Tempting Fate

Eighteen

The cream-colored Chandler house on North Broadway stood silent in the bright afternoon sun. With the watchman’s gun heavy in her hand, Dani stopped on the wide sidewalk and looked up at the sky, almost as if there should be a hot-air balloon floating overhead, carrying her smiling mother back to her, just like in The Wizard of Oz.

“Oh, Mama,” she whispered, fighting back tears.

She’d dragged her father from the pavilion back to the bottling plant, where Russ was holding his bandanna to his wounded head. By then, the police sirens were close. Russ had promised to see to her father and let her borrow his car. She’d driven straight to Millionaires’ Row.

Her aunt was in a wicker chair on the front porch, stroking a long-haired white cat in her lap. A pile of crumpled pink petunia blossoms lay scattered on the floor beside her. She wore one of her feminine, flowery dresses and smiled as Dani climbed the steps onto the wide, curving porch. “Hello, Danielle. What a pleasant surprise. Won’t you sit down.”

“Sure.”

But she sat not on a wicker chair next to her aunt, but on the railing, under a hanging basket of petunias.

“Is something wrong, Danielle? You look-My goodness, is that blood on your shirt?”

Russ’s blood. And maybe her father’s. She hadn’t noticed it until that moment. Zeke, too, had had bloodstains on his shirt. That hadn’t penetrated until he’d vanished into the woods.

“Sara, we need to talk.”

“Of course. You know I’m always here for you.”

“Grandfather stopped by today. He showed me the passage in Beatrix Chandler’s diary about the gold key and her friendship with Louisa Pembroke.”

“Yes, I know. He told me.” The corners of her pink-stained mouth twitched in a small smile. “The more you abuse him, the more he seems to appreciate you.”

Dani tried to keep her thoughts focused, on course. “Did you show Joe Cutler that passage when he was here?”

“Now, how would I remember something like that?” She faltered, pulling in her lower lip. “Danielle, exactly what are you trying to get at?”

“Is Roger home?”

“No.”

“Grandfather?”

“He’s not here. Danielle-”

“You know,” she said, “I’ve been looking at this thing all wrong, trying to blame everything on Joe Cutler and Quint Skinner. The blackmail-”

“What blackmail?” Sara seemed genuinely shocked. She shoved the cat off her lap but didn’t get up. “You’ve been under tremendous strain lately, Danielle. Perhaps you’ve-”

“Gone off the deep end? Started to self-destruct like Nick and my father? Right now I almost wish I had. Sara, Mother and Nick both were being blackmailed over her role in Casino. Someone knew she’d have done just about anything to keep it a secret.”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t me. Lilli never told me a thing about her acting.”

The undertone of jealousy and bitterness was hard to miss. But Dani didn’t let it deter her. “Joe knew about the blackmail.”

“Knew about it,” Sara said, her incisive eyes on Dani, “or committed it?”

“For a while I believed he might have committed it.” She kept her voice steady and calm, despite the raging inside her. “But it doesn’t make any sense. Nick says the blackmailer never asked for much money, a hundred here and there. Joe could have made more than that by selling off the gold key he found. Instead he gave it to Mother.”

“She trusted him. Joe certainly had us all fooled. Look what he did in combat.” Sara rose gracefully, ladylike. But her skin was a little pale, and she teetered on her high heels. “I don’t believe I care to continue this conversation. You understand. It’s just too painful.”

Dani didn’t move from the porch railing. “Joe had a copy of one of the blackmail letters. If he wasn’t the blackmailer, how did he get it?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Why did he see Nick a few years later when he was on leave and then come here to Saratoga?”

Sara walked all the way to the ornate front door but stopped there, her back to Dani.

“Did he see you then?” she asked softly.

“Danielle, please don’t.”

“I’m not trying to upset you, Sara. But I need to know.”

“Why?” She spun around at Dani, tears shining in her vivid blue eyes. “Why do you need to know?”

“Too much has been happening. It needs to stop. We need to know the truth about the past.”

“Joe is dead. Lilli’s never coming back. What possible good can come of knowing who was blackmailing whom twenty-five years ago?”

Dani persisted. “Did Joe come to see you, Sara?”

Sara sank against the door, slipping her hands behind her and holding on to the polished brass handle. She nodded. “I-I’d caught him blackmailing Lilli. He wanted money to send his brother to Vanderbilt University. I…I made him give Lilli the gold key or I’d tell on him. I saw him that evening-”

“The night Mother disappeared?”

“Yes, but earlier. It’s why I was late to help you get dressed. You remember?”

Dani remembered. She’d hated the white chiffon dress and especially the new patent-leather shoes, and Sara had been in such a state she’d almost let Dani wear her shorts.

“I broke off our…relationship. I hadn’t been sure how I felt about him-I suppose I was attracted to him for all the wrong reasons. When I caught him at blackmail, I told him to leave Saratoga or I’d report him to the police.”

A squirrel ran up a maple in the front yard and out to the end of a branch near the porch and chattered at them. “What made you think Joe was the blackmailer?” Dani asked.

“Oh, that wasn’t difficult to figure out,” Sara said vaguely.

“Did Mother know?”

“I’m not sure. I never saw her again to ask. Of course, she’d have wanted to save Joe from himself. You remember how she was, especially that summer after our mother died.”

The tears glistened on Sara’s pale cheeks now, although she wasn’t sobbing. Dani made herself press on. “Why did Joe come back four years later?”

She pulled away from the door and sniffled, regaining some composure. The bodice on her dress was cut low, and her breasts heaved with her rapid, shallow breathing. But she tilted up her chin, looking regal. “I wouldn’t know. I refused to see him.”

