Tempting Fate. Carla Neggers
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she hoisted herself up in no time. But it was a warm afternoon, and she hadn’t slept much last night. She was sweaty, and as she sat on a boulder to catch her breath, she could feel the ache in her legs.
“Miss Pembroke?”
Dani whirled around, immediately recognizing a young local reporter at the top of the cliffs. A camera dangling from her neck, she apologized for startling Dani and explained she’d been assigned to do an article on the Pembroke and Pembroke Springs.
“No one will talk to me,” she said. “I just tried to interview the plant manager, but he said he can’t talk to reporters, and I noticed you walking over here.”
“He can’t. It’s nothing personal—mineral water is an extremely competitive business, and we have to watch ourselves.”
“Oh. That’s what he said.” She licked her lips, looking awkward, which, Dani had come to discover, was unusual in a reporter. “Would you mind…I know this is short notice…could you answer a couple of questions? I’ve done my homework. I’ve read everything I can find on you, your family, the estate—I won’t ask you questions you’ve been asked a million times before.”
Dani squinted up at her. “I won’t talk about my mother.”
“Oh, I assumed that. You never have—and it’s old news.” She blushed. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to sound callous.”
“It’s okay. What’s your name?”
“Heather. Heather Carey.”
“You could use a break?”
“I sure could. My boss says I’m not aggressive enough.”
She wasn’t, but sometimes aggression wasn’t what got the story.
Dani knew she wasn’t dressed for an interview. And she wasn’t prepared. She hadn’t gone over possible questions and answers with her staff. She hadn’t gotten their advice, their consent.
Heather Carey had climbed down to the flat rock. She was small, thin, no more than twenty-five. “That’s an interesting necklace.”
Dani glanced down at the two keys. They were heavy for a necklace, and it had been stupid to wear them rock climbing. But how could she resist? “Have a seat.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
Clearly Heather Carey didn’t believe her luck.
Ninety minutes later Dani arrived back at her cottage with no regrets. Before she showered—before she called her PR people and confessed what she’d done—she dug out a pen and a sheet of Pembroke Springs stationery.
Whistling, she jotted a quick note.
It may or may not have gotten Emily Post’s stamp of approval, but it did graciously—even cheerfully—indicate her acceptance of the invitation to the annual Chandler lawn party.
Two
As he eased into the pilot’s chair on the flybridge of his restored 1955 Richardson all-wood cabin cruiser, Zeke Cutler felt the fatigue and tension of the past three weeks subside. He was home again. Or as close to home as he expected he’d ever get.
Crescent-shaped San Diego Bay glistened in the late-day sun, and he had just enough left in his fifth of George Dickel to fill his glass. Which he did. Slowly. Savoring the sound of splashing Tennessee bourbon and the feel of the wind and the peace of being back on his boat. He had two weeks. Two weeks of fishing and sleeping and watching the waves and the sunset before he had to tackle his next job.
His last job he’d just have to put out of his mind. He’d spent two torturous weeks teaching a group of self-centered, greedy, unscrupulous executives how to stay out of trouble and, should reasonable means of prevention fail, how to get out of trouble. “Trouble” meaning anything from a simple street mugging to international terrorism. These particular individuals, however, reminded Zeke a bit too much of the last group of white-collar thugs he’d handed over to the police. He really did like being able to tell the good guys from the bad guys without looking too hard.
But life wasn’t that simple.
Security consulting didn’t used to be so complicated. Like everything else, it had gone high-tech, which had its points, except the bad guys had gone high-tech, too. They had high-tech security systems and high-tech communications systems and—his favorite—high-tech weaponry. Too much high-tech weaponry for Zeke’s tastes.
He swirled the George Dickel around in his mouth and swallowed. He’d eaten green chili at a distinctly low-tech Mexican restaurant, and his stomach still burned. The bourbon and Southern California sun didn’t help. He closed his eyes. For half a cent he’d dive into the bay.
“If I was a bad guy and wanted to kill you,” Sam Lincoln Jones said nearby, “you’d be dead.”
“Not unless you had a grenade launcher and fired off down on the dock.” Zeke opened his eyes and grinned. “I saw you coming, Sam.”
Sam grinned back at him. “Guess I’m not easy to miss.”
That he wasn’t. Sam was four inches shorter than Zeke’s six-one, but, at two-twenty, thirty pounds heavier. They were both solid; seldom was either accused of being handsome. Many shades darker than Zeke, Sam had had his nose broken at least three times too many, but he liked to say Zeke had come into the world with a grim face. They’d both entered their profession through the back door, Sam with a doctorate in criminology and a yearning to get out of the ivory tower he’d worked so hard to get into, Zeke with a host of dead dreams and a yearning never to get caught up in a dream again. They’d met ten years ago over the corpse of a mutual friend. Together they’d found his killer.
“Don’t know why this old tug hasn’t sunk into the bay by now,” Sam said.
“Because it’s a classic, and like all classics just gets better with age. I’d offer you a drink, but I emptied the bottle. What’s up?”
Sam withdrew a pale pink envelope from the back pocket of his tan linen pants. He had on a mango-colored polo shirt. Zeke felt underdressed in his cutoff shorts, and it was his damn boat.
Sam said, “Letter from home.”
It would have come to their shared postal box in San Diego. Given their profession and peripatetic lifestyle, such things as home and office addresses made little sense. They took turns checking the box. They were independent specialists but worked together on and off. Most of their communications were handled by telephone and computer, with the occasional need for a fax machine or courier. Neither received many letters. Zeke had never received one from home. He’d left for good twenty years ago, at age eighteen. His parents and his only brother were dead, and there was hardly anybody he knew left in Cedar Springs, Tennessee. His hometown and the kid he’d been there were just a part of his dead dreams.
Sam discreetly knelt one knee on the polished mahogany bench in the sun and looked out at the bay. Zeke tore open the delicate envelope. Inside was a folded newspaper article and a single pink page, with Naomi Witt Hazen embossed in tiny script at the top. He tried not to react. Seeing her name, his hometown, was like having the fading shreds of a dream stay with you as you woke up, making you unsure of what was real and what wasn’t.
It was like getting a letter from home when you’d almost talked yourself into believing you no longer had a home.
Like everyone else, Zeke made no claim to understand Naomi Witt Hazen. She always used all three of her names, as if she could be anything she wanted to be—a daughter, a wife, a widow, a Witt, a Hazen. An ordinary woman. Zeke only understood that he owed her. She’d helped save his soul if not his life. He was glad she was still alive, although she could have been dead for all he’d have known. There was no one in Cedar Springs who’d have thought to tell him otherwise.
Tilting back in his pilot’s chair, he read her letter first.
Dearest