Tempting Fate. Carla Neggers
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I’m serious. It was Beethoven’s birthday. I had a date.”
“Well, then, no wonder you remember.” Her sarcasm was a none-too-subtle slam on Dani’s notoriously inactive love life. “Where did you go?”
“To a charity ball, of all things. Unfortunately I didn’t get the details on where it was and who was throwing it. I almost croaked when this guy drove right up to the New York Chandler.”
“Granddaddy and Aunt Sara were there?”
“Bejeweled and not expecting me.”
“They kick you out?”
“That would have been too crass. They were sickeningly gracious. Turned out my date—unbeknownst to me—worked for Chandler Hotels. He was new in town, brought in from Hawaii, and was unaware of my relationship with that side of my family. Thought I was his ticket to the top. Little did he know.”
“So that’s why you now have guys submit their résumés before you’ll go out with them.”
Dani shot her friend a look. “The man was a heel, Kate.”
“Yeah, well, heels do exist.” She got back to the point. “But you did wear an honest-to-God evening gown?”
“Black velvet with sequins. Low-cut. Very expensive. Even my grandfather approved.”
Kate looked as if she was trying to picture it. “Still have it?”
“Somewhere. I keep it around as another reminder of what being a Chandler and a Pembroke’s all about.”
Ever pragmatic, Kate said, “Well, velvet’s too heavy for August anyway. Why don’t you go into town and buy something. Little dresses are always in. Come on, Dani. You know clothes. You just don’t like to spend money on anything you might wear for fun. And—as you well know—you wear little dresses all the time. Just make it short and close-fitting and over forty dollars and you’ll be a hit. You’ve got a flat stomach and great legs.”
Dani frowned. “I don’t have time for a full-fledged shopping trip before tomorrow. Isn’t there something in there I could dress up?”
“No.”
“You could have hesitated.”
“Look.” Kate wasn’t about to give up. “Why not rent a dress. People do it around here in August all the time.”
Dani jumped off the bed. “I must have been crazy to accept that invitation, but I refuse to back down now, just on account of not having anything to wear. Don’t you have something you could lend me?”
“You’d look like a little kid dressing up in her mother’s clothes.” Kate winced at her faux pas, as if Lilli Chandler Pembroke had disappeared yesterday and not twenty-five years ago and all Dani’s wounds were still raw. It was a reaction Dani often received, even from her best friends. “I’m sorry—I know tomorrow won’t be easy for you.”
“Forget it. Actually, you’ve just given me an idea. I knew I could count on you. See Ira before you leave for a bottle of champagne. Your choice. You and your people will deserve to celebrate after pulling off tomorrow night.”
“Thanks,” Kate said. “Believe me, we’ll need to unwind. Your auntie’s a great big pain in the butt, if you’ll pardon my saying so—but she’s ever so sweet. Kills you with a look and twenty polite demands, if you know what I mean.”
“A Chandler lady never raises her voice.”
“No wonder you don’t fit in with that crowd.”
“Shouldn’t you be julienning zucchini or something?”
But Kate’s expression suddenly turned serious. “Dani, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
She smiled. “No.”
“Look—”
“It’s okay, Kate. I don’t know exactly why I’m going this year. It’s true my grandfather and I have maintained an undeclared cease-fire in the last few years—mainly by each pretending the other doesn’t exist. But it’s August in Saratoga, and I’m here. I can’t ignore that I’m half Chandler.” She paused. “Neither can my grandfather.”
Kate stared at her for a few seconds, then threw up her hands. “Go for a little dress. You’ll look great.”
Not long after Kate left, Dani headed to her attic and pulled the string attached to the naked seventy-five-watt bulb at the top of the steep stairs. The air was hot and musty, the rough wood floors crowded with old kites and abandoned projects, college textbooks on subjects she barely remembered taking and a thousand-piece puzzle of a castle in Germany she and Mattie had put together one rainy July weekend. There was a vase she’d made in the first grade from an old liquid-detergent bottle for Mother’s Day; she had no idea how it had landed in Saratoga.
It was an attic of memories, but most attics were.
Pushing past overflowing cardboard boxes, she knelt on the dusty floor in front of a huge old Saratoga trunk. It had belonged to her great-great-grandmother, the intrepid Louisa Caldwell Pembroke. She’d been a survivor. Just twenty when she’d married Ulysses, she’d never been a real part of the extravagance—the notorious capitalistic excesses—of Saratoga in the last decade of the nineteenth century. But she’d fallen in love with a gambler, had known Diamond Jim Brady, the onetime bellhop who’d become a millionaire, and Lillian Russell, the voluptuous singer whose cocker spaniel Mooksie had a collar made of diamonds and gold. Louisa had been in Saratoga when Joseph Pulitzer sent Elizabeth Cochrane—“Nellie Bly”—to the upstate spa to write her famous exposés for his New York newspaper. One had been on Ulysses Pembroke’s oddball, money-eating estate.
The Saratoga trunk was now a valuable antique. Train conductors had despised their curved lids because they made stacking them difficult.
Dani threw open the trunk. On top was the frayed, moth-eaten fox stole Mattie Witt had worn in The Gamblers. It’d probably sell for a fortune. Gently pushing it aside, Dani dug through layers of dresses, scarves, old shoes, gloves, crushed hats. Things from Mattie, things from her mother. She felt the tears on her cheeks and angrily brushed them away. She had no business crying. The past was the past. She’d carved out a niche for herself separate from the self-destructive Pembrokes, the celebrated Mattie Witt, the lost Lilli Chandler Pembroke. She’d moved forward with her life and had learned to live in the present.
She’d learned to stay out of attics.
Refusing to knuckle under to self-pity, she got on with her task.
Deep in the trunk, she found the dress.
It was red and sleek and perfect. Mattie had worn it in Tiger’s Eye, the movie that had transformed her from an overnight sensation into a star.
Dani dug even deeper and produced the ostrich plume.
Rolling back on her heels, she held it up to the dim light. I must be out of my mind. Dyed red to match the dress, it was an integral part of Mattie’s glamorous look. Dani had never in her life worn a feather in her hair.
It’s my Pembroke genes. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
And she couldn’t stop herself.
The plume was squashed from having been stuffed in the trunk, but otherwise in good shape.
Would anyone at the Chandler lawn party recognize it?
Oh, yes.
In her unforgettable scene in Casino, Lilli Chandler Pembroke had worn Mattie’s ostrich plume. Nick had said she’d meant it as a tribute to her mother-in-law, a symbol of independence and freedom to Lilli and to millions of women.
Maybe Kate was right, Dani thought, and she ought to dust off her checkbook and go to town and buy a dress.
If no one else recognized the dress Mattie Witt had