Tempting Fate

Seventeen

In the morning Dani made herself get dressed and walk over to her office at the main house. Ira came in to show her his bruised neck. “And you know what kind of sympathy I get around here? None. People say they wish they’d done it. Some friends I have. Rejoicing that I’m almost choked to death by some psychopath.”

“Ira, you’re exaggerating.”

“My own friends telling me that’s the way I’ll die, with someone’s hands around my throat.”

Dani tried not to laugh because, of course, she didn’t believe a word. “Not if I’m around with my trusty rock.”

“Or Zeke with his gun. I think our friend spotted the guy lurking in the woods, and that’s why he ran off.”

“Women never get credit for anything,” Dani said, propping her feet up on her art deco-style coffee table.

Ira scoffed. “Your problem is you want credit for everything. Comes from being the only child of an only child. You don’t even have cousins. The rest of us learned what it’s like to be shoved out of a tree house by a brother or sister, but not Dani Pembroke. She expects people to behave. Why would some goon want to spy on her in the woods?”

She wiggled her toes, feeling remarkably refreshed given her current state of confusion and sporadic sleep. “Don’t inflict your stereotypes on me, Ira. Do you want the day off?”

“No, you’d never manage to run this place and skulk about in the woods for desperadoes. Dani-” He sighed and ran a hand through his corkscrew curls, calming down. “Thanks for letting me vent. I’m worried, that’s all. About you, if you want the truth. I know it annoys you to have anyone worry about you, but there it is.”

Her eyes misted. “Thanks. If anything had happened to you yesterday-”

“You’d have named some stupid garden after me-The Ira Bernstein Memorial Blackberry Patch.” He grinned then, irreverent as ever. “I’ll run along and let you pretend to work.”

When he’d gone, one of her consultants in New York called. Dani acted glad to hear from him. “What’s going on up there? Rumors are flying.”

“Such as?”

“Such as an internationally known security expert who happened to have grown up in the same hometown as your grandmother is at the Pembroke.”

“Zeke Cutler. Yes, he’s here. What else?”

She could almost hear her very professional, very good marketing consultant gritting his teeth. “That Mattie Witt and Nick Pembroke are there.”

“Also true.”

“What about your wearing the dress your mother wore in Casino to the track on Saturday?”

“Not true,” Dani said steadily.

“And your having decided to sell the Pembroke because you can’t stand the memories?”

“You know that’s not true.”

He sighed. “Just like to be sure. Is there anything going on that hasn’t hit the rumor mill?”

“A lot, but let’s talk later.”

“Dani…just be careful. Please.”

“I will. Thanks for the call.”

She hung up before she ended up saying more than she should and someone overheard her in the hall and got another rumor started.

Zeke had returned to her cottage after midnight and stayed until just after dawn. When he left, he didn’t say where he’d been or where he was going.

“I’m doing what I know how to do,” he’d told her.

“And shutting me out.”

He’d smiled in that deliberate, cocky way of his that said he just might know her better than she knew herself. She wondered if he knew how irritating that was. “I wouldn’t presume to tell you about total dissolved solvents.”

She was smiling, thinking of him, when Eugene Chandler walked into her office. “Hello, Danielle,” he said as he looked around, her unconventional work space a contrast to the elegant offices at the Chandler Hotels headquarters in New York. He cleared his throat and added, “I apologize for not calling ahead.”

“That’s okay. Have a seat. Can I get you anything?”

“No, thank you.”

He didn’t sit down, but walked into the middle of the sun-washed room, rubbing one finger across the top of her old player piano. She’d opened the windows to let in a cool, fresh morning breeze, filled with the scent of flowers and grass. She could hear guests outside enjoying themselves. Her grandfather peered out the leaded-glass window.

“Is something the matter?” she asked.

“I’d forgotten how quite extraordinary this property is,” he said pensively, still staring out the window. “It always was impractical as a private home. Of course, Ulysses Pembroke never concerned himself with practicalities. I understand that but for you, Danielle, this property would be a shopping mall by now.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Many people are grateful you stuck to your guns when I told you this scheme of yours would never work. Don’t get me wrong. I admire what you’ve accomplished. I didn’t come here to criticize.”

His quiet words, the concern in his cool blue eyes, made Dani wonder if she might have unfairly pigeonholed her grandfather, damned him forever for the occasional insensitive remark, failed to understand him as badly as he’d failed to understand her. Failed to forgive. Perhaps, she thought, his rigidness and uncompromising attitude weren’t as rigid and uncompromising as she’d always believed. Learning more about Jackson Witt allowed her to look at her disagreements with Eugene Chandler-and there undeniably were many-with a new perspective. If nothing else, she had to give her grandfather credit for always being forthright with her in his own exasperating way.

