Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

“Doesn’t matter.”

“She’s only half Chandler,” Sam said.

“Half is enough.” We’re from different worlds, Joe had said about Sara Chandler. Zeke understood what he’d meant. “But that’s not even the point. Dani is a distraction I don’t need at the moment.”

“No doubt.”

“And she doesn’t trust me,” Zeke added quietly, almost to himself. “She doesn’t trust anyone right now but herself.”

“Can you blame her?”

Zeke checked his irritation, which was mostly with himself. After leaving Dani at Pembroke Springs, he’d worked hard to get his rage under control. What had Joe been doing in Saratoga four years after Lilli’s disappearance? Why hadn’t Zeke known? He was tangled up in a thousand threads with nothing to hold them together, nothing to make any sense or order out of them.

“Where is she now?” Sam asked.

“At the train station picking up Mattie and Nick.”

“Just what we need, a couple of old Hollywood types underfoot. Know why they’re here?”

“No,” Zeke said. He had to get himself back on an even keel. But finding Dani taking on Quint with a rock had thrown him off balance. And Ira. The poor guy had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Quint could have taken them both out without working up a sweat. Of course, Dani’s aim was pretty good…

Zeke pushed back his chair and stood up. “Quint’s staying in a rented house not far from here. I went by earlier, but he wasn’t home.”

“You leave a calling card?”

“I broke in and had a look around. He’ll know.”

Zeke had considered tossing the place, but he’d found bunk beds in one bedroom and dinosaur sheets in the linen closet. The owners probably thought they’d been fortunate to rent to a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.

“I’ll find him,” Sam said.

“Thanks.”

“What about John Pembroke?”

Zeke threw a few dollars onto the table in the sunny restaurant, its festive atmosphere so different from his own mood. “I think he’s relatively safe in the hospital. My bet is Quint took him out of the picture when he had the chance, or just didn’t want Pembroke to see him up at the springs.”

Sam’s eyes were hidden behind his sunglasses. “And Dani?”

“All my years in this business, Sam, and I’ve never met anyone-man or woman-so determined to get things done on her own, in her own way.”

“She’s a Pembroke. She courts disaster.”

“Yeah, well, she can wait until I’m back in San Diego fishing.”

Sam scooped up Zeke’s dollar bills. “Does that mean she’s on her own?”

“No,” Zeke said, “it does not.”

As he left he heard Sam laughing.

John felt like a little kid when his parents walked into his hospital room, both looking rumpled and exhausted. But nobody pretended they’d gone to all the trouble of getting to Saratoga just for his sake.

“You look awful,” Nick said.

“It’s all the dope they keep feeding me.”

Nick didn’t look convinced. Mattie kissed her only child on the forehead. He might have been nine, except his mother had never been one to hover. “How are you, darling?”

“Getting there.” He nodded to his father. “I thought you said the trip east would kill you.”

“Almost did.”

Mattie scowled at him. “You’re not ready for the glue factory yet, Nicholas Pembroke.” She straightened, effortlessly transforming herself from a solicitous mother into the independent, eccentric, tough woman who’d walked away from a stunningly successful Hollywood career. Her dark, still-beautiful eyes narrowed on her ex-husband. “Tell him, Nick. Tell him everything.”

Then she retreated to the waiting room, where Dani, discreet for once in her life, was keeping her distance.

Nick grumbled something about Mattie being more like her father than she’d ever admit.

“Tell me what?” John asked.

Sighing, Nick sat on the edge of his son’s bed and told him that he was being blackmailed over Lilli’s role in Casino when she disappeared.

John listened without interruption. It was just one more thing his wife and father had shared that he hadn’t. Shut up in his office in New York, trying to do the right thing, giving Lilli the space to pull herself out of her grief, John had been of no use to her or anyone else. Lilli must have thought him a bore who just didn’t give a damn about her. Nick, on the other hand, could never be faulted for lacking interest in a woman’s troubles.

But it was far, far too late to condemn Nick for being who he was, and there was time yet to go on condemning himself.

“Mattie knew?” he asked.

Nick grunted. “Not until I told her on the train.”

“I’m surprised she didn’t throw you off. Maybe she’s mellowing.”

“Don’t count on it. Next she’s going to make me tell Dani.”

John’s head vibrated with pain that zigzagged right down to his broken ribs. “She’s right, Nick.”

“I know it.” He coughed, a wet, sloppy cough the by-product of which ended up in John’s wastebasket. His father was clearly exhausted but insisted on getting to his feet. “There’s something I neglected to tell even Mattie-I’ll be damned if I know why. Not to spare her, for sure. I guess I just don’t know what to make of it myself.”

“What?” John prodded.

“Joe Cutler came to see me shortly before he was killed. He was on his way home via California and stopped in.”

“What for?”

His father’s eyes were watery, with spots of yellow clouding the whites, but utterly sane. “He wanted to know if I’d ever figured out who was blackmailing me.”

“You didn’t, did you?”

“Hell, I thought it was Joe.”

John sat up, pain shooting through him. “Nick-”

“But it wasn’t. And now I keep wondering if maybe he figured out who it was-or something. I don’t know.”

“I’ll talk to Zeke Cutler,” John said.

“Yeah. One other thing, John. There was never anything between me and Lilli. Not even a glimmer. I know it’s been on your mind. She treated me like a father-in-law.”

“Whom she adored and respected.”

“She came to me because she wanted to try something new-to stretch herself. That’s all. When she turned up missing, she hadn’t made up her mind, as far as I know, about what she was willing to sacrifice to realize her dreams. John-I swear, I just wanted to make her happy.”

John reached for his father’s bony hand. “I know, Pop. We all did.”

Dani flopped down onto a chair at the umbrella table in her cottage garden, kicked off her sneakers and put her feet up. Ira had reported that Pembroke security was on the alert; they’d already escorted several uninvited reporters off the premises.

She unscrewed the top off a bottle of lime-flavored mineral water she’d grabbed ice cold from her refrigerator. Nothing made any sense. Her mother, her father, Mattie, Nick, Joe Cutler, Zeke, movies, Tennessee, blackmail-how could she ever hope to put all the pieces together?

It was hot and sticky even in her garden. She rolled up the hem of her shorts, noticing the grass and dirt stains. She must look terrible. She ought to turn Magda loose on her.

Ira, semirecovered from his encounter with Quint Skinner in the woods, had insisted on greeting the two film legends like royalty when Dani arrived at the inn with Mattie and Nick. If Ira hadn’t had such a rotten day, he’d probably have drummed up a red carpet and a couple of crowns. As it was, he’d waltzed them off to the former ballroom-where Nick’s grandfather was so famously born-for a candlelight dinner and oohing and aahing by the guests.

Mattie and Nick pretended not to be fazed, but Dani wasn’t fooled. They loved every minute of the attention they received.