Tempting Fate

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 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 that Jackson Witt wasn’t the benevolent old man most people in Cedar Springs pretended he was. He had started Cedar Springs Woolen Mill to provide jobs for the impoverished people of his town, a market for its farmers’ wool, opportunities for its children. Back then it was the biggest employer in town.

“So Mr. Witt’s going to die?” Zeke asked.

“Not right away.”

“What’ll happen to Mrs. Hazen?”

“I expect she’ll go on pretty much the way she’s been going. Truth is, she’ll be better off with him gone.”

Joe was eighteen and worked the graveyard shift at the mill. He still lived at home, in their little one-bedroom, uninsulated house northeast of the square. He gave half his paycheck to their mother to help out, covered his own expenses and banked any left over. Someday, he’d told Zeke, he’d leave Cedar Springs, maybe go to California. He said he didn’t plan to work the graveyard shift at Cedar Springs Woolen Mill the rest of his life. But right now his mother and Zeke needed him, and he’d stick around.

After taking Jackson Witt to the doctor’s, Joe, who hadn’t been to bed since getting off work at seven that morning, turned on the baseball game and sacked out on the couch. When Emmy Cutler came home from her shift at the mill, she got him up and called Zeke in from playing ball and told them Wesley Hazen was dead.

“He had a heart attack right at his desk.” She looked tired, as she almost always did. She was a thin, dark-haired woman who’d once been pretty. “He went quick. Now, I want you boys to go into town and get a dress coat and tie. I’ll iron your good white shirts. There’ll be calling hours probably the day after tomorrow, and then the funeral. I want you both to go.”

“Mother,” Joe said, “we can’t afford new coats.”

“I’ve got some money put away. You take it and go on. Wes Hazen and Jackson Witt gave me a job when I needed one. I was a widow with two small boys, and I don’t know what I’d’ve done without the mill. Don’t matter what anybody else says about Mr. Hazen, we’re going to pay our respects.”

Joe was adamant. “If a clean shirt’s good enough for church, it’s good enough for Wes Hazen’s funeral.”

Emmy Cutler was equally adamant. “You listen to me, Joe Cutler. If I have to get in the car and drive to Nashville myself and buy you two coats, then that’s what I’ll do. By this time you boys ought to know when I mean business.”

Zeke hadn’t said anything, but he was used to their mother lumping him and Joe together. She went into her bedroom and came back with a bunch of twenties in a rubber band.

“I’ll bring back the change,” Joe said.

“There’d better not be much. I won’t have people in this town saying I wasn’t grateful for what Wesley Hazen did for me.”

Joe’s eyes darkened. “Like what? Work you half to death at sweatshop wages—”

“I won’t have that kind of talk in my house. There’s never been a Cutler too proud to work. Now, you take your brother and go. Zeke, make sure he goes to a decent store. I want you coming home with proper coats and ties.”

Zeke nodded but made no promises, not where his brother was concerned. Joe didn’t listen to him any more than he did anyone else. When it came to their mother’s sense of right and wrong, however, Joe usually relented. They went to Dillard’s, but Joe hunted up a couple of khaki coats on the clearance racks that looked good enough to him. Since they’d been instructed not to come back with much change, he bought their mother a bottle of perfume and a pretty scarf and took Zeke to the local diner for a piece of chess pie.

When they got back home, Joe gave their mother her change and her presents, then said he’d go to the bank in the morning and pay her back for his coat and tie. Emmy Cutler said he was impossible; then she hugged him.

Over five hundred people attended Wesley Hazen’s funeral, and Joe muttered to Zeke that he’d bet nobody would have noticed if they hadn’t worn a coat and tie. Their mother had on her new scarf. Zeke looked around and saw Naomi sitting in back with the lowest-paid workers from the mill. She had on a black suit and a black hat with a veil. Her face was very pale, and she looked tiny. She hadn’t lived with Wesley since she’d run off with Nick Pembroke ten years earlier.

Her father was up front with the Hazen family and the mill management. He never looked back at Naomi.

“I’m going back to sit with Mrs. Hazen,” Zeke whispered to his mother. Emmy Cutler looked pained; she didn’t tell him yes, but she didn’t tell him no, either. So Zeke sneaked to the back of the church. Naomi smiled at him. It was a sad, soft smile, but at that moment Zeke knew she didn’t mind being an outcast. It was the only way she had of being who she wanted to be.

That night Joe Cutler announced over supper that he was heading to New York to find Mattie Witt and tell her that her daddy was dying. Zeke expected his mother to argue with him. From the look on his brother’s face, he guessed Joe expected the same thing.

But Emmy Cutler surprised her two sons. Or maybe she just knew Joe. Dipping her spoon into a bowl of redeye gravy, she said, “You do what you think is right.”

“Can I go, too?” Zeke asked.

