Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

“What if you do choose to fight?”

“Do so with the sole purpose of getting away. Don’t worry about apprehending or defeating an attacker. Your safety should be your only concern. If you do use violence, use it only as a last resort, with authority, and never halfheartedly.” His voice, he realized, was quiet, intense, controlled. It was the voice that often convinced people he meant business. Dani, however, didn’t look convinced or intimidated, only slightly dubious, as if he just might be pulling her leg. “Again, the purpose of any violence is to debilitate your attacker long enough to make your escape.”

“And you give your clients tips on appropriate types of violence?”

“I do.”

Their dinners arrived, Zeke’s lasagna hot and delicately flavored, a nice counter to his concession-stand fare. Before Dani could ask him how to poke a guy’s eyeballs out with her car keys, he said, “I saw the book on my brother on your kitchen counter.”

Her face paled just a little. “Kate told me about it.”

He nodded.

“I haven’t read it yet. Should I not bother?”

“If you’re asking me if I believe what Quint Skinner wrote about my brother, all I can tell you is that his accuracy has never been challenged.”

She stabbed a twist of red pasta with her fork. “Accuracy and truth aren’t always the same thing. Anyway, I only got the book out because I wanted to know more about you.” She quickly added, “About what your appearance in Saratoga has to do with me.”

“Dani-”

“I’m sorry about your brother.”

“He’s been gone a long time.”

“Does that matter?”

He shook his head, hearing Joe’s laugh. “No, it doesn’t.”

“A lot of people think I should be over my mother’s disappearance by now,” Dani went on softly, “but you never get over something like that. You carry on, and you live your life, enjoy it, but that loss stays with you. Maybe it would be wrong if it didn’t.”

In the candlelight he saw the faint lines at the corners of her eyes and the places where her lipstick had worn off, and the slowly fading bruise on her wrist. He reached across the table and touched his thumb to her lower lip. She didn’t look at him.

“You’re not what I expected to find in Saratoga,” he said.

Her eyes reached his, and he saw her swallow, but she didn’t speak. And he knew what he had to do. Reaching into his back pocket, he withdrew the photograph of Mattie Witt and Lilli Chandler Pembroke in their red-and-white balloon twenty-five years ago.

He handed it to Dani. “My brother sent this to your grandmother’s younger sister in Tennessee before he died. It’s why I’m here.”

Dani stared at her mother’s beautiful smile and the gold gate key hanging from her neck. “Zeke…”

He rose, his meal barely touched. “I’m sorry. Take your time. Get your head around this. Talk to your family.” He gave her a hint of a smile. “You know where to find me.”

“Room 304,” she said quietly.

But she was pale and sat frozen in her seat, and Zeke threw down some money on the table and headed out, overhearing people chatting about wine, fresh pasta and horses.

Dani found her father lying on the double bed in the second upstairs bedroom, smoking a cigarette on the soft, worn quilt. He looked wide awake. “It’s unsafe to smoke in bed, you know,” Dani told him.

“No chance of me falling asleep, I assure you.” He sat up, ashes falling down his front, and tossed the half-smoked cigarette in a nearly empty glass of water. “I’ve stunk up the place, haven’t I? If it’s any consolation, I don’t smoke nearly as much as I used to. It’s-Dani…what’s wrong?”

She knew she must look awful-pale, drawn, as if she’d been seeing ghosts, which, in a way, she had. She could have stared all night at the picture Zeke had given her. She’d tucked the picture in her handbag and paid for dinner, and she’d debated running after Zeke and asking him to have that talk now. To get him to tell her everything he knew about her mother, the key. About her grandmother.

She wanted, too, his reassuring presence.

A dangerous man on so many levels, she thought.

She’d gone instead to find her father.

“Nothing’s wrong,” she told him. “What were you thinking about just now?”

He shrugged, looking awkward. “Myself, your mother. You.”

“I guess we could have made things easier on ourselves and each other over the years.”

“I guess we could have.” He settled back against the pillows, looking older than Dani remembered. He’d always seemed so vibrant, such a devil-may-care scoundrel. “When your mother and I married, I was so thrilled at having extricated myself from the force of Mattie and Nick’s legend-even that old cretin Ulysses’s-that I never…” He exhaled, shaking his head. “I should have been more sensitive to your mother’s need to rebel, perhaps to become something of a legend herself.”

“What could you have done?”

“Listened.”

“Did she ever try to talk to you?”

He didn’t answer at once. Then slowly he shook his head. “What good would it have done? That summer she disappeared-it was just eight months after her mother had died, and I blamed her unhappiness, her restlessness, on Claire’s death. I wanted to give her time to grieve, give her space. She didn’t talk to me about her troubles, and I didn’t ask.” He stretched out his bony legs; Dani saw that he had a small hole in the toe of his sock. “So she went to Nick.”

“You never guessed he’d put her in Casino? ”

“I had no idea. None. He said he did it because she was good, but I think he understood her need to go beyond what her mother had done with her life, to take a risk.”

“Nick thinks everyone has a capacity for risk. Pop, we can’t blame her for her choices or her desires. She had a variety of pressures on her. She did her best.” Dani’s voice cracked, but she pressed on. “So did we.”

John looked at his daughter. “Do you believe that?”

“It’s been a long time coming, but, yes, I believe it.”

“I wish I knew what happened to her.”

“I know, Pop.”

He nodded, patting her hand. “I know you do, kid. I like to think an answer-any answer-would be better than not knowing. But it’s been so long. Eugene hasn’t hired one of his private detectives in years. And we’ve carried on, you and I.” He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “For a while after the embezzlement and my first experiments with gambling and globe-trotting, I wondered if she might come back. I thought I was becoming more of the kind of man she wanted. A rakehell, a real Pembroke.”

“But she didn’t come back,” Dani said, aware of the twittering of birds in the meadow outside and the sudden chill in the air.

Her father shook his head. “No.”

She squeezed his hand, remembering how they used to walk everywhere together in New York, before Eugene Chandler caught him stealing money from him. There was no getting around it; her father had let her grow up without him. And, if she were somehow, miraculously, still alive, so had her mother.

“Pop,” she said hoarsely, “I need to show you something.”

She handed him the picture Zeke had given her and watched his hand tremble as hers had a short time ago.

“You knew about the key, didn’t you?” she asked.

“Dani…”

“It’s the same one I found on the rocks-it matches the key to the pavilion at the springs. I think whoever robbed me was after those keys.”

Her father’s face had paled, grayed, aged; she felt guilty. “Dani, don’t do this to yourself.”

“And this morning Zeke’s room at the inn was tossed-searched, I think, for this photograph. It’s why he’s here. Pop, his brother had this picture. How? And how did the key end up on the rocks?” She was talking rapidly now, firing off questions, not stopping even to breathe. “How did Mother get it? Who took the picture? How did Joe Cutler get his hands on it?”