“I understand Mattie and Nick are in town,” he said.

Dani wasn’t surprised. That kind of news would travel fast. “They arrived yesterday afternoon.”

“And they’re already up to their old antics. I was with a friend at his stables this morning, and who should float overhead in a bright yellow balloon but those two. Mattie still has that orange flight suit of hers, I see. I should have thought by now they were too old for ballooning.”

“Not according to Mattie. Nick I don’t know about-she probably had to browbeat him into going. It’s fairly calm out. They shouldn’t have run into any problems.”

He didn’t seem reassured. “Danielle-why are they here? Why is your father here? And what really happened to him?”

It went against every fiber of her being to confide in him. Dani dropped her feet to the floor and jumped up, wishing for an interruption. A fax, another call from New York, papers to sign. But she walked over to the window and stood beside her tall and very dignified grandfather. She inhaled, suddenly sympathetic to this old man who’d lost so much. But how could she explain questions she barely understood herself-never mind their possible answers?

“I don’t know exactly why Mattie, Nick and Pop are here, except that some things have been going on…” But her nature, years of mistrust and miscommunication, and maybe a touch of concern for him, stopped her from going further. She added gently, “I’m sure it’s all a tempest in a teapot.”

He turned to her, and she could see where he’d nicked his chin shaving, where the dark, puffy circles had formed under his eyes. “There’s something I think you should know. Zeke Cutler and his older brother, Joe, were in Saratoga the week your mother disappeared. I didn’t know it at the time-no one thought to tell me.”

“How did you find out?”

He smiled thinly. “It was the one reasonably interesting detail my private investigators managed to produce. Oh, I had both Cutler brothers checked out. Joe was in the army then, Zeke was in high school in Tennessee. Apparently they came north to inform Mattie that her father was dying of cancer.”

“Zeke told me-”

“But did he tell you his brother had decided while he was up here that he was in love with your aunt Sara?”

Dani felt a rush of cold. Sara? And Joe Cutler? Zeke had to know. And he’d chosen not to tell her. She didn’t feel betrayed, only a tug of hopelessness. She was falling in love with Zeke-no use pretending she wasn’t-but how could they ever really work together? The past seemed destined to extinguish the possibilities that had sparked between them.

“Of course,” her grandfather went on, “Sara’s heart already lay with Roger. It was right around that time that they began seeing each other.”

“Did he know about Joe?”

“I don’t think so. I believe Joe knew more about Roger than Roger knew about Joe.”

“Then Sara dumped Joe?”

Her grandfather wrinkled up his face in distaste. “I don’t think their relationship ever progressed to the point that she needed to be that direct. I’m sure she discouraged him as sensitively as she could.”

Dani sank onto the piano bench, remembering her aunt at twenty. She’d been pretty and rebellious, still shattered by her mother’s death. Having two men as different as Roger Stone and Joe Cutler falling for her must have been a welcome distraction. But how different was the Sara Chandler Stone of today. “Does Sara realize you know this?” Dani asked.

He shook his head. “There would be no point. She’s had enough to endure without another reminder of that terrible summer. Joe Cutler…” He hesitated, turning from the window. “It’s too late now, I suppose, but I’ve often wondered if he might have known something…” He trailed off. “But there’s never been any evidence to suggest his involvement with your mother’s disappearance.”

“Could Roger and Sara know anything and just not realize it?”

“It’s possible. I intend to ask.” His eyes clouded. “Danielle-I brought you something. I don’t know if it will make any difference to you, but-” Stopping midsentence, he reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a small, black leather volume; it looked old. “This is one of my mother’s journals. Her last, actually. The entries stop right as her three oldest children became ill with diphtheria and died. Lilli and Sara both read it when they were younger-I’d have given it to you sooner to read if I’d thought you were interested.”

Dani felt a stab of guilt. “Grandfather, I had no idea…”

He held up a hand. “I’m not criticizing. I’m merely explaining why I’ve waited until now to give this to you. Danielle, my mother and your great-great-grandmother-Ulysses’s wife-maintained a quiet, almost secret friendship.” Handing Dani the diary, he went on. “I’ve marked an entry I think might interest you right now, given what’s been going on in your life.”

