After Caroline

by Kay Hooper

  “We all have choices,” Griffin told her roughly.

  “About some things. Not about this. I haven’t felt so strongly about anything in my entire life. I’m sorry you don’t understand.”

  “How can I understand? You’re talking about subjective things here. Feelings, senses, beliefs. There’s not one thing in all this that I can hold in my hand and say, ‘Yeah, this is real.’”

  Joanna leaned forward, planted her elbows on his desk, and said, “I’m here. I’m real. Explain that.”

  As much as he would have liked to, Griffin could offer no other explanation for her presence here except an incredible string of coincidences—and if he offered that one, he’d be calling her a liar. Something he hardly wanted to do. The fact remained that if she had indeed come here deliberately, something had helped narrow her search for Caroline. Otherwise he didn’t believe she could ever have found this small town. He would check out her story, of course, as far as he could, but unless Joanna had excited some undue attention in getting here—like laying a heavy bribe on Dylan and Lyssa’s hotel manager, for instance—he doubted he’d find anything to either confirm or disprove what she claimed.

  “All right,” he said finally, hearing the reluctance in his own voice. “I’ll accept that you came here because of a signpost in a dream. I don’t like it, but I’ll accept it. I’ll even accept that you believe there’s something wrong here, or was. You’ve been talking to people about Caroline for days now; have you found even a hint of anything wrong?”

  Joanna hesitated, wanting to ask him if he’d warned the townspeople not to talk to her. But she wasn’t quite ready to ask that question. Maybe because she didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “No, not really. Vague things, but nothing you could hold in your hand. Regan thinks her mother was afraid, but you don’t have to tell me that poor kid’s swimming in grief. There’ve been a few things said about Caroline that bugged me, but nothing drastic. Maybe she didn’t have a great marriage, and maybe she wasn’t close to many people around here, but she seems to have loved her daughter and she seems to have had a busy life.”

  “Well, then?”

  “Don’t ask me to be logical,” she told him, trying not to sound as tense and defensive as she felt. “I can’t be. But I’m sure there’s an answer here—I just haven’t found it yet. Probably because I’m not looking in the right place.” She paused, then leaned back in her chair and said slowly, reluctantly, “And then there’s you.”

  He was startled. “Me? What about me?”

  Joanna didn’t take her eyes off him. “Were you in love with Caroline?”

  He didn’t get indignant or angry, and he didn’t seem surprised. He merely looked at her for a moment, as if he had expected the question, then said evenly, “No, I wasn’t.”

  Joanna wished she believed him. “Then there must be some other reason for it.”

  “For what?”

  “The way you look when you talk about her. The tone of your voice. I don’t know you very well, Griffin, but I do know pain when I see it. And I see it in you. Something about Caroline—or her death—has affected you profoundly.” She didn’t ask the question, just watched him and waited. For a moment she didn’t think he was going to respond, but finally he did.

  “Caroline sent me a note that morning, asking me to meet her at an old barn just off the coast highway. At noon.”

  Joanna felt more tension creep into her, even though she couldn’t tell much from his level voice and those dark eyes. What did he feel about this? She drew a breath, and asked cautiously, “Was that usual?”

  “Dammit, no. We weren’t involved with each other.”

  She still didn’t believe him. His words told her one thing, but his voice and those veiled eyes told her something else. “Then why did she want to meet you at such an odd place?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t she say—”

  “I didn’t meet her,” Griffin visibly forced himself to pause a moment to regain his calm, then went on. “I had a minor emergency come up here, and the next thing I knew it was well after twelve. I figured she wouldn’t have waited so long, so I didn’t bother to go.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Joanna said, still feeling her way cautiously, “but I get the feeling you didn’t attach too much importance to her request.”

  Griffin’s mouth twisted bitterly. “No, you aren’t wrong.”

  “But if you didn’t know what it was about—”

  “The meeting place was odd, but there didn’t seem to be any particular urgency. If I thought about it at all, I just assumed she was going to be on her way to Portland or somewhere else and the barn was handy. As to what it was about, she was on a half dozen different committees and it wouldn’t have been the first time she’d wanted to talk to me about a zoning ordinance or what permits she’d need for a PTA-sponsored carnival.”

  “Wouldn’t she have come here to your office for anything like that?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, probably. Christ, how do I know what she wanted to talk to me about?”

  Joanna heard guilt and self-blame in his voice now and thought she could guess where it was coming from. “You believe if you had met her, she wouldn’t have been killed, don’t you?”

  “I believe … I should have been there. If I had met her at the old barn at noon, it’s unlikely she would have been coming down the coast road like a bat out of hell at half past.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “No, but it’s a good bet I’m right.”

