Tempting Fate

Nineteen

Dani joined her grandmother in the garden behind her cottage. It was dusk. The questioning by police, the media, was over. Mattie had found an old kite and spread it out on the teak table, with scissors, a stapler, a jackknife and some twisted nylon line. She had on her orange flight suit, and Dani smiled at this woman she had always adored. “You’ve always been good with your hands,” she said.

“My mother’s doing. She taught me how to knit, crochet, tat, quilt, do cutwork. All those ladylike skills. I was supposed to teach Naomi after Mother died, only I never did.”

Dani sank into a chair. She was barefoot, exhausted but not so overwhelmed anymore. Just damn tired. “Sara said that the afternoon and evening Mother spent with you had made her realize that we were all a part of who she was and that she could never give us up. Nick had let her go after a dream. You helped her to discover for herself whether or not it was a dream she wanted to make come real.”

Mattie had tears in her eyes; it occurred to Dani that she’d almost never seen her grandmother cry. “So did Joe Cutler.”

“He was a survivor, too. You have an ability to carry on, Mattie, that I…” She shut her eyes a moment, pulling herself together. It would be ridiculous to fall apart now. “That I hope to discover in myself.”

“You will,” her grandmother said with confidence.

Dani opened a bottle of Pembroke Springs Mineral Water, now tangibly and forever linked with her mother, as the Chandler Stakes had been. She wondered if she finally understood what her mother’s dream of singing and dancing had been about. Her frustration and searching in the months after her own mother’s death. Had Lilli simply been discovering her own ability to carry on?

“What about Zeke?” Mattie asked softly.

“I’ve known him such a short time-it’s been a whirlwind.” Dani tucked her knees up under her chin; she rarely discussed her love life with anyone, even this knowing, kind woman who’d helped raise her. “I never thought I’d fall for someone the way I have him.”

Mattie smiled. “I felt the same way about myself some sixty years ago.”

Zeke had been through so much in his life. At the police station, trying to explain the past days, Dani had felt his strength of character, even as the sorrow seeped into her until she physically ached. There was no middle ground now between death and abandonment. Her mother was gone forever. But Zeke had lost a father and a mother and a brother and had worked in a field of loss and danger. He’d suffered and struggled and become strong.

“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.