Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

“Yep. And I didn’t hurt her as much as she keeps making out.” He shrugged, matter-of-fact. “Not as much as I could have, anyway.”

John clutched the bag. “You son of a bitch.”

“Save it. I’m not in this to get you people to like me.”

No kidding, John thought, annoyed now as much as afraid.

Skinner glanced at him and grinned. “You’d like to smack me one, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d like to do more than that.”

“Well, you’ll just have to wait. Joe found the gold key when he was up here when your wife disappeared. He told me. We were pals, you know?”

He waited, seeming to want John to respond. So he did. “Fine way you had of showing it.”

“People read the book wrong. I wasn’t condemning him. I was just-never mind.”

His knuckles turned white as he gripped the steering wheel; the man, John thought, definitely had his own agenda. But what was it? He asked again, “What do you want from me?”

“There are a ton of gates on your little girl’s property. I checked.”

His little girl. John shut his eyes, fighting nausea and dizziness and the feeling-the horrible dread-that he was about to fail his daughter again.

“I can’t risk making a mistake. So you’re going to show me which gate those keys unlock.” Quint spoke as if he had no doubt that was exactly what John would do.

“And if I don’t?”

“I’ll make your daughter show me.”

Zeke had too many theories.

He walked through the elegant gaming room on the second floor of the Canfield Casino Museum in Congress Park. The decor was high Victorian, lavish, heavy, dark. The thick, patterned carpet absorbed his footsteps as he checked out the faro table, which looked relatively innocuous under an ornate chandelier. He tried to imagine Dani’s two great-great-grandfathers-robber baron Ambrose Chandler and gambler Ulysses Pembroke-placing their bets. Maybe it was Jackson Witt’s influence on the culture of Cedar Springs, but Zeke had never seen the attraction of gambling.

On his way out he stopped at the glass-fronted display case in the hall.

Beatrix Chandler smiled at him from the grainy photograph taken a few days after her marriage to hotel magnate Ambrose Chandler. She was fair and pretty and just nineteen. She and Ambrose would have four children. Three would die of diphtheria. Money or no money, it wasn’t as if the Chandlers hadn’t faced tragedy in their lives.

Squinting, blocking out all sound around him, Zeke studied another photograph, this one of Ulysses and Louisa Pembroke in the pavilion at Pembroke Springs just before his bottling plant had gone bust. In small print the caption stated that the shy judge’s daughter and the notorious rake had first met in the pavilion. Was that why, of all the gold keys legend says she sold, Louisa Caldwell Pembroke hadn’t sold the gold key to that particular pavilion? How had it ended up back there for Joe to find decades later? And then end up on the cliffs for Dani to find twenty-five years after that?

Too many theories to fit too many facts, Zeke thought.

He’d hooked up with Sam in his nondescript car outside Quint Skinner’s little rented house last night and discussed the possibilities.

“What about your ex-heiress?” Sam had asked.

“You ever call her ‘my’ anything within her earshot, be prepared to duck. She’s her own woman.”

“It’s just an expression.”

“She doesn’t have a sense of humor about that sort of thing.”

Sam nodded thoughtfully. “I can understand that. So did you leave her to her own devices?”

“Ira Bernstein has the grounds crawling with security people. They’re very low-key.”

“Any good?”

“I think so.”

“What about our boy Quint?”

“Sleeping at the moment.”

Zeke had looked out at the small Cape Cod house. “We’re missing something, Sam.”

“Either that,” Sam said, “or we’ve got all the pieces sitting right in front of us and are too damn blind or stupid to put them together.”

After the storms the night air was cool and still, with neighborhood cats on the prowl. “Who stands to gain?” Zeke had asked rhetorically.

“Gain what?”

It was a good point. “The gold key would be worth a hefty sum-not just because it’s gold, but also because of its historical and romantic significance.”

“The profit motive,” Sam said. “Our Pulitzer Prize winner could use money. Think he knows its connection to Lilli?”

“Yes, I do. Joe could have shown him the photograph of her and Lilli in the balloon-or Quint could have just come across it while they served together-and he recognized the key in Dani’s picture in the paper, just like Naomi did.”

“Would you remember what kind of necklace a woman was wearing in a photograph you saw twenty years ago?”

Zeke gave that some thought. “Maybe if the woman was a missing heiress and the other woman she was with was a legendary actress and I was looking for a way to the top.”

“Or maybe if your army buddy pointed the key out to you for some reason.” Sam stretched and added quietly, “The Pembrokes could use money, too. John, Nick, even Dani. But it doesn’t fit the facts for one of them to be after the gold key for profit.”

“No,” Zeke said.

“And I gather the Chandlers don’t need money. So what if this thing’s not about profit? What are the other possibilities?”

A yellow cat had crossed in front of Sam’s car and scampered up a maple. “Lilli Chandler Pembroke.”

Sam hadn’t said anything for a moment. “There are two angles to consider. One, someone doesn’t want the truth about what happened to her to come out. Two, someone’s after the truth.”

So they considered both angles for a while, tossing ideas back and forth in the quiet night.

“One thing we know for sure,” Sam said. “Joe’s dead. Whoever’s doing what around here, it can’t be him.”

Zeke had spelled him for a while, then headed back to Dani’s Hansel and Gretel cottage. Her tale of Nick’s blackmail was just another fact to fit into his host of theories.

On his way out of the casino museum, he stopped at the gift shop. Reproductions of the newspaper headline announcing Ulysses Pembroke’s horse as the winner of the first Chandler Stakes were almost sold out.

Zeke bought one, just for the hell of it.

Nick and Mattie were at the teak table in Dani’s cottage garden when she returned with Beatrix Chandler’s diary.

“I’ll never do that again,” Nick said.

Mattie scoffed. “I still don’t believe that was your first time in a balloon. I could swear I took you up once years ago.”

“You did not. I must be senile to have let you whisk me off like that. No wonder people think you’re eccentric. If I’d known you were this crazy-hell, I’d have shot you off your moral high horse years ago. You’ve got no room to talk about me being reckless.”

“Now, Nick, it wasn’t so bad.” Mattie stirred a spoonful of sugar into a mug of coffee; she and Nick had helped themselves to Dani’s pantry. “When I die, I’d love to have my ashes sprinkled over the Adirondacks from the basket of a beautiful hot-air balloon.”

Nick grunted. “Do that to me, and I’ll come back and haunt you. I swear I will. I’m going into the ground in a pine box, not dumped from the sky like an ashtray.”

“You two are morbid,” Dani said.

Her grandfather grinned at her. “Wait till you’re my age, urchin. You’ll find the prospect of living forever’s a good deal more frightening than that of dying. I know more people in the Great Beyond than I do here.”

Mattie handed him the sugared coffee. “That’s because you’ve lived so bloody long.”