Tempting Fate

Mattie had known exactly how Lilli felt, and she’d tried so hard to explain. “Darling, it’s not that Nick understands you—it’s that he’s willing to let you be whoever you want to be. He demands it. He’s a rare man in that he has no expectations of you whatever.”

On the flip side, Nick had no expectations of himself, either. For a woman who’d based her goals and ideas on the expectations of others—parents, husband, society—being exposed to Nicholas Pembroke’s talent and vision and enthusiasm for life, his love of freedom without responsibility, could be an enormously liberating and intoxicating experience. But there were costs. Always there were costs.

For Mattie, those costs had been her home and family. To be free, she’d had to leave them behind all those years ago. There had been no opportunity for compromise, no possible middle ground. Yet even after six decades, the pull of home and family on her remained strong. Every day something would catch her off guard and trigger a memory of her stern father, of her dark-eyed little sister, of the people and oak-lined streets of Cedar Springs. Mattie didn’t regret her choices. She treasured her independence, her good years with Nick, their son, the work she’d done, the life she’d made for herself in New York. She’d had time to put the costs of her freedom into perspective.

Had Lilli discovered, too late, what those costs would be for herself?

Frank Sinatra stopped singing.

Mattie stared at the photograph. At Lilli’s smile. At the gold key hanging from her neck. Joe had given it to her.

How had it ended up on the Pembroke estate for Dani to find so many years later?

“Nicholas Pembroke is an extraordinary man,” Mattie had told Lilli. “I’d be a liar if I tried to tell you otherwise. The good Lord only knows where I’d be if he hadn’t decided to go fishing in Tennessee way back when. But, Lilli, Nick can’t save himself, much less anyone else. Darling, I know what it is to want to be free.”

“At my age you were already a legend.”

Mattie had tried to explain. Her acting had had its rewards, but fame was a strange thing. Mattie wasn’t famous to herself, but to other people—people she didn’t even know. She couldn’t get inside their heads. Back at the height of her fame, she’d disguised herself and sneaked into a theater playing one of her films, but still couldn’t get inside the minds of those strangers watching her and be a part of her own fame. And Mattie had realized she was only herself. She wasn’t what other people thought of her.

Lilli had shaken her head, as if at her own shattered dreams. “I’m thirty, and I’ve done nothing at all with my life.”

Which wasn’t true. Lilli Chandler Pembroke had given as much of herself to her daughter and husband as any woman could be asked to give. She was a tireless volunteer, a wonderful sister, a devoted daughter. She managed a large apartment in New York and a house in the country, and had taken over as Chandler hostess admirably since her mother’s death. But she’d wanted more. And who was Mattie to tell her she couldn’t have it?

Aching and tired, more depressed than she’d felt in years, Mattie replaced the photograph in her Bible. She’d never shown it to anyone, not even Dani. Few people knew about Joe and Zeke Cutler’s trip to Saratoga that summer. Certainly not her granddaughter. Mattie hadn’t told her. Nor had she ever sat Dani down and explained about the little sister she’d left behind in Tennessee, the half-crazy father who’d died a long, tortured death. About her own ambivalent feelings about her hometown and her childhood there.

Dani would be surprised and hurt. She thought her grandmother had no secrets from her.

The problem was, she had too many.

Four

With her bare feet propped up on the teak umbrella table in the garden behind her gingerbread cottage, Dani regarded Sara Chandler Stone with reasonably good humor. “Tell me, Sara, have you ever been on Pembroke property before?”

Her aunt didn’t answer. So far she hadn’t said much. She’d slipped into the garden while Dani was enjoying a bottle of Pembroke Springs Mineral Water after a late-afternoon stint of weed pulling. She’d offered Sara a bottle. Sara had refused politely. She was a tall, slender woman, with tawny hair cut into a classic bob and pretty, rich blue eyes and a slightly uptilted chin. She’d just come from the races and had on a raspberry-flowered dress, very feminine, with raspberry heels and a long raspberry scarf tied around her straw hat. Dani herself had on gym shorts and a T-shirt. But her aunt—her mother’s younger sister—was the quintessential Chandler heiress, everything her niece made no attempt to be, couldn’t have been even if she’d tried.

“I received your note.” Sara was as icily polite as only a Chandler could be. “You really are coming tomorrow?”

“I really am.”

“Well, that’s wonderful, of course. We’re delighted. I only hope—” She smiled, cool and gracious. “You do understand how much the hundredth anniversary of the running of the Chandler Stakes means to Father.”

