seat, rose-flowered wallpaper and a jewel-colored crazy quilt on a brass queen-size bed. There was a marble-topped dresser and a needlepoint-cushioned chair he didn’t think he was supposed to sit on.
There was no beer in the tiny refrigerator, just a six-pack of Pembroke Springs Natural Orange Soda. He opened up a bottle. It was clear glass with a pale green label featuring a kite floating above a stand of birches. What kites and birches had to do with natural soda Zeke didn’t even want to speculate. He took a sip. It wasn’t as syrupy as regular orange soda, but it was still soda.
He examined a brochure. If he wanted to, he could take hang gliding lessons, climb rocks or show up on the front lawn at the crack of dawn for a hot-air balloon ride. There were quilting bees on the “north porch.” Nature walks. Kite-making and kite-flying lessons. Tubing expeditions on the Batten Kill. “Handson workshops” in the many flower, herb and vegetable gardens. Zeke took them to be weeding sessions. He could soak in mud if he wanted to. Get scrubbed, clipped, polished, deep cleaned and massaged. He could jog. Ride a bike. Climb a mountain. Tour Saratoga. Go to the races. Shop. Take in a concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, a lecture at Skidmore College.
He could, if he chose, pick wild blueberries and make his own jam.
Only a Pembroke could get people to pay good money to do something they could do for free. Did Dani Pembroke have her guests do their own sheets as well? Beat them against rocks like in the old days?
Quite a place, the Pembroke.
He called Sam Lincoln Jones in San Diego. “Sam, if you’ve got some time on your hands, mind doing me a favor?”
“Been figuring you’d call.”
“Always a step ahead. Could you check out what Nick Pembroke’s up to these days? I think he’s still alive.”
“I’ll look him up and let you know. Where are you?”
Zeke told him.
Naturally Sam had heard of the place. He chuckled. “Going to sign up for croquet?”
After he hung up, Zeke headed into the bathroom, which was small but cozy. The fluffy white towels were monogrammed with the same ornate P that was engraved on his soda bottle. On the back of the john was a basket of glycerin soaps, bath gels, bath salts, lotions, shampoos. He turned the water on in the tub, which was up on legs. Homey. Feeling reckless, he dumped an envelope of bath salts into the hot water and watched them dissolve.
Croquet and jam making, he thought.
He just couldn’t wait to meet Dani Pembroke.
Five
Tucking her box of brand-new red shoes under one arm, Dani headed up to her bedroom, exhausted. She swore she’d rather scale Pikes Peak than go shopping for shoes. She’d tried downtown Saratoga first, where one could find handmade jewelry, fine wines, expensive antiques, art supplies, adorable children’s outfits, fancy toys, homemade pastries and chocolates, fresh pasta, health food, Victoriana, nice clothes. Everything, it seemed, but a pair of size-six shoes that matched Mattie Witt’s red ostrich plume. She’d finally had to drive south of town to a shoe outlet. The red was an exact match, but the heels were three inches high. Fortunately she’d only have to wear them a few hours.
Presumably it would have been simpler just to buy a new dress. Or to wear her all-purpose black pumps. But, in for a penny, in for a pound.
A long, relaxing bath, however, was in order.
Her only bathroom was downstairs, which meant fetching her robe from upstairs. In renovating the main house, she and her architects had become quite clever at finding places for bathrooms where there were no obvious places. Space wasn’t the problem at the cottage; the problem was getting around to the job. An upstairs bath just wasn’t a pressing need.
She stopped hard at her bedroom door, clutching the shoe box.
Holding her breath, she stared, frozen, at the mess.
Someone had removed all the drawers from her bureau, dumped them out on the floor and tossed them aside. Her underwear, her nightgowns, her socks, her T-shirts—the entire contents of her bureau were scattered and thrown everywhere. Her mattress was torn halfway off the bed frame, blankets and sheets in a heap under the window. The curtains billowed in a strong afternoon breeze. She could hear birds twittering in her garden.
