There had been no reconciliation, no understanding. Twenty-five years later, Eugene Chandler remained horrified and humiliated by what he regarded as his older daughter’s betrayal, her underhandedness. He continued to believe that by encouraging Lilli to be something she wasn’t, Nick Pembroke bore at least partial responsibility for her disappearance.

The story of Casino picked up where The Gamblers had left off. It painted a less romanticized, more realistic picture of Ulysses Pembroke, not shying away from how he’d gambled away his fortune at Saratoga ’s gaming tables and New York ’s stock market, how he’d wanted desperately to do the right thing but always came up short. In Casino he didn’t get the girl, and he didn’t ride off into the proverbial sunset. As in real life, he was shot dead by an anonymous sore loser outside Canfield Casino, now a Saratoga landmark. Three weeks later his wife gave birth to their son on the gleaming ballroom floor of the outrageous mansion he’d built near the Saratoga Race Course. Unable to find a buyer for her husband’s eclectic, unaffordable estate, his widow had stripped it of anything she could sell to make a life for herself and her child.

The last scene in the movie showed her holding her baby as she gathered up the keys to every wrought-iron gate on the property. Ulysses had had two keys made for each gate, one of brass, one of gold. His widow sold off the gold keys.

It was a nice touch-an example of Ulysses Pembroke’s profligacy. For years Dani had thought it pure fiction. She’d never seen hide nor hair of any gold keys.

Until a few weeks ago.

While rock climbing on the old Pembroke estate, she’d run across an old gate key on a narrow ledge. It turned out to be twenty-four-karat gold. And it matched exactly the brass key to the wrought-iron gate of the pavilion at the springs.