Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

“What makes you think we have any more sense now? Nick, you haven’t changed. If you had the energy, you’d still be chasing women.”

“No.” His watery eyes fastened on her, as searching and intense as they’d been when she’d stood with her valise on the riverbank so long ago, aching for him to take her with him. “I’d know I had the only woman I ever wanted, and fidelity wasn’t too great a price to pay for her.”

Mattie was touched. Nick had never been particularly sentimental. “Oh, Nick, we’ve had a life together the only way we could. We were never meant to live all this time together under the same roof. It never would have worked. If you hadn’t been anyone but who you are, I doubt I’d have kept you a part of my life all this time. And, you know, it wasn’t all you.”

“You don’t say.”

But Mattie was serious. “If you hadn’t gambled and chased women, I’d have picked something else to gripe about, because I was meant to live on my own the way I have. I went from my father’s house to yours…it was important to me to have a house of my own.”

Nick nodded, but she wasn’t sure, in his exhaustion, he’d absorbed all she’d said. “Have you been happy?”

“For the most part, yes. Very much. I’ve come to rather enjoy being a screen legend of sorts. It would be ungrateful of me to complain.”

She held his hand; it was, indeed, awfully cold. She remembered well how warm he’d been in bed. They’d made love since their divorce. Even since his affair with her sister. Not often, but they’d accepted long ago that whatever bond existed between them-however else anyone might define or judge it-it was one that suited them, and would endure.

“And you, Nick?” she asked. “Have you been happy?”

He averted his gaze. “I’ve had some grand times-no question of it. But at what cost? Mattie, Mattie.” He coughed, looking pale and beyond tired. “I’ve made so many mistakes. I have so many regrets. Too many.”

“Nick, don’t.”

“Oh, I know. I’ve done some memorable films. I don’t deny that’s important and satisfying. I’ve given some good times to people who needed a break from reality. But when it’s all done, Mattie, when you’re an old man and the Great Beyond is beckoning, what’s any of that matter? I was-am-a poor father to my only son. My only grandchild doesn’t trust me, with good reason.”

Mattie hated to see her devil-may-care ex-husband so tortured. “But they both accept you. Nick, of course we have regrets. Those who don’t never stretched themselves, never took risks.”

He nodded, his eyes closed, the once-dark lashes almost nonexistent. “I’d planned a very different life for myself, Mattie,” he said in his sandpapery voice. “I didn’t expect to end up an old man living on the largesse of my granddaughter.”

“Now, don’t start being hard on yourself after all these years. You’re too old for that. You can’t change the past.”

“I should never have gone back to Cedar Springs.”

“Where would Naomi be if you hadn’t? At the bottom of the Cumberland River, likely enough. Would your staying away have stopped Joe Cutler from heading north to tell me my father was dying? Where does the blame begin-or stop? I can blame my father for my repressive childhood, but how did he become such a difficult man? We can keep digging into the past for explanations and excuses, even understanding. You could blame your flaws on a murdered, legendary grandfather who remained an elusive fantasy to you. You re-created him in two of your greatest films, made him both real and unreal. But Nick, ultimately we each have to take responsibility for our own choices and actions.”

He looked half-asleep, but instinctively Mattie knew he was listening. “Nick,” she went on softly, “if you’re going to assign blame, assign some to me as well. I can’t get off scot-free. If I’d never left home-”

His eyes opened. “You had no choice.”

“Of course I did. Darling, if that day we met on the Cumberland was meant, then so was the rest of it.”

“Joe Cutler and Lilli?”

Mattie sank back and stared out the window, the sun glittering on the wide, still Hudson. Joe had died in battle. Lilli-who knew? Still facing the window, she said, “You can’t think Joe was responsible for Lilli.”

Nick made no comment.

Her heart thumped, spreading pain through her chest; all she needed now was to drop dead of a heart attack. “Nick?”

“Someone knew about her role in Casino, Mattie. I was being blackmailed over it.”

Mattie felt as if she’d been stabbed. Turning to Nick, she saw he was deathly pale.

“I paid up to keep whoever it was quiet. Lilli couldn’t stand the thought of her family finding out about her role in one of my pictures-about her dream of becoming a movie star. Amazing, isn’t it? Hundreds of women would have done anything to get that role, and Lilli wanted to keep it secret, at least until she’d figured out if acting was really what she wanted in life. I guess when you think about it, hundreds of women would have liked to have been a Chandler heiress, too. The blackmail was amateurish-demands to have envelopes of cash left in Congress Park, that sort of thing. It just didn’t seem dangerous, or I’d have insisted we go to the police.”

“You never told me.”

“I didn’t think it was that significant.”

The train rocked slightly as it moved steadily north, and Mattie felt her stomach turn over as she realized she hadn’t been the only one with secrets. “Did you tell Lilli?”

“No. She had enough on her mind.”

“Do you think-could it have been Joe?”

Nick’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t know.”

Lilli had always been compassionate and generous, Mattie thought, if sometimes dangerously blind to other people’s faults. If she’d suspected Joe Cutler of blackmailing Nick, she’d have tried to help him-to save him from himself. He could simply have gotten in over his head, engaging in a harebrained blackmail scheme before he really got to know her. Mattie was sure his friendship with her daughter-in-law had been genuine.

Nick had closed his eyes, pretending to sleep. Mattie sat back, annoyed. From long years of experience she knew he was holding back on her. There was more he could tell her. She also knew, however, she couldn’t torture from Nicholas Ulysses Pembroke one word he didn’t want to tell her. Men, she thought, disgusted. They always spared women the wrong things. The truth she could handle. It was deceit she loathed.

But hadn’t she deceived her own granddaughter?

“I suppose it would be convenient to blame everything on Joe since he’s dead,” Mattie said, trying to control her impatience with Nick, with herself. “But would that account for why we’re on this train heading for Saratoga right now?”

Nick answered with a badly faked snore.

“If you weren’t so bloody old,” she said, “I’d give you a good kick.”

One eye opened. “You know, Matt, you always have been a hard-hearted old bat.”

“A good thing, or living with you would have killed me a half century ago.”

The train rocked and pressed on, and Nick settled back in his seat, and in a few more minutes his snores were no longer faked. Mattie sighed, wide awake. She wished she, too, could sleep. But that was impossible when all she could do-had done for the past few days-was to relive those days twenty-five years ago when she learned her father was dying and her daughter-in-law had disappeared.

“You got it bad, my friend.”

“Shut up, Sam.”

Sam grinned across from Zeke at a small table at a café on Broadway, drinking cappuccino. Zeke had ordered black coffee. “I only speak the truth.”