Her heart pounded. Mattie’s dress…
It was there, in a ball beside Dani’s bed.
Clothes and shoes spilled from her ransacked closet. The antique shaker box she used for jewelry was turned over, empty, on top of her bureau.
Slowly and carefully, intensely aware of what she was doing, she withdrew one of her red high heels from its shoe box and held it by the toe, its lethal three-inch heel pointed out.
“Hello?”
Despite her constricted throat, her voice sounded eerily calm in the silent house. She could hear the faint laugh of Pembroke guests in the distance.
Naturally there was no answer.
What a stupid thing to say, she thought. She’d been mugged once in New York. A decidedly unpleasant experience. But it had happened outside, on a street far from her own familiar neighborhood, and it had been quick. Give me your money. Okay, here you go. The mugger leaves, you call the police. Nothing they can do. You go home, open a bottle of wine, call some friends, complain about New York’s crime rate. Scary and nothing you’d want to repeat, but different—very different—from having someone walk into your home and go through your personal belongings.
Very different, she thought, from having to guess, heart thumping, whether or not the thief was still around.
“Look, I don’t want any trouble.” She sounded controlled but not belligerent, at least to her own ears. “If you’re still here, wait just a second and I’ll go down into the kitchen and you can leave. Okay?”
Still no response.
But she did as she said. She set the shoe box on the floor, took her one high heel with her and made sure her footsteps were loud on the stairs. She started to run when she hit the living room, but made herself stop in the kitchen. Should she keep running? But what if the thief was lurking in the garden? What if he followed her?
She turned on the radio so the burglar would know she’d kept her word. She was in the kitchen. She’d give him a chance to get out the front door.
Should I call Ira? The police?
So they could come and scrape her off the floor after the thief had figured out she’d tried to trick him?
Most likely the burglar had taken off already. Or was outside waiting to make his escape. Surely if he were inside, he’d have made his presence known by now.
Dani switched off the radio and listened past the sound of blood pounding in her ears and the blue jays chasing off the sparrows in her garden.
“Okay.” She tried to project her voice without yelling. “I’m coming back upstairs.”
If he was in the garden, he’d hear her and make good his escape. Which was just fine with her. If he was hiding in the living room, he could sneak out while she was upstairs. If he was in the kitchen—
Swallowing hard, she resisted the urge to look around. If he was stuffed in the broom closet, best to give him a chance to leave quietly.
What if the bastard was upstairs?
He wasn’t. Of all her choices, going back up to her bedroom scared her the least. She’d just come from there, and nothing had happened.
She debated taking one of the knives she’d ordered from a company that advertised during a late-night television show she watched when she was suffering through a bout of insomnia. Kate hated the knives. “You get what you pay for,” she’d said.
Never mind, she thought. She had her shoe.
She repeated her words in the living room, again on the stairs, again on the landing, and one last time as she approached her bedroom door. Whoever had trashed the bedroom had to have gone by now. She was just being dramatic.
But she heard a sound behind her. A movement.
“No, wait—”
She started to turn around—to plead, yell, jab with her high heel—but before she could do anything, she felt a hard push against her back, propelling her up and across the room like a missile. Her shoe went flying, and she was hurtling so fast her feet barely touched the floor; she couldn’t control them or where she was going. Arms outstretched to brace her fall, she tripped on the edge of her mattress and fell over a pulled-out drawer, landed atop another, banged her shins and elbows and wrenched her hand. She hurt so much she didn’t think to do anything but utter a loud, vicious curse.
Behind her she heard heavy footsteps pounding down the stairs. Now her intruder was taking off. Obviously he hadn’t believed she’d keep her promise.
Groaning, aching, Dani sat a moment amidst her scattered underwear, trying to calm her wild breathing and assure herself she’d live. She wasn’t hurt that badly.
Clearly the garden would have been a better choice.
