After Caroline

by Kay Hooper

  MORE PRAISE FOR KAY HOOPER AND

  AFTER CAROLINE

  “Kay Hooper’s dialogue rings true; her characters are more three-dimensional than those usually found in this genre.”

  —The Atlanta Journal

  “Kay Hooper gives you a darn good ride, and there are far too few of those these days.”

  —Dayton Daily News

  “Peopled with interesting characters and intricately plotted, the novel is both a compelling mystery and a satisfying romance.”

  —Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel

  “Kay Hooper has crafted another solid story to keep readers enthralled until the last page is turned.”

  —Booklist

  “Joanna Flynn is appealingly plucky and true to her mission as she probes the mystery that was Caroline.”

  —Variety

  Bantam Books by Kay Hooper

  HAUNTING RACHEL

  FINDING LAURA

  AFTER CAROLINE

  AMANDA

  THE WIZARD OF SEATTLE

  ON WINGS OF MAGIC

  And don’t miss Kay Hooper’s latest novels of suspense

  STEALING SHADOWS

  HIDING IN THE SHADOWS

  OUT OF THE SHADOWS

  TOUCHING EVIL

  And look for

  WHISPER OF EVIL

  TO MY FRIENDS,

  CATHERINE, LINDA, IRIS,

  AND FAYRENE—

  BECAUSE CONNECTIONS

  MATTER.

  July 1

  IT WASN’T MUCH to cause such a drastic effect. Not much at all. A small spot on the road, maybe a smear of oil that had dripped down when some other car had inexplicably paused here where there were no side streets or driveways or even wide shoulders to beckon. She never saw it. One moment, her old Ford was moving smoothly, completely under her control; the next moment, it was spinning with stunning violence.

  She was jerked about like a rag doll, and clung to the steering wheel out of some dim conviction that she could somehow regain control over the vehicle. But the sheer force of the spin made her helpless. It seemed to go on forever, the summer green of the scenery revolving around her wildly, the anguished scream of tires on hot pavement shrill in her ears. Other cars cried out in response, their tires shrieking and horns blaring, adding to the cacophony blasting her.

  And then there were actual blows as the whirling car began to strike stationary objects, the overgrown shrubbery that lined the street at first, and then small trees. Harsh shudders shook her and the car again and again. The spinning slowed, she thought, but then the undercarriage snagged something that refused to give or let go, there was an ungodly wail of tortured metal, and the car flipped—not once, but over and over, as violently as it had spun on its wheels.

  She didn’t realize she had closed her eyes until the car jolted a final time upright, rocked threateningly, and then went still with a groan.

  In that first instant, she understood the phrase “deafening silence”; all she could hear was her own heart thudding. Then, as though someone had turned up the volume, the sounds of people shouting and car horns filtered into her awareness. She opened her eyes cautiously, blinking back tears of fright.

  The sight that met her gaze was appalling. The windshield’s shatterproof glass had simply vanished, and she could see with terrible clarity the long hood of her car now crumpled back toward her like some monstrous accordion, with unbroken headlights pointed bizarrely toward the sky. The passenger door had also been forced inward, so that she could have easily rested her elbow on it without even leaning to the right. And though the driver’s door seemed amazingly whole and unharmed, she knew without even looking back that the rear of the car had also folded in, so that she was encased in a tight box of collapsed metal.

  She forced her hands to let go of the steering wheel and held them up to eye level, warily examining her fingers one at a time until she could convince herself that all ten were present and working properly. Then, as the voices came nearer to what was left of her car, she shifted a bit, carefully, waiting for a pain or some other indication of injury. She even managed to feel down her legs, bared by her summer skirt, and searched for damage.

  Nothing. Not a scratch.

  She wasn’t a religious woman, but staring around her at something that didn’t even look like a car anymore, she had to wonder if perhaps something or someone hadn’t been watching over her.

  “Lady, are you all right?”

