Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

An unusual woman, Danielle Chandler Pembroke.

Zeke would never forget how courageous and gentle she’d been with her aunt and Eugene Chandler. Before anyone-him, the police, her father-could react, Dani had quietly taken the gun from Sara’s hand. Later, she’d stayed close to her shattered grandfather.

“I need you, Grandfather,” she’d told him, and it was what he’d needed, just to hang on.

Apparently Roger had planned to take Sara and Dani back up to Pembroke Springs to kill them, blaming what he could on Quint and what he couldn’t on his wife. Accepting his own culpability wasn’t something of which Roger Stone was even remotely capable. Quint had robbed Dani, attacked Ira, snatched John. But it was Roger who’d stumbled on John in the woods and nailed him, Roger who’d tried everything he could to keep tabs on Quint and find out what he was doing in Saratoga, to stop him from uncovering the truth about Lilli and Joe. Roger had used Quint, and in the end had killed him.

“I should have guessed years ago,” John said, shaking his head with regret. “The connection between Skinner and Roger was under my nose, and I missed it.”

“How could you have known?”

John looked pained. “Quint tried to interview me. Roger found out. He must have worried about what else Joe could have told Skinner. Roger used him,” John said. “Not long after I turned Quint down for an interview, I was framed for embezzling.”

“Framed? Why didn’t you fight?”

He shrugged. “It was airtight. I didn’t have the foggiest idea who’d done it to me-or even if it might have been just some god-awful mistake someone made. But Roger and Eugene condemned me right off the bat. I knew I couldn’t win. I thought-hell, I don’t know. I guess I thought Lilli might come back to me if I became a good Pembroke scoundrel.” He was silent a moment. “But she was already dead.”

Walking back to his car, Zeke stopped a delivery van with the name of some Saratoga hamburger joint emblazoned on its side. He got the guy to take his six roses and give them to Dani Pembroke. “Tell her that if she wants to shoot me out of the saddle, she’ll have to find me first.”

He’d give her a month to track him down. It’d be a challenge for her.

The woman had to figure out for herself that he didn’t come on any silver platter.

The temperature had dropped to a tolerable one hundred degrees when John arrived back in Tucson.

His apartment, shut up for two weeks, was sweltering and smelled bad. His ungodly spider had taken over his bathroom. His living area was scattered with the pages of a manuscript he knew now he’d never finish. The historians could have the last word on Ulysses Pembroke’s life.

John would write his memoirs of growing up as the only child of his lunatic, famous, impossible mother and father.

His trip to Saratoga had cleaned him out. There was a letter from the IRS in his mailbox. He needed money, fast.

Looking at the squalid conditions of his life, he wondered why he hadn’t taken his father-in-law’s offer to return to Chandler Hotels. The job would have meant moving back to New York. He’d be closer to Dani and Mattie. His daughter certainly could use all the moral support she could get. After giving her mother a proper burial next to Claire Chandler in the family plot, Dani had rolled up her sleeves and tackled the problems endemic to the kind of publicity she, the Pembroke and Pembroke Springs had received in the past days. On top of having her mother’s body turn up after twenty-five years on her property and a murderer in the family, it turned out Roger Stone had hated her guts and floated rumors of her impending self-destruction. Apparently he’d been terrified Eugene would succeed in bringing Dani back into the fold, make her head of Chandler Hotels. Roger had never felt secure; he could never really be a Chandler himself.

John thought it’d be nice to be close to his mother and daughter.

Dani hadn’t asked him to stick around, but she’d kissed him at the airport, slipped him a couple hundred bucks and told him she loved him-she who’d never been open about such feelings. That was enough. More than he deserved, for certain.

And he’d already told Eugene no. Even now he couldn’t explain why.

He turned up the air conditioners as high as they’d go, opened a Dos Equis and cleaned out his refrigerator. Then he got down on his hands and knees and gathered up the scattered fragments of his manuscript.

Opening another beer, he sank into his lumpy couch and opened up an old photo album. Right there on the front page was his favorite picture, of the five of them together: Nick, Mattie, Lilli, Dani, himself. They looked happy.

They’d been happy.

He was still staring at the picture when someone pounded on his front door. “Yeah, coming.”

A troop of neighborhood kids trailed into his apartment. They carried fresh tortillas, pots of beans, a big salad and a dozen eggs, all from their mothers, who’d heard he was back in town and were worried he didn’t have any food.

He was thanking them profusely when he sensed the foreign presence at his feet. Standing rock-still, he looked down. There was the hairy little bastard. A few of these let loose on the streets of New York City, he thought, and every smarmy New York cockroach would head for the Hudson River. For a change, he had on shoes. If he moved fast and stomped hard, death would be quick and sure, if not neat.

The spider scampered toward the toilet. John let him go.

The kids howled with laughter. “Hey, Johnny,” one impertinent urchin said, “we sure missed you.”

He grinned. “I missed you, too, kid.”

Zeke walked down a dirt road to a quiet stretch of the slow-moving, muddy Cumberland River. He went right up to the edge of the water. It was a warm, drizzly afternoon, and he saw two boys out in a canoe in the middle of the river, heard them laughing and fishing, not caring about the weather or, he hoped, anything else.

He remembered Joe taking him out here to show him the spot where Mattie Witt met Nick Pembroke.

“Can’t you see it, Zeke? The two of them…”

Joe had howled with glee at the thought. That story was just the greatest thing to him.

Zeke lifted his pack off his shoulders and got out the simple container that held his brother’s ashes. Joe had loved the river. He’d loved Tennessee and the people of their small town.

Stepping just into the water, Zeke lifted the top off the container. There were no accusations or excuses within his brother’s ashes. No tales of heroics or cowardice. Just the remains of a man who’d died far from home.

Who’d died a hero to his men.

Zeke knew what he had to do.

Maybe people’s ideas about his brother would change now that the truth was out, but maybe they wouldn’t. Quint Skinner was dead, and Joe had been dead for a long time.

Zeke didn’t care about what other people thought. He only cared about what his brother had been.

He took out a folded bandanna and wiped the rain from his forehead and the tears from his eyes, and then he wiped his fingers until they were perfectly dry.

And as the boys in the canoe disappeared around the bend, Zeke laid his brother to rest in the river he’d loved.

“Akite,” Mattie Witt explained to her sister a week after she’d come home to Cedar Springs, “is a heavier-than-air object that requires lift-wind-for it to defy the forces of gravity. Now, contrary to popular opinion, there doesn’t need to be a great deal of wind, as there isn’t today. Here, I’ll show you.”