Tempting Fate (35 page)

Z
eke walked down a dirt road to a quiet stretch of the slow-moving, muddy Cumberland River. He went right up to the edge of the water. It was a warm, drizzly afternoon, and he saw two boys out in a canoe in the middle of the river, heard them laughing and fishing, not caring about the weather or, he hoped, anything else.

He remembered Joe taking him out here to show him the spot where Mattie Witt met Nick Pembroke.

“Can't you see it, Zeke? The two of them…”

Joe had howled with glee at the thought. That story was just the greatest thing to him.

Zeke lifted his pack off his shoulders and got out the simple container that held his brother's ashes. Joe had loved the river. He'd loved Tennessee and the people of their small town.

Stepping just into the water, Zeke lifted the top off the container. There were no accusations or excuses within his brother's ashes. No tales of heroics or cowardice. Just the remains of a man who'd died far from home.

Who'd died a hero to his men.

Zeke knew what he had to do.

Maybe people's ideas about his brother would change now that the truth was out, but maybe they wouldn't. Quint Skinner was dead, and Joe had been dead for a long time.

Zeke didn't care about what other people thought. He only cared about what his brother had been.

He took out a folded bandanna and wiped the rain from his forehead and the tears from his eyes, and then he wiped his fingers until they were perfectly dry.

And as the boys in the canoe disappeared around the bend, Zeke laid his brother to rest in the river he'd loved.

“A
kite,” Mattie Witt explained to her sister a week after she'd come home to Cedar Springs, “is a heavier-than-air object that requires lift—wind—for it to defy the forces of gravity. Now, contrary to popular opinion, there doesn't need to be a great deal of wind, as there isn't today. Here, I'll show you.”

With her back to the wind, she held the simple nylon kite up by its bridle. It immediately snapped into a flying position.

Mattie was delighted. “There, you see? Enough wind.”

Naomi dubiously eyed the kite and her sister. “Then we're in business?”

“You bet.”

They walked down West Main to the field behind the old military academy. Jackson Witt had forbidden them to play there when they were children. It was a perfect place to fly a kite. Naomi had taken a bit of convincing. She worried about catching a chill and old Doc Hiram coming by and thinking they'd lost their minds. Mattie had been her most persuasive. When Naomi came downstairs in a skirt and pumps and one of those plastic rain bonnets over her neatly coiffed hair, Mattie had withheld comment. She herself had on her favorite orange flight suit. Naomi said she looked like an escaped lunatic.

“It's rather cool out here,” Naomi said.

Mattie was sweltering. She gestured to the sweater she'd brought along and tossed onto the grass; it was one of Nick's castoffs. “Put that on.”

“Oh, Mattie, I couldn't. It's a man's sweater—”

“Then catch a cold.”

Clucking to herself, Naomi scooped up the sweater and picked off bits of grass before she put it on. It was even bigger on her than it would be on Mattie. She neatly turned up the sleeves. “I suppose it won't look too tacky from a distance.”

Mattie was getting the biggest kick out of her sister. They'd been together for a week, and Mattie felt as if they were kids again; and yet their relationship felt new at the same time. She couldn't explain it. They would fuss at each other and giggle and cry and argue about anything. That morning they'd gone all through breakfast debating whether Billy Cook and Pearl Butterfield had married, though Billy and Pearl both were dead now. Every night, Naomi dragged out scrapbooks and photo albums and told her sister about virtually every birth, death, marriage and divorce that had occurred in Cedar Springs since Mattie had left.

“Let's get this kite into the air,” Mattie said.

“Now, Mattie, you can't be running across this field as if you were ten years old. If you trip, you're likely to break a hip. At your age your bones must be brittle.”

Mattie loved the way Naomi said “your” age, as if she weren't in her seventies herself. “I'm not going to run. That's not an effective way to launch a kite.”

“Oh?”

She had Naomi's interest now. She came in closer. “If there's enough wind,” Mattie explained, “you can launch a kite from your hand. It's just a question of getting it above the ground-air turbulence until it soars. But there's not quite enough wind for that today.”

“So what do we do?”

