Dani stood in front of Sara and touched her hand, the nails perfectly manicured, a pale pink. “Sara, what happened to Mother?”
“She fell.”
“On the rocks?”
“Yes!” Fat tears rolled down her cheeks, but she remained eerily still. “I was so upset. I must have backed her up too close to the edge of the rocks, and then when she tried to tell me what to do—I shoved her. I didn’t mean anything by it. It was just a reaction.” Tears continued to drop down her cheeks, mingling with the others, dripping off her chin. She didn’t seem to notice. “It was an accident…it was so dark out there…”
Dani held back her own tears. “Then what happened?”
“Well, I…I buried her, of course.”
“Where?”
“At the pavilion.” The whites of her eyes were red, the eyelids swollen, and her speech was slurred. “I thought I’d get the courage to confess everything, but Father—he already despised me. I was too wild, I wasn’t his perfect Lilli. And Mother had just died, and I needed him, and then I thought, would it be exciting for Lilli just to have disappeared?”
Dani didn’t argue with her. It was far, far too late for what Sara Chandler should have done the night her sister fell.
“She’d be a mystery instead of just another dead heiress.” She smiled at Dani. “Do you think people would have made such a big deal about her role in Casino if she hadn’t been a missing heiress? You see, I gave Lilli what she really wanted. Because of me, she got her fame, her mystique.”
“But, Sara—”
“No, it’s true. Don’t you see? Without me, Lilli wouldn’t have achieved the status she has.”
Dani took her aunt’s hands into hers and held on tight. “I’m not disagreeing with you, Sara, but I need you to listen just a moment. Okay? Just listen.”
Her aunt didn’t seem to hear her. “And Father didn’t suffer. Not really. I became his Lilli for him. She wouldn’t have done half of what I’ve done for him. Look at what she did the first time she was to serve as hostess for the Chandler lawn party. She went hot-air ballooning with Mattie Witt! Left me to dress her only daughter! She didn’t even show up.” Sara looked at Dani, smiled sadly. “My only failing, of course, was that I could never be your mother.”
Hanging on to the shreds of her own self-control, Dani fought an urge to tear at her hair and scream at the sky, to let out everything that was raging inside her. “Sara, what did Joe want when he came back here?”
She bit her lip. “He…I’d confessed to him. I got his address from Quint Skinner when he tried to interview your father, and—and I asked him to come see me when he got out or came home on leave. I suppose I shouldn’t have.”
“You told him everything that happened that night?”
“Oh, yes.”
And there you have it, Dani thought, feeling no sense of victory, only a crushing emptiness. But now, at least, the pieces fit together. She touched her aunt’s arm. “Sara, did you look over the rocks and actually see where Mother fell?”
“Wh-what?”
“Could you see her from where you were standing?”
“No, I…It was dark.”
“But you buried her yourself.”
Sara didn’t respond.
“I need to ask you one more question,” Dani said softly. “Sara, you’re not as tall as Mother was—you’ve always weighed less. How did you get her back up the rocks to the pavilion?”
Sara’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “What?”
“It’s a tough, steep climb. I’ve done it.”
“I don’t know what you mean—”
“You couldn’t have carried her by yourself. Sara, Roger knew what had happened, didn’t he? You said he was there with you at the springs.”
“He…It was dark…he knew it was an accident…” She cleared her throat, struggling to reassert the cool heiress who would know what to do, what to say, in any awkward situation. “He said I should leave and he’d take care of everything. Dani, please—please don’t say anything. You have to understand! Roger’s protected me all these years. He can’t be a part of this.”
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.”
He smirked and neither confirmed nor denied her statement.
“You’ll blame my death on Sara, saying she killed me because I’d found out she’d killed her sister. You’ll say you tried to stop her, but you were too late.”
“No one’s ever accused you of being stupid, Danielle.”
“And you just had to kill your own crazy wife in self-defense. Everyone would believe you because you’re Roger Stone of Chandler Hotels.”
“I feel no remorse, Danielle. Everything would have been fine if you hadn’t found that key.” His eyes pinned her. “Let’s get moving.”
She tried to keep him talking. “Joe was onto you. Sara had confessed to him, but like me, he couldn’t put it all together—”
But Roger wasn’t biting. “We have to go now. Drop your gun, please, Danielle. It’s not going to do you any good. I’m an excellent shot. I’ve already shot two men today, and if I have to, I’ll shoot you right here on your grandfather’s front porch. I’ll get away with it, Danielle. You know I will.”
