“Where is he now?” Mattie asked.

“At the hospital with Sam Jones.”

“Are you going to go to him?”

Dani hesitated. If she asked him, Zeke would suffer for her. It would be so easy to let him. To lose herself. “No,” she said, but added, “not yet.”

Before Mattie could argue, Nick burst into the garden from the kitchen. He looked scrawny and ancient and very full of himself. Mattie asked him if he’d hunted up a poker game.

“Nope,” he said. “Hamburgers.”

“Hamburgers?”

“I have eaten enough nuts, seeds, pasta, grains, fruits and vegetables to last me the rest of my life, be that two more hours or another century. Found a place that makes hundred-percent-beef hamburgers and delivers. They’ll be here in ten minutes. With french fries and chocolate shakes. And pickles,” he said. “Salty pickles.”

Mattie was incensed. “If you drop dead on me-”

Nick grinned. “At least it’ll be with meat in my stomach.”

Zeke paid the tab for his room at the Pembroke and cleared out. He thought Ira looked glad to have him on his way. But before he left the grounds, he stopped at the rose garden. It was almost dark. A small sign warned him not to pick any roses. He did anyway, using his jackknife. Six in six different colors.

“The thing about my daughter is this,” John Pembroke had told him from his hospital bed when Zeke had stopped in after visiting Sam, who’d emerged from surgery in good shape. “She likes to have a challenge. Something comes to her on a silver platter, she doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t trust herself with anything easy.”

An unusual woman, Danielle Chandler Pembroke.

Zeke would never forget how courageous and gentle she’d been with her aunt and Eugene Chandler. Before anyone-him, the police, her father-could react, Dani had quietly taken the gun from Sara’s hand. Later, she’d stayed close to her shattered grandfather.

“I need you, Grandfather,” she’d told him, and it was what he’d needed, just to hang on.

Apparently Roger had planned to take Sara and Dani back up to Pembroke Springs to kill them, blaming what he could on Quint and what he couldn’t on his wife. Accepting his own culpability wasn’t something of which Roger Stone was even remotely capable. Quint had robbed Dani, attacked Ira, snatched John. But it was Roger who’d stumbled on John in the woods and nailed him, Roger who’d tried everything he could to keep tabs on Quint and find out what he was doing in Saratoga, to stop him from uncovering the truth about Lilli and Joe. Roger had used Quint, and in the end had killed him.

“I should have guessed years ago,” John said, shaking his head with regret. “The connection between Skinner and Roger was under my nose, and I missed it.”

“How could you have known?”

John looked pained. “Quint tried to interview me. Roger found out. He must have worried about what else Joe could have told Skinner. Roger used him,” John said. “Not long after I turned Quint down for an interview, I was framed for embezzling.”

“Framed? Why didn’t you fight?”

He shrugged. “It was airtight. I didn’t have the foggiest idea who’d done it to me-or even if it might have been just some god-awful mistake someone made. But Roger and Eugene condemned me right off the bat. I knew I couldn’t win. I thought-hell, I don’t know. I guess I thought Lilli might come back to me if I became a good Pembroke scoundrel.” He was silent a moment. “But she was already dead.”

Walking back to his car, Zeke stopped a delivery van with the name of some Saratoga hamburger joint emblazoned on its side. He got the guy to take his six roses and give them to Dani Pembroke. “Tell her that if she wants to shoot me out of the saddle, she’ll have to find me first.”

He’d give her a month to track him down. It’d be a challenge for her.

The woman had to figure out for herself that he didn’t come on any silver platter.

Twenty

The temperature had dropped to a tolerable one hundred degrees when John arrived back in Tucson.

His apartment, shut up for two weeks, was sweltering and smelled bad. His ungodly spider had taken over his bathroom. His living area was scattered with the pages of a manuscript he knew now he’d never finish. The historians could have the last word on Ulysses Pembroke’s life.

John would write his memoirs of growing up as the only child of his lunatic, famous, impossible mother and father.

His trip to Saratoga had cleaned him out. There was a letter from the IRS in his mailbox. He needed money, fast.

Looking at the squalid conditions of his life, he wondered why he hadn’t taken his father-in-law’s offer to return to Chandler Hotels. The job would have meant moving back to New York. He’d be closer to Dani and Mattie. His daughter certainly could use all the moral support she could get. After giving her mother a proper burial next to Claire Chandler in the family plot, Dani had rolled up her sleeves and tackled the problems endemic to the kind of publicity she, the Pembroke and Pembroke Springs had received in the past days. On top of having her mother’s body turn up after twenty-five years on her property and a murderer in the family, it turned out Roger Stone had hated her guts and floated rumors of her impending self-destruction. Apparently he’d been terrified Eugene would succeed in bringing Dani back into the fold, make her head of Chandler Hotels. Roger had never felt secure; he could never really be a Chandler himself.

John thought it’d be nice to be close to his mother and daughter.

Dani hadn’t asked him to stick around, but she’d kissed him at the airport, slipped him a couple hundred bucks and told him she loved him-she who’d never been open about such feelings. That was enough. More than he deserved, for certain.

And he’d already told Eugene no. Even now he couldn’t explain why.

He turned up the air conditioners as high as they’d go, opened a Dos Equis and cleaned out his refrigerator. Then he got down on his hands and knees and gathered up the scattered fragments of his manuscript.

Opening another beer, he sank into his lumpy couch and opened up an old photo album. Right there on the front page was his favorite picture, of the five of them together: Nick, Mattie, Lilli, Dani, himself. They looked happy.

They’d been happy.

He was still staring at the picture when someone pounded on his front door. “Yeah, coming.”

A troop of neighborhood kids trailed into his apartment. They carried fresh tortillas, pots of beans, a big salad and a dozen eggs, all from their mothers, who’d heard he was back in town and were worried he didn’t have any food.

He was thanking them profusely when he sensed the foreign presence at his feet. Standing rock-still, he looked down. There was the hairy little bastard. A few of these let loose on the streets of New York City, he thought, and every smarmy New York cockroach would head for the Hudson River. For a change, he had on shoes. If he moved fast and stomped hard, death would be quick and sure, if not neat.

The spider scampered toward the toilet. John let him go.

The kids howled with laughter. “Hey, Johnny,” one impertinent urchin said, “we sure missed you.”

He grinned. “I missed you, too, kid.”