“Well, you take the kite and walk downwind about fifty feet. I'll hold on to the line. When a gust hits the kite—you'll feel it—you let go. I do the rest.”

“I think I can do that.”

This was false modesty, Mattie knew. In her own way, Naomi was one of the most self-confident people Mattie had ever known. She took the kite and walked gingerly across the field, Nick's pilled sweater hanging loosely from her tiny frame.

“If the kite spins and dives,” Mattie yelled, “it's too light for the wind conditions. But I don't think that'll be the case.”

“We'll soon find out, won't we?”

Naomi stood on her tiptoes and held the kite up as high as she could, and when the gust came, she released it fast—as fast as Mattie would have—and her sister pulled the line. Naomi squealed and ran back to her. “Mattie, it's working! It's working!”

“Yes, yes!”

Mattie could feel the Tennessee wind at her back, Naomi laughing at her side, clapping her hands, as their kite rode the wind, and finally—just a speck of bright yellow in a clear blue sky—soared high above Cedar Springs.

O
n a blustery afternoon in late September, when the trees were tinged with bright reds and oranges, Dani eased herself into the hot, bubbling, slightly smelly mineral water in a deep tub in Ulysses's elegantly renovated bathhouse. Thousands of tiny bubbles clung to her skin. The feeling was downright erotic. Her body was buoyant in the highly mineralized naturally carbonated water, totally relaxed.

And yet her mind was spinning.

“Step one,” Kate had told her, “is to figure out what you want.”

That wasn't step one. She already knew what she wanted. She'd known from the moment she'd tried to bonk Zeke on the head with a Pembroke Springs Mineral Water bottle in her garden.

Step one was finding him.

She closed her eyes, trying to abandon herself to the soothing powers of the water. There was nothing to keep her at the Pembroke. The worst of the summer crisis had passed, and with it the rumors, the horror, the blazing headlines, the pity. Tactless as ever, Ira had claimed to be up to the challenge of having a body discovered on the premises of a luxury spa-inn of which he was manager. “It'll lend a certain cachet and naughtiness to the place,” he'd said. “As if it needs more.”

But he'd done his job, and the frantic phone calls from her marketing consultants and her bean counters had dropped off, not because of any dramatic improvement in her cash flow, but because Eugene Chandler had offered to have a look at her setup and she'd agreed. Her bean counters had had him over to their office—“A man of his bearing shouldn't have to endure your office, Dani”—and they'd gone over her companies top to bottom, inside and out. Her grandfather hadn't found anything he'd change from a purely business if not a personal standpoint. Personally he'd change a lot. But Dani wouldn't self-destruct anytime soon. Even Ira had been annoyingly reassured.

“I've been telling you that for months,” she argued.

“Yes, but you're half Pembroke. He's not.”

Her professional life remained full, busy and satisfying. It was her personal life that needed work. Living alone had lost its charm. Before Zeke, she'd been fine. Now, although she didn't feel incomplete and wasn't afraid or bored or unfulfilled, she would sit in her garden and wonder where he was, what he was doing, if he still cared. She'd think of how much she loved about him and imagine the possibilities of a life together with him. Was he, too, figuring out new meanings for the past? Trying to let his brother's life teach him something that he could take with him into his own life?

Suddenly Magda burst into the private, all-white salon room. “Up, up,” she said in her Russian accent, shaking out a heated white sheet.

“What's the matter? Have I been in here too long, am I going to shrivel up? Magda—”

“No need to panic. You have a visitor, that's all.”

Zeke.

Dani jumped out of the tub and into the towel, but Magda, tiny as she was, pushed her toward the cot and made her lie down, at least for a few minutes. Her skin was too overheated. She didn't want to faint, did she?

“Magda, who's out there panting to see me?”

“Well,” Ira said, “I wouldn't say I was panting.”

If she'd been in more than just a sheet, Dani would have strangled him. “This is not funny, Ira.”

He waved her quiet. “Sam Lincoln Jones is waiting at your cottage—says you may be a budding tycoon, but you make a rotten detective. First, however, I need to give you something.”

“Ira…”

“So impatient.” He handed over an envelope. “It's a plane ticket. We all pitched in here and over at the bottling plant to send you to California. You know, after a crisis it's sometimes polite of an owner to take a damn vacation and let people adjust.”

