Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

She decided against fresh clothes and instead put on her sneakers and headed out in her jeans. She tore through her garden and out the back gate, moving fast over the familiar ground.

Ira was waiting for her in room 304. It was one of her favorites. She’d found the crazy quilt in a dusty antique shop in Vermont and had repaired it herself.

“Housekeeping came in to make up the bed,” Ira said, “and found it like this. Efficient bastard.”

Indeed. A duffel had been dumped out, its contents scattered. Dani noticed jeans, canvas pants, dark shirts. White-knight clothes. “This is Zeke Cutler’s room, isn’t it?”

Ira nodded. “Dani-” He sighed, running one hand through his corkscrew curls. “Look, I didn’t call the police because I don’t know what’s going on around here. This guy shows up. Your cottage is broken into. He drives you to the Chandler party last night. He comes in this morning at the crack of dawn. Leaves. Now we find his room tossed.”

“That about sums it up.” Dani balled her hands into fists, trying to maintain some semblance of calm even as she fought to get a decent breath. The small room suddenly seemed oppressive and airless. “I don’t know what’s going on, either, Ira.”

“If you want me to, I can handle this. I’ll leave you out altogether. But if this is personal-if I’m going to tread somewhere you don’t want me to tread…” He paused, his cockiness and irreverence nowhere in evidence. “You just tell me what you want me to do.”

Any residual sleepiness or fatigue vanished as Dani straightened, looking around the ransacked room. The mattress was off the bed, drawers dumped, linens heaped, bath crystals and salts and powders emptied. What had Zeke brought down on her head?

“You’ve called our own security people?”

“On their way.”

“Good. Let them deal with the police. I’ll deal with Zeke myself.”

Ira looked dubious. “You’re sure?”

“No.” She forced herself to meet Ira’s eye, to smile. “But it’ll be okay. Thanks, Ira.”

Before he could stop her, she left, heading back across the grounds to her cottage, where she showered and changed. Fifteen minutes later, she was on her way into Saratoga. She found a parking space in a public lot and walked over to the library, where, after some digging, she checked out a copy of Joe Cutler: One Soldier’s Rise and Fall.

Then she walked to Kate Murtagh’s small yellow Victorian house, on a pretty street off-well off-Union Avenue. Dani went around back and knocked on the door, because it was August in Saratoga and if Kate wasn’t catering some event, she was in her kitchen. She yelled that the door was open, and Dani went in.

The kitchen was bright, airy, functional and spotless, with open shelves, pots hanging from cast-iron hooks, stacks of pure white cotton towels and aprons, white cabinets and miles of countertop. Kate was decorating petits fours at her butcher-block table.

“Egad, Dani,” Kate said, putting down her frosting bowl, “you look like the whirling dervish. What’s up?”

“I need to know if you’ve found anything else out about Zeke Cutler.”

“Aha.” She wiped her hands on her apron and gestured to a chair across from her, but Dani didn’t sit down. “Well, for starters, you didn’t tell me the man’s a stud. I saw him with my own two eyes, and he-Hey, are you blushing?”

“It’s hot in here. Where did you see him?”

“Outside your grampy’s place last night. Told him not to pester you or he’d have me to deal with. Didn’t seem to bother him much. But as you can imagine, I’ve plumbed my sources for any information I can on the man.”

“And?”

“And I’ve come up with precious little beyond what I’ve already told you.”

“But you have something,” Dani said.

Kate sighed. “Yeah, but what about you? Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“I will, Kate-you know that. But right now I just don’t have time to go into all the boring details.”

“I can’t imagine that any details about you and our white hat would be boring. But before you whirl out of here, I will tell you what remarkably little I know.” She frowned at Dani. “Will you please eat a petit four or something and calm down?”

Realizing she’d been pacing, Dani did grab an unfrosted petit four and pop it in her mouth, but she didn’t even begin to calm down. She needed to find Zeke and get some answers. Maybe she’d wring his neck while she was at it. She wouldn’t think about his dark eyes and strong thighs. She’d just kick his sneaky butt out of her life. He had invaded her territory, her life, and she’d bet everything she owned he hadn’t begun to tell her what he was doing in Saratoga. And it wasn’t the kind of risky gamble three generations of Pembrokes had lost their shirts on. It was a sure bet.

“Have you talked to Mattie?” Kate asked quietly.

Dani shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Are you going to?”

She felt the weight of the book on Joe Cutler in her bag. She already suspected that Mattie-her own grandmother, the one person she’d always trusted and believed in without question-hadn’t told her the truth when she’d given no indication she knew Zeke. Maybe she hadn’t lied outright. But she’d held back, and that Dani found disturbing.

“As soon as I know more,” she said. “Zeke could just be using me to get to Mattie-for what reason I can’t imagine, except that she’s a reclusive, world-famous movie star.” She tried to control her impatience. “Look, Kate, I know I owe you an explanation, but-”

“But you’re going to start spitting blood if I don’t talk.”

“I’ll tell you everything, I promise.”

“Yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, would you like to know where our white hat’s sitting at the Chandler this afternoon?”

The weather at the Saratoga Course was dry, clear and warm, perfect for watching skinny-legged racehorses run around in circles. Zeke had borrowed a private box on the clubhouse balcony. By the sixth race of the afternoon, he’d drunk one large, lukewarm beer, watched all the people he cared to watch and decided that horse racing had to be more exciting if you knew what was going on. He didn’t. The people around him, however, clearly did. They seemed to be having a grand time for themselves.

The track’s shaded grounds were jam-packed, the fifty thousand or so who’d come to see the Chandler Stakes running the gamut from shabby pickpockets to the superrich in their straw hats and panamas. Zeke had already checked out the Chandler box. Sara and Roger were there with old Eugene and a few guests. He was quite sure none of them had seen him. He was good at not being seen when he didn’t want to be seen.

He had a decent view from his seat, but the backstretch was still a blur, and everything happened so fast that by the time he figured out which horse was which, the race was over. Most of the people around him had come prepared with binoculars and well-marked programs. Strategically placed monitors and an announcer helped make up for what Zeke couldn’t see or understand, but the truth was, he didn’t care which horse won any particular race. He was there for the atmosphere, for a sense of what drew people here year after year. It wasn’t just the racing, which was supposedly impressive. It was more-in his opinion, at least-the history of the place, its continuity, its sense of its own past. The graceful iron fences, wooden grandstand and clubhouse, the red-and-white awnings, the flowers and trees and fountains and ultragreen grass, the well-dressed crowd-they all provided a tangible link with a bit of America’s colorful past. Television couldn’t capture that feeling. Neither, Zeke had to admit, could it fully capture the breathtaking beauty, the awesome power and speed, of a dozen thoroughbreds thundering around one of the world’s great tracks.