Dani opened up to the marked page. Her great-grandmother’s handwriting was delicate and clear, faded with time. She looked up at her grandfather, but he waved her on. She read:

I saw Louisa today. Despite her tremendous financial woes, she has finally decided not to sell the gold key that Ulysses made to match the gate key to the pavilion at Pembroke Springs, where they met in a more optimistic time. However, neither can she bear to keep it. Ulysses caused her so much joy, and yet brought her so much suffering. She has chosen instead to bury it in the fountain inside the pavilion, as a testament to what I frankly do not know. Her ambivalence about her late husband, perhaps? At least she has made her decision, however little I understand it. I have promised to go with her tomorrow morning to help her dislodge the fountain tiles. Naturally I have told my husband none of this…

Dani pictured the two refined women smashing up the fountain in their ruffled tea dresses. She shut the volume. “Did Nick know about this?” she asked her grandfather.

“Not unless Lilli told him. I’m quite sure his grandmother never told him about having buried a large twenty-four-karat gold key. Otherwise he would have…” He deliberately didn’t finish.

But Dani did. “He’d have hocked it first chance he got.”

Eugene Chandler let her have the last word on that one. “I only wish Lilli had left us with a similar insight into her character as my mother did.” He became strangely quiet, his shoulders slumped. “It would be a blessing to know what happened to her before I pass on. I’ve always thought I wouldn’t have to die with her disappearance still unresolved.”

“I hope you won’t,” Dani said.

“But,” he went on awkwardly, “I would rather leave the past alone and not know than to see anything happen to you.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead. “It’s always a pleasure to see you, Danielle.”

She was too stunned to say goodbye. As she watched him leave, it struck her that despite his inability to know what to say to her-his seeming lack of emotion-her grandfather had suffered and had been changed by the long years of not knowing what had happened to his firstborn daughter. His inability to know what to say to Dani-his seeming lack of emotion-didn’t mean he didn’t care.

She remembered the day he’d marched down to her Greenwich Village apartment for the first and only time, not long after she’d gone into business for herself. He had demanded to know why, if she insisted on a career, didn’t she take a position with Chandler Hotels? She’d been mystified. Not only did he disapprove of Chandler women taking careers, and generally disapproved of her choice, but her father had embezzled from Chandler Hotels, betrayed his father-in-law’s trust. Betrayed his coworkers. How could her grandfather expect her to work with the same people her father had robbed?

“I’m a Pembroke, Grandfather,” she’d told him.

And he’d looked at her with his grave steel-blue eyes. “You don’t have to be.”

“What?”

“Drop the Pembroke from your name. In time people will forget who your father was. At least they’ll know you want no part of him-that you’re different.”

She’d thrown him out and had called a lawyer to begin the proceedings to disinherit herself. “Not a nickel!” she’d told him. “Not a nickel of his money do I want crossing my palm!”

And not a nickel had.

Quint Skinner handed John his pants. “Get dressed.”

John clutched the pants and tried not to look scared out of his wits.

“I’m not kidnapping you.” Skinner’s eyes were hard, his voice absolutely calm. “You’re coming of your own free will.”

“Now, why would I do that?”

“Because,” Skinner said with no small touch of drama, “I know where your daughter is.”

John felt a stab of fear. Dani. He swung his legs off the edge of his bed. A hell of a lot of help he’d been since coming to Saratoga. So far he’d had his head knocked in, and now he was getting himself snatched right out of his hospital bed. Where were Sam Jones and Zeke Cutler when he needed them?

“What do you want from me?” he asked the big red-faced man.

“Get dressed first.”

Swallowing groans of pain and refusing to whine, John pulled on his pants, which hung even more than usual. He’d lost weight in the past couple of days. Skinner thrust his shirt and sneakers at him. “No socks?” John asked cheekily.

He didn’t get even a glimmer of a smile from the stinking thug.

When he finished dressing, he and Skinner headed down the hospital corridor. “What if I faint?” John asked.

“Your daughter lives in a purple cottage on the Pembroke estate. Has a statue of Artemis in the garden.”

John felt his knees wobble under him.

Outside, Saratoga was enjoying beautiful weather, last night’s storms having washed out the clouds and humidity. Skinner shoved John into the front seat of a dark blue BMW. “Mind the noggin,” John said. “I presume it was your doing?”

Quint ignored him.

John sat very still, trying to hold off a wave of dizziness. He’d talked the doctors into springing him today. He wanted desperately to do something to get to the bottom of whatever was going on in Saratoga. He hadn’t had being kidnapped in mind. He looked at the solid man beside him. “I know who you are, you know.”