“You're a fine one to talk about what's ‘polite,'” Dani said, but she took the envelope. Indeed, inside was an airline ticket. “Ira, I can't let you guys pay for my airfare—Hey, it's to San Diego. Are you nuts? I can't—”

“Isn't San Diego Zeke's home base?”

“Yes, that's my point!”

“Mine, too. Sam will give you directions from the airport to wherever the hell Cutler's got himself squirreled away. The rest is up to you.”

“I smell a conspiracy.”

“You're the boss, kid, but you're also our friend.” Ira smiled at her, unrepentant. “We just want you to be happy.”

For the first time in twenty years Zeke had a dream.

He settled back in the pilot's chair of his boat and indulged himself.

Dani would bounce up onto his flybridge with her dark hair and dark eyes and sparkling smile. She'd be wearing one of her little dresses, maybe have her hair pulled back. She'd laugh when she saw him. He'd scoop her up and carry her down to his bunk where they'd make love until dawn.

It was a hell of a dream.

“Zeke?”

Her voice was always a part of it—the things she would say to him, the things he would say to her.

“You can put down the machine gun. It's me, Dani.”

He opened his eyes, and she was there on his flybridge, in a short fuchsia dress and fuchsia sandals. His imagination?

“There you are,” she said.

“Hello, Dani,” he answered, just in case she wasn't a mirage.

“No machine gun?”

“Nope. I'm retired. Out of the business. Think I'll spend the foreseeable future fishing.” Or carrying toddlers on his shoulders. Maybe both. But that was a part of his dream.

She shrugged. “Oh, you'll find something to do. White knights always do. I was afraid for a minute I had the wrong boat. Sam said to look for the oldest, ugliest boat out here—”

“Sam?”

“Well, yes. How else did you think I'd ever find you?”

Zeke sighed. “You weren't supposed to find me so easily.”

“It wasn't easy. By the way, Sam's a very nice man. He fell in love with Saratoga while he was recovering in the hospital.”

Zeke squinted, wondering if he'd had too much sun or too much George Dickel. Was he hallucinating? “What're you doing here?”

She squinted right back at him, as if wondering if he was the same man she'd met in Saratoga a month ago, had slept with and loved and cried with. She wrinkled up her nose, uncharacteristically unsure of herself. “I need a date.”

He started off his chair. A date? “Choking's too good for you. I think I'll just throw you into the bay—”

“No, I'm serious.”

He looked at her. How could he have fallen in love with such an exasperating woman? “So am I.”

Then she laughed that laugh of his dreams. How could she be real?

“Dani—”

“There's going to be a big gala celebration of Nick's ninetieth birthday in Beverly Hills on Saturday. It's being televised. Mattie's coming. It'll be her first public appearance in a million years. Pop's flying in from Tucson—well, you can imagine all the hoopla.”

Zeke just stared at her. She had to have been born to legends and scoundrels. An anonymous upbringing like his wouldn't have made her who she was. She'd have been someone else altogether, and he didn't want that. He wanted her.

“I dragged Kate to New York, and she helped me pick out a dress,” she chattered on. “It's by some fancy designer. Cost more than I've spent on clothes in the last ten years. No lie. Grandfather's picking up the bill. My Chandler grandfather. Nick's as broke as ever. Anyway, Grandfather said if I turned up in something out of a catalog, he'd disown me, not that he can, and Kate agreed that if I tried to use the money for a new roof on the bottling plant—”

“Dani,” Zeke said again.

She snapped her mouth shut. “What?”

“Why me?”

Brushing her hair back with one hand, she didn't answer right away. He knew then, with certainty, that he was asking her to take the biggest risk of all, one that had nothing to do with money or total dissolved solvents or proprietary bottles. One that had only to do with herself. And him.

“Because I love you.”

He slid off his chair and went to her, held her in his arms, felt the tension slide out of her. “Oh, Dani,” he whispered, “one day you'll know how much I love you.”

Because the bourbon hadn't conjured her up, and neither had the sun. She wasn't even a dream.

Dani—what they had together, what they could be together—was real.