  She looked through the glassless window into a stranger’s concerned face and heard an uncertain laugh emerge from her mouth.

  “Yeah. Can you believe it?”

  “No,” he replied frankly, a grin tugging at his lips. “You ought to be in about a million pieces, lady. This has gotta be the luckiest day of your life.”

  “Tell me about it.” She shifted slightly, adding, “But I can hardly move, and I can’t reach the door handle. Can you get it open?”

  The stranger, a middle-aged man with the burly shoulders that come of a lifetime’s hard work, yanked experimentally on her door. “Nope. There isn’t a mark on this door, but it’s been compressed in the front and back, and it’s stuck tight. We’re gonna need the Jaws of Life, sure enough. Don’t worry, though—the rescue squad and paramedics are on their way.”

  Distant sirens were getting louder, but even so she felt a chill of worry. “I had a full tank of gas. You don’t think—”

  “I don’t smell anything,” he reassured her. “And I’ve worked in garages most of my life. Don’t worry. By the way, my name is Jim. Jim Smith, believe it or not.”

  “It’s a day to believe anything. I’m Joanna. Nice to meet you, Jim.”

  He nodded. “Same here, Joanna. You’re sure you’re okay? No pain anywhere?”

  “Not even a twinge.” She looked past his shoulder to watch other motorists slipping and sliding down the bank toward her, and swallowed hard when she saw just how far her car had rolled. “My God. I should be dead, shouldn’t I?”

  Jim looked back and briefly studied the wide path of flattened brush and churned-up earth, then returned his gaze to her and smiled. “Like I said, this seems to be your lucky day.”

  Joanna looked once more at the car crumpled so snugly around her, and shivered. As close as she ever wanted to come…

  Within five minutes, the rescue squad and paramedics arrived, all of them astonished but pleased to find her unhurt. Jim backed away to allow the rescue people room to work, joining the throng of onlookers scattered down the bank, and Joanna realized only then that she was the center of quite a bit of attention.

  “I always wanted to be a star,” she murmured.

  The nearest paramedic, a brisk woman of about Joanna’s age wearing a name badge that said E. Mallory, chuckled in response. “Word’s gotten around that you haven’t a scratch. Don’t be surprised if the fourth estate shows up any minute.”

  Joanna was about to reply to that with another light comment, but before she could open her mouth, the calm of the moment was suddenly, terribly, shattered. There was a sound like a gunshot, a dozen voices screamed, “Get back!” and Joanna turned her gaze toward the windshield to see what looked like a thick black snake with a fiery head falling toward her out of the sky.

  Then something slammed into her with the unbelievable force of a runaway train, and everything went black.

  There was no sense of time passing, and Joanna didn’t feel she had gone somewhere else. She felt … suspended, in a kind of limbo. Weightless, content, she drifted in a peaceful silence. She was waiting for something, she knew that. Waiting to find out something. The silence was absolute, but gradually the darkness began to abate, and she felt a gentle tug. She turned, or thought she did, and moved in the direction of the soft pull.

  But
almost immediately, she was released, drifting once more as the darkness deepened again. And she had a sudden sense that she was not alone, that someone shared the darkness with her. She felt a featherlight touch, so fleeting she wasn’t at all sure of it, as though someone or something had brushed past her.

  Don’t let her be alone.

  Joanna heard nothing, yet the plea was distinct in her mind, and the emotions behind it were nearly overwhelming. She tried to reach out toward that other, suffering presence, but before she could, something yanked at her sharply.

  “Joanna? Joanna! Come on, Joanna, open your eyes!”

  That summons was an audible one, growing louder as she felt herself pulled downward. She resisted for an instant, reluctant, but then fell in a rush until she felt the heaviness of her own body once more.

  Instantly, every nerve and muscle she possessed seemed on fire with pain, and she groaned as she forced open her eyes.

  A clear plastic cup over her face, and beyond it a circle of unfamiliar faces breaking into grins. And beyond them a clear blue summer sky decorated with fleecy white clouds. She was on the ground. What was she doing on the ground?

