Tempting Fate

Eleven

Someone knocked on Zeke’s door just after seven, waking him. He’d collapsed atop the crazy quilt around one. Pembroke housekeeping had unransacked his room. He wished they hadn’t. He might have been able to tell what Quint had been after. Did he know about the blackmail note as well?

“Hang on,” he called, rolling off the bed. He pulled on his jeans and shook off the last vestiges of sleep. “Who is it?”

“Ira Bernstein.”

So Dani wasn’t bluffing about kicking him out. Zeke opened up. “Look-” He stopped instantly, taking in the Pembroke manager’s pale face and shaken look. “What’s wrong?”

“Dani’s father has been found unconscious out near the bottling plant. He’s being transported to the hospital by ambulance now.”

“Does she know?”

Ira shook his head. “I thought you…”

He thought Zeke could tell her. “Do you know what happened to him?”

“He appears to have stumbled and fallen. He wasn’t on the path.”

“What’s his condition?”

“I don’t know.”

“Give me three minutes.”

“I’ll wait out here.”

Zeke nodded and shut the door. Outside his window the clouds and dawn drizzle had vanished, leaving in their wake a beautiful blue sky. Guests were already up and at it. He could see a half-dozen doing stretches on the lawn.

He dialed Sam in San Diego. “This thing’s getting even uglier.”

It was still night on the West Coast, but Sam was clearheaded. “One thing I’ve learned, the past is never past.”

“Find out anything about our boy Quint?”

“He’s broke and out of work.”

Zeke appreciated Sam’s matter-of-fact tone. Sam had never met Quint or Joe and wasn’t one to judge people. “I need your help,” Zeke said.

“I’ll tuck a toothbrush in my backpack and be on my way.”

“Thanks.”

“What for?”

“He’s asleep,” Zeke said, as he and Dani stood next to her father’s hospital bed.

Dani shook her head, her small, trim body rigid with tension and fear, neither of which, Zeke knew, she would acknowledge. He and Ira had found her throwing things around her kitchen and holding back tears even as she’d cursed her father to the rafters for sneaking out on her. She took the news about her father-Zeke told her the basics, and Ira supplied the details, what few there were-without a word. Ira had stayed at the Pembroke. Zeke had driven her to the hospital. She’d wanted to drive herself, but he’d prevailed.

“He’s faking it,” she said. She leaned over her father. “Pop, I know you’re not asleep.”

He didn’t answer. He’d just come from the emergency room. His eyes were shut, and there was a grayish cast to his skin, except for the purple and red spots that seemed to seep from the edges of his bandaged head. He’d needed stitches on his forehead and had a bloodied nose where he’d hit a tree when he’d fallen. But Zeke was more interested in the lump at the back of his head. How had it gotten there if he’d pitched forward face-first? If the rain had continued, if he’d tripped before getting to the edge of the woods, if the night watchman hadn’t checked the grounds before going off shift…John Pembroke could have been in worse shape than he was now.

“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 sister 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.”