Tempting Fate

by Carla Neggers

  “He shouldn’t have been out there.” Dani stared down at him, managing to look both irritated and terrified. “Pop, you should have gotten some sleep. People do need to sleep, you know.”

  Zeke touched her arm. “Dani, maybe we should wait outside.”

  “He’s awake, Zeke. He just doesn’t want to face me.”

  Under the circumstances, Zeke wasn’t sure he would, either. Her father had no health insurance, but Dani had said she’d sign what she had to sign, write a check, hock the Pembroke—the hospital should concentrate on giving him the care he needed and let her worry about the tab.

  Her black eyes were huge and mesmerizing, reminding him of Mattie and Naomi. And their difficult father, for they were Witt eyes. She pulled her arm free. “I give up. I’m going to get some coffee. Pop, no more games when I get back. Stitches or no stitches. I swear I’ll dump a glass of ice water on you if you keep this up.”

  When she was safely down the hall, Zeke said, “She’s gone.”

  John opened his eyes and managed a weak grin. “I knew she wouldn’t have the patience to wait me out. Think she’d dump ice water on me?”

  Zeke grinned. “I wouldn’t doubt her.”

  “Probably just what I need. I feel like death warmed over.” He cleared his throat, adjusting his position in the hospital bed, trying to pull himself up. “How close is my daughter to spinning out of control?”

  “Her willpower keeps her under wraps. She’s scared, John.”

  “Yeah. So am I.”

  Zeke waited for more, but John looked blankly out the window at the hospital parking lot.

  Finally Zeke said, “You didn’t trip.”

  John’s dark, hurting eyes focused on Zeke, and he said hoarsely, “No.”

  “Are you up to telling me what happened?”

  “Some jackass bonked me on the back of the head.”

  “Did you get a look at him?”

  John snorted. “Before or after I saw stars?”

  Zeke straightened, resisting the urge to press and press hard for information. He couldn’t tell if the man lacked the energy and focus to explain what had happened due to his injuries, or simply refused to tell Zeke—a stranger with his own agenda—anything.

  “Look,” Zeke said, “I have no intention of meddling where I’m neither wanted nor needed. You and your daughter can handle your own problems if that’s what you want. I’ll stay out of your way.”

  John grabbed his wrist. “No, Zeke.”

  Zeke was silent, waiting.

  “I went out to the rocks where Dani found the gold key. Someone either followed me or more likely was out there, too. If it had been Dani instead of me…” He inhaled, and the terror that had been in his daughter’s eyes now was in his. “Maybe she’d have been killed, maybe not.”

  “I’ll go out there and have a look.”

  “This is your business. You know you won’t find anything.”

  John Pembroke was a gambler and an embezzler and something of a reprobate, but he wasn’t a stupid man. Zeke acknowledged the truth of his words. And the hard knot in the pit of his own stomach. He had to pull back. He was getting too close to the Pembrokes and their reckless, personable ways.

  The former vice president of Chandler Hotels struggled to sit up. “Get in her way, Zeke,” he said, wincing in pain. “Get in her way and stay in it.”

  Kate Murtagh eyed Zeke from behind an enormous stainless-steel bowl of potato salad in her immaculate kitchen. Her backyard, he’d noticed, was nothing but herb and vegetable gardens. Dressed in overalls, her blond hair tied back with a purple bandanna, she looked gorgeous as she snipped chives with the largest pair of scissors he’d ever seen.

  “I know she was here,” Zeke said.

  “How?”

  “Eyewitness.”

  “What sneak—” She stopped herself, her glower deepening as she realized she’d been had. “You just make a wild guess that she’d come here.”

  “She didn’t take her car, and she wouldn’t have waited for a taxi and risked being inundated by reporters who’d heard scoundrel John Pembroke was in Saratoga for the first time since his wife’s disappearance. So wherever she went had to be within reasonable walking distance of the hospital. I looked you up in the phone book, checked my chamber of commerce map and voilà.”

  “So clever. How come you didn’t just track her down on the streets like a runaway dog?”