  “She’s back with us,” one of the faces said back over his shoulder to someone else. “Let’s get her on the stretcher.” Then, to her, “You’re going to be all right, Joanna. You’re going to be just fine.”

  Joanna felt her aching body lifted. She watched dreamily as she floated past more faces. Then a vaguely familiar one appeared, and she saw it say something to her, something that sunk in only some time later as she rode in a wailing ambulance.

  Definitely your lucky day. You almost died twice.

  Her mind clearing by that time, Joanna could only agree with Jim’s observation. How many people, after all, go through one near-death experience? Not many. Yet here she was, whole and virtually unharmed—if you discounted the fact that the only part of her body that didn’t ache was the tip of her nose.

  Still, she was very much alive, and incredibly grateful.

  At the hospital, she was examined, soothed, and medicated. She would emerge from the day’s incredible experiences virtually unscathed, the doctors told her. She had one burn mark on her right ankle where the electricity from the power line had arced between exposed metal and her flesh, and she’d be sore for a while both from the shock that had stopped her heart and from the later efforts to start it again.

  She was a very lucky young lady and should suffer no lasting effects from what had happened to her; that was what they said.

  But they were wrong. Because that was the night the dreams began.

  “CAROLINE?”

  It wasn’t the hand on her shoulder that made Joanna Flynn turn; it was the utter astonishment in the voice that had called her by another woman’s name. Astonishment and something else, something she sensed more than heard. Whatever the emotion was, it prompted Joanna to respond.

  “No,” she said. Then, driven by something she saw in the man’s face, she added, “I’m sorry.”

  He, a fairly nondescript man with reddish blond hair and blue eyes that were only now losing the expression of shock, took his hand from her shoulder and nodded a bit jerkily. “No,” he agreed, “you couldn’t be. … I’m sorry. Sorry. But you look so much like—” He stopped, shook his head. He offered her a polite, forgive-me-for-bothering-you smile and brushed past her to keep walking.

  Joanna watched him striding away and felt vaguely troubled without even knowing why. People were mistaken for other people all the time, she knew that, and just because it had never happened to her before was no reason to let it bother her now. But she couldn’t seem to get his shocked expression out of her mind.

  She stood there on the virtually deserted Atlanta sidewalk in the hot September sunlight for much longer than she should have, gazing after the stranger she could no longer see, before she finally managed to shake off her uneasiness enough to continue on toward the private library where she worked as a researcher.

  It was just another odd thing, that was all. Just another item to note in the column of her life reserved for strange occurrences—the column that had been filling up with items since her accident two months before.

  Some of the items were minor ones. Her restlessness, very unusual for her. The vague but increasingly strong sense of urgency she felt. Her anxiety, churning within her for no reason she could pinpoint.

  But the biggest item was the dream. It had begun the very night of her accident, and though it had been sporadic those first few weeks, it was a nightly occurrence now. Always the same, it presented a sequence of images and sounds, always in the same order. It was not a nightmare; there was nothing innately terrifying about the images or how they were presented. Yet Joanna woke each morning with her heart pounding and a sense of fear clogging her throat.

  Something, somewhere, was wrong. She knew it. She felt it. Something was wrong, and she had to do something about it. Because if she didn’t … something terrible would happen.

  She didn’t know what, but she knew it would be something terrible.

  It was so damned vague, it was maddening. So vague that it should have been easy to dismiss as nothing more than the distorted but unimportant ramblings of the unconscious mind. Joanna had never paid much attention to her dreams, and she wanted to be able to ignore this one as easily. But she couldn’t.

  Her doctor said that odd dreams were to be expected. After all, she had suffered a blast of electricity strong enough to stop her heart. The brain was filled with electrical impulses, and it made sense that those impulses could have been scrambled by thousands of volts from a power line. He was sure there was nothing for her to worry about.

