Tempting Fate (27 page)

Zeke peered down, squinting in the bright sun, but he made no comment, asked no questions.

Dani slapped at a mosquito on her bruised arm and missed. “For years after my mother disappeared, my grandfather hired a series of private investigators to follow up on any leads on her whereabouts. None ever had the slightest success. When I was about sixteen, one of them came to me. He was a burly, pragmatic guy with a strong Brooklyn accent—he seemed nice. He was just getting background from me, he said. He asked me what my favorite dream of my mother was.” She looked at Zeke. “Isn't that strange?”

“Sometimes,” he said, “a strange question can lead to clarity in other areas. What was your answer?”

“That she was living a wonderful life on a South Seas island. That she was happy, really happy. She'd never come home because she'd somehow lost her memory on her way back after her balloon ride with Mattie. I could actually see her drinking from coconuts and walking on sandy beaches, unaware she even had a daughter.”

“It's a nice dream,” Zeke said.

Dani felt the warm afternoon breeze. “It's a compromise between death and abandonment. I get everything—a mother who's alive and happy, who didn't leave me behind on purpose.”

“What did the detective say?”

“‘Far-fetched, kid,'” she repeated, imitating his Brooklyn accent. “‘Better get used to the idea that your mother's dead.'”

Zeke looked thoughtful, neither condemning nor endorsing that advice. “That isn't easy, either.”

“Is your mother…”

“They're all dead. My mother, my father, my brother.” He kicked a small, loose pebble off the boulder. “We might as well head back.”

But Dani didn't move.

Zeke's eyes were completely lost in the flickering shade as the wind picked up. He stood very still, very close to her. She could sense the tension in him. And the resolve. He was just as determined and stubborn as she was, only his manner was calmer.

“There's more,” he said, not making it a question.

Dani could feel the ache of fatigue, and she had to force herself not to change her mind. Finally she said, “Zeke, your brother was here after my mother's disappearance. Four years later.”

He was silent a moment. “You're sure—”

“I've thought about it ever since I realized who he was, and yes, I'm sure. Everything was blowing up over my father's embezzling, and Mattie grabbed me one day and headed up here.”

“What month?”

“August. I remember racing season had started.”

“How do you know it was Joe?”

“I recognized his picture in the book. Not at first—it took a while. But it was the same person.”

“Where did you see him?” Zeke asked, his tone businesslike.

“Right here on this rock. I used to love taking off in the woods on my own, and I'd come out here and sit and swing my legs over the edge. That was before I took up rock climbing. That day I found a man standing out here.”

“Joe,” Zeke said.

She nodded, feeling the wind on her back. Clouds were billowing up, and the humidity had increased, making her shirt cling.

“Did the two of you talk?”

“I think I told him who I was. I was a little nervous about meeting a stranger in the middle of nowhere. He didn't say much that I can recall, just that he'd heard about me and was glad to have met me. That wasn't all that unusual a comment in those days, with the publicity about my mother and grandparents and Pop getting nailed to the wall for his light fingers.”

She paused, but Zeke said nothing. She had no idea what he was thinking. A mosquito was on his dark hair. She brushed it away, feeling awkward and nervous, even cruel. He couldn't have a favorite dream about his brother drinking from coconuts on a South Seas island. Joe Cutler was dead. The whole world knew it.

“We talked about the cliffs and the view,” she went on. “He didn't say why he was here. That much I can remember, because I'd wondered. He left before I did. On my way back to the cottage, I saw him at the pavilion, just sitting among the weeds. I didn't call or wave to him—I didn't want him to see me, try to follow me home, something like that.”

“Do you know if he saw Mattie while he was here?”

Dani shook her head. “I don't know. Not that she'd have told me if he had. Did you know he'd come back to Saratoga?”

“No.”

The humidity was bringing out the mosquitoes. They were buzzing all around now, but Zeke ignored them. Dani tried to, but she was tired and confused, and everything seemed to irritate her.

“Zeke, it's your turn,” she finally said.

He turned away from the edge of the boulder, his back to her.

She didn't relent. “Why would Quint Skinner be here?”

He was walking away from her, up the steep incline.

“Zeke—”

Looking back at her, he said quietly, “I don't know.”

She watched him climb up to the hemlock but didn't hear him as he vanished into the woods, leaving her standing alone in the wind.

M
attie sat in the window seat on the train, Nick dozing beside her. The peaceful, scenic ride along the Hudson River had always brought her comfort. Looking at her former husband, she ached for him, for he did indeed look every second of his ninety years. The physical signs of age didn't sadden her—the thinning white hair, the protruding veins, the brown spots, the wrinkles and sags—as much as the knowledge that he wasn't always going to be around. Likely enough, the bold, charming man who'd captivated her on the Cumberland River more than sixty years ago would die before she did.

And she wasn't ready. She'd never be ready.

He stirred. “What're you staring at?” he asked, sounding cranky.

“You. How long has it been since I told you I love you?”

“Decades.”

She smiled. “Well, I do, you know. I always have.”