  “There’s something else, something else that bothers you,” Joanna said, after a moment’s thought, trying to read him. “What is it?”

  Griffin sighed. “At the time, there was nothing. But, looking back now, it seems to me that Caroline was … jittery that last week or two before she was killed. Much more so than usual.”

  Joanna sat up straighter. “You mean all this time I’ve been saying there’s something wrong here and you agreed with me?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. There was nothing going on here, Joanna, no grand conspiracy involving Caroline. She was jittery, that’s all. She must have had something on her mind, something she wanted to talk to me about. It could have been anything—”

  “Anything that made her more nervous than usual?”

  “Joanna, there was no sign of something serious being wrong, not that I noticed. Hell, not that anyone noticed. Nothing had happened out of the ordinary—”

  “A man had fallen from the cliffs not long before that,” she reminded him.

  “I told you, that happens every few years. Why do you want to connect it to Caroline?”

  “Because it happened around the same time as her death, and I’m looking for … drama. A catalyst.” Joanna recalled her dream about the girl falling from the cliff, and couldn’t help wondering if it meant something she hadn’t considered. Not the fact that a woman went over the cliffs, but the fact that someone was pushed. “I suppose there was no sign that that man’s death wasn’t an accident? I mean, murder was never considered?”

  Griffin stared at her for a moment, less incredulously than he might have done a couple of hours earlier. “No.”

  “Did you check him out?”

  “For what? For dying in Cliffside?”

  “Griffin—”

  “He was a tourist. He’d been staying at The Inn less than a week when he wandered too close to the edge of the cliffs and went over. That was all there was to it.”

  Joanna put her hands up briefly to massage her temples with a gentle touch; she was getting a headache. Not at all surprising, really. She tried to concentrate. “Tourist. He was here alone?”

  “Yeah. Is that sinister? You’re here alone, you know.”

  She felt her teeth grinding again, but refused to let his sarcasm throw her off track. “Had he been doing the usual tourist stuff?”

  “He didn’t buy a cast-iron doorstop.”

  “Griffin.”<
br />
  “What usual tourist stuff?”

  “Whatever unaccompanied male tourists do around here. Was he here for the hiking? The scenery? I hear the fishing’s good; did he have fishing equipment?”

  “I don’t know. Look, as far as I remember, there was nothing odd about the man. Nobody had spoken to him beyond pleasantries, but he had plenty of ID, and when I called his sister in San Francisco, she came up and claimed the body. No mystery, Joanna.”

  “Caroline didn’t know him?”

  “Nobody around here—” Griffin broke off abruptly and frowned.

  “What?”

  His frown deepened, and the fingers of one hand drummed restlessly on his desk. Then he shook his head. “Christ, now you’ve got me questioning the most ordinary things. Just because Scott spoke to the man briefly in town a week or so before he was killed doesn’t mean there has to be anything diabolical about it.”

  “Scott McKenna?”

  Griffin nodded, still scowling. “They passed each other outside one of the stores in town. Spoke just a few words, I think; I was too far away to be able to tell even if I’d paid close attention.”

  “But—that’s a connection with Caroline,” Joanna pointed out.

  “Yeah? What if the guy just asked Scott the time? Would that be a connection?”

  “You don’t know what they said.”

  “No, but it’s a damn sight more likely to have been something innocent than something ominous.”

  Joanna was about to press him on that point, but he frowned suddenly, and she said, “You’ve thought of something. What?”

  “Butler was from San Francisco,” he muttered. “A businessman from San Francisco. Scott’s originally from San Francisco, and still does business there from time to time.”

  Joanna felt the first real surge of hope since she’d arrived here. “That’s enough of a connection to check out, isn’t it?”

  Before Griffin could respond, his phone buzzed, and she listened to a brief one-sided conversation that seemed to indicate the mayor was in search of his sheriff.

  “Ask him to wait a minute, please,” Griffin said finally. He punched a button and put the phone down, then got up and came around the desk to her. “Joanna—”

  She stood up. “It’s all right, I need to go anyway. Nails to return, you know. Paranoia to cultivate.”

  “I don’t think you’re paranoid,” he told her.

  “No, that would mean I thought I was being persecuted, wouldn’t it? I’m just being haunted, in a sense. And you think I’m imagining things, at the very least, and that I’m crazy at worst. Is that supposed to be the lesser of two evils?”

  He put his hands on her shoulders. “Stop it. I’m not taking any of this lightly, I promise you. But without more to go on than your dreams and my guilty conscience, there isn’t much I can do, Joanna.”

  “I know, I know.” She managed a smile. “Hey, maybe I’ll get lucky and ask the right person the right question. In the meantime, the mayor’s waiting to talk to you.”