Dani didn’t believe her, but she decided not to push the point, not yet. She jumped down from the porch railing. “I think he was trying to figure out what happened to Mother.”

“What business was Lilli of his?” she demanded, combative.

“She was his friend.”

Sara’s eyes flashed. “She was my sister!”

As if that gave her prerogatives. Dani moved in closer to her aunt. “Sara, what happened that night?”

She pushed back her hair, maintaining her composure.

“You and Roger went out to look for Mother after the lawn party. Did you find her?”

Even as she stood as still and sleek as a mannequin, tears spilled once more down her porcelain cheeks. Dani felt her own composure starting to give way. She made herself go to her aunt. “Sara,” she said, touching her rounded shoulder. “What happened?”

“I killed her,” Sara whispered.

Dani shut her eyes, and her aunt fell onto her shoulder, sobbing, quaking with guilt and relief, and Dani had to hold her, had to stand firm, or they both would have collapsed.

“God help me,” Sara said over and over. “I killed my own sister.”

Zeke got to the little yellow house with the welcome goose on the front door too late.

Quint was sprawled on the living-room floor, dying. Forcing back any emotion, Zeke called the police and found a towel in the downstairs bathroom. He pressed the towel to Quint’s abdomen. The wound was bad. Quint’s face was gray from the loss of blood.

“Hang on,” Zeke said.

“It’s too late.”

Zeke knew it was. “We’ll just sit here together and wait for help.”

“Whole thing was a setup. I thought Joe’d found out what I’d been a part of. Thought he’d turn me in. Hell, we were just kids. I…” He swallowed, panting, still fighting. “I was stupid.”

“Save it.”

“For what? Think the devil doesn’t know what I’ve done? You gotta know, Zeke. Your brother never broke. He did his job.” Quint licked his lips, shuddering with pain. “He was the best.”

Your brother never broke…

The land mines of his past, Zeke thought, his arm-his entire body-shaking as he held the towel to Quint’s wound.

“I watched the terrorists take him out. He was a hero, Zeke.” Quint sobbed hoarsely, without tears or energy. “I lied. I made a name for myself on his back. Him-his men-everybody was dead but me.”

Because this man was dying, and Joe was already dead, and he didn’t know what else to do, Zeke said, “What’s done is done, Quint.”

He raised himself up off the floor and gripped Zeke’s arm with what must have been all his remaining strength. “Joe was my friend!”

“Let it go,” Zeke said gently.

“I only wanted justice.”

Zeke could hear the sirens not too far away. “Quint, who did this to you? Who shot you?”

“Didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” he said weakly, his voice barely audible. “Damn, Zeke…she was there all along.”

Quint was fading but still lucid, and Zeke felt himself go so rigid he thought he’d crack into pieces. “Do you mean Lilli?”

“In the fountain…didn’t want to say anything with her husband and daughter right there.”

“Quint-who shot you?”

His eyes focused on Zeke, clear and alert and dying. “You’ll fix it?”

He couldn’t fix a wound like the one Quint had. He couldn’t fix a mother who had died twenty-five years ago. That kind of knight in shining armor just didn’t exist. But he nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”

The siren was getting louder. Once the police and ambulance arrived it wouldn’t be easy to get away. And he had to. There were other lives at stake, and nothing more he could do in the grape-colored dining room.

Quint Skinner was dead.

Dani was on her feet, pacing, forcing herself to concentrate, to hold herself together. There was a breeze against her back, and on North Broadway a couple of little girls walked down the sidewalk dragging a red wagon. Suddenly she wished she could be nine again, hiding from her grandfather, thinking up ways to make her mother happy.

“I ran into her on her way home,” Sara said. She’d composed herself and returned to her wicker chair; the cat had climbed back into her lap. “I told her I’d broken off with Joe. She was disappointed-I could tell. She liked him. So I told her he was the one who’d blackmailed her.”

“Did Mother believe you?”

“No, of course not. She wanted to hear it directly from Joe. So we walked up to the old bottling plant where he and his brother had pitched their tent, only they were already gone.”

To tell Mattie that her father in Cedar Springs was dying.

Dani crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself, trying not to think about herself, her own shattered dreams. No more amnesia scenario. Oh, Mama…

“What about Roger?” she asked.

Sara’s blue, crystal, tearless eyes focused on Dani. “Roger?”

“You two left the party together.”

“Oh, yes. He was there. I mean, he walked up to the springs with us. He stayed at the pavilion while Lilli and I headed over to the cliffs so we could talk in private.” She swallowed, stroking the cat. A part of her seemed relieved finally to talk. “We argued, Lilli and I. We so seldom did. My parents discouraged open disagreement, and there was such a big age difference between us.”

“What did you argue about?”

“Everything,” Sara said.

Dani fought back her impatience, controlled her grief. “You saw her wearing the key?”

“Yes, it-she said it proved Joe didn’t want money, because he’d given it to her. I was upset that he had. He’d found it for me, not her. It shouldn’t have mattered that I’d just ended our relationship.” She checked her anger, her mascara smudged under her eyes, her normally perfect makeup looking garish against her pale skin. “It was just one more thing we argued about. Lilli got very frustrated with me-she just couldn’t bear to hear the truth about Joe.”

“Did she say who she thought was blackmailing her and Nick?”

Sara shook her head. “She refused to. She said we should just go on back, and I should let her take care of everything.”

“Then she was trying to protect you-”

“No!” She dumped the cat off her lap. “She was protecting herself! I knew she was sneaking around behind Father’s back, performing in Casino. Why Nick picked her I’ll never understand, but I don’t care.”

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.