“Where is he now?” Mattie asked.
“At the hospital with Sam Jones.”
“Are you going to go to him?”
Dani hesitated. If she asked him, Zeke would suffer for her. It would be so easy to let him. To lose herself. “No,” she said, but added, “not yet.”
Before Mattie could argue, Nick burst into the garden from the kitchen. He looked scrawny and ancient and very full of himself. Mattie asked him if he’d hunted up a poker game.
“Nope,” he said. “Hamburgers.”
“Hamburgers?”
“I have eaten enough nuts, seeds, pasta, grains, fruits and vegetables to last me the rest of my life, be that two more hours or another century. Found a place that makes hundred-percent-beef hamburgers and delivers. They’ll be here in ten minutes. With french fries and chocolate shakes. And pickles,” he said. “Salty pickles.”
Mattie was incensed. “If you drop dead on me—”
Nick grinned. “At least it’ll be with meat in my stomach.”
Zeke paid the tab for his room at the Pembroke and cleared out. He thought Ira looked glad to have him on his way. But before he left the grounds, he stopped at the rose garden. It was almost dark. A small sign warned him not to pick any roses. He did anyway, using his jackknife. Six in six different colors.
“The thing about my daughter is this,” John Pembroke had told him from his hospital bed when Zeke had stopped in after visiting Sam, who’d emerged from surgery in good shape. “She likes to have a challenge. Something comes to her on a silver platter, she doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t trust herself with anything easy.”
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.
Twenty
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.”
Twenty-One
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.
S
tepping 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.
Twenty-Two
“A kite,” 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.”
With her back to the wind, she held the simple nylon kite up by its bridle. It immediately snapped into a flying position.
Mattie was delighted. “There, you see? Enough wind.”
Naomi dubiously eyed the kite and her sister. “Then we’re in business?”
“You bet.”
They walked down West Main to the field behind the old military academy. Jackson Witt had forbidden them to play there when they were children. It was a perfect place to fly a kite. Naomi had taken a bit of convincing. She worried about catching a chill and old Doc Hiram coming by and thinking they’d lost their minds. Mattie had been her most persuasive. When Naomi came downstairs in a skirt and pumps and one of those plastic rain bonnets over her neatly coiffed hair, Mattie had withheld comment. She herself had on her favorite orange flight suit. Naomi said she looked like an escaped lunatic.
“It’s rather cool out here,” Naomi said.
Mattie was sweltering. She gestured to the sweater she’d brought along and tossed onto the grass; it was one of Nick’s castoffs. “Put that on.”
“Oh, Mattie, I couldn’t. It’s a man’s sweater—”
“Then catch a cold.”
Clucking to herself, Naomi scooped up the sweater and picked off bits of grass before she put it on. It was even bigger on her than it would be on Mattie. She neatly turned up the sleeves. “I suppose it won’t look too tacky from a distance.”
Mattie was getting the biggest kick out of her sister. They’d been together for a week, and Mattie felt as if they were kids again; and yet their relationship felt new at the same time. She couldn’t explain it. They would fuss at each other and giggle and cry and argue about anything. That morning they’d gone all through breakfast debating whether Billy Cook and Pearl Butterfield had married, though Billy and Pearl both were dead now. Every night, Naomi dragged out scrapbooks and photo albums and told her sister about virtually every birth, death, marriage and divorce that had occurred in Cedar Springs since Mattie had left.
“Let’s get this kite into the air,” Mattie said.
“Now, Mattie, you can’t be running across this field as if you were ten years old. If you trip, you’re likely to break a hip. At your age your bones must be brittle.”
Mattie loved the way Naomi said “your” age, as if she weren’t in her seventies herself. “I’m not going to run. That’s not an effective way to launch a kite.”
“Oh?”
She had Naomi’s interest now. She came in closer. “If there’s enough wind,” Mattie explained, “you can launch a kite from your hand. It’s just a question of getting it above the ground-air turbulence until it soars. But there’s not quite enough wind for that today.”
“So what do we do?”
“Well, you take the kite and walk downwind about fifty feet. I’ll hold on to the line. When a gust hits the kite—you’ll feel it—you let go. I do the rest.”
“I think I can do that.”
This was false modesty, Mattie knew. In her own way, Naomi was one of the most self-confident people Mattie had ever known. She took the kite and walked gingerly across the field, Nick’s pilled sweater hanging loosely from her tiny frame.
“If the kite spins and dives,” Mattie yelled, “it’s too light for the wind conditions. But I don’t think that’ll be the case.”
“We’ll soon find out, won’t we?”
Naomi stood on her tiptoes and held the kite up as high as she could, and when the gust came, she released it fast—as fast as Mattie would have—and her sister pulled the line. Naomi squealed and ran back to her. “Mattie, it’s working! It’s working!”