The front door slammed shut, startling her. A fresh wave of adrenaline flowed through her system. Okay. At least he was gone.
She raced into Mattie’s room and looked out the window but saw no one. How could her intruder disappear that fast?
Unless he hadn’t.
Trying to ignore her bruises and scrapes and the throbbing in her left knee, Dani grabbed the poker from the fireplace in Mattie’s room and checked everywhere, starting with the two bedrooms and the closets upstairs. She climbed up to the attic and checked it. She went downstairs and checked under the couch and in the closets and in every nook and cranny in the kitchen and pantry. She even went down to the basement and checked behind the furnace.
Nothing.
Back upstairs, her palms sweaty, her body aching, she sorted through the mess in her bedroom for what was missing. Twenty dollars in odd bills. Her canning jar of emergency change. Her sterling-silver earrings, her turquoise bracelet, a jade pin, the fetish necklace her father had sent from Arizona saying it was handmade, but for all she knew had been mass-produced in Taiwan.
Then she remembered the one piece of jewelry that she really did care about: the gold key she’d found on the cliffs.
“The bastard!”
The matching brass key was gone, too. Any relief she’d felt at not having been killed quickly transformed itself into anger. She started to pick up a drawer and throw it, but remembered her chestnut bureau was an antique and set the drawer back down.
She was furious.
This felt better than being scared.
Her thief must have seen the article on her in the paper or any of the recent publicity on the hundredth running of the Chandler Stakes. Like too many before him, he must have figured someone with a name and a family history like hers would have tons of valuables and disposable cash. That he’d been wrong was at least a small consolation.
But her keys—she’d definitely miss them.
She headed painfully back downstairs and started to call Ira, but hung up before she finished dialing. What good would calling the police or even Pembroke security do at this point? Unfortunately Saratoga in August was a stomping ground for petty thieves. Hers hadn’t gotten away with much that anyone else would care about. And, in retrospect, he hadn’t really tried to hurt her. He’d just been too stupid to make his getaway when he’d had the chance. Besides which, he was probably long gone by now. He had only to cut through the woods to the bottling plant or mingle with the crowds in the rose gardens and he’d be home free. She couldn’t even provide a decent description of the son of a bitch.
She also didn’t need that kind of publicity.
But she’d have to tell Ira a thief was skulking about the premises. As Pembroke manager, he needed to know such things. She’d tell him…later.
First she doctored the worst scrape on her shin with a dab of antibacterial goo, then put two 7.7-ounce bottles of Pembroke Springs Mineral Water into an ice bucket, filled it with ice, got out a tall glass and went out to the terrace.
Her garden was bathed in cool afternoon shade, a hummingbird darting among the hollyhocks. Dani opened a bottle of mineral water, took a sip and poured the rest in her glass. Her wrist ached. So did her elbows. Her shin plain hurt.
Setting her bottle on the umbrella table, she pulled out a chair so she could sit and think and regain her composure before she did anything.
Something moved in the garden to her left.
Adrenaline pumped through her bloodstream with such velocity that she ached even more. She flew around, hoping she was overreacting, that it was just a bird or a squirrel.
It wasn’t.
A man materialized from behind the dogwood. Dani reached for her empty Pembroke Springs bottle. He was strongly built, around six feet, striking but not exactly handsome. He had very alert dark eyes and a small scar under his left eye.
He looked capable of coming at a woman half his size from behind and giving her a good shove.
“Afternoon,” he said. “I didn’t think the cottage was occupied.”
Nice try. Her fingers curled around the cool neck of her green bottle. “Who are you?”
“I’d be happy to tell you if you’ll think twice about throwing that bottle at me.”
But Dani had grown up in New York City and knew better than to think twice or give anyone a chance to explain something like pitching her across her own bedroom.
She whipped the bottle as hard as she could, aiming for the man’s head. Before it could strike its mark, she spun around and bolted for her kitchen.
Behind her, she heard a distinct curse as the bottle hit its target or came close.