  “She had a head start.” He’d come out of John’s room and found her gone. He hadn’t been surprised. She’d already known her father wasn’t going to cooperate.

  Kate shrugged. “You had wheels.”

  “She didn’t have to look you up.”

  “Must annoy you having a woman who sells water for a living give you the slip.” But Kate set down her scissors, for which Zeke was grateful, and wiped her hands on her plain white apron. She could have been a butcher or a model for Vogue. “Is she in bad trouble?”

  “That’s what I want to find out.”

  “Word is you can be trusted.”

  “People either trust me or they don’t.”

  “My father’s a Vietnam-combat vet.” She stuck the end of a skinny chive in her mouth, her blue eyes riveted on him. “He wouldn’t talk to anyone after he came home, couldn’t hold down a job for the first few years he was back. I don’t think he slept a night through for years. He knows a lot of guys who have their names on the Wall. In my eyes, he was a hero, and he’s the best man I’ve ever known.” She threw her chewed chive into a paper bag of potato peels and eggshells. “I’d better be right about you, Cutler.”

  Zeke said nothing.

  “Get out your chamber of commerce map.”

  He did.

  She pointed out the Amtrak station. “Dani’s on her way to New York. If you hurry, you’ll catch her.”

  An hour down the Hudson River on the four-hour train ride to New York, Dani made her way to the dining car for coffee. She ordered a large, black. She’d already tried sleeping and had found she couldn’t.

  She located a quiet spot, sipped her coffee and called Nick on her cell phone.

  “Hello? Hello, is someone there?”

  “Quit pretending you can’t hear me. It’s me—Dani. Your granddaughter. The one you and Mattie have been holding back on for years and years.”

  “Who? What’s that? Who is this?”

  “Knock it off, Granddad. You’re nowhere near as deaf as you’re trying to pretend.”

  “Dani—is that you?”

  “Pop’s been injured. Smacked on the head from behind.”

  Nick was silent.

  Her tone softened. “He’s going to be okay.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m fine.” But she could hear the fatigue in her voice. “Nick, I’ve read the book on Joe Cutler. He was from Mattie’s hometown. Did you know him?”

  “How would I know him? He wasn’t born when I met your grandmother.”

  “But he was born when you had your affair with her sister.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “It’s just a short paragraph in the book. It says Joe worked at the mill Mattie’s father owned and became friends with her ‘estranged’ sister, Naomi Witt Hazen, who’d had an affair with you years after you and Mattie divorced.” Dani hesitated. “I’m not judging you. I just want to know…”

  “I was fishing near her home,” Nick said softly. “I found Naomi floating on her back in the Cumberland River in the same spot where I’d met Mattie. She was just letting the current carry her. I got her ashore. She was covered with bruises, her eyes were as flat and dead as any I’ve ever seen and…” He sighed. “I took her away. It was so long after Mattie.”

  “But she went back?”

  “Cedar Springs is Naomi’s home. She’ll die there.”

  Dani had known Mattie had a sister, but Naomi had never been real to her. She’d been portrayed—albeit passively—as an estranged sister who’d wanted nothing to do with her famous siste
r and her family. Now the reality seemed so much more complicated. Dani had a great-aunt she’d never met in a small Tennessee town, the same town where the Cutler brothers were from.

  “Joe Cutler’s younger brother is in Saratoga,” she said.

  “Go on.”

  She told her grandfather everything. When she finished, he didn’t say a word.

  Dani panicked. “Granddad?”

  “I haven’t kicked off yet,” he said in his sarcastic, gravelly voice.

  “I just want answers. Is there anything you can tell me that would help?”

  “No.”

  “Is that the truth—”

  “Dani…” He gave a small, fake cough. “Ouch…I’m having chest pains.”

  “Then call a doctor,” she said and hung up on him. But she immediately felt guilty and called him back. “I’m sorry, Granddad.”

  “Just take care of yourself, urchin.”

  Of course, he sounded fine.

