Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

“Didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” he said weakly, his voice barely audible. “Damn, Zeke…she was there all along.”

Quint was fading but still lucid, and Zeke felt himself go so rigid he thought he’d crack into pieces. “Do you mean Lilli?”

“In the fountain…didn’t want to say anything with her husband and daughter right there.”

“Quint-who shot you?”

His eyes focused on Zeke, clear and alert and dying. “You’ll fix it?”

He couldn’t fix a wound like the one Quint had. He couldn’t fix a mother who had died twenty-five years ago. That kind of knight in shining armor just didn’t exist. But he nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”

The siren was getting louder. Once the police and ambulance arrived it wouldn’t be easy to get away. And he had to. There were other lives at stake, and nothing more he could do in the grape-colored dining room.

Quint Skinner was dead.

Dani was on her feet, pacing, forcing herself to concentrate, to hold herself together. There was a breeze against her back, and on North Broadway a couple of little girls walked down the sidewalk dragging a red wagon. Suddenly she wished she could be nine again, hiding from her grandfather, thinking up ways to make her mother happy.

“I ran into her on her way home,” Sara said. She’d composed herself and returned to her wicker chair; the cat had climbed back into her lap. “I told her I’d broken off with Joe. She was disappointed-I could tell. She liked him. So I told her he was the one who’d blackmailed her.”

“Did Mother believe you?”

“No, of course not. She wanted to hear it directly from Joe. So we walked up to the old bottling plant where he and his brother had pitched their tent, only they were already gone.”

To tell Mattie that her father in Cedar Springs was dying.

Dani crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself, trying not to think about herself, her own shattered dreams. No more amnesia scenario. Oh, Mama…

“What about Roger?” she asked.

Sara’s blue, crystal, tearless eyes focused on Dani. “Roger?”

“You two left the party together.”

“Oh, yes. He was there. I mean, he walked up to the springs with us. He stayed at the pavilion while Lilli and I headed over to the cliffs so we could talk in private.” She swallowed, stroking the cat. A part of her seemed relieved finally to talk. “We argued, Lilli and I. We so seldom did. My parents discouraged open disagreement, and there was such a big age difference between us.”

“What did you argue about?”

“Everything,” Sara said.

Dani fought back her impatience, controlled her grief. “You saw her wearing the key?”

“Yes, it-she said it proved Joe didn’t want money, because he’d given it to her. I was upset that he had. He’d found it for me, not her. It shouldn’t have mattered that I’d just ended our relationship.” She checked her anger, her mascara smudged under her eyes, her normally perfect makeup looking garish against her pale skin. “It was just one more thing we argued about. Lilli got very frustrated with me-she just couldn’t bear to hear the truth about Joe.”

“Did she say who she thought was blackmailing her and Nick?”

Sara shook her head. “She refused to. She said we should just go on back, and I should let her take care of everything.”

“Then she was trying to protect you-”

“No!” She dumped the cat off her lap. “She was protecting herself! I knew she was sneaking around behind Father’s back, performing in Casino. Why Nick picked her I’ll never understand, but I don’t care.”

Dani stood in front of Sara and touched her hand, the nails perfectly manicured, a pale pink. “Sara, what happened to Mother?”

“She fell.”

“On the rocks?”

“Yes!” Fat tears rolled down her cheeks, but she remained eerily still. “I was so upset. I must have backed her up too close to the edge of the rocks, and then when she tried to tell me what to do-I shoved her. I didn’t mean anything by it. It was just a reaction.” Tears continued to drop down her cheeks, mingling with the others, dripping off her chin. She didn’t seem to notice. “It was an accident…it was so dark out there…”

Dani held back her own tears. “Then what happened?”

“Well, I…I buried her, of course.”

“Where?”

“At the pavilion.” The whites of her eyes were red, the eyelids swollen, and her speech was slurred. “I thought I’d get the courage to confess everything, but Father-he already despised me. I was too wild, I wasn’t his perfect Lilli. And Mother had just died, and I needed him, and then I thought, would it be exciting for Lilli just to have disappeared?”

Dani didn’t argue with her. It was far, far too late for what Sara Chandler should have done the night her sister fell.

“She’d be a mystery instead of just another dead heiress.” She smiled at Dani. “Do you think people would have made such a big deal about her role in Casino if she hadn’t been a missing heiress? You see, I gave Lilli what she really wanted. Because of me, she got her fame, her mystique.”

“But, Sara-”

“No, it’s true. Don’t you see? Without me, Lilli wouldn’t have achieved the status she has.”

Dani took her aunt’s hands into hers and held on tight. “I’m not disagreeing with you, Sara, but I need you to listen just a moment. Okay? Just listen.”

Her aunt didn’t seem to hear her. “And Father didn’t suffer. Not really. I became his Lilli for him. She wouldn’t have done half of what I’ve done for him. Look at what she did the first time she was to serve as hostess for the Chandler lawn party. She went hot-air ballooning with Mattie Witt! Left me to dress her only daughter! She didn’t even show up.” Sara looked at Dani, smiled sadly. “My only failing, of course, was that I could never be your mother.”

Hanging on to the shreds of her own self-control, Dani fought an urge to tear at her hair and scream at the sky, to let out everything that was raging inside her. “Sara, what did Joe want when he came back here?”

She bit her lip. “He…I’d confessed to him. I got his address from Quint Skinner when he tried to interview your father, and-and I asked him to come see me when he got out or came home on leave. I suppose I shouldn’t have.”

“You told him everything that happened that night?”

“Oh, yes.”

And there you have it, Dani thought, feeling no sense of victory, only a crushing emptiness. But now, at least, the pieces fit together. She touched her aunt’s arm. “Sara, did you look over the rocks and actually see where Mother fell?”

“Wh-what?”

“Could you see her from where you were standing?”

“No, I…It was dark.”

“But you buried her yourself.”

Sara didn’t respond.

“I need to ask you one more question,” Dani said softly. “Sara, you’re not as tall as Mother was-you’ve always weighed less. How did you get her back up the rocks to the pavilion?”

Sara’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “What?”

“It’s a tough, steep climb. I’ve done it.”

“I don’t know what you mean-”

“You couldn’t have carried her by yourself. Sara, Roger knew what had happened, didn’t he? You said he was there with you at the springs.”

“He…It was dark…he knew it was an accident…” She cleared her throat, struggling to reassert the cool heiress who would know what to do, what to say, in any awkward situation. “He said I should leave and he’d take care of everything. Dani, please-please don’t say anything. You have to understand! Roger’s protected me all these years. He can’t be a part of this.”