She grabbed her car keys off their hook in the kitchen and, while she was at it, the eight-inch cast-iron frying pan soaking in the sink. Water spilled out over her legs, stinging her scraped shins. She raced through the dining room and into the living room, surprised at how clearly she was thinking. She’d get to her car, head for the main house, alert security. Ira would say she should have called him or the police in the first place….
She scooted out the front door, bounded down the brick walk with her frying pan and came to the gravel driveway where she kept her very used car parked.
The man from the garden was leaning against the door on the driver’s side, looking unhurt and in amazingly good humor.
Dani raised the frying pan.
“Throw that thing at me,” he said amiably, “and I’ll duck. You’ll break a window. Won’t accomplish much. Besides, I’m harmless.”
She kept the frying pan raised high. “You don’t look harmless.”
He smiled. “I consider that a gift.”
What kind of man was he? She lowered the frying pan a fraction of an inch. She thought he noticed. But it was heavy, and her wrist hurt. “Who are you, and what were you doing in my garden?”
“I didn’t mean to startle you.” He hadn’t moved off her car and didn’t seem particularly worried that she might decide to bonk him on the head after all. It didn’t appear her bottle had struck home. “My name’s Zeke Cutler. I would have taken more care if I’d realized the cottage was occupied and you’d just been robbed.”
She almost dropped the frying pan. “How do you know I was just robbed?”
“A woman throwing bottles and arming herself with an iron skillet is usually a dead giveaway.” But his smile and the touch of humor in his dark, dark eyes gave way to a frown and a squint, a serious expression of determination and self-assurance. He seemed to know of what he spoke. “So are bruised wrists, skinned elbows, scraped shins.”
“You’re very observant.”
“However,” he said, the humor flickering back to his eyes, “if you’re Dani Pembroke, and I take it you are, you could have gotten banged up fetching a kite down from a tree or climbing rocks.”
She straightened, suddenly acutely aware of the position in which this man had found her. Bruised, scared, robbed. “Are you a reporter? Can’t you guys leave me alone? Look, I haven’t admitted anything—”
“I’m not a reporter.” Zeke Cutler pulled himself from her car. His eyes never left her. He was, she thought, one intensely controlled man. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Did you get a good look at the man who attacked you?”
She refused to answer. What if this was an act and he was the one who’d attacked her? What if he really was a reporter?
“You didn’t call the police,” he said.
“What makes you so sure?”
His expression was unreadable now, any humor gone. “It’s an educated guess.”
“Well, Mr. Cutler, I appreciate your concern, but if you don’t mind, I’d like you off my property. Under the circumstances, you’re making me nervous. I’m sure you understand.”
“Suit yourself.”
Without further argument, he started down the driveway. His running shoes scrunched on the gravel. Dani made herself notice his clothes: jeans and dark blue pullover. Black sport watch. No socks. He looked clean enough. And he moved with a speed, grace and economy that struck her as inordinately sexy and not entirely unexpected. It suddenly occurred to her that he could be a lost guest from the Pembroke. But he didn’t seem the type to stay at a spa-inn, nor, certainly, the type to get lost.
He seemed more the type who could have pitched her across her room and lied about it.
She waited until he was out of sight. Then she returned to her cottage, pried the frying pan from her grip and picked up the phone again.
This time she didn’t stop dialing until she’d finished. But it wasn’t Ira she called, or the police, or Pembroke security, or any of her friends, or, God knew, her father or grandfathers or her sweet aunt Sara. She called the one person she could always call when she found her house ransacked and a strange man in her garden, and that was her grandmother, Mattie Witt.
Dani Pembroke wasn’t what Zeke had expected.
He entered the rose garden, figuring that if he’d just robbed Dani Pembroke, it was where he’d head. But as he stepped through the iron gate, memories—dreams that were dead and done with—assaulted him. He pictured how the garden had looked twenty-five years ago, with Mattie Witt sitting in its overgrown midst, wearing her orange flight suit as she’d worked on the basket of her hot-air balloon.