  Joanna just wished she was as sure.

  The roar of the ocean was deafening at first, smothering all other sounds. The house, perched high above the sea, was beautiful and lonely and awoke in her a confusing jumble of feelings. Admiration, pride, and satisfaction clashed with uneasiness and fear. She wanted to concentrate on the emotions, to understand them, but felt herself abruptly pulled back away from the house. It receded into the distance and grew hazy. Then a brightly colored carousel horse passed in front of her, bobbing and turning on its gleaming brass pole, as if to music she couldn’t hear. She smelled roses and from the corner of her eye caught a glimpse of the flowers in a vase. Then the roar of the sea abruptly died down until the loud ticking of a clock could be heard. She walked past a colorful painting on an easel, her steps quickening because she had to … get somewhere. She had to … find … something. She heard sobs, and tried to run forward—

  Joanna sat bolt upright in bed, her arms reaching out, her heart pounding against her ribs. She was shaking, and her breath rasped from her tight throat. And inside her was pain and a terrible grief, and over everything else lay a cold, black pall of fear.

  Her arms slowly fell while she tried to calm down. The fear and pain and grief faded slowly, leaving only the familiar uneasiness behind, and Joanna tried to reassure herself. It was a dream. Just a dream.

  But the dream had changed, and its impact on Joanna had changed as well. The sense of fear had been a part of the dream all along, but this time there had been more. The grief was new, and the pain, and what she had felt while the dream had played out before her, the overwhelming feelings of anxiety and urgency, that was different, too, so powerful now that she couldn’t even try to ignore what she felt.

  More than ever, she was certain there was something she had to do. She didn’t know what it was, but the urgency was so strong that she actually threw back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She hesitated for a moment when she realized what she was doing, then went ahead and got up. It was morning anyway—albeit very early morning. Five-thirty.

  In the kitchen of her small apartment, she put coffee on, then wandered into the living room and turned on a couple of lamps. It was a pleasant room, with comfortable overstuffed furniture and an eclectic collection of knickknacks from all over the wo
rld. Aunt Sarah had loved to travel, and every summer she had packed up her niece and jetted off to some remote corner of the globe.

  Joanna’s friends had always envied her her Aunt Sarah, who had certainly not been a conventional parent. And Joanna had enjoyed her unorthodox upbringing. But in a small, secret corner of her heart, she had envied her friends, because all of them had a mother and father.

  She wandered over to the cold fireplace and, with her index finger, traced the edge of a silver-framed photo of her Aunt Sarah that was on the mantel. The shrewd eyes gazed out at her, and the warm smile stirred memories, and Joanna felt disloyal somehow for the childish idea that her aunt had not been enough, that her childhood had been missing something vitally important.

  Still touching her aunt’s photo, Joanna turned her gaze to the other silver-framed picture on the mantel. Her parents. Her mother had been younger than she was now when the photo had been taken. Fair and delicate, she stood in the protective shelter of her husband’s arm, her smile glowing. Lucy Flynn had married her childhood sweetheart, and had been head over heels in love with him until the day she died. One of Joanna’s most enduring memories was of the sound of her mother’s voice speaking softly to her husband and calling him “darling.”

  As for Alan Flynn, what Joanna remembered most about him was his laugh, deep and contented. He had adored his wife and child, a fact neither had questioned. He had always been there, for both of them, never too busy or too preoccupied by his job as an attorney to spend time with his family.

  Joanna reached over to touch the silver frame holding her parents’ picture and wondered, as she had so many times before, what would have happened if a judge’s illness had not given her father time off on that sunny June morning. Time to happily gather up his wife and take her sailing in their small craft. She wondered why fate had placed her far away that day, gone with Aunt Sarah on an impulsive trip to Disney World. She wondered why the weather service had not warned of a storm coming or, if it had warned, why her father had not taken heed. She wondered why he, an expert and experienced sailor, had been unable to bring the little boat safely back to shore.