“Yes, yes!”
Mattie could feel the Tennessee wind at her back, Naomi laughing at her side, clapping her hands, as their kite rode the wind, and finally—just a speck of bright yellow in a clear blue sky—soared high above Cedar Springs.
Twenty-Three
On a blustery afternoon in late September, when the trees were tinged with bright reds and oranges, Dani eased herself into the hot, bubbling, slightly smelly mineral water in a deep tub in Ulysses’s elegantly renovated bathhouse. Thousands of tiny bubbles clung to her skin. The feeling was downright erotic. Her body was buoyant in the highly mineralized naturally carbonated water, totally relaxed.
And yet her mind was spinning.
“Step one,” Kate had told her, “is to figure out what you want.”
That wasn’t step one. She already knew what she wanted. She’d known from the moment she’d tried to bonk Zeke on the head with a Pembroke Springs Mineral Water bottle in her garden.
Step one was finding him.
She closed her eyes, trying to abandon herself to the soothing powers of the water. There was nothing to keep her at the Pembroke. The worst of the summer crisis had passed, and with it the rumors, the horror, the blazing headlines, the pity. Tactless as ever, Ira had claimed to be up to the challenge of having a body discovered on the premises of a luxury spa-inn of which he was manager. “It’ll lend a certain cachet and naughtiness to the place,” he’d said. “As if it needs more.”
But he’d done his job, and the frantic phone calls from her marketing consultants and her bean counters had dropped off, not because of any dramatic improvement in her cash flow, but because Eugene Chandler had offered to have a look at her setup and she’d agreed. Her bean counters had had him over to their office—“A man of his bearing shouldn’t have to endure your office, Dani”—and they’d gone over her companies top to bottom, inside and out. Her grandfather hadn’t found anything he’d change from a purely business if not a personal standpoint. Personally he’d change a lot. But Dani wouldn’t self-destruct anytime soon. Even Ira had been annoyingly reassured.
“I’ve been telling you that for months,” she argued.
“Yes, but you’re half Pembroke. He’s not.”
Her professional life remained full, busy and satisfying. It was her personal life that needed work. Living alone had lost its charm. Before Zeke, she’d been fine. Now, although she didn’t feel incomplete and wasn’t afraid or bored or unfulfilled, she would sit in her garden and wonder where he was, what he was doing, if he still cared. She’d think of how much she loved about him and imagine the possibilities of a life together with him. Was he, too, figuring out new meanings for the past? Trying to let his brother’s life teach him something that he could take with him into his own life?
Suddenly Magda burst into the private, all-white salon room. “Up, up,” she said in her Russian accent, shaking out a heated white sheet.
“What’s the matter? Have I been in here too long, am I going to shrivel up? Magda—”
“No need to panic. You have a visitor, that’s all.”
Zeke.
Dani jumped out of the tub and into the towel, but Magda, tiny as she was, p
ushed her toward the cot and made her lie down, at least for a few minutes. Her skin was too overheated. She didn’t want to faint, did she?
“Magda, who’s out there panting to see me?”
“Well,” Ira said, “I wouldn’t say I was panting.”
If she’d been in more than just a sheet, Dani would have strangled him. “This is not funny, Ira.”
He waved her quiet. “Sam Lincoln Jones is waiting at your cottage—says you may be a budding tycoon, but you make a rotten detective. First, however, I need to give you something.”
“Ira…”
“So impatient.” He handed over an envelope. “It’s a plane ticket. We all pitched in here and over at the bottling plant to send you to California. You know, after a crisis it’s sometimes polite of an owner to take a damn vacation and let people adjust.”
“You’re a fine one to talk about what’s ‘polite,’” Dani said, but she took the envelope. Indeed, inside was an airline ticket. “Ira, I can’t let you guys pay for my airfare—Hey, it’s to San Diego. Are you nuts? I can’t—”
“Isn’t San Diego Zeke’s home base?”
“Yes, that’s my point!”
“Mine, too. Sam will give you directions from the airport to wherever the hell Cutler’s got himself squirreled away. The rest is up to you.”
“I smell a conspiracy.”
“You’re the boss, kid, but you’re also our friend.” Ira smiled at her, unrepentant. “We just want you to be happy.”
For the first time in twenty years Zeke had a dream.
He settled back in the pilot’s chair of his boat and indulged himself.
Dani would bounce up onto his flybridge with her dark hair and dark eyes and sparkling smile. She’d be wearing one of her little dresses, maybe have her hair pulled back. She’d laugh when she saw him. He’d scoop her up and carry her down to his bunk where they’d make love until dawn.
It was a hell of a dream.
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