Tempting Fate by Carla Neggers Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€œMay 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.
    â€œWe’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