Tempting Fate (34 page)

But Roger wasn't biting. “We have to go now. Drop your gun, please, Danielle. It's not going to do you any good. I'm an excellent shot. I've already shot two men today, and if I have to, I'll shoot you right here on your grandfather's front porch. I'll get away with it, Danielle. You know I will.”

He was supremely confident. Her eyes on him, Dani squatted to lay her gun on the floor. Zeke couldn't be hurt. He couldn't be dead. She needed him right now and he…

He was on the porch steps behind Roger.

Dani only barely glanced at him, not wanting to give away his presence. She'd never met anyone so tough who could move so gracefully and silently. Was it his shoes?

I'm losing it.

Oh, Mama, Mama…

“Sara,” Roger said gently, “put the cat down, dear. We need to go. I'm taking you to the springs, to Lilli.”

Dani still had one hand on her gun. If she let go, she'd have no chance to stop Roger, to protect herself.

He pointed his own gun at her. It looked expensive and bigger than hers. “Nice and slow, Danielle.”

Zeke was on the top step, not two feet behind Roger.

His dark eyes held hers.

She knew what he wanted her to do. Not to give up. Not to turn her life over to him.

To trust him.

As he, now, was trusting her.

She let go of her gun so that Roger would think, for a split second, that he had her completely under his control.

It was all Zeke needed.

He grabbed Roger's gun hand and jerked it up and to the side, away from Dani and Sara. The gun clattered to the porch floor. Dani dived for it, but there was no need. When she scrambled to her feet, Zeke had Roger pinned face-first to the porch column, his arm twisted behind him at a painful angle.

“You had Quint kill my brother,” Zeke said in a low, hard voice.

“No! Quint didn't kill him—”

“He set him up. Amounts to the same thing.”

“What would you have done in my place? Joe gave me a month to come clean about Lilli. He left me no choice! Don't you understand? I would have lost everything.”

Zeke was eerily calm. “Quint knew about the picture Joe took. He recognized the key Dani found and came to Saratoga, stole it, started to look at things in a new light and figured you'd used him. So he decided to try to make things right. You found out and you killed him.”

“I offered him a fortune—”

“He only wanted justice.”

At that moment the police arrived, followed by a taxi that barely came to a stop before Dani saw her father leap out, gauze and adhesive tape trailing from his head. Then the Chandler limousine slid up to the curb.

Sara calmly pushed the cat off her lap, demurely picked a few white hairs off her skirt, leaned over and stretched so that she could reach the Pembroke Springs security guard's gun.

Dani got to her before her aunt could shoot her husband dead.

D
ani joined her grandmother in the garden behind her cottage. It was dusk. The questioning by police, the media, was over. Mattie had found an old kite and spread it out on the teak table, with scissors, a stapler, a jackknife and some twisted nylon line. She had on her orange flight suit, and Dani smiled at this woman she had always adored. “You've always been good with your hands,” she said.

“My mother's doing. She taught me how to knit, crochet, tat, quilt, do cutwork. All those ladylike skills. I was supposed to teach Naomi after Mother died, only I never did.”

Dani sank into a chair. She was barefoot, exhausted but not so overwhelmed anymore. Just damn tired. “Sara said that the afternoon and evening Mother spent with you had made her realize that we were all a part of who she was and that she could never give us up. Nick had let her go after a dream. You helped her to discover for herself whether or not it was a dream she wanted to make come real.”

Mattie had tears in her eyes; it occurred to Dani that she'd almost never seen her grandmother cry. “So did Joe Cutler.”

“He was a survivor, too. You have an ability to carry on, Mattie, that I…” She shut her eyes a moment, pulling herself together. It would be ridiculous to fall apart now. “That I hope to discover in myself.”

“You will,” her grandmother said with confidence.

Dani opened a bottle of Pembroke Springs Mineral Water, now tangibly and forever linked with her mother, as the Chandler Stakes had been. She wondered if she finally understood what her mother's dream of singing and dancing had been about. Her frustration and searching in the months after her own mother's death. Had Lilli simply been discovering her own ability to carry on?

“What about Zeke?” Mattie asked softly.

“I've known him such a short time—it's been a whirlwind.” Dani tucked her knees up under her chin; she rarely discussed her love life with anyone, even this knowing, kind woman who'd helped raise her. “I never thought I'd fall for someone the way I have him.”

Mattie smiled. “I felt the same way about myself some sixty years ago.”

Zeke had been through so much in his life. At the police station, trying to explain the past days, Dani had felt his strength of character, even as the sorrow seeped into her until she physically ached. There was no middle ground now between death and abandonment. Her mother was gone forever. But Zeke had lost a father and a mother and a brother and had worked in a field of loss and danger. He'd suffered and struggled and become strong.

“Where is he now?” Mattie asked.

“At the hospital with Sam Jones.”

“Are you going to go to him?”

Dani hesitated. If she asked him, Zeke would suffer for her. It would be so easy to let him. To lose herself. “No,” she said, but added, “not yet.”

Before Mattie could argue, Nick burst into the garden from the kitchen. He looked scrawny and ancient and very full of himself. Mattie asked him if he'd hunted up a poker game.

“Nope,” he said. “Hamburgers.”

“Hamburgers?”

“I have eaten enough nuts, seeds, pasta, grains, fruits and vegetables to last me the rest of my life, be that two more hours or another century. Found a place that makes hundred-percent-beef hamburgers and delivers. They'll be here in ten minutes. With french fries and chocolate shakes. And pickles,” he said. “Salty pickles.”

