Tempting Fate by Carla Neggers

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?
    â€œNicholas 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.”
    â€œAt 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
    W ith 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.
    â€œI received your note.” Sara was as icily polite as only a Chandler could be. “You really are coming tomorrow?”
    â€œI really am.”
    â€œWell, 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.”
    â€œAnd seeing how Mother ruined the seventy-fifth by so inconveniently disappearing, I’d better