Tempting Fate. Carla Neggers
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since Mattie Witt’s defection from his life and work, had needed. Naturally he’d squandered it. No one had expected him to do anything else.
All Dani’s instincts urged her to leap out of the line and keep going, keep walking.
Twenty-five years.
Blood pounded in her ears, but she didn’t move.
She remembered herself at nine, waiting for her mother to come home. She’d sat on a wicker swing on the front porch of the Chandler cottage in her raspberry-smeared white dress, plucking a basket of petunias bald-headed until finally her white-faced father—Mattie Witt and Nick Pembroke’s only son—had come for her. She made him put the raspberries she was saving for her mother into the refrigerator. They’d molded there, untouched.
Dani stayed in the line. She didn’t look like the women on the posters. With her black eyes and short black hair, her strong features and straight, athletic figure—and her supposed recklessness—she was usually compared not to the southern Witts or the blue-blooded Chandlers but to three generations of Pembroke scoundrels. She’d seen the comparisons in the worried faces of her marketing consultants in New York. Through two days of nonstop strategy sessions, reports, brainstorming, even casual meals together, she’d sensed their unasked questions. Had she gone too far? Had she overextended herself? Was there any Chandler in her, or was she, after all, pure Pembroke? Not one Pembroke in the last hundred years had been worth a damn when it came to reliability, trustworthiness, commitment or responsibility.
When people did recognize a trace of her mother, of Chandler, in Dani—in her full, generous mouth or her occasional displays of graciousness—it was commented on with surprise, as if they must have imagined it. Even as a little girl, before her mother had disappeared, a New York gossip columnist had said, “Danielle Chandler Pembroke is not a child meant to have been born rich.”
But she’d taken care of that.
Inside the theater she found a seat in the front near an exit. She’d seen both movies before, but never on the big screen. Never in public.
Sitting through The Gamblers was relatively easy. It was fun, romantic, like watching someone she didn’t know, although she’d visited her grandmother in Greenwich Village just a few days ago. Mattie Witt was eighty-two now and still beautiful, still fiercely independent.
The film’s rendition of Ulysses Pembroke’s life—the murdered grandfather Nick had never known—painted him as a lovable rogue, a well-meaning scoundrel. It skipped his tragic end.
Dani almost left before Casino started.
She’d seen it just twice, both times on television at one o’clock in the morning. When it was released in the spring after her mother’s disappearance, the adults around her all had agreed she should be spared. Nonetheless, Dani had felt the tension between the two sides of her family. Caught in the middle, her father had tried to mediate. Yes, his young wife should have—could have—told her family that she’d taken the role in Casino. But no, his father hadn’t been wrong to offer it to her, to let her be reckless this once, to let her put this one dream into action.
There had been no reconciliation, no understanding. Twenty-five years later, Eugene Chandler remained horrified and humiliated by what he regarded as his older daughter’s betrayal, her underhandedness. He continued to believe that by encouraging Lilli to be something she wasn’t, Nick Pembroke bore at least partial responsibility for her disappearance.
The story of Casino picked up where The Gamblers had left off. It painted a less romanticized, more realistic picture of Ulysses Pembroke, not shying away from how he’d gambled away his fortune at Saratoga’s gaming tables and New York’s stock market, how he’d wanted desperately to do the right thing but always came up short. In Casino he didn’t get the girl, and he didn’t ride off into the proverbial sunset. As in real life, he was shot dead by an anonymous sore loser outside Canfield Casino, now a Saratoga landmark. Three weeks later his wife gave birth to their son on the gleaming ballroom floor of the outrageous mansion he’d built near the Saratoga Race Course. Unable to find a buyer for her husband’s eclectic, unaffordable estate, his widow had stripped it of anything she could sell to make a life for herself and her child.
The last scene in the movie showed her holding her baby as she gathered up the keys to every wrought-iron gate on the property. Ulysses had had two keys made for each gate, one of brass, one of gold. His widow sold off the gold keys.
It was a nice touch—an example of Ulysses Pembroke’s profligacy. For years Dani had thought it pure fiction. She’d never seen hide nor hair of any gold keys.
Until a few weeks ago.
While rock climbing on the old Pembroke estate, she’d run across an old gate key on a narrow ledge. It turned out to be twenty-four-karat gold. And it matched exactly the brass key to the wrought-iron gate of the pavilion at the springs.
Dani had hung both keys on a gold chain. They’d attracted no comments whatever in New York. Her consultants apparently had been more interested in looking into her eyes for any sign she was going off the deep end.
She touched the keys as she watched the movie. In a performance as enriching as it was painful, the thirty-year-old heiress to the Chandler fortune managed to capture not only the soul of her character—a stunning, tragic singer in late Victorian America, a complex woman of torn loyalties and dreams she herself didn’t dare acknowledge—but also of countless women like her. She bridged the gap between rich and poor, between educated and illiterate, between virgin and harlot.
Lilli Chandler Pembroke tore out her own heart and gave it to every woman in her audience.
To her own daughter.
Yet if millions of moviegoers had their image of the famous missing heiress forged by her one short, unforgettable scene in Casino, Dani’s central vision of her mother was of her smiling and waving from the basket of a hot-air balloon.
She’d looked so happy.
As Dani had called up to the balloon as it lifted off with her promise to save her some raspberries, she’d never guessed—couldn’t have imagined—that she’d never see her mother again.
It was late when the theater emptied, but Saratoga was a late-night town, and the sidewalks were still crowded. Dani cut through Congress Park, past stately Canfield Casino. She wouldn’t have been surprised if she walked right over the spot where Ulysses Pembroke had been murdered.
On the other side of the park she crossed onto Union Avenue, a wide street lined with beautifully restored Victorian houses. The air was cool, fragrant with grass, pine and summer flowers. She passed the historic racetrack, quiet so late at night, its tall, pointed wrought-iron fences and red-and-white awnings silhouetted against the dark grounds.
Soon she came to the narrow, unpretentious driveway and discreet sign that marked the entrance to the Pembroke. Not long ago there’d been no sign, just the crumbling, pitted driveway. No more. Transforming Ulysses Pembroke’s dilapidated house and grounds into an inn and spa had been Dani’s biggest gamble. So far, it looked to pay off.
The biggest miracle, she thought, was that Nick hadn’t sold the property to a mall developer years ago, never mind that she’d threatened everything short of murder if he did. Instead, she’d leased the land from him and revived Ulysses’s long-defunct mineral springs, turning it into a profitable company that enabled her to buy out her grandfather. Of course, Nick liked to claim he’d never have sold out on her. Hadn’t he hung on to the old place, let it be a drag on his finances, for decades? But Dani was unimpressed. Nick Pembroke was a gambler. This time he’d just gambled on her.
Walking up the driveway, she could smell the roses even before she passed the rose garden she’d restored, first on her own, with goatskin gloves and some books on roses, then later with a gardener and landscape architect. The garden was free and open to the public, as Ulysses Pembroke himself had intended when he’d first planted roses there over a hundred years ago.
Beyond the gardens the paved road veered to the right, onto the hillside where she