“Fine way of showing it.” But he patted her hand. “I'm cold as a fish. Circulation stinks.” He sighed and settled into his seat, hardly moving. He seemed utterly spent after his long—and so far insufficiently explained—cross-country flight. “Don't you wish we had the sense fifty years ago that we have now?”

“What makes you think we have any more sense now? Nick, you haven't changed. If you had the energy, you'd still be chasing women.”

“No.” His watery eyes fastened on her, as searching and intense as they'd been when she'd stood with her valise on the riverbank so long ago, aching for him to take her with him. “I'd know I had the only woman I ever wanted, and fidelity wasn't too great a price to pay for her.”

Mattie was touched. Nick had never been particularly sentimental. “Oh, Nick, we've had a life together the only way we could. We were never meant to live all this time together under the same roof. It never would have worked. If you hadn't been anyone but who you are, I doubt I'd have kept you a part of my life all this time. And, you know, it wasn't all you.”

“You don't say.”

But Mattie was serious. “If you hadn't gambled and chased women, I'd have picked something else to gripe about, because I was meant to live on my own the way I have. I went from my father's house to yours…it was important to me to have a house of my own.”

Nick nodded, but she wasn't sure, in his exhaustion, he'd absorbed all she'd said. “Have you been happy?”

“For the most part, yes. Very much. I've come to rather enjoy being a screen legend of sorts. It would be ungrateful of me to complain.”

She held his hand; it was, indeed, awfully cold. She remembered well how warm he'd been in bed. They'd made love since their divorce. Even since his affair with her sister. Not often, but they'd accepted long ago that whatever bond existed between them—however else anyone might define or judge it—it was one that suited them, and would endure.

“And you, Nick?” she asked. “Have you been happy?”

He averted his gaze. “I've had some grand times—no question of it. But at what cost? Mattie, Mattie.” He coughed, looking pale and beyond tired. “I've made so many mistakes. I have so many regrets. Too many.”

“Nick, don't.”

“Oh, I know. I've done some memorable films. I don't deny that's important and satisfying. I've given some good times to people who needed a break from reality. But when it's all done, Mattie, when you're an old man and the Great Beyond is beckoning, what's any of that matter? I was—am—a poor father to my only son. My only grandchild doesn't trust me, with good reason.”

Mattie hated to see her devil-may-care ex-husband so tortured. “But they both accept you. Nick, of course we have regrets. Those who don't never stretched themselves, never took risks.”

He nodded, his eyes closed, the once-dark lashes almost nonexistent. “I'd planned a very different life for myself, Mattie,” he said in his sandpapery voice. “I didn't expect to end up an old man living on the largesse of my granddaughter.”

“Now, don't start being hard on yourself after all these years. You're too old for that. You can't change the past.”

“I should never have gone back to Cedar Springs.”

“Where would Naomi be if you hadn't? At the bottom of the Cumberland River, likely enough. Would your staying away have stopped Joe Cutler from heading north to tell me my father was dying? Where does the blame begin—or stop? I can blame my father for my repressive childhood, but how did he become such a difficult man? We can keep digging into the past for explanations and excuses, even understanding. You could blame your flaws on a murdered, legendary grandfather who remained an elusive fantasy to you. You re-created him in two of your greatest films, made him both real and unreal. But Nick, ultimately we each have to take responsibility for our own choices and actions.”

He looked half-asleep, but instinctively Mattie knew he was listening. “Nick,” she went on softly, “if you're going to assign blame, assign some to me as well. I can't get off scot-free. If I'd never left home—”

His eyes opened. “You had no choice.”

“Of course I did. Darling, if that day we met on the Cumberland was meant, then so was the rest of it.”

“Joe Cutler and Lilli?”

Mattie sank back and stared out the window, the sun glittering on the wide, still Hudson. Joe had died in battle. Lilli—who knew? Still facing the window, she said, “You can't think Joe was responsible for Lilli.”

Nick made no comment.

Her heart thumped, spreading pain through her chest; all she needed now was to drop dead of a heart attack. “Nick?”

“Someone knew about her role in
Casino,
Mattie. I was being blackmailed over it.”

Mattie felt as if she'd been stabbed. Turning to Nick, she saw he was deathly pale.

“I paid up to keep whoever it was quiet. Lilli couldn't stand the thought of her family finding out about her role in one of my pictures—about her dream of becoming a movie star. Amazing, isn't it? Hundreds of women would have done anything to get that role, and Lilli wanted to keep it secret, at least until she'd figured out if acting was really what she wanted in life. I guess when you think about it, hundreds of women would have liked to have been a Chandler heiress, too. The blackmail was amateurish—demands to have envelopes of cash left in Congress Park, that sort of thing. It just didn't seem dangerous, or I'd have insisted we go to the police.”

“You never told me.”

“I didn't think it was that significant.”

The train rocked slightly as it moved steadily north, and Mattie felt her stomach turn over as she realized she hadn't been the only one with secrets. “Did you tell Lilli?”

“No. She had enough on her mind.”

“Do you think—could it have been Joe?”

Nick's shoulders slumped. “I don't know.”