He’d been a fool to let the past determine his actions. He couldn’t afford to make that kind of mistake again.
But there was a lot of Mattie in her granddaughter, in her dark good looks, her independence. And with her zest for a fight—an iron skillet, for pete’s sake—a flash of Nicholas Pembroke.
Instinctively Zeke knew all those qualities were what Dani wanted people to see in her. She wouldn’t want them to see the mystery and vulnerability he’d detected behind her direct manner, the parts of her she held back, the parts that would remind people of her gentle, sensitive, lost mother. Her eyes, as black as Lilli’s had been blue, said she had secrets and knew you knew she had them but wasn’t going to tell you what they were anyway.
There was a lack of self-pity about the owner of Pembroke Springs that Zeke could admire.
And, given the circumstances, a hotheadedness that worried him.
The rose garden covered two acres and was, in his view, the best part of the estate. There were fountains, gazebos, marble statuary, stone benches, low iron fences and dozens of beautiful, perfectly pruned rosebushes. Their fragrance filled the afternoon air.
He noticed a discreet plaque dedicating the rosebushes to the memory of Lilli Chandler Pembroke. His throat tightened. He needed distance. Control. Squinting against the bright sun, he scanned the crowd meandering along the brick walks. He’d come to do a job. Time to get on with it.
He went utterly motionless.
Quint Skinner.
There was no mistaking the bull-like physique, the cropped red-blond hair, the scarred face. Skinner had served with Joe Cutler. After he got out of the army, he’d become a journalist and hooked up with his old unit, discovering that morale was low and Joe’s sense of pride and honor had deteriorated. He’d seen Joe’s men die. And he’d seen Joe die.
Joe Cutler: One Soldier’s Rise and Fall was Quint’s book. He hadn’t done much since.
What the hell was he doing in Saratoga?
Tucked between two teenage girls, Skinner edged out of the rose garden. A small pack was slung over one massive shoulder. Zeke would bet he’d find Dani Pembroke’s belongings in that pack. But there was nothing he could do. Not right now—not that made sense. Pulitzer Prize winner or not, Quint Skinner was perfectly capable of ransacking a woman’s bedroom and smacking her around. He was also capable of using a couple of innocent girls to get his ass out of a sling with Zeke.
And it occurred to Zeke that Dani Pembroke just might not appreciate his efforts. The media would pounce on a confrontation between Quint Skinner and Joe Cutler’s brother in the Pembroke rose gardens. Zeke had already noted that Dani hadn’t reacted to his name. Seemed she had no idea who he was. What all hadn’t Mattie told her?
He let Quint go. For now.
It was teatime at the Pembroke. Wild-blueberry muffins, fresh fruit and Earl Grey tea were being served on the veranda. Zeke headed on up. Afterward maybe he’d try to scare up a fifth of George Dickel in this Yankee town.
If he was lucky, in due time he’d bump into Quint Skinner on neutral turf. If not, he’d just have to hunt him down and have a little chat.
Ira Bernstein was not pleased to learn a burglar had been prowling the Pembroke grounds. He was even less pleased to find out over an hour after the fact. “Why didn’t you call me?” he screamed at Dani.
She leaned back against the couch in her office. Now that the crisis was over, she was aching and tired; even thinking was an effort. And talking to Mattie hadn’t helped. Instead of offering her usual love, wisdom and concern, she had been shocked and withdrawn, which led Dani to worry something was wrong with her grandmother. But Mattie had denied that Dani had caught her at a bad time, assured her she was well—and then urged her not to call the police, because she didn’t need the added publicity.
Since when had Mattie worried about publicity?
When Dani didn’t answer, Ira paced, hands thrust in his pants pockets, hair wild. “You don’t have any description?”
