Tempting Fate

by Carla Neggers

  Despite his appearance and manner, the man wasn’t stupid. John vowed to keep that in mind. “At least you had it to lose. I never did myself. Anyway, I don’t recognize you from your book. You tried to interview me in New York before I was nailed for embezzlement. Remember?”

  The placid expression didn’t change. “I remember.”

  “You were fresh out of the military, trying to launch a journalism career by digging out a story on my mother. Your angle was unusual. You’d served with Joe Cutler and figured you’d compare the Witts and the Cutlers of Cedar Springs, their different destinies. Only you never wrote the piece.”

  “You wouldn’t talk to me.”

  John grinned. “I was still noble in those days.”

  They’d come to a light on Broadway. Quint was a careful driver, confident. He reached over and popped open the glove compartment, pulled out a wrinkled paper bag. He dropped it onto John’s lap. “Take a look inside.”

  He did so. The dizziness from his head injury came in waves. As he stared into the bag, it threatened to inundate him.

  Inside the bag were two gate keys, one brass, one gold.

  “You took these from my daughter,” John said hoarsely.

  “Yep. And I didn’t hurt her as much as she keeps making out.” He shrugged, matter-of-fact. “Not as much as I could have, anyway.”

  John clutched the bag. “You son of a bitch.”

  “Save it. I’m not in this to get you people to like me.”

  No kidding, John thought, annoyed now as much as afraid.

  Skinner glanced at him and grinned. “You’d like to smack me one, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’d like to do more than that.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to wait. Joe found the gold key when he was up here when your wife disappeared. He told me. We were pals, you know?”

  He waited, seeming to want John to respond. So he did. “Fine way you had of showing it.”

  “People read the book wrong. I wasn’t condemning him. I was just—never mind.”

  His knuckles turned white as he gripped the steering wheel; the man, John thought, definitely had his own agenda. But what was it? He asked again, “What do you want from me?”

  “There are a ton of gates on your little girl’s property. I checked.”

  His little girl. John shut his eyes, fighting nausea and dizziness and the feeling—the horrible dread—that he was about to fail his daughter again.

  “I can’t risk making a mistake. So you’re going to show me which gate those keys unlock.” Quint spoke as if he had no doubt that was exactly what John would do.

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I’ll make your daughter show me.”

  Zeke had too many theories.

  He walked through the elegant gaming room on the second floor of the Canfield Casino Museum in Congress Park. The decor was high Victorian, lavish, heavy, dark. The thick, patterned carpet absorbed his footsteps as he checked out the faro table, which looked relatively innocuous under an ornate chandelier. He tried to imagine Dani’s two great-great-grandfathers—robber baron Ambrose Chandler and gambler Ulysses Pembroke—placing their bets. Maybe it was Jackson Witt’s influence on the culture of Cedar Springs, but Zeke had never seen the attraction of gambling.

  On his way out he stopped at the glass-fronted display case in the hall.

  Beatrix Chandler smiled at him from the grainy photograph taken a few days after her marriage to hotel magnate Ambrose Chandler. She was fair and pretty and just nineteen. She and Ambrose would have four children. Three would die of diphtheria. Money or no money, it wasn’t as if the Chandlers hadn’t faced tragedy in their lives.

  Squinting, blocking out all sound around him, Zeke studied another photograph, this one of Ulysses and Louisa Pembroke in the pavilion at Pembroke Springs just before his bottling plant had gone bust. In small print the caption stated that the shy judge’s daughter and the notorious rake had first met in the pavilion. Was that why, of all the gold keys legend says she sold, Louisa Caldwell Pembroke hadn’t sold the gold key to that particular pavilion? How had it ended up back there for Joe to find decades later? And then end up on the cliffs for Dani to find twenty-five years after that?

  Too many theories to fit too many facts, Zeke thought.

  He’d hooked up with Sam in his nondescript car outside Quint Skinner’s little rented house last night and discussed the possibilities.

  “What about your ex-heiress?” Sam had asked.