Mattie was incensed. “If you drop dead on me—”

Nick grinned. “At least it'll be with meat in my stomach.”

Zeke paid the tab for his room at the Pembroke and cleared out. He thought Ira looked glad to have him on his way. But before he left the grounds, he stopped at the rose garden. It was almost dark. A small sign warned him not to pick any roses. He did anyway, using his jackknife. Six in six different colors.

“The thing about my daughter is this,” John Pembroke had told him from his hospital bed when Zeke had stopped in after visiting Sam, who'd emerged from surgery in good shape. “She likes to have a challenge. Something comes to her on a silver platter, she doesn't know what to do. Doesn't trust herself with anything easy.”

An unusual woman, Danielle Chandler Pembroke.

Zeke would never forget how courageous and gentle she'd been with her aunt and Eugene Chandler. Before anyone—him, the police, her father—could react, Dani had quietly taken the gun from Sara's hand. Later, she'd stayed close to her shattered grandfather.

“I need you, Grandfather,” she'd told him, and it was what he'd needed, just to hang on.

Apparently Roger had planned to take Sara and Dani back up to Pembroke Springs to kill them, blaming what he could on Quint and what he couldn't on his wife. Accepting his own culpability wasn't something of which Roger Stone was even remotely capable. Quint had robbed Dani, attacked Ira, snatched John. But it was Roger who'd stumbled on John in the woods and nailed him, Roger who'd tried everything he could to keep tabs on Quint and find out what he was doing in Saratoga, to stop him from uncovering the truth about Lilli and Joe. Roger had used Quint, and in the end had killed him.

“I should have guessed years ago,” John said, shaking his head with regret. “The connection between Skinner and Roger was under my nose, and I missed it.”

“How could you have known?”

John looked pained. “Quint tried to interview me. Roger found out. He must have worried about what else Joe could have told Skinner. Roger used him,” John said. “Not long after I turned Quint down for an interview, I was framed for embezzling.”

“Framed? Why didn't you fight?”

He shrugged. “It was airtight. I didn't have the foggiest idea who'd done it to me—or even if it might have been just some god-awful mistake someone made. But Roger and Eugene condemned me right off the bat. I knew I couldn't win. I thought—hell, I don't know. I guess I thought Lilli might come back to me if I became a good Pembroke scoundrel.” He was silent a moment. “But she was already dead.”

Walking back to his car, Zeke stopped a delivery van with the name of some Saratoga hamburger joint emblazoned on its side. He got the guy to take his six roses and give them to Dani Pembroke. “Tell her that if she wants to shoot me out of the saddle, she'll have to find me first.”

He'd give her a month to track him down. It'd be a challenge for her.

The woman had to figure out for herself that he didn't come on any silver platter.

T
he temperature had dropped to a tolerable one hundred degrees when John arrived back in Tucson.

His apartment, shut up for two weeks, was sweltering and smelled bad. His ungodly spider had taken over his bathroom. His living area was scattered with the pages of a manuscript he knew now he'd never finish. The historians could have the last word on Ulysses Pembroke's life.

John would write his memoirs of growing up as the only child of his lunatic, famous, impossible mother and father.

His trip to Saratoga had cleaned him out. There was a letter from the IRS in his mailbox. He needed money, fast.

Looking at the squalid conditions of his life, he wondered why he hadn't taken his father-in-law's offer to return to Chandler Hotels. The job would have meant moving back to New York. He'd be closer to Dani and Mattie. His daughter certainly could use all the moral support she could get. After giving her mother a proper burial next to Claire Chandler in the family plot, Dani had rolled up her sleeves and tackled the problems endemic to the kind of publicity she, the Pembroke and Pembroke Springs had received in the past days. On top of having her mother's body turn up after twenty-five years on her property and a murderer in the family, it turned out Roger Stone had hated her guts and floated rumors of her impending self-destruction. Apparently he'd been terrified Eugene would succeed in bringing Dani back into the fold, make her head of Chandler Hotels. Roger had never felt secure; he could never really be a Chandler himself.

John thought it'd be nice to be close to his mother and daughter.

Dani hadn't asked him to stick around, but she'd kissed him at the airport, slipped him a couple hundred bucks and told him she loved him—she who'd never been open about such feelings. That was enough. More than he deserved, for certain.

And he'd already told Eugene no. Even now he couldn't explain why.

He turned up the air conditioners as high as they'd go, opened a Dos Equis and cleaned out his refrigerator. Then he got down on his hands and knees and gathered up the scattered fragments of his manuscript.

Opening another beer, he sank into his lumpy couch and opened up an old photo album. Right there on the front page was his favorite picture, of the five of them together: Nick, Mattie, Lilli, Dani, himself. They looked happy.

They'd
been
happy.

He was still staring at the picture when someone pounded on his front door. “Yeah, coming.”

A troop of neighborhood kids trailed into his apartment. They carried fresh tortillas, pots of beans, a big salad and a dozen eggs, all from their mothers, who'd heard he was back in town and were worried he didn't have any food.

He was thanking them profusely when he sensed the foreign presence at his feet. Standing rock-still, he looked down. There was the hairy little bastard. A few of these let loose on the streets of New York City, he thought, and every smarmy New York cockroach would head for the Hudson River. For a change, he had on shoes. If he moved fast and stomped hard, death would be quick and sure, if not neat.

The spider scampered toward the toilet. John let him go.

The kids howled with laughter. “Hey, Johnny,” one impertinent urchin said, “we sure missed you.”

He grinned. “I missed you, too, kid.”