“No.” She paused. “Not of the burglar. But there was another man…I was wondering if you’ve seen him around. Dark hair, dark eyes, maybe six feet tall. Looks really fit. Very controlled.” And sexy, she thought, but judiciously left out that assessment. “He says his name’s Zeke Cutler. Ring any bells?”
It hadn’t with Mattie, but Ira stopped pacing and hesitated.
“What?” Dani prodded.
He looked at her. “You won’t fly off the handle?”
“Ira.”
“He’s a guest.”
Hell’s bells, she thought. Just her luck. She decided not to tell Ira she’d thrown a bottle at him. “Go on.”
“He arrived this afternoon—”
“He had a reservation?”
“Not exactly. Apparently he called in a favor and got the room of a former client or the daughter of a former client—something like that.”
“A client? Who is he, what’s he do?”
“He’s a security consultant. From what I understand, he’s very good at what he does.”
Dani could feel her face redden. What in blue blazes had she gotten herself into?
“Anyway,” Ira went on, “I believe he’s having tea on the veranda—”
She was on her feet and out the door, leaving Ira Bernstein to do what he would about her burglar. A professional white knight. What next?
Her head throbbed, and her antibacterial goo hadn’t done a thing to stop her scraped shin from hurting. But she pounded down the wood-paneled hall, past the library, through the ballroom and out to the veranda, which looked out onto a formal garden and a small fishpond.
Zeke Cutler was there, alone.
“Tell me, Dani Pembroke,” he said, rocking back in his rattan chair. “What’s the difference between a wild blueberry and the regular kind?”
She inhaled, remembering he was a guest. “Wild blueberries are wild, for one thing. They’re smaller, and many people think they’re more flavorful than cultivated blueberries.”
“Ah.”
“Mr. Cutler—”
“Zeke.”
The rhythms of his southern accent and his subtle but unmistakable humor softened the hard edges of his voice. But his eyes, she noticed, remained alert and intense, taking in everything. She became aware of the spots of blood on her T-shirt, the ratty socks she’d quickly pulled on before heading up to the main house, her crummy sneakers, her short, messy hair. She usually dressed up when she was in a spot where she could run into guests.
“I understand you’re staying here at the Pembroke.”
“That’s right.”
“What brings you to Saratoga?”
He shrugged, his eyes never leaving her. “Curiosity.”
That could mean anything, and she suspected he knew it. “My manager tells me you’re a professional white knight.”
He gave a short laugh. “I’ve never thought of it quite like that.”
“You’re not looking at a potential client, in case the thought crossed your mind.”
The dark eyes narrowed. Suddenly self-conscious, Dani ran one hand through the pink geraniums in a marble urn, looking for a wilted blossom. There wasn’t one, so she snapped off one that was still healthy.
“Was your being in my garden a coincidence?” she asked.
“I didn’t rob you.”
A man of few but well-chosen words. Dani didn’t know what to make of him. “If you think you saw an opening to get yourself hired to protect me or some such thing, you’re wrong.”
There was a distinct gleam of amusement in his eyes. “Honey, I’d rather protect a pack of pit bulls.” But the humor vanished; he became, once again, calm and steady, utterly in control. “I’m not in Saratoga on business, if that’s what you’re getting at. You want to tell me what happened at your cottage?”
“No, I don’t.”
“You surprised your thief, didn’t you? He pushed you from behind—I take it you didn’t see him. Did he get away with anything of value?”
“Nothing much.” She wished she hadn’t come out here. She imagined Zeke Cutler was very good at what he did.
“Did he snatch your gold key?”
Dani controlled her surprise. So Zeke Cutler had read the article on her. Was that why he’d come to Saratoga, to the Pembroke? Had he robbed her after all? Or had he staged the burglary to get her to hire him? She saw that her hand was shaking and pulled it away from the geraniums; she clenched it at her side so he wouldn’t see.
“That’s not your concern,” she said.
“I suppose it isn’t.”
“If I find out you are a leech,” she said, “I’ll have you thrown off my property.”
