Tempting Fate. Carla Neggers

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      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 could blow him and those around him—anyone left he cared about—to pieces.

      He jumped up, unable to sit another second.

      As he started across the threadbare Oriental rug, he saw in Naomi’s face the fear that Zeke Cutler would fail her as so many others before him had.

      “I need to think,” he said.

      And he walked into the entry and out the front door, onto the porch and into the heat and glare of a Tennessee summer afternoon.

      In the shade of the oak trees Jackson Witt had planted almost a century ago, Zeke walked down West Main, where the memories were as pervasive and unavoidable as the summer heat. He could see himself and Joe, shirtless and barefoot, on their way home from swimming in the creek. As a boy, Zeke had never even noticed the heat. Now he could feel the humidity settling over him, could smell the exhaust that hung heavy in the oppressive air. He was aware of the constant hum of traffic on a street where dogs used to lie in the sun on warm mornings.

      The memory came at him sideways, fast and silent, catching him defenseless.

      It was a hot, still afternoon, like this one, twenty-five years ago.

      Naomi’s husband, Wesley Hazen, had dropped dead of a heart attack at his office at the woolen mill, on the same day his estranged wife had finally talked to her father—who for the previous ten years had maintained he had no daughters—into seeing the doctor about his stomach trouble. Doc Hiram referred him to a cancer specialist in Nashville. The old man refused to make an appointment. His father had been born in Cedar Springs and died there, and that was good enough for Jackson Witt. How long was a man supposed to live? Joe Cutler had driven him to Doc Hiram’s office on account of Jackson Witt’s being too sick to drive himself and too stubborn to ride in a car with Naomi.

      When he got back home, Joe told Zeke what had happened. Zeke was thirteen and knew СКАЧАТЬ