He was supremely confident. Her eyes on him, Dani squatted to lay her gun on the floor. Zeke couldn’t be hurt. He couldn’t be dead. She needed him right now and he…
He was on the porch steps behind Roger.
Dani only barely glanced at him, not wanting to give away his presence. She’d never met anyone so tough who could move so gracefully and silently. Was it his shoes?
I’m losing it.
Oh, Mama, Mama…
“Sara,” Roger said gently, “put the cat down, dear. We need to go. I’m taking you to the springs, to Lilli.”
Dani still had one hand on her gun. If she let go, she’d have no chance to stop Roger, to protect herself.
He pointed his own gun at her. It looked expensive and bigger than hers. “Nice and slow, Danielle.”
Zeke was on the top step, not two feet behind Roger.
His dark eyes held hers.
She knew what he wanted her to do. Not to give up. Not to turn her life over to him.
To trust him.
As he, now, was trusting her.
She let go of her gun so that Roger would think, for a split second, that he had her completely under his control.
It was all Zeke needed.
He grabbed Roger’s gun hand and jerked it up and to the side, away from Dani and Sara. The gun clattered to the porch floor. Dani dived for it, but there was no need. When she scrambled to her feet, Zeke had Roger pinned face-first to the porch column, his arm twisted behind him at a painful angle.
“You had Quint kill my brother,” Zeke said in a low, hard voice.
“No! Quint didn’t kill him—”
“He set him up. Amounts to the same thing.”
“What would you have done in my place? Joe gave me a month to come clean about Lilli. He left me no choice! Don’t you understand? I would have lost everything.”
Zeke was eerily calm. “Quint knew about the picture Joe took. He recognized the key Dani found and came to Saratoga, stole it, started to look at things in a new light and figured you’d used him. So he decided to try to make things right. You found out and you killed him.”
“I offered him a fortune—”
“He only wanted justice.”
At that moment the police arrived, followed by a taxi that barely came to a stop before Dani saw her father leap out, gauze and adhesive tape trailing from his head. Then the Chandler limousine slid up to the curb.
Sara calmly pushed the cat off her lap, demurely picked a few white hairs off her skirt, leaned over and stretched so that she could reach the Pembroke Springs security guard’s gun.
Dani got to her before her aunt could shoot her husband dead.
Nineteen
Dani joined her grandmother in the garden behind her cottage. It was dusk. The questioning by police, the media, was over. Mattie had found an old kite and spread it out on the teak table, with scissors, a stapler, a jackknife and some twisted nylon line. She had on her orange flight suit, and Dani smiled at this woman she had always adored. “You’ve always been good with your hand
s,” she said.
“My mother’s doing. She taught me how to knit, crochet, tat, quilt, do cutwork. All those ladylike skills. I was supposed to teach Naomi after Mother died, only I never did.”
Dani sank into a chair. She was barefoot, exhausted but not so overwhelmed anymore. Just damn tired. “Sara said that the afternoon and evening Mother spent with you had made her realize that we were all a part of who she was and that she could never give us up. Nick had let her go after a dream. You helped her to discover for herself whether or not it was a dream she wanted to make come real.”
Mattie had tears in her eyes; it occurred to Dani that she’d almost never seen her grandmother cry. “So did Joe Cutler.”
“He was a survivor, too. You have an ability to carry on, Mattie, that I…” She shut her eyes a moment, pulling herself together. It would be ridiculous to fall apart now. “That I hope to discover in myself.”
“You will,” her grandmother said with confidence.
Dani opened a bottle of Pembroke Springs Mineral Water, now tangibly and forever linked with her mother, as the Chandler Stakes had been. She wondered if she finally understood what her mother’s dream of singing and dancing had been about. Her frustration and searching in the months after her own mother’s death. Had Lilli simply been discovering her own ability to carry on?
“What about Zeke?” Mattie asked softly.
“I’ve known him such a short time—it’s been a whirlwind.” Dani tucked her knees up under her chin; she rarely discussed her love life with anyone, even this knowing, kind woman who’d helped raise her. “I never thought I’d fall for someone the way I have him.”
Mattie smiled. “I felt the same way about myself some sixty years ago.”
Zeke had been through so much in his life. At the police station, trying to explain the past days, Dani had felt his strength of character, even as the sorrow seeped into her until she physically ached. There was no middle ground now between death and abandonment. Her mother was gone forever. But Zeke had lost a father and a mother and a brother and had worked in a field of loss and danger. He’d suffered and struggled and become strong.
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