Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

“I have only one request to make of you,” his mother said to him on her deathbed. “Promise me you won’t make the same mistakes your grandfather did. Don’t let your good intentions be responsible for trapping anyone else, for inflicting pain on anyone else, especially those you love.”

He’d promised. He’d adored his mother, had been shattered by her illness and premature death. And he’d always been very good at making promises. He just wasn’t very good at keeping them.

He’d leave the chair to Dani in his will.

He couldn’t be thinking about death now. He had to concentrate on the present.

And decide whether he should try to get hold of John at the Tucson airport and tell him the rest.

All of it.

He laid his head back and closed his eyes. His chair had seemed larger in recent years, but he’d finally admitted it was the same size: he had shrunk. He was ancient, for the love of God. He might yet live to a hundred. And what did he have to show for his long life? An unforgiving ex-wife. A son he’d failed. A granddaughter who treated him like a charity case. Hell, he was a charity case. And a few well-regarded movies- The Gamblers , Tiger’s Eye , Casino. He’d lived too long and had too many forgettable movies, too many dry years and too much bad press to be admired the way people admired Mattie Witt.

Yeah, well, what was a reputation? Glorified gossip. Not the sort of thing in which one took great comfort a month before one’s ninetieth birthday.

And he had his mistakes to show, too.

Using his cane, he rose slowly. Twenty years ago the cane had been a dapper affectation, but now it was an unfortunate necessity. He was thin and stooped, and sometimes when he looked in the mirror, he wondered who the hell that scrawny old fart was looking back at him. His black hair had turned completely white, and what was left of it was so thin he seldom had to comb it. His eyes, veined and weak, had a tendency to bulge. He hadn’t asked the doctors why. Didn’t want to know. His crepey skin sagged on his brittle bones. He supposed he ought to be grateful he still had all his faculties: he could recall every asinine thing he’d done and said in the past century.

And yet there were times, especially on quiet, warm nights, when he yearned to be, if only for a moment, the irresistible cocky young man he’d been decades ago, when he’d stumbled upon Mattie on the banks of the Cumberland River.

“God willing, you’ll live a long life,” she’d told him many times, and she’d never meant it kindly.

He crept into the kitchen, pulled open his refrigerator and found a bottle of Pembroke Springs Mineral Water. Dani sent him a case every couple of months. With a shaking hand, he unscrewed the cap and drank straight from the bottle, the cold, effervescent water dribbling down the sides of his chin. It tasted as it always had, from the first day he’d tried it as a boy almost a century ago: clean and crystal clear, slightly earthy, as if he were taking in a little of the Adirondack Mountains with every sip. Maybe he could blame his longevity on a boyhood spent drinking this stuff.

He set the empty bottle on the counter and belched.

Consequences, he thought. He’d always hated facing consequences.

If you make a promise to your dying mother you break time and time again, you stand to endure a lifetime of guilt. If you screw another woman while you’re married to someone else-someone who’s a part of your soul-you stand to lose her. If you spirit a sad, tortured young woman away from her abusive father and husband for a summer of freedom, you stand to set into motion a series of events over which you and she have no control.

Nick sagged against the refrigerator, trying not to remember Joe Cutler. If Joe hadn’t come north to fetch Mattie back to Cedar Springs to see her dying father…if he’d understood that Mattie could never go back…

Unlike her younger sister, Naomi Witt Hazen, whom Nick, too, had loved. “I’ll go back home and do what I have to do,” she’d told him after the heat of their long-ago summer affair had expired and they’d known they’d gone as far as they ever would together. “But my father and husband will never have the same hold over me as they once did. I’m free.”

Nick banged his cane against the refrigerator and wished the memories-a century of them-would just go away. Sometimes he’d rather be a drooling old man in a nursing home.

He should have known twenty-five years ago one was never finished with a blackmailer.

If Saint Mattie hadn’t told Dani about the Cutler boys’ trip to Saratoga the summer her mother went missing, Nick hadn’t told anyone about the nasty, pathetic blackmail letters he’d received while filming Casino. Someone-he’d never known who-had found out about his secret deal with Lilli to let her play the minor role of the singer. He’d never expected that one scene, his daughter-in-law’s one performance, would take over the movie the way it had, to set its tone, deepen its meaning, make itself not just accessible to its audience, but a part of them. But he’d promised her he would keep her identity a secret. If she wanted the world-her family-to know, she could be the one to tell them. It was one promise he’d kept, until it became moot when Casino was previewed and a critic recognized Lilli Chandler Pembroke. Nick admitted everything.

But he’d never mentioned the blackmail.

The scheme had been pitiful, inept. A few hundred dollars here, a thousand there. He’d received a letter threatening to expose Lilli’s role if he didn’t pay up. So he’d paid up. He hadn’t told Lilli what was going on; she’d had enough on her mind. And a couple of days before her disappearance, the blackmail had stopped.

He supposed he should have gone to the police, at least after Lilli disappeared. But he’d wanted to protect her, wanted to keep the notoriety and nastiness, the cheapness, of blackmail from being tied to her. The blackmailer had never threatened her-the letters had never even hinted that any harm would come to her-and had been directed to Nick, not to Lilli. As far as he knew, she had no idea he was being blackmailed over her role in Casino.

As far as he knew.

What if she had known? What if she had been blackmailed herself? She’d had a hell of a lot more money than Nick ever did.

And what if the blackmailer had been Joe Cutler? Or his then thirteen-year-old brother, Zeke? Or both of them?

The doorbell was ringing. Nick couldn’t have said for how long. As he shuffled back to the front room, he considered that the one thing-the only thing-he could reliably do these days was to die. Just drop dead like an old dog. And yet his death would accomplish nothing.

He would still have sent his son to Saratoga without all the facts.

When he opened the door, a strongly built black man nodded to him. “Mr. Pembroke? Sorry to bother you. My name’s Sam Lincoln Jones. I’m an independent security consultant.”

“You work with Zeke Cutler,” Nick said. Over the years he’d kept track of Joe Cutler’s little brother.

Jones hid any surprise. “I’d like to talk with you, if I may.”

“About what?”

“About what you’ve been up to lately.”

Nick grinned. “Nice try, my friend. Zeke Cutler sent you to find out what I know about a certain gold key my daughter-in-law was wearing the night she disappeared.”

“Which is?”

“Not a damn thing.”

John hitched a ride to the Tucson airport from a skinny kid who’d stopped in the convenience store and mentioned he was headed in that direction and paid for his ticket to Albany, New York, with the emergency traveler’s checks he kept on hand. With elderly parents, he felt compelled to have airfare available at all times-something that would only disgust Nick and Mattie, who apparently thought they’d never die. Or didn’t give a damn if they did. John had given up on ever truly understanding his famous mother and father.