“What?”

“Drop the Pembroke from your name. In time people will forget who your father was. At least they’ll know you want no part of him-that you’re different.”

She’d thrown him out and had called a lawyer to begin the proceedings to disinherit herself. “Not a nickel!” she’d told him. “Not a nickel of his money do I want crossing my palm!”

And not a nickel had.

Quint Skinner handed John his pants. “Get dressed.”

John clutched the pants and tried not to look scared out of his wits.

“I’m not kidnapping you.” Skinner’s eyes were hard, his voice absolutely calm. “You’re coming of your own free will.”

“Now, why would I do that?”

“Because,” Skinner said with no small touch of drama, “I know where your daughter is.”

John felt a stab of fear. Dani. He swung his legs off the edge of his bed. A hell of a lot of help he’d been since coming to Saratoga. So far he’d had his head knocked in, and now he was getting himself snatched right out of his hospital bed. Where were Sam Jones and Zeke Cutler when he needed them?

“What do you want from me?” he asked the big red-faced man.

“Get dressed first.”

Swallowing groans of pain and refusing to whine, John pulled on his pants, which hung even more than usual. He’d lost weight in the past couple of days. Skinner thrust his shirt and sneakers at him. “No socks?” John asked cheekily.

He didn’t get even a glimmer of a smile from the stinking thug.

When he finished dressing, he and Skinner headed down the hospital corridor. “What if I faint?” John asked.

“Your daughter lives in a purple cottage on the Pembroke estate. Has a statue of Artemis in the garden.”

John felt his knees wobble under him.

Outside, Saratoga was enjoying beautiful weather, last night’s storms having washed out the clouds and humidity. Skinner shoved John into the front seat of a dark blue BMW. “Mind the noggin,” John said. “I presume it was your doing?”

Quint ignored him.

John sat very still, trying to hold off a wave of dizziness. He’d talked the doctors into springing him today. He wanted desperately to do something to get to the bottom of whatever was going on in Saratoga. He hadn’t had being kidnapped in mind. He looked at the solid man beside him. “I know who you are, you know.”

Quint nodded. “That stupid book on Joe Cutler fixed that for me. There’s no going back once you’ve lost your anonymity.”

Despite his appearance and manner, the man wasn’t stupid. John vowed to keep that in mind. “At least you had it to lose. I never did myself. Anyway, I don’t recognize you from your book. You tried to interview me in New York before I was nailed for embezzlement. Remember?”

The placid expression didn’t change. “I remember.”

“You were fresh out of the military, trying to launch a journalism career by digging out a story on my mother. Your angle was unusual. You’d served with Joe Cutler and figured you’d compare the Witts and the Cutlers of Cedar Springs, their different destinies. Only you never wrote the piece.”

“You wouldn’t talk to me.”

John grinned. “I was still noble in those days.”

They’d come to a light on Broadway. Quint was a careful driver, confident. He reached over and popped open the glove compartment, pulled out a wrinkled paper bag. He dropped it onto John’s lap. “Take a look inside.”

He did so. The dizziness from his head injury came in waves. As he stared into the bag, it threatened to inundate him.

Inside the bag were two gate keys, one brass, one gold.

“You took these from my daughter,” John said hoarsely.

“Yep. And I didn’t hurt her as much as she keeps making out.” He shrugged, matter-of-fact. “Not as much as I could have, anyway.”

John clutched the bag. “You son of a bitch.”

“Save it. I’m not in this to get you people to like me.”

No kidding, John thought, annoyed now as much as afraid.

Skinner glanced at him and grinned. “You’d like to smack me one, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d like to do more than that.”

“Well, you’ll just have to wait. Joe found the gold key when he was up here when your wife disappeared. He told me. We were pals, you know?”

He waited, seeming to want John to respond. So he did. “Fine way you had of showing it.”

“People read the book wrong. I wasn’t condemning him. I was just-never mind.”

His knuckles turned white as he gripped the steering wheel; the man, John thought, definitely had his own agenda. But what was it? He asked again, “What do you want from me?”

“There are a ton of gates on your little girl’s property. I checked.”

His little girl. John shut his eyes, fighting nausea and dizziness and the feeling-the horrible dread-that he was about to fail his daughter again.

“I can’t risk making a mistake. So you’re going to show me which gate those keys unlock.” Quint spoke as if he had no doubt that was exactly what John would do.

“And if I don’t?”

“I’ll make your daughter show me.”

Zeke had too many theories.

He walked through the elegant gaming room on the second floor of the Canfield Casino Museum in Congress Park. The decor was high Victorian, lavish, heavy, dark. The thick, patterned carpet absorbed his footsteps as he checked out the faro table, which looked relatively innocuous under an ornate chandelier. He tried to imagine Dani’s two great-great-grandfathers-robber baron Ambrose Chandler and gambler Ulysses Pembroke-placing their bets. Maybe it was Jackson Witt’s influence on the culture of Cedar Springs, but Zeke had never seen the attraction of gambling.

On his way out he stopped at the glass-fronted display case in the hall.

Beatrix Chandler smiled at him from the grainy photograph taken a few days after her marriage to hotel magnate Ambrose Chandler. She was fair and pretty and just nineteen. She and Ambrose would have four children. Three would die of diphtheria. Money or no money, it wasn’t as if the Chandlers hadn’t faced tragedy in their lives.

Squinting, blocking out all sound around him, Zeke studied another photograph, this one of Ulysses and Louisa Pembroke in the pavilion at Pembroke Springs just before his bottling plant had gone bust. In small print the caption stated that the shy judge’s daughter and the notorious rake had first met in the pavilion. Was that why, of all the gold keys legend says she sold, Louisa Caldwell Pembroke hadn’t sold the gold key to that particular pavilion? How had it ended up back there for Joe to find decades later? And then end up on the cliffs for Dani to find twenty-five years after that?

Too many theories to fit too many facts, Zeke thought.

He’d hooked up with Sam in his nondescript car outside Quint Skinner’s little rented house last night and discussed the possibilities.

“What about your ex-heiress?” Sam had asked.

“You ever call her ‘my’ anything within her earshot, be prepared to duck. She’s her own woman.”

“It’s just an expression.”

“She doesn’t have a sense of humor about that sort of thing.”

Sam nodded thoughtfully. “I can understand that. So did you leave her to her own devices?”

“Ira Bernstein has the grounds crawling with security people. They’re very low-key.”

“Any good?”

“I think so.”

“What about our boy Quint?”

“Sleeping at the moment.”

Zeke had looked out at the small Cape Cod house. “We’re missing something, Sam.”

“Either that,” Sam said, “or we’ve got all the pieces sitting right in front of us and are too damn blind or stupid to put them together.”

After the storms the night air was cool and still, with neighborhood cats on the prowl. “Who stands to gain?” Zeke had asked rhetorically.

“Gain what?”

It was a good point. “The gold key would be worth a hefty sum-not just because it’s gold, but also because of its historical and romantic significance.”