Tempting Fate

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 Zeke,

I know this letter will come as a surprise, and perhaps not altogether a pleasant one, but I don’t know where else to turn. Please come home, Zeke. I need your help. I’ll explain everything when you get here.

Yours truly,

Naomi Witt Hazen

Zeke refolded the letter and tucked it back into the envelope. “Guess I won’t be spending my time off fishing.”

“Anything I can do?” Sam asked. There was no urgency in his tone, no desire or need to help; he was just asking a question.

Zeke shook his head. He unfolded the newspaper article. The Cedar Springs Democrat had picked up a story on Pembroke Springs and the Pembroke, a new spa-inn, and their owner, Dani Pembroke. Mattie Witt’s granddaughter. Mattie was Naomi’s older sister. She hadn’t stepped foot in her hometown in sixty years. Nonetheless, people there kept track of her.

Dani Pembroke was described as an entrepreneur and “former heiress.” Apparently she’d thrown her inheritance into Eugene Chandler’s face when he’d suggested she drop the Pembroke from her name after he’d fired her father as vice president of Chandler Hotels. She’d built her mineral water and natural soda business from scratch, without one nickel of Chandler money. Zeke was unimpressed. She’d had the famous name, she’d had access to a world-famous mineral spring through family, and she’d known she could go crawling back to her rich granddaddy if worst came to worst. There was no “from scratch” about what she’d done.

Why had Naomi sent him the article? It wasn’t the first piece written about a Chandler or a Pembroke.

Then he looked more closely at Dani Pembroke’s picture, past her black eyes and resemblance to Nick Pembroke that had first caught his attention. He focused on the two keys dangling from her slender neck. The caption said one was brass and one was gold. She’d found the gold one while rock climbing near the Pembroke Springs bottling plant.

Zeke swore under his breath.

“You going home?” Sam asked.

And here he’d been thinking he’d just come home. Zeke smiled sadly, staring at Dani Pembroke. “I reckon so.”

Zeke flew to Nashville the next day, and by the time he got to Cedar Springs, Naomi Witt Hazen had a peach pie in the oven and sun tea poured in a tall clear glass.

“It’s good to see you, Zeke.” Her voice was melodic and genteel. “I knew you’d come.”

He hadn’t known himself. “I’m glad you knew.”

In her inexpensive turquoise suit and walking shoes, Naomi looked even tinier than Zeke remembered. Her hair had gone from deep brunette to a soft, pure white, but it was curled the same as always, in a lady’s do, short and neat. Although she never told anyone her age, everyone in Cedar Springs knew she was seven years younger than her famous sister Mattie. That made her seventy-five.

She had Zeke sit in the front parlor on the antique sofa her father had always insisted came from the Hermitage, the Nashville home of Andrew Jackson. Jackson Witt had been the richest man in Cedar Springs. He’d owned the woolen mill where Zeke’s father and mother and brother had worked and had been a benefactor in his small town in the rolling hills east of Nashville. He’d died before the New South had made its big push into his corner of Tennessee. Cedar Springs was no longer the town in which Zeke had grown up. Farmland had been divided up into estate lots for huge brick houses, and old farmhouses and chicken coops bulldozed. Streetlights had gone in, as well as fast-food chains and discount department stores and vast supermarkets. Nobody shopped on the square anymore. West Main had been widened and built up, most of its houses converted into apartments and beauty shops and carpet stores and real estate offices. Naomi had once said her house, a beautiful Greek Revival but no longer the biggest and fanciest in town, would make a nice funeral parlor.

The oven buzzer sounded, and she started toward the kitchen.

“Let me help,” Zeke said.

“No, no, you just sit here and let me wait on you.”

He’d known that would be her answer. “You don’t have to.”

She smiled. “I know I don’t have to. I want to.”

Zeke didn’t argue. In Naomi’s world he was her guest and a man, and it was her responsibility—her pleasure, she’d say—to wait on him. She rushed off to the kitchen, playing the proper southern lady. Zeke knew better. Jackson Witt’s younger daughter usually managed to do as she pleased, afterward working her actions into her belief system. Like her scandalous affair with Nicholas Pembroke, her sister’s husband. It had lasted less than a summer but had cost her. It left her marriage to the vice president of Cedar Springs Woolen Mill and her reputation in her hometown in shambles. And it prompted her father to disown her, just as he’d disowned Mattie when she’d run off with Nick Pembroke more than twenty years earlier. Thenceforth, Jackson Witt maintained he had no daughters. Zeke had never liked nor understood the stern, uncompromising old man, but he’d never once heard Naomi complain about him, no matter how cruelly he’d treated her.

She returned from the kitchen with a blue willow plate of her steaming, incomparable peach pie. She’d put a fat scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. “I’m not having any,” she said, handing him the plate. “I have to watch my sugar.”

Knowing she wouldn’t talk until he’d finished, Zeke downed the pie quickly, its filling juicy and as sweet as his best memories of growing up. A ceiling fan whirred, keeping the room remarkably cool. The parlor hadn’t changed. It was dark and crowded, with small, framed oval photographs of Jackson Witt and his long-dead, delicate, prim wife hanging above the marble fireplace. There were other photographs, of elderly cousins, friends, mill executives, but none of the dazzling Mattie Witt or the filmmaker she and her sister both had loved. None of Mattie’s only son, none of her long-missing daughter-in-law, none of her only granddaughter.

Zeke finished his pie and tried the sun tea, cool and smooth and, like the pie, tasting of the past.

“You’re not an easy man to locate,” Naomi said without criticism. “Is that by design?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose in your profession discretion is a matter of life and death.”

He smiled, or tried to. “It can be.”

“Do you ever wish you hadn’t left home?”

“No.”

And he wanted to ask her, but didn’t, if she’d ever wished she had left. After her affair with Nick, she’d returned to the house of her birth and childhood. Her husband had refused even to speak to her again, or to divorce her. She’d nursed her ailing father until his death from cancer. Through those eleven years, Jackson Witt had paid her a wage and referred to her as his live-in housekeeper. She’d even had to eat in the kitchen while he ate in the dining room. To Zeke’s knowledge, Naomi had never complained nor given in to any temptation to try to drown the old bastard in the bathtub. She’d saved the meager salary he paid her and, after his death, bought the Witt house with her own money. Her first order of business had been to get rid of the rosewood bed in which her grandfather and father had died. She and Zeke dragged it down to the flea market and sold it to the first comer for thirty dollars. It was probably worth a hundred times that much, even then, but Naomi, determined, had told Zeke, “I won’t be the third generation of Witts to die in that bed.”

With her warm, dark eyes fastened on him, Naomi Witt Hazen suddenly looked old and sad. “Zeke, I know I could have told you everything in my letter, but I wanted to see you. You look well. Are you happy?”

He thought of the sunset sparkling on the blue waters of San Diego Bay. “Sure.”

“You’ve never married.”

“Wouldn’t work in my profession.”

“I’ve always thought you’d make a fine husband and father.”

Not with the dead dreams he carried with him, not with the life he led. But Zeke didn’t try to tell Naomi she was wrong. He liked having someone think those kinds of things about him; he could almost believe they could be true.

She twisted her fingers, gnarled with arthritis, in her lap and lowered her eyes. “Zeke, I—” She looked at him. “I need you to go to Saratoga 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.