  As she made her way back through the train, she spotted Zeke munching on a bag of peanuts in a window seat. The seat next to him was empty. Dani wasn’t surprised. Even when he was in a good mood, the man had a grim look about him that didn’t invite company.

  She leaned over the aisle seat. “All that salt’s not good for you.”

  “I’m from the South,” he said. “We’re immune to salt.”

  “Did Kate tell you where I was?”

  He smiled innocently but didn’t seem to try too hard to be convincing. “Just taking a trip to the Big Apple.”

  “I won’t have you bird-dogging my every move.”

  His look cut her short. It was dark and serious and bored right through to her soul. “Dani, you don’t have to do this alone.”

  “That’s my decision.”

  He popped a handful of peanuts into his mouth. “Fine. I’ll just see you at Mattie’s.”

  Now she was surprised.

  His smile seemed genuine, if not innocent. “You’re not as difficult to predict as you think you are.”

  “My coffee’s getting cold.”

  “Then sit down and drink it.”

  It was her turn to smile. “You aren’t as tough as you think you are.”

  He laughed. “There goes my reputation.”

  “How’s my father?”

  “In pain but on the mend. And worried.”

  She nodded and sat beside him, not because her coffee was getting cold but because she really didn’t want to be alone—which unnerved her probably as much as anything else that had happened in the past few days.

  “I read the book on your brother,” she said.

  “I figured as much.”

  “Zeke…”

  He looked at her. “Talk to Mattie first.”

  Twelve

  Nick didn’t bother to pack. These days even picking up an empty suitcase was an effort. But Mattie would have something he could wear. If not, he’d buy what he needed. He was feeling quite flush, having called a Hollywood memorabilia collector he knew. “What would you give me for the dress Mattie Witt wore the same day she arrived in Hollywood?” he asked.

  The collector was at his front door within the hour, cash in hand.

  Having a reclusive film legend for an ex-wife had its uses.

  Now he wouldn’t have to beg Mattie or Dani for the money for a plane ticket east. He had his own money. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t hocked that dress years ago. He wasn’t sentimental.

  He settled back in the cab, on his way to LAX.

  His eyes burned. He knew he was taking a physical risk and might not accomplish a thing beyond hastening his own death by going to New York and then Saratoga. But he couldn’t stand to have Dani hate him. He was ninety years old, and nothing he’d accomplished—the movies he’d made, the awards he’d won, the place he’d earned in film history—meant more to him than that spitfire of a granddaughter back East. Didn’t she know that?

  Yeah, he thought. She knew it. But she was still furious with him.

  He’d take the first flight he could get. He’d sit down with Mattie and talk. Tell her everything. Even about the blackmail. Then, if she didn’t kill him, he’d take the train up along the Hudson River to Saratoga Springs, just as he and his mother had done so long, long ago, when the world had been a different place and Ulysses Pembroke’s black-haired grandson had been filled with dreams.

  Both his parents had died young, and Nick, just a kid himself, had fled west to sunny California and fast proved he had a knack for directing movies. But it was a fishing trip to Tennessee that had changed his life.

  He’d chosen Tennessee because it was warm and crisscrossed with streams and rivers, and because it was far, far from the social whirl of show business. Lean, dark and charming, Nick had discovered the possibilities of being the grandson of a murdered gambler and a director with growing power. Women had flocked to him. He’d needed a rest.

  Determined to be off by himself, he’d told no one his destination. He wanted to be utterly alone and try to remember the man he’d meant to become.

  On his third day of fishing east of Nashville on the snaking, slow-moving Cumberland River, he’d startled a dark-haired girl bent over on the riverbank, absolutely still and silent as she’d stared into the water. So complete was her surprise that she’d slipped on the muddy riverbank and slid, without making a sound, all the way into the Cumberland, her blue cotton dress billowing out around her.

  Nick had paddled furiously to get to her, then leaped from his canoe into the water. He’d meant to rescue her, but she came up dripping wet and fighting mad, a rock in one hand. She was small and slim and had the most dynamic black eyes he’d ever seen. Her dark hair was yanked back in a severe braid, with wisps, damp from the humidity and the river, escaping all around her hairline.

