Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

“Could Roger and Sara know anything and just not realize it?”

“It’s possible. I intend to ask.” His eyes clouded. “Danielle-I brought you something. I don’t know if it will make any difference to you, but-” Stopping midsentence, he reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a small, black leather volume; it looked old. “This is one of my mother’s journals. Her last, actually. The entries stop right as her three oldest children became ill with diphtheria and died. Lilli and Sara both read it when they were younger-I’d have given it to you sooner to read if I’d thought you were interested.”

Dani felt a stab of guilt. “Grandfather, I had no idea…”

He held up a hand. “I’m not criticizing. I’m merely explaining why I’ve waited until now to give this to you. Danielle, my mother and your great-great-grandmother-Ulysses’s wife-maintained a quiet, almost secret friendship.” Handing Dani the diary, he went on. “I’ve marked an entry I think might interest you right now, given what’s been going on in your life.”

Dani opened up to the marked page. Her great-grandmother’s handwriting was delicate and clear, faded with time. She looked up at her grandfather, but he waved her on. She read:

I saw Louisa today. Despite her tremendous financial woes, she has finally decided not to sell the gold key that Ulysses made to match the gate key to the pavilion at Pembroke Springs, where they met in a more optimistic time. However, neither can she bear to keep it. Ulysses caused her so much joy, and yet brought her so much suffering. She has chosen instead to bury it in the fountain inside the pavilion, as a testament to what I frankly do not know. Her ambivalence about her late husband, perhaps? At least she has made her decision, however little I understand it. I have promised to go with her tomorrow morning to help her dislodge the fountain tiles. Naturally I have told my husband none of this…

Dani pictured the two refined women smashing up the fountain in their ruffled tea dresses. She shut the volume. “Did Nick know about this?” she asked her grandfather.

“Not unless Lilli told him. I’m quite sure his grandmother never told him about having buried a large twenty-four-karat gold key. Otherwise he would have…” He deliberately didn’t finish.

But Dani did. “He’d have hocked it first chance he got.”

Eugene Chandler let her have the last word on that one. “I only wish Lilli had left us with a similar insight into her character as my mother did.” He became strangely quiet, his shoulders slumped. “It would be a blessing to know what happened to her before I pass on. I’ve always thought I wouldn’t have to die with her disappearance still unresolved.”

“I hope you won’t,” Dani said.

“But,” he went on awkwardly, “I would rather leave the past alone and not know than to see anything happen to you.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead. “It’s always a pleasure to see you, Danielle.”

She was too stunned to say goodbye. As she watched him leave, it struck her that despite his inability to know what to say to her-his seeming lack of emotion-her grandfather had suffered and had been changed by the long years of not knowing what had happened to his firstborn daughter. His inability to know what to say to Dani-his seeming lack of emotion-didn’t mean he didn’t care.

She remembered the day he’d marched down to her Greenwich Village apartment for the first and only time, not long after she’d gone into business for herself. He had demanded to know why, if she insisted on a career, didn’t she take a position with Chandler Hotels? She’d been mystified. Not only did he disapprove of Chandler women taking careers, and generally disapproved of her choice, but her father had embezzled from Chandler Hotels, betrayed his father-in-law’s trust. Betrayed his coworkers. How could her grandfather expect her to work with the same people her father had robbed?

“I’m a Pembroke, Grandfather,” she’d told him.

And he’d looked at her with his grave steel-blue eyes. “You don’t have to be.”

“What?”

“Drop the Pembroke from your name. In time people will forget who your father was. At least they’ll know you want no part of him-that you’re different.”

She’d thrown him out and had called a lawyer to begin the proceedings to disinherit herself. “Not a nickel!” she’d told him. “Not a nickel of his money do I want crossing my palm!”

And not a nickel had.

Quint Skinner handed John his pants. “Get dressed.”

John clutched the pants and tried not to look scared out of his wits.

“I’m not kidnapping you.” Skinner’s eyes were hard, his voice absolutely calm. “You’re coming of your own free will.”

“Now, why would I do that?”

“Because,” Skinner said with no small touch of drama, “I know where your daughter is.”

John felt a stab of fear. Dani. He swung his legs off the edge of his bed. A hell of a lot of help he’d been since coming to Saratoga. So far he’d had his head knocked in, and now he was getting himself snatched right out of his hospital bed. Where were Sam Jones and Zeke Cutler when he needed them?

“What do you want from me?” he asked the big red-faced man.

“Get dressed first.”

Swallowing groans of pain and refusing to whine, John pulled on his pants, which hung even more than usual. He’d lost weight in the past couple of days. Skinner thrust his shirt and sneakers at him. “No socks?” John asked cheekily.

He didn’t get even a glimmer of a smile from the stinking thug.

When he finished dressing, he and Skinner headed down the hospital corridor. “What if I faint?” John asked.

“Your daughter lives in a purple cottage on the Pembroke estate. Has a statue of Artemis in the garden.”

John felt his knees wobble under him.

Outside, Saratoga was enjoying beautiful weather, last night’s storms having washed out the clouds and humidity. Skinner shoved John into the front seat of a dark blue BMW. “Mind the noggin,” John said. “I presume it was your doing?”

Quint ignored him.

John sat very still, trying to hold off a wave of dizziness. He’d talked the doctors into springing him today. He wanted desperately to do something to get to the bottom of whatever was going on in Saratoga. He hadn’t had being kidnapped in mind. He looked at the solid man beside him. “I know who you are, you know.”

Quint nodded. “That stupid book on Joe Cutler fixed that for me. There’s no going back once you’ve lost your anonymity.”

Despite his appearance and manner, the man wasn’t stupid. John vowed to keep that in mind. “At least you had it to lose. I never did myself. Anyway, I don’t recognize you from your book. You tried to interview me in New York before I was nailed for embezzlement. Remember?”

The placid expression didn’t change. “I remember.”

“You were fresh out of the military, trying to launch a journalism career by digging out a story on my mother. Your angle was unusual. You’d served with Joe Cutler and figured you’d compare the Witts and the Cutlers of Cedar Springs, their different destinies. Only you never wrote the piece.”

“You wouldn’t talk to me.”

John grinned. “I was still noble in those days.”

They’d come to a light on Broadway. Quint was a careful driver, confident. He reached over and popped open the glove compartment, pulled out a wrinkled paper bag. He dropped it onto John’s lap. “Take a look inside.”

He did so. The dizziness from his head injury came in waves. As he stared into the bag, it threatened to inundate him.

Inside the bag were two gate keys, one brass, one gold.

“You took these from my daughter,” John said hoarsely.