Tempting Fate by Carla Neggers Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€œI shouldn’t have written,” Naomi said.
    â€œYou 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
    M attie 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