Lilli had always been compassionate and generous, Mattie thought, if sometimes dangerously blind to other people's faults. If she'd suspected Joe Cutler of blackmailing Nick, she'd have tried to help him—to save him from himself. He could simply have gotten in over his head, engaging in a harebrained blackmail scheme before he really got to know her. Mattie was sure his friendship with her daughter-in-law had been genuine.

Nick had closed his eyes, pretending to sleep. Mattie sat back, annoyed. From long years of experience she knew he was holding back on her. There was more he could tell her. She also knew, however, she couldn't torture from Nicholas Ulysses Pembroke one word he didn't want to tell her. Men, she thought, disgusted. They always spared women the wrong things. The truth she could handle. It was deceit she loathed.

But hadn't she deceived her own granddaughter?

“I suppose it would be convenient to blame everything on Joe since he's dead,” Mattie said, trying to control her impatience with Nick, with herself. “But would that account for why we're on this train heading for Saratoga right now?”

Nick answered with a badly faked snore.

“If you weren't so bloody old,” she said, “I'd give you a good kick.”

One eye opened. “You know, Matt, you always have been a hard-hearted old bat.”

“A good thing, or living with you would have killed me a half century ago.”

The train rocked and pressed on, and Nick settled back in his seat, and in a few more minutes his snores were no longer faked. Mattie sighed, wide awake. She wished she, too, could sleep. But that was impossible when all she could do—had done for the past few days—was to relive those days twenty-five years ago when she learned her father was dying and her daughter-in-law had disappeared.

“You got it bad, my friend.”

“Shut up, Sam.”

Sam grinned across from Zeke at a small table at a café on Broadway, drinking cappuccino. Zeke had ordered black coffee. “I only speak the truth.”

“Doesn't matter.”

“She's only half Chandler,” Sam said.

“Half is enough.”
We're from different worlds,
Joe had said about Sara Chandler. Zeke understood what he'd meant. “But that's not even the point. Dani is a distraction I don't need at the moment.”

“No doubt.”

“And she doesn't trust me,” Zeke added quietly, almost to himself. “She doesn't trust anyone right now but herself.”

“Can you blame her?”

Zeke checked his irritation, which was mostly with himself. After leaving Dani at Pembroke Springs, he'd worked hard to get his rage under control. What had Joe been doing in Saratoga four years
after
Lilli's disappearance? Why hadn't Zeke known? He was tangled up in a thousand threads with nothing to hold them together, nothing to make any sense or order out of them.

“Where is she now?” Sam asked.

“At the train station picking up Mattie and Nick.”

“Just what we need, a couple of old Hollywood types underfoot. Know why they're here?”

“No,” Zeke said. He had to get himself back on an even keel. But finding Dani taking on Quint with a rock had thrown him off balance. And Ira. The poor guy had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Quint could have taken them both out without working up a sweat. Of course, Dani's aim was pretty good….

Zeke pushed back his chair and stood up. “Quint's staying in a rented house not far from here. I went by earlier, but he wasn't home.”

“You leave a calling card?”

“I broke in and had a look around. He'll know.”

Zeke had considered tossing the place, but he'd found bunk beds in one bedroom and dinosaur sheets in the linen closet. The owners probably thought they'd been fortunate to rent to a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer.

“I'll find him,” Sam said.

“Thanks.”

“What about John Pembroke?”

Zeke threw a few dollars onto the table in the sunny restaurant, its festive atmosphere so different from his own mood. “I think he's relatively safe in the hospital. My bet is Quint took him out of the picture when he had the chance, or just didn't want Pembroke to see him up at the springs.”

Sam's eyes were hidden behind his sunglasses. “And Dani?”

“All my years in this business, Sam, and I've never met anyone—man or woman—so determined to get things done on her own, in her own way.”

“She's a Pembroke. She courts disaster.”

“Yeah, well, she can wait until I'm back in San Diego fishing.”

Sam scooped up Zeke's dollar bills. “Does that mean she's on her own?”

“No,” Zeke said, “it does not.”

As he left he heard Sam laughing.

John felt like a little kid when his parents walked into his hospital room, both looking rumpled and exhausted. But nobody pretended they'd gone to all the trouble of getting to Saratoga just for his sake.

“You look awful,” Nick said.

“It's all the dope they keep feeding me.”

Nick didn't look convinced. Mattie kissed her only child on the forehead. He might have been nine, except his mother had never been one to hover. “How are you, darling?”

“Getting there.” He nodded to his father. “I thought you said the trip east would kill you.”

“Almost did.”

Mattie scowled at him. “You're not ready for the glue factory yet, Nicholas Pembroke.” She straightened, effortlessly transforming herself from a solicitous mother into the independent, eccentric, tough woman who'd walked away from a stunningly successful Hollywood career. Her dark, still-beautiful eyes narrowed on her ex-husband. “Tell him, Nick. Tell him everything.”

Then she retreated to the waiting room, where Dani, discreet for once in her life, was keeping her distance.

Nick grumbled something about Mattie being more like her father than she'd ever admit.

“Tell me what?” John asked.