Quint nodded. “That stupid book on Joe Cutler fixed that for me. There’s no going back once you’ve lost your anonymity.”

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 did 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, Dani 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…

Listening hard, she heard nothing but birds and the sough of the wind in the trees. She ran through a small grove of pines, feeling the soft grass underfoot, slowing as she came up behind the pavilion where she suspected Quint had taken her father.

Suddenly she heard her father’s voice, and the rush of adrenaline was so enormous she thought her chest would burst.

He’s alive.

“You should see your face,” he was saying to Skinner. “It’s about the color of a good roasted red pepper. Keep this up, you’re going to have a stroke.”

Peering from behind thick branches of a pine tree, Dani saw Quint rising, a crowbar in one hand. “I ought to hit you over the head just for driving me crazy. You’re worse than the mosquitoes.”

No one, Dani thought, could be more maddening than her father.

She edged forward to the wrought-iron fence. The gate was on the opposite side, which helped give her the advantage of surprise. Skinner would be unlikely to expect an approach from that direction. But it didn’t permit her to cut off his exit. The gate had been left wide open.

Ducking under one more branch, she came out within a foot of the gate. She raised Russ’s gun. Elbows bent…be ready for the kick…point and pull the trigger…

Her father spotted her. She knew because he looked as if he was going to throw up.

“Keep your hands where I can see them,” she said.

Skinner looked around at her, then laid his crowbar onto a massive shoulder like a fishing pole and laughed at her.

“I wouldn’t annoy her if I were you,” John said. He didn’t sound particularly terrified, but that was her father. Bravado in the face of any problem, no matter how serious.

“I don’t care what you’re doing here,” Dani said to Skinner. “Just let my father go.”

“You’re welcome to him.” He slung the crowbar off his shoulder and held it easily in one hand at his side. The amusement left his expression. He nodded to the fountain. “I found what I came to find.”

He turned his back to her and her gun and sauntered off toward the gate.

“Hey,” she said. “I have a gun pointed at you.”

He glanced back at her, his face red and dirty. “So?”

“So you nearly killed my hotel manager and then my security guard. And I’ll bet you landed my father here in the hospital.”

“Nope,” he said. “I didn’t do that one. The others-what can I say? Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.”

“I’m not going to let you just walk out of here.”

“Dani,” her father said.

“Stay out of this, Pop.”

“Sweetheart,” Quint said, “you fire that thing, the only one who’s going to get hurt is you. It’s a forty-four. It’ll knock you on your pretty little ass.”

He continued through the gate.

Her father jumped between her and Skinner. “Dani, just let the bastard go.”

“Relax, Pop. I’m not going to do anything crazy.”

“You’re damn right you’re not,” Zeke said from behind her.

She swung around, and he snatched her gun before she could accidentally-or on purpose-shoot him, then caught her by the shoulder, steadying her. She didn’t protest. “Where did you come from?” she asked.

“The inn. Mattie and Nick heard from the hospital that John was gone-they’re frantic. Ira’s got someone with them. He’s ready to call out the National Guard.”

“What happened to your friend?” John asked, still on the bench on the other side of the fence. “I kept expecting him to swoop to my rescue at any moment. Unlike other members of my family, I’d happily turn my safety over to either one of you.”

“Sam was shot,” Zeke said, grim-faced.

Dani grabbed his wrist. “Will he be okay? What happened?”

“He’s fine, but later,” he said. “The police are on the way. Since this isn’t my show, I’d prefer not to stick around.” He pulled his wrist free and started around the pavilion. “By the way, Quint was bluffing. Your gun’s a thirty-eight. It has a kick, but it wouldn’t have knocked you on your pretty little ass. I would have. You don’t take on killers when you don’t have to.”

“I did have to.”

“Do you ever not argue back?”

She managed a smile. “Never.”

He grinned. “Good.”

Then he was gone.

“My, my,” her father said, eyeing her.

She frowned at him. “It’s not what you think.”

“Oh, I’m afraid it is.”

She would stand for no more of this. “What was Skinner after?”

“I haven’t the foggiest. He made a damn mess of your fountain, though.” He climbed unsteadily to his feet and walked to the edge of the circular brick path inside the pavilion and examined the area where Quint had been digging. “Oh, hell.”

“Pop?”

She lunged for the gate. Her father tried to stop her. But he was too weak, too shocked himself, and she pushed past him.

She saw the twisted, crumpled mess that was still recognizable as the straw hat her mother had had with her the night she disappeared twenty-five years ago.