  “You ever call her ‘my’ anything within her earshot, be prepared to duck. She’s her own woman.”

  “It’s just an expression.”

  “She doesn’t have a sense of humor about that sort of thing.”

  Sam nodded thoughtfully. “I can understand that. So did you leave her to her own devices?”

  “Ira Bernstein has the grounds crawling with security people. They’re very low-key.”

  “Any good?”

  “I think so.”

  “What about our boy Quint?”

  “Sleeping at the moment.”

  Zeke had looked out at the small Cape Cod house. “We’re missing something, Sam.”

  “Either that,” Sam said, “or we’ve got all the pieces sitting right in front of us and are too damn blind or stupid to put them together.”

  After the storms the night air was cool and still, with neighborhood cats on the prowl. “Who stands to gain?” Zeke had asked rhetorically.

  “Gain what?”

  It was a good point. “The gold key would be worth a hefty sum—not just because it’s gold, but also because of its historical and romantic significance.”

  “The profit motive,” Sam said. “Our Pulitzer Prize winner could use money. Think he knows its connection to Lilli?”

  “Yes, I do. Joe could have shown him the photograph of her and Lilli in the balloon—or Quint could have just come across it while they served together—and he recognized the key in Dani’s picture in the paper, just like Naomi did.”

  “Would you remember what kind of necklace a woman was wearing in a photograph you saw twenty years ago?”

  Zeke gave that some thought. “Maybe if the woman was a missing heiress and the other woman she was with was a legendary actress and I was looking for a way to the top.”

  “Or maybe if your army buddy pointed the key out to you for some reason.” Sam stretched and added quietly, “The Pembrokes could use money, too. John, Nick, even Dani. But it doesn’t fit the facts for one of them to be after the gold key for profit.”

  “No,” Zeke said.

  “And I gather the Chandlers don’t need money. So what if this thing’s not about profit? What are the other possibilities?”

  A yellow cat had crossed in front of Sam’s car and scampered up a maple. “Lilli Chandler Pembroke.”

  Sam hadn’t said anything for a moment. “There are two angles to consider. One, someone doesn’t want the truth about what happened to her to come out. Two, someone’s after the truth.”

  So they considered both angles for a while, tossing ideas back and forth in the quiet night.

  “One thing we know for sure,” Sam said. “Joe’s dead. Whoever’s doing what around here, it can’t be him.”

  Zeke had spelled him for a while, then headed back to Dani’s Hansel and Gretel cottage. Her tale of Nick’s blackmail was just another fact to fit into his host of theories.

  On his way out of the casino museum, he stopped at the gift shop. Reproductions of the newspaper headline announcing Ulysses Pembroke’s horse as the winner of the first Chandler Stakes were almost sold out.

  Zeke bought one, just for the hell of it.

  Nick and Mattie were at the teak table in Dani’s cottage garden when she returned with Beatrix Chandler’s diary.

  “I’ll never do that again,” Nick said.

  Mattie scoffed. “I still don’t believe that was your first time in a balloon. I could swear I took you up once years ago.”

  “You di
d not. I must be senile to have let you whisk me off like that. No wonder people think you’re eccentric. If I’d known you were this crazy—hell, I’d have shot you off your moral high horse years ago. You’ve got no room to talk about me being reckless.”

  “Now, Nick, it wasn’t so bad.” Mattie stirred a spoonful of sugar into a mug of coffee; she and Nick had helped themselves to Dani’s pantry. “When I die, I’d love to have my ashes sprinkled over the Adirondacks from the basket of a beautiful hot-air balloon.”

  Nick grunted. “Do that to me, and I’ll come back and haunt you. I swear I will. I’m going into the ground in a pine box, not dumped from the sky like an ashtray.”

  “You two are morbid,” Dani said.

  Her grandfather grinned at her. “Wait till you’re my age, urchin. You’ll find the prospect of living forever’s a good deal more frightening than that of dying. I know more people in the Great Beyond than I do here.”

  Mattie handed him the sugared coffee. “That’s because you’ve lived so bloody long.”