  She’d raised her rock with the clear intention of striking him. “You get away from me.”

  “Easy there.” Nick’d had no desire to return to California with stitches in his head. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “You’re not sorry. You’re laughing.”

  “No!”

  But he was, because he’d never seen anyone so beautiful look so mad and so ridiculous. And here they were in the middle of nowhere, not a soul in sight.

  “My name’s Nick Pembroke,” he’d said, studying her for any sign of recognition.

  There was none. Apparently she’d never seen any of his films. Nick wasn’t insulted. He’d bitten his tongue trying not to laugh lest she knock him on the head with her rock after all.

  “I fail to see what’s so funny.” She hadn’t given him a chance to respond, but plunged ahead in her educated Tennessee drawl. “I have been coming out to this river for years and years, and I have never had anyone sneak up on me and scare me half to death.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I was just fishing. What’s your name?”

  She’d eyed him dubiously, then said politely, “Mattie Witt.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Miss Witt.”

  He’d extended his hand, but she didn’t take it. Regal even when soaked through to the skin, Mattie had looked very young, and although she was slender, her wet dress clung to some flattering curves. Nick had struggled to keep his gaze from resting too long on the outline of her breasts against the thin, wet fabric. But her eyes, expressive and yet secretive, had enchanted him.

  “I saw your last movie at the picture show on the square,” she’d said, catching him by surprise.

  So she had heard of him, Nick had thought. The picture show. The square. He couldn’t imagine anywhere more remote than wherever the devil she came from. But his heart was pounding, and he’d felt as if he’d come all the way from New York to California to Tennessee just to meet dark-eyed Mattie Witt.

  “I should let you get back to your fishing,” she’d said. “I’ll have to tell my father I slipped from the riverbank out of pure clumsiness. He wouldn’t be pleased to know I was speaking to a Hollywood movie director.” />
  “Why should he care?”

  “It isn’t proper. And Hollywood is the devil’s playground.”

  But there was a glint in her eye, perceptible to the observant Nicholas Pembroke, that suggested to him that she didn’t lose sleep over what was proper and what wasn’t or where the devil played. She’d waded back to the riverbank and climbed gracefully from the water. On dry land, she looked even tinier and yet surprisingly sexy, an intriguing blend of strength and vulnerability.

  “This looks like a good place to fish,” Nick had called after her, feeling a surge of panic that he might never see her again. “I’ll probably be out here every morning.”

  “Well, sir, you just be careful and mind the snakes.”

  Snakes?

  He’d wondered if she was too naive—too much of a damn hick—to have gotten his message, but she was back the next morning, in the same spot where he’d startled her.

  “What are you doing?” he’d asked when he again found her staring into the Cumberland.

  “Oh—studying the changes in the river. I’ve been coming out here since I was a small child. Some things about it have stayed the same. Some have changed. Did you catch any fish yesterday?”

  “Yes, but I released them.”

  “Why on earth would you do that?”

  “Didn’t feel like cleaning and eating them. I like to fish for the sport. If I played tennis, I wouldn’t fillet and fry up every opponent who lost to me.”

  “But those would be human beings. These are fish.”

  Smiling, Nick had realized there was more to Mattie than big eyes and a fondness for movies, more to his attraction to her than simple lust. “My motive is the same whether I’m fishing or playing tennis—sport, not subsistence.”

  She didn’t get it. He’d asked her where she was from. “Cedar Springs,” she’d said. “It’s a small town a few miles from here.”

  The next day she’d brought a picnic lunch in a wicker hamper—enough for two, she’d said, because eating in front of someone was rude. There was fried chicken and pimento cheese and a bag of cold biscuits, with two fat slices of caramel-iced prune cake for dessert. “My mother died a while back,” she’d said matter-of-factly, as if her loss wasn’t worth considering in comparison to what others suffered. “I cook for my father and younger sister. Naomi’s just eleven. I’m eighteen. Where are you from?”