His mother put the spoon back into the bowl. She hadn’t gotten any gravy. Her eyes misted over. “That’s up to your brother,” she said.

“Won’t you need him here?” Joe asked.

“I reckon it’s time I started learning to do without you two boys. Now you go on and make up your own minds about what you need to do. I’ll be fine.” She folded her hands in front of her plate and looked at her sons. “I have just one request.”

Joe nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You ask Naomi Hazen if she wants you to go.”

“It’s Mr. Witt who’s sick—”

“And it’s Mrs. Hazen who’ll have to live with the consequences of what you do—whether her sister decides to come home or whether she doesn’t.”

So that evening Joe and Zeke walked over to West Main Street, and Naomi met them on the porch and she didn’t say she wanted them to go to New York and she didn’t say she didn’t want them to go. Which was good enough for Joe. The next morning he and Zeke packed up his Chevy and headed north.

As he walked on the cracked sidewalks of his childhood, Zeke could hear Joe’s laugh, and for the first time in years it sounded real and alive and immediate to him. It was as if his brother were there with him, not as the man he’d become—a man Zeke didn’t know—but as the boy he’d been, another boy’s big brother, idolized and imperfect.

He’d come to the West Main Street branch of the Cedar Springs Free Public Library. Jackson Witt’s father had donated the land for the building not long after he’d helped the town establish a pure-water supply after an outbreak of typhoid fever in 1904. Jackson himself had left the library a hefty endowment. The dirt wasn’t settled good over his grave when Naomi carted down the oil portrait he’d had painted of himself and donated it to the library, not, Zeke had always felt, out of generosity, but because she couldn’t stand to keep it hanging in her house.

Inside, the library smelled as it always had, of musty books and polished wood. Zeke found himself glancing around for a gawky kid in jeans and dangling shirttail, looking to books as a way out of his poverty and isolation. Go for it, Joe had always told him. Do some good in the world.

He had wanted to.

“May I help you?” the middle-aged woman behind the oak desk asked. She sounded tentative. Zeke suddenly realized he must look even more tight-lipped and grim than usual. And hot. The air-conditioning was set a notch below sweltering.

He tried to smile. “Thank you, but I can find my way.”

A hint of his old middle Tennessee accent had worked its way into his voice. The woman seemed somewhat reassured. He went to the local-history section, just across from Jackson Witt’s portrait above the fireplace. On one shelf were a Bible signed by Andrew Jackson and a pair of boots reputedly worn by Davy Crockett. Below them, in a locked glass box, was the red-feathered hat Mattie Witt had worn in The Gamblers. Some newcomer to town had bought it on auction and donated it to the library. There was also a copy of two unauthorized biographies of her famous sister.

On the bottom shelf—Zeke had to kneel—was the flag, properly folded, that had draped Joe Cutler’s coffin. Naomi had taken it after the funeral when Zeke didn’t want it.

He rubbed his fingers over the coarse fabric.

Twenty years later, and he still missed his brother.

“We’re not like other folks, brother. We never will be.”

Even in Cedar Springs the Cutler brothers hadn’t been like anybody else. They were a couple of country boys whose daddy had died when a tractor fell over on him when Zeke was a year old, and whose mama did the best she could, working overtime at the mill.

After Saratoga, Joe had enlisted in the army. After he shipped out to basic, their mother cut herself so badly on the card machine at the mill that she’d bled to death before Doc Hiram could get to her. He’d cried when he told Zeke, who’d just turned fifteen. Joe came home on emergency leave but went back, convinced the best way—the only way—he could help his younger brother was to stay in the army. Zeke went to live with a second cousin, and Joe wrote to him every week; every week Zeke wrote back, and Naomi Hazen and Doc Hiram were there for him, too, all through high school.

He’d failed them all. Joe, Naomi, Doc. And himself.

Two weeks after Zeke had started Vanderbilt on scholarship, Joe Cutler was killed in Beirut. He was just twenty-three years old.

On the shelf next to the flag was the slim volume that had come out after his death. Zeke picked it up. The book had won a Pulitzer Prize. It was the story of a solid southern boy who’d become a soldier with good intentions, then was “corrupted,” transformed by a system and a world he didn’t understand. The book explained how Joe Cutler had taken a stupid risk, disobeyed orders and got his men and himself killed. He hadn’t lived up to his own expectations of heroism. His story was all the more searing and memorable for its banality, depicting an ordinary soldier who’d lost faith in his country, his men, himself.

Had that downward spiral started in Saratoga?

Quint Skinner, the man who wrote Joe’s story, was himself an army veteran and had served with Joe, considered him a friend. Skinner had tried to interview Zeke at Vanderbilt. They’d ended up in a fistfight, and not long after Zeke quit Vanderbilt altogether.