  “To harangue you, my dear.”

  Dani had had enough. Grabbing a handful of wild blueberries from a basket Mattie had brought down from the main house, she jumped up and started inside.

  “Off somewhere?” Mattie asked.

  “The springs. I won’t be gone long.”

  Concern darkened her grandmother’s face. “But if you were attacked there—”

  “I wasn’t. Ira was.”

  “Still, don’t you think you should wait for Zeke?”

  The suggestion made her raise her eyebrows, and she grinned at Mattie. “What for?”

  “He’s a trained professional. If someone out there wants to hurt you—”

  “Given her gene pool, Mattie,” Nick said, “Dani’s not likely to appreciate anyone swooping in to her rescue.” His black eyes focused on Dani with a measure of amusement. “Are you, urchin?”

  What he was saying, she knew, was that she had a tendency to be defiant and independent to a fault. That she was reluctant to trust anyone, including Zeke Cutler.

  “I’ll be back,” she said.

  “Is there any particular reason you’re going out there?” Mattie asked. She had her mug to her lips and was blowing on the hot coffee.

  “Just checking on a couple of things.”

  One thing in particular. According to Zeke, his brother had found the gold key at the pavilion at Pembroke Springs, no doubt right where Louisa Caldwell Pembroke and Beatrix Chandler had buried it. In Beatrix’s diary, she stated that she and Louisa had carefully replaced the tiles they’d dislodged. Decades later, however, again according to Zeke, the fountain had been a mess, with broken and missing tiles, the area overgrown and dug up in places. Fountains and pavilions throughout the old estate had been vandalized over the years. But when Dani had begun her restoration of the grounds after Pembroke Springs was on solid financial footing, she’d been surprised at what good shape the pavilion near the bottling plant was in.

  Who, in the years between her mother’s disappearance and then, had cleaned up the place? And why?

  She asked Mattie, “Did you have any work done out at the springs before I took over?”

  “No—why?”

  “I’m not sure, but it’s not important right now. I’ll be back in a little while.” She smiled. “You two, behave yourselves.”

  Zeke headed to Quint’s rented house to check with Sam once more before making his way back to the Pembroke. He’d lay out all his theories for Dani, Nick, Mattie, John if he was out of the hospital. They’d put their heads together. See what they came up with.

  Sam had moved across the street, down from the cute yellow house. Zeke pulled up behind Sam’s car. There was no sign of his friend, but Zeke wasn’t concerned. For all he knew, Sam was perched on Quint’s rooftop, peering down his chimney.

  As Zeke approached Sam’s car, the driver’s-side door swung open, and Sam fell out onto the street.

  Zeke took out his gun and ran to him.

  Sam reached for the door handle, grunting with pain and effort as he tried to pull himself up. Zeke got to him. He took Sam’s weight and saw the grayish cast to his skin and the blood soaked into his tangerine polo shirt and the leg of his sand-colored jeans. Around them, kids skidded by on bicycles. A mother yelled.

  “Looks worse than it is,” Sam said, sweating.

  “What happened?”

  “Shot.”

  “Quint?”

  They were already moving toward Zeke’s car. Sam was not a light man. He shook his head, shuddering. Zeke could almost see his friend’s pain. “I didn’t see who did it. Came up from behind.” He grimaced as Zeke held him against his car, opening the back door. “Thought I was dead this time.”

  “Did you see Quint?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll check on him after I get you to the hospital.”

  As always, Sam’s professionalism was in full gear. “I can wait.”

  But Zeke got him into the backseat and checked his wound. A clean shot to the shoulder and one to the thigh. Blood everywhere. Sam couldn’t wait. Slamming the door, Zeke climbed into the front seat. The hospital wasn’t far.

  In the backseat Sam didn’t make a sound.

  “Just keep your mouth shut,” Quint ordered.

  Stretched out on the stone bench inside the pavilion, John watched his kidnapper loosen another section of Spanish tile with his crowbar. He’d decided Quint was mostly a lot of hot air. Oh, he could kill John. Just like he could have killed Dani when he’d had the chance. One whack with the crowbar would do the job. But John didn’t think he’d do it. Whatever Skinner was up to, it wasn’t about profit and murder. At least not entirely.

