Carla Neggers: Tempting Fate

Dear Reader,

If you’ve ever been to Saratoga Springs in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, you know it’s a great place to be. I’ve spent many days there enjoying its beautiful Victorian streets and sidewalk cafés, its colorful history, its incomparable mineral springs-and breakfast at the Saratoga racetrack in August is an experience not to be missed.

All these elements are the perfect backdrop for Tempting Fate, a favorite novel of mine that I’m delighted to see back in print-updated, even better than the original! I loved diving back into this story and revisiting its colorful cast of characters and the dangers they face. They’ve stayed with me from the moment they started percolating in my head on a pleasant stroll in downtown Saratoga, and I hope they stay with you, too.

Enjoy!

Carla

www.carlaneggers.com

Before she could change her mind, Dani Pembroke cut down a narrow side street in downtown Saratoga Springs, New York, and joined the line outside a small theater.

It was a beautiful August evening, the start of Saratoga ’s racing season, a tradition since 1863, when, just a month after the bloody Battle of Gettysburg, John “Old Smoke” Morrissey and Cornelius Vanderbilt had brought twenty-six horses to America ’s favorite spa for four days of racing. Dani loved the energy, the excitement, that she could feel in town. People jammed the pretty streets, the shops and restaurants were crowded and the sidewalk vendors were out in full force.

The Chandlers would have arrived by now, she thought.

My family.

Dani fought the urge to head up to the restored Victorian house they owned on North Broadway, Saratoga ’s “Millionaires’ Row.” She could see if the wraparound front porch had the hanging baskets of pink and white petunias and antique wicker furniture she remembered as a little girl. If the gardens still smelled of summer roses and lilies.

If the place still reminded her of her mother.

For twenty-five years-ever since she was nine years old-Dani had avoided Saratoga in August. Her one searing memory was of watching her mother take off in a hot-air balloon, never to return.

More people fell into the line. The August factor at work, Dani thought. Usually the theater had to scramble for a crowd. But today, a hundred people would pack the house.

Then someone said, “It’s twenty-five years this month that Lilli Chandler Pembroke disappeared,” and Dani felt herself go cold. But she did nothing to draw attention to herself. The theater was showing a double feature of Nick Pembroke’s masterpiece, The Gamblers, and its sequel thirty years later, Casino. The owners had gotten hold of the old posters. The one of The Gamblers showed a smiling, black-eyed Mattie Witt.

She’s so beautiful , Dani thought, staring at her grandmother, a young woman in the picture-dazzling and mysterious with her midnight-black eyes and glossy black hair. Even then, before she’d become a star, her famous mystique was in place. Mattie Witt had made her last movie, given her last interview and abandoned Hollywood long before Dani was even born.

Her grandmother had also been long divorced from Nick Pembroke by the time her one and only grandchild was born. But as reckless as she was feeling, Dani didn’t want to think about her grandfather, a talented, scoundrel Pembroke if there’d ever been one.

Her gaze shifted to the second poster, and her chest tightened at the image of her mother. It wasn’t the original Casino poster. It was the one the studio had made after Nick Pembroke admitted that the unknown young blonde in the movie-stealing scene in the second act was his daughter-in-law, missing heiress Lilli Chandler Pembroke. He’d given her the part when he’d filmed Casino on location in Saratoga the previous August, days before she disappeared.

Her photograph captured not the mother Dani had known and loved and lost, but the woman Lilli Chandler Pembroke had longed to become: vivacious, sexy, independent-someone else. She had a completely different look from Mattie Witt thirty years earlier. Lilli was all Chandler, slender, fair, patrician, pretty but not exotic. She’d believed her destiny was to be the proper heiress, always gracious and elegant, never taking a wrong-a daring-step.

Until her father-in-law had cast her in his comeback movie.

Lilli’s searing performance had helped catapult Casino into the commercial and artistic success Nick Pembroke, who hadn’t done much since Mattie Witt’s defection from his life and work, had needed. Naturally he’d squandered it. No one had expected him to do anything else.

All Dani’s instincts urged her to leap out of the line and keep going, keep walking.

Twenty-five years.

Blood pounded in her ears, but she didn’t move.

She remembered herself at nine, waiting for her mother to come home. She’d sat on a wicker swing on the front porch of the Chandler cottage in her raspberry-smeared white dress, plucking a basket of petunias bald-headed until finally her white-faced father-Mattie Witt and Nick Pembroke’s only son-had come for her. She made him put the raspberries she was saving for her mother into the refrigerator. They’d molded there, untouched.

Dani stayed in the line. She didn’t look like the women on the posters. With her black eyes and short black hair, her strong features and straight, athletic figure-and her supposed recklessness-she was usually compared not to the southern Witts or the blue-blooded Chandlers but to three generations of Pembroke scoundrels. She’d seen the comparisons in the worried faces of her marketing consultants in New York. Through two days of nonstop strategy sessions, reports, brainstorming, even casual meals together, she’d sensed their unasked questions. Had she gone too far? Had she overextended herself? Was there any Chandler in her, or was she, after all, pure Pembroke? Not one Pembroke in the last hundred years had been worth a damn when it came to reliability, trustworthiness, commitment or responsibility.

When people did recognize a trace of her mother, of Chandler, in Dani-in her full, generous mouth or her occasional displays of graciousness-it was commented on with surprise, as if they must have imagined it. Even as a little girl, before her mother had disappeared, a New York gossip columnist had said, “Danielle Chandler Pembroke is not a child meant to have been born rich.”

But she’d taken care of that.

Inside the theater she found a seat in the front near an exit. She’d seen both movies before, but never on the big screen. Never in public.

Sitting through The Gamblers was relatively easy. It was fun, romantic, like watching someone she didn’t know, although she’d visited her grandmother in Greenwich Village just a few days ago. Mattie Witt was eighty-two now and still beautiful, still fiercely independent.

The film’s rendition of Ulysses Pembroke’s life-the murdered grandfather Nick had never known-painted him as a lovable rogue, a well-meaning scoundrel. It skipped his tragic end.

Dani almost left before Casino started.

She’d seen it just twice, both times on television at one o’clock in the morning. When it was released in the spring after her mother’s disappearance, the adults around her all had agreed she should be spared. Nonetheless, Dani had felt the tension between the two sides of her family. Caught in the middle, her father had tried to mediate. Yes, his young wife should have-could have-told her family that she’d taken the role in Casino. But no, his father hadn’t been wrong to offer it to her, to let her be reckless this once, to let her put this one dream into action.