He stretched out his long legs. “Fair enough.”
“Meanwhile—” she managed a gracious smile that would have done any Chandler proud “—enjoy your stay at the Pembroke.”
Having survived tea and being called a professional white knight, Zeke headed into town for something real to eat. Dinner at the Pembroke had included flowers. His waiter had promised they were edible. Zeke had passed. Besides which, he had an appointment to keep.
Roger Stone was waiting for him on the terrace at a hopping restaurant just off Broadway that did, indeed, serve hamburgers. A good-looking man in his mid-forties, Roger had taken over as vice president of Chandler Hotels after his brother-in-law—Dani Pembroke’s father—was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He was now president and chief executive officer; Zeke had checked. Roger rose, and the two men shook hands.
“It’s good to see you,” Roger said, as if they’d seen each other since the summer his wife’s sister had disappeared, which they hadn’t.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“I’d begun to wonder if you’d gotten my message.”
It had come to Zeke’s room at the Pembroke, before he found himself ducking Dani Pembroke’s mineral water bottle. “Word travels fast. How’d you hear I was in town?”
Roger shrugged evasively. He was fair and tall and fit, with angular features, pale blue eyes and impeccable taste in everything. His suit, Zeke noticed, was custom tailored. He himself had put on a fresh shirt but had left on his jeans. “A friend arrived at the airport the same time you did. It’s a small airport. And half the fun of coming to Saratoga is keeping track of who else is here.” Roger had already ordered a bottle of wine; he poured Zeke a glass. “But I suppose if you’d wanted to keep a low profile, I’d never have found out you were here.”
True, Zeke thought.
“Does that mean you’re not here on business?” Roger asked.
Zeke smiled. “Just here for health, history and horses, as the saying goes.”
“But you’re staying at my niece’s hotel…or whatever she calls that place of hers.”
“It seemed as good a place as any.”
Zeke tried his wine. It was, of course, an excellent choice. A waiter took his order for a hamburger. Roger wasn’t eating. “Sara and I have a dinner party later this evening.”
Sara, Sara. Zeke wondered what she looked like now, if she was happy. Had she regretted picking Roger, one of her own kind, over Joe? Even twenty-five years ago, from what Zeke could gather the couple of times he’d met him, Roger Stone had been wealthy and polished, an Ivy Leaguer, everything Joe Cutler wasn’t. Joe had known it and hadn’t cared. He’d never understood things like social class and the gulf between the Cutlers of Cedar Springs, Tennessee, and the Chandlers of New York City, Kentucky and Saratoga.
“Zeke, I…” Roger paused, exhaling, not meeting Zeke’s eyes. “I’m sorry about your brother. He had such promise.” He winced, looking embarrassed. “I’m sorry. That sounds patronizing, and I don’t mean to patronize.”
“It’s okay. And thanks. Why did you ask me here?”
He smiled thinly. “I’d heard you were one to cut to the heart of things. It’s a delicate matter. About Danielle, in fact.”
Danielle. Zeke could see her shining black eyes, the fear behind them. But if Roger was looking for a reaction, he didn’t get one.
“Frankly, Sara and I are worried about her—something we dare not let her realize. She’s independent to a pathological degree, in my opinion. But we do care about her.”
“Worried in what way?”
“I’m not sure—we could be overreacting. Rumors have been circulating all summer that she’s overextended herself, but I see no real evidence of that myself. And she’s coming tomorrow night.” He said it as if Zeke would automatically know what tomorrow night was, which he did. “She hasn’t attended since her mother…well, you know.”
“Anything else?”
He shrugged. “Nothing specific. We just don’t want anything to happen to her.”
A sentiment, Zeke had a feeling, that would just irritate the hell out of Dani Pembroke. His hamburger arrived, without flowers. He poured on the ketchup and dug in. “You’re worried she’s going to prove herself a true Pembroke and let everything she’s accomplished go up in smoke.”
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