“And seeing how Mother ruined the seventy-fifth by so inconveniently disappearing, I’d better not make a scene.”

Sara reddened, inhaling sharply. “I didn’t mean that.”

Dani felt a stab of guilt, having forgotten—or simply not consciously reminded herself—that hers wasn’t the only loss, that her aunt had lost a sister. She dropped her feet to the stone terrace, warm in the afternoon sun. “I know you didn’t. Don’t you want to sit down?”

“I can’t stay—we have a dinner party this evening. I just wanted to be sure that the note was in fact from you, that it wasn’t some sort of cruel practical joke. This is such a sudden change of heart on your part—although of course we welcome it—and I know you’re very busy.” She paused, looking around at the cracked marble birdbath that stood in the midst of the myrtle, at the hundreds of marigolds Dani had planted. There were perennials, flowering shrubs and trees, herbs, more annuals, all enclosed by a tall Victorian wrought-iron fence. “I saw the article on you.”

Dani winced, taking another sip of her mineral water. The bottle was a handsome proprietary design of evergreen-colored glass, with a distinctive long slender neck and an ornate P engraved on one side. The label was a design Dani particularly loved: a red kite floating above a pine grove. Eugene Chandler—her grandfather, Sara’s father—considered her use of Pembroke for her profitable, visible company just one more example of his only grandchild’s thumbing her nose at him.

“I didn’t mention you or Grandfather,” she said. “Or my mother.”

“You didn’t have to. Any article on you will dredge us up no matter what you say or don’t say. Having all that…history come out now is painful.”

Dani refused to feel guilty. The interview had been on the spur of the moment, and she wasn’t supposed to do anything on the spur of the moment. She had too many responsibilities. She was half Chandler. She had a missing mother. Even Ira Bernstein had offered his two cents, threatening to take up a collection to buy her new sneakers. Her sneakers hadn’t even been in the photograph of her. “The holes,” he’d said, “were implied by the rest of your ‘outfit.’”

There was no pleasing anyone anymore.

“It’s not as if our ‘history’ isn’t already on people’s minds,” Dani said. “It’s the hundredth anniversary of the Chandler Stakes, the twenty-fifth of my mother’s disappearance—people will talk, even if we don’t.”

Sara straightened. “I’m not a fool. I might not run a company, but that doesn’t mean—” She stopped abruptly, replacing the demure stance, the stiff, polite smile with the look of a well-bred Chandler. “Let’s not argue. Father’s delighted you’re coming tomorrow—Roger is, too.” Her smile broadened at the mention of Roger Stone, her husband, and seemed genuine. “So am I.”

Dani almost believed her.

After her aunt left, Dani didn’t return to her flower beds, but propped her feet back up on her umbrella table and contemplated the blue sky, felt the cool afternoon breeze against her skin. Something must not be quite right in her head, she thought. Otherwise she’d have told her aunt that she’d changed her mind and wouldn’t be attending the annual Chandler lawn party tomorrow night after all.

“Dani, you back here?”

She recognized Kate Murtagh’s voice even as her six-foot-tall, blond, gorgeous friend barreled through the gate at the far end of the garden. Kate marched up to the stone terrace. She had on an inexpensive chambray dress, her long hair held back with a jade-and-rose-colored scarf; she didn’t even have to work at looking stunning.

“Do I take it from your auntie’s stiff-upper-lip exit that the rumors are true and you’re going tomorrow?”

Dani shrugged. It didn’t surprise her there were rumors or that Kate Murtagh had heard them. She was one of Saratoga’s most sought-after caterers. She’d even landed the Chandler lawn party for the first time, in spite of her long friendship with Dani.

“It’s going to be all over the gossip columns, you know,” Kate said. She was clearly on one of her tears. “Are you prepared for that kind of publicity?”

“People will say what they say.”

“Oh, indeed they will. In my opinion—” not that Dani had asked “—things have gotten too quiet between you and your grandfather. You’d rather have him fighting with you than not paying any attention at all.”

Dani deliberately didn’t answer. Everyone, including her friends, seemed to have a theory about her relationship with her mother’s family.

Kate sighed. “What’re you going to wear to this shindig?”

“Is that the real reason you’re here?”

“You know you can’t be trusted to pick out a party dress on your own.”

Dani laughed but was already on her feet, leading Kate through the back door into her cottage’s small, charming kitchen. As always, her friend had to take a minute to shudder. “I have nightmares about this kitchen.”

“You just have unrealistically high standards.”

“Like a fully functional stove and a refrigerator that postdates Donna Reed?”

“Picky, picky.”

“And counters,” Kate added.