Worse was giving up the dream he’d had of his brother, the dream of what he’d wanted to do for Joe when he came home, of repaying him for all he’d sacrificed. How he’d wanted them to be real brothers again. But maybe that was every brother’s dead dream.

The book’s presence on the library shelf next to the flag had to be Naomi’s doing. She’d believed in Joe Cutler as much as Zeke had, and maybe she still did. But he could hear her say she also believed in truth and fairness.

On his way out, Zeke stopped at a big clay pot on the library steps and plucked a marigold, its orange color as deep and dark as the center of a Tennessee summer sunset. He wondered if somewhere beyond the subdivisions and fast-food chains two brothers were out on the creek fishing for their supper, waiting for the sun to go down so they could light their campfire and tell ghost stories and pretend they wanted to be men.

He climbed the steps onto Naomi’s front porch. She was in a rocking chair, crocheting as she watched the cars go by. She glanced at him but didn’t say a word.

He tossed the crumpled marigold blossom over the porch rail. His shirt had stuck to his back, and he picked up the picture and the envelope with the blackmail letter in it and tucked them into his back pocket.

“I shouldn’t have written,” Naomi said.

“You did the right thing.” He tried to smile to reassure her but couldn’t. “I don’t know if there’ll be anything there for me to find at this late date, but I’ll go to Saratoga.”

She started to say something, stopped, and finally just nodded as she slowly, almost painfully with her gnarled fingers, continued to crochet.

Three

Mattie Witt could feel the high ozone levels of the summer city air in her sinuses as she sat on the front steps of her Greenwich Village town house. Her whole face ached, even her teeth. New York was so damn hot in August. She’d read that in the old days people from the southern end of Manhattan would come to Greenwich Village during the summer to escape yellow fever. At least that was no longer the case.

She neatened her skirt around her knees. Her long, loose broadcloth dress reminded her of long-ago summers in Tennessee, when the heat—there’d been no air conditioners and precious few fans—had never bothered her. The warm brick step ground into her bottom. She walked forty-five minutes every morning but at eighty-two didn’t have the muscle tone she’d once had.

Across the street a woman chatting with the mailman spotted Mattie and waved. It was an effort, but Mattie waved back. Normally by late afternoon her front steps would be crowded with friends and neighbors, indulging in the time-honored Greenwich Village tradition of stoop-sitting. Today they seemed to sense her need to be alone and stayed away.

The woman went through her courtyard to the back entrance of her building. The mailman continued on his way. In the many years since Mattie had left Hollywood and moved east, she had come to love the crooked tree-lined streets of Greenwich Village, with their brick town houses and lamplights and long history. She appreciated the variety of people there—artists, actors, writers, doctors, bankers, garbage collectors, drunks, nurses, students, secretaries—and the tradition of tolerance, independence and nonconformity. Everyone knew her, the aging movie star who’d introduced generations of Greenwich Village kids to the fun of kite flying. It was no big deal that she was a film legend. There were other legends in the neighborhood.

But in her heart, no matter what she did or where she went or how long she stayed away, home for Mattie would always be Cedar Springs, Tennessee.

She could feel the warm air on her face, the pressure of her inflamed sinuses.

Dani, Dani. What am I going to do?

Her granddaughter’s sheer, stubborn, incorrigible Pembroke nature worried Mattie. Dani would have to find out where that damn key had come from, how it had gotten onto the rocks.

But perhaps she should.

One of Dani’s friends in New York had stopped by with the article on her and Pembroke Springs and groaned as she’d handed it to Mattie. “Couldn’t she have taken a shower first?” But overall it was a good piece. Dani was as unpretentious and as totally honest as ever. Maybe she wasn’t as smooth and as prepared as she could have been, but her energy shone through every quote.

But those gate keys…

Feeling stiff and old, Mattie climbed slowly to her feet. She had to use the rail. She went back inside, where a ceiling fan, much like the one she remembered in her father’s house in Cedar Springs, helped keep her front room cool. She’d pulled the drapes to keep out the hot sun. The room seemed dark, crowded, too much like the Witt front parlor on West Main Street a thousand miles—a thousand years—away. Mattie concentrated on the roses and Prussian blue of her decor, colors her father would never have chosen. She caught her breath before going upstairs.

In her small feminine bedroom she sat on the edge of her four-poster bed. A lace-curtained window overlooked the hidden garden behind her town house, where she spent many peaceful, solitary hours among her roses, hollyhocks, morning glories and asters. She had a good life here. Few regrets.

She opened the old Bible on her bedstand. Even before she could talk, her father had taught her his favorite psalms. She remembered them all. They were a part of her. On dark nights they’d come to her, sometimes in her mother’s almost-forgotten voice, or Naomi’s, even her father’s. Never in the voice of the child she’d been. It was as if that girl had never existed.