Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

Dani felt a surge of warmth and pity toward her aunt, even as the sure, inescapable agony of loss swept through her. “Sara, I met Joe on the rocks,” she said carefully. How could she go on? How could she explain? “He asked me if there was any way up from the bottom, any path. I told him there’s one that winds around and hooks up with one of the old carriage roads, which branches out into various narrow paths, one of which leads back around to the top of the cliffs. It’s the long way around-well over a mile. The only other route is straight up the rocks.”

Sara frowned. “I don’t see your point.”

“I found the gold key Mother was wearing on a ledge about fifteen feet below where you said she’d fallen.”

“So? Danielle,” she said, reverting to Chandler formality, “what are you trying to say?”

“I’m saying no one would drag a dead body-” ah, no “-a mile or more or straight up a sheer rock cliff to bury her at the pavilion. Why not bury her where she fell? I’m saying,” she went on hoarsely, “that you don’t have that kind of strength. Neither does Roger.”

“Joe wasn’t there-”

Dani shook her head, cutting her off. “Mother only fell fifteen feet. She landed on the ledge.”

Her eyes widening, Sara gripped Dani’s arm, digging her fingers into the bruised flesh from where she’d landed on her bureau drawer in what seemed like another lifetime.

“You didn’t kill her, Sara.”

Her aunt’s grip was unrelenting.

“She wasn’t dead when you left that night.”

John had been fighting with medical types since they’d strapped him to a stretcher and stuffed him into the ambulance like a loaf of bread. Now he was fighting with an emergency-room doctor. “Get me the police,” he said.

“Mr. Pembroke, you can speak to the police when we’re finished here. Your health-”

“Now!”

The doctor removed his stethoscope from his ears. A nurse was sticking an IV into John’s arm, and someone in the background was denying she’d had anything to do with his premature departure from his hospital bed.

He’d already heard snatches of conversation that told him Quint’s body had arrived.

“I can have you sedated,” the doctor said.

John was suddenly dead calm. “Try that, and I’ll rip your head off. Get the police in here. Now. Some rich snot’s trying to get away with murder. I’d like to see him in handcuffs before more corpses come streaming in here. My daughter’s in particular.”

The doctor sighed, as if he dealt with this kind of lunatic patient every day, and looked at the nurse. “The patient isn’t in any immediate danger. There are several police officers in the waiting room. Get them in here, please.”

Zeke caught up with Sam just as he was going in for surgery to remove the bullet that had gone through his side and lodged in his thigh. He was sedated but alert enough. Zeke figured he had less than a minute before the doctors noticed and kicked him out.

“Sam, think back. When you were on Quint, did he ever bump into, meet or any way hook up with Roger Stone? He’s tall, white, fair and rich.”

“Dani’s uncle, right? Yeah-yeah, Quint talked to him in Congress Park. Not for long. A minute or two. I should have been paying closer attention.”

Zeke shook his head. “I should have given you a rundown on all the players. Get well, my friend.”

He turned to go, but Sam stopped him. “Dani’ll try to solve this on her own. She’s the type, and it’s her mother.”

“I know.”

Sam managed a weak grin. “Guess you’d better get busy.”

“How dramatic,” Roger Stone said, walking onto his father-in-law’s front porch.

Dani tensed every muscle in her body to keep herself from shaking. Sara wasn’t going to be any help. Sitting primly in her wicker chair, she gently stroked her cat. She didn’t even seem to see her husband.

“You killed my mother,” Dani said.

He shrugged. “A sin more of omission than commission.”

She noticed he had a gun. Well, so did she. When she’d seen him pull up to the curb, she’d judiciously collected it off the porch railing. “She was still alive when you found her on the ledge.”

“Alive and alert.” Roger leaned against a thick column; he wouldn’t be visible from the street. “But not well, I’m afraid. She had a nasty bump on her head. Proved to be far more significant than I’d anticipated. If I’d gone straight to the hospital…but I didn’t.” His pale blue eyes narrowed on Dani, focused on her with a mix of despair and hatred that was almost palpable. “You’re far more like her than you’d ever care to admit.”

“She knew you were blackmailing her and Nick.”

“It was just for fun. Nothing serious. But you Chandler women-” He shook his head, sighing. “No sense of fun.”

Dani wasn’t about to argue with him. “So you killed her?”

“She insisted I confess.”

“If the blackmail was just for fun, why didn’t you?”

Roger laughed derisively. “You aren’t as smart as you think you are. If I’d confessed, I’d have lost my shot at everything I’d ever wanted, including your pretty aunt. You see, I’d told her Joe Cutler was her sister’s and Nick’s blackmailer, that he’d come to Saratoga for whatever he could get-her, money, anything. Only Saint Joe really wasn’t interested in any of it. He gave that damn gold key to your mother-do you see what I was up against? He cared about Lilli, really respected her. And he loved Sara.”

In the wicker chair Sara cried softly, stroking the white cat.

“I persuaded her to dump him,” Roger said. “It was in Sara’s best interest.”

“Yours, too.”

He smiled. “Of course.”

“Did Mother threaten to tell the police?”

“No, no, not our holier-than-thou Lilli. She wanted to help me. At that point I hadn’t done anything really awful, just extorted a few hundred dollars from her and Nick and lied to Sara, set Joe up for a broken heart and an abrupt departure from Saratoga. Still, I tried to talk your mother out of her point of view.” He paused, his lips drawn together in a straight, unreadable line. “While I was talking, I began to notice she’d stopped arguing.”

Dani clutched the handle of her gun; she wasn’t sure Roger had even seen it. Her heart was racing along at an alarming rate, but there was a part of her that was utterly calm.

“She was lapsing in and out of consciousness,” Roger said. “I knew I should have gone for help at once, but I didn’t. I just sat there and waited and-well, she died in my arms. I’ve read up on head injuries in the years since. You can be fine one minute and dead the next, that’s why they watch you. If I’d gotten her to the hospital, she probably would have been fine. But the longer she sat there, the more the pressure built up inside her head…” He trailed off, letting Dani fill in the rest.

“So you buried her,” Dani said.

“Yes. I neatened up the area as best I could to make a nice grave for her. Sara came back and planted the roses and morning glories-it was a dangerous gamble on her part.”

“You let Sara believe she’d killed her own sister.”

He laughed, incredulous. “What else would you have had me do? I certainly wasn’t the one who’d pushed her off the cliff to begin with.”

“That was an accident. Not taking her to the hospital was deliberate.”

“Well, you can’t honestly expect me to have told Sara what really happened. I’d have been drummed right out of the family.”

It was so important to him to be a Chandler. “You’re telling me now,” Dani pointed out.

“It no longer matters what you know.”

Dani grew very still. “You’re going to kill me. Sara, too.”