Tempting Fate. Carla Neggers
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Springs, New York.”
Automatically he felt himself falling back on the training and discipline that had sustained him through years of dangerous work. He had expected something difficult and painful. Yet even with the article on Dani Pembroke, he’d talked himself out of believing it was Saratoga. He’d imagined Naomi telling him she’d developed colon cancer like her daddy and wanted him to see to her funeral, to selling the Witt house and its contents. But he’d seen the keys around Dani Pembroke’s neck, and deep down he’d known what Naomi would ask.
“Go on,” he said.
Naomi’s cheeks reddened. “This is much more difficult than I’d anticipated. I—Zeke, I’m afraid there’s something I’ve never told you.”
That didn’t surprise him. He’d always believed Naomi Witt had neglected to tell anybody—least of all him—a great number of things. He took another sip of iced tea and set the glass carefully on a coaster decorated with irises, the Tennessee state flower. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, needing to get this done.
“Zeke, before your brother died…”
But she stopped, biting her lip, and in her watery eyes—Zeke didn’t know if the moistness was from tears or age—he could see not only loss and disappointment but also anger. For all she’d had done to her, for all the pain and anguish and betrayal she’d witnessed and perhaps even committed, Naomi, in Zeke’s experience, had never expressed any anger over her lot. She would say anger was an unladylike emotion. Fits of temper weren’t proper for a well-bred lady. And yet Zeke could see it bubbling to the surface, choking for air, for renewed life, even if she refused to acknowledge its presence.
She cleared her throat and looked away for a moment, then continued in a strong, controlled voice. “Before Joe died, he sent me a letter. I’ve never shown it to you—to anyone. It didn’t say much. I can’t tell you he knew he was going to die, I can’t say there was any sign he was going to do any of the things people said he did.” She paused, the moistness—the tears—filling her eyes. “He enclosed a picture. I should have shown it to you before now, Zeke, but I never have.”
With a trembling hand she opened the frayed Bible on the marble end table beside the Andrew Jackson sofa and withdrew a color snapshot. She was breathing rapidly, and Zeke was afraid she might faint. He leaned forward, taking the snapshot from her so she wouldn’t have to move.
It was one he’d never seen before, but he immediately recognized the place, the time, the two women.
Saratoga Springs, New York.
Twenty-five years ago.
Mattie Witt and her daughter-in-law, Lilli Chandler Pembroke.
Joe had taken their picture. They were in the basket of Mattie’s hot-air balloon, just as it had started to float onto the evening winds. It had been Lilli’s first time up. In her expression, frozen for all time, was that mix of fear and excitement Zeke remembered as she’d watched the huge balloon inflate. She’d wanted to go and didn’t want to go. Joe had offered to serve as their chase team. But Mattie had told him no. She and Lilli would just ride the winds for a while and see what happened, and find their own way home.
Looking at Lilli’s fearful, exuberant smile, her tawny hair caught in the wind, Zeke saw how young she’d been, and how unsure of herself. For Lilli Chandler Pembroke, going up in a balloon with her eccentric mother-in-law instead of playing the good little heiress at the Chandler lawn party had been a monumental act of rebellion. Mattie Witt stood beside her in the gondola, looking as tiny and independent and heart-stoppingly beautiful as Zeke remembered.
After her balloon ride, Mattie had told Joe that she couldn’t go back to see her father before he died or the sister she’d left behind decades years earlier.
An hour later, he and Zeke were on the road back to Tennessee.
“I don’t understand it,” Joe had said as he and Zeke headed home in defeat. “I’d go through hell and back for you, and she won’t even go home to see her only sister and dying daddy. I know he’s not an easy man, but he’s her father. I just don’t get it.”
That was Joe Cutler. He hadn’t understood why people couldn’t get along. All they had to do was put their minds to it and it’d happen.
And he did go through hell for Zeke. He just hadn’t come back.
Zeke saw the gold key hanging from Lilli’s alabaster throat, remembered it. Even for a wealthy Chandler, it had seemed exotic and extravagant. Yet Joe had given it to her.
He made himself look up from the picture. “It doesn’t have to be the same key.”
“But it could be,” Naomi said.
And if it was, the next question would be how it ended up on the Pembroke estate for Lilli’s daughter to find all these years later. If it had anything to do with Lilli’s disappearance. If Joe was involved, had known something—if he’d done something.
“I have to know the truth, Zeke.”
He remained silent and still, hot liquid pain coursing through him. He had to repress his physical reaction and concentrate on the situation at hand. He had to be the cool, distanced professional. He had to ask himself the tough questions. Not just about his brother, but about Naomi herself. She was a woman he’d known and trusted all his life, but he forced himself to ask if the years of loneliness and abuse had finally driven her over the edge and he was being sucked along with her, just by being back in Cedar Springs, back under Jackson Witt’s roof.
But there were never any saner eyes than the ones that held him to his seat.
There was more. He could tell. But he didn’t prod her. Experience had taught him patience. Rush people and they could panic and make up things. Let them think. Choose their words. Hide what they wanted to hide. Sometimes it worked better if they had control. He could learn more about what was really at stake and what wasn’t.
Naomi withdrew another envelope from her Bible, handed it to Zeke. “Joe sent this to me with the picture. He asked me to hang on to it and not open it.” She smoothed her skirt with her unnaturally bent fingers. “I didn’t, until I saw the picture of Dani Pembroke wearing that gold key.”
Her eyes were lowered, and Zeke pulled a yellowed sheet of typing paper from the envelope and unfolded it. There were four lines of type:
Don’t underestimate me. The whole world will know Lilli Chandler Pembroke isn’t the perfect heiress she pretends to be. But your secret is safe with me if you pay up tonight.
Zeke didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to.
“I’m not asking you to be a hero,” Naomi Witt Hazen said softly. “All I’m asking is for you to be that brave, levelheaded young man I once knew who so badly wanted to do some good in the world.”
As if it were so easy. As if the kid Zeke Cutler had been—so filled with energy and optimism and determination—mattered anymore. He’d failed and changed in ways he didn’t want to examine and maybe didn’t want Naomi to know, although he could see she did.
She collapsed back against the soft cushion of her chair. In her look of fatigue and near despair was the impact of the years, of the losses she’d endured and the choices she’d made. “I believe in you, Ezekiel Cutler.” She sounded worn down, as if that was the last belief she held and now even it was being challenged. “I believe in you even if you don’t believe in yourself.”
He couldn’t meet her eye. He’d faced death as recently as six weeks ago and now couldn’t look at the old woman who’d always been there for him.
“Will you go?” she asked.
Before he’d opened her letter in San Diego, he’d have said he’d put the past behind him. Now, sitting in the dark Old South parlor, Zeke knew he’d only been sidestepping the past, one land mine at a time in a field of hundreds, always aware, somewhere in the recesses of his mind, that his next step