  “Louisa Pembroke sold off all the other gold keys,” John pointed out. He was uncomfortable—his head throbbed—but the scent of roses and morning glories, of the hemlocks and pines, helped. “She probably hung on to the one that matched the key to this gate because she met Ulysses here. Buried it in a fit of pique. From what I hear, she was something of a hothead herself—a lot like my daughter.”

  Quint smashed two chunks of no-doubt pricey antique tiles into bits, an act of frustration more than purpose. “I don’t care about finding more gold keys.”

  Precisely what John had expected he’d say. “And what do you care about?”

  Quint looked around at him, sweat pouring down his unhandsome face. “Justice.”

  Spoken like a Pulitzer Prize winner, John thought, wondering if he was delirious. Quint had kidnapped him. Why wasn’t he more terrified? Because being only slightly terrified is all I can manage right now.

  And because he thought Quint Skinner just might be telling the truth.

  “What’re you going to do with me when you’re finished here?” he asked.

  “Don’t know yet.”

  John wasn’t encouraged. “My daughter has security guards on the property. Aren’t you worried someone’s going to come out here and ask what you’re doing?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m armed,” Quint said, then paused a half beat. “And I have you.”

  There was that, John thought. He cleared his throat and decided to keep quiet. He had never been a terribly good judge of character, and Skinner might yet prove to be a killer.

  But what was he after?

  Dani ducked into the bottling plant through the rear entrance. The walk through the woods had helped clear her head, and she wanted to let the security guard know she was on the grounds. She debated having him go over to the springs with her, just in case Quint Skinner was lurking about, ready to pin someone against a tree.

  She heard a moan a few feet away, under a wild-looking juniper near the entrance to the shipping office in the old part of the building.

  The security guard was slumped under the tree, gagged and bleeding from an ugly gash on the right side of his head. His hands and feet were bound with an extension cord. One extension cord. That, Da
ni thought, must have required a certain proficiency.

  “Russ, are you all right? Here—hold on.” Her hands shaking, she pulled out the gag, a simple bandanna. Russ was a skinny guy, about her father’s age. No match for the likes of Quint Skinner. “I’ll call the police.”

  “No time,” he choked out.

  Dani worked on freeing his hands and feet. The cord was hard to work with. “Just take it easy.”

  She got the cord off, freeing him, and staved off a surge of panic as she dabbed at his gash with the bandanna. He went completely white and swore. The gash looked horrible: bloody, purple, swollen. Dani got out her cell phone. Her entire body was shaking.

  Russ was trying to struggle to his feet. “I screwed up, Miss Pembroke.”

  “No, you didn’t. Guarding a mineral-water plant wasn’t supposed to be your dangerous sort of security job.”

  He collapsed back onto the grass, even whiter now. “He’s got your father.”

  She couldn’t move. “Skinner?”

  “I don’t know his name. Big guy.” Russ winced in agony. “Said your father’s in the car with him. I don’t think your father knew he coldcocked me.”

  “I’ll call the police—”

  “Get me my gun,” Russ said. “Dani—I can’t let your father…”

  She found the gun under the juniper. “Tell me how to use it,” she said, kneeling back down next to him. “I’ll go. You wait for the police.”

  Russ took the gun from her, released the safety and handed it back to her. “Point and pull the trigger. Keep your elbows bent.” He coughed, his eyes squinted against the pain. “Be ready for the kick. Small as you are, you’ll feel it.”

  She thrust her cell phone at him. “You’re sure—”

  “Go,” he said.

  She was off, keeping the gun pointed at the ground. She concentrated on where her feet touched the brick path, the rhythm of her movements, the weight of the gun in her hand, her breathing.

  Pop…

  She cut off the thought before it could blossom and overwhelm her. Her father had to be all right. She wasn’t ready to lose him.

  If she could simply distract Skinner until the police go there…