  “Yeah.” He hesitated, lifted a hand briefly to touch her cheek, then let her go and went to open the door for her. “I’ll see you later,” he said.

  “I’ll be around.”

  Griffin closed the door behind her and slowly went back to his desk. He sat down and picked up the receiver, but instead of immediately punching the flashing button that was the mayor, he buzzed one of the administrative assistants. “Shelley? Could you hunt up that file on the dead tourist last summer? The one who went over the cliffs behind The Inn, yeah. See what info we’ve got on his business in San Francisco, and see if we can get more details. And one more thing.” He hesitated, then swore inwardly. “Pull everything we’ve got on Scott McKenna, all the public records. And see what you can find out about who he does business with in San Francisco. No, no hurry. Thanks.”

  He almost forgot about the mayor, despite his flashing button.

  His Honor wasn’t happy with the sheriff.

  If she’d been asked why she’d picked that afternoon, with hardly more than an hour or so of sunlight left, to return to Caroline’s gazebo, Joanna wouldn’t have been able to offer a really good answer. Answers aplenty, but no really good ones. Because she needed a brisk walk with the salt breeze blowing away cobwebs. Because she didn’t know where to go next or what to ask when she got there. Because Regan with her helpless, suppressed grief was haunting her as much as the dream did, and she wanted to see and talk to the child again.

  Because Sheriff Griffin Cavanaugh had touched her cheek.

  She walked briskly through the woods at a safe distance from the cliff’s edge, trying not to think for a while. Her head still ached faintly despite the aspirin she’d taken at the hotel, and she knew it was the tension of the last days. Even so, stopping the thoughts and questions racing through her mind seemed about as easy as halting a runaway train with an uplifted hand.

  She reached the gazebo and went inside, finding herself absently stroking the painted forelock of the carousel horse as if it were real. It was sort of like a worry stone, she realized, her fingers tracing the swirls of colorful mane. A way to keep the fingers busy while the mind drifted. She wondered if Caroline had thought the same, and was somehow unsurprised to hear the answer aloud.

  “Mama used to do that.”

  “Hello, Regan.”

  The little girl came slowly up into the gazebo, but only far enough to lean against one of the posts as she looked at Joanna. “You remembered my name,” she said.

  “Of course I did. Do you remember mine?”

  “Joanna. I thought I’d see you before now, Joanna.”

  Hearing the faint note of accusation in that young voice, Joanna answered quietly. “I thought it might be easier for you if I stayed away.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I only look like your mama.”

  Regan considered that for a moment, her big, dark blue eyes grave. Then she nodded. “You don’t have to worry, Joanna. I know Mama isn’t coming back.” She dug her hands into the pockets of her jeans and hunched her shoulders in what seemed to be her usual posture.

  “It’s all right to miss her, Regan.”

  “Daddy doesn’t miss her,” the little girl replied.

  “Some people,” Joanna said, “have trouble showing what they feel. But that doesn’t mean they don’t feel. Maybe your daddy is like that.”

  Regan shrugged. “Maybe. But I heard Mama tell him he didn’t have a heart. That’s like the Tin Man, right? You can’t feel without a heart.”

  “Everybody has a heart.” Joanna had no idea if she was saying any of the right things, only that she had to try to reassure Regan. “Some people just can’t open theirs and let other people in.”

  “I don’t think my daddy likes me.” Regan’s voice quivered suddenly.

  “Of course he does, honey.”

  “How do you know?” she demanded fiercely.

  “Because daddies always love their little girls. Just like mamas do.”

  “Even when they’re bad?”

  Joanna wanted to go over and put her arms around this little girl, but held herself still. “Little girls are never as bad as they think they are,” she told Regan gently, suspecting that the child somehow blamed herself for her mother’s death and her father’s apparent remoteness.

  “I was bad, Joanna. I was awful bad.”

  “Honey, you could never do anything bad enough to make your mama and daddy stop loving you. I promise you that.” Whether it’s true or not, dammit, she has to believe it!

  Regan drew a breath and let it out, relief easing her features, and Joanna was glad she had said it. She was also glad she hadn’t asked what the child had done that she considered so bad. Probably, it was nothing serious—few things really were when you were eight—and the sooner she put it behind her, the better.

  As for other questions, no matter how tempted she might be, the one person in all of Cliffside Joanna had no intention of questioning a
bout Caroline was this little girl, so she merely changed the subject and said, “It’s a little late or you to be out here, isn’t it?”

  “I come out to watch the sunset sometimes. It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

  Joanna turned her head to look at the reddening western horizon and nodded. “Very. And the water looks like lass.”

  “I know. Mama said—”

  “Regan.”

  They both started, and Joanna turned her head back swiftly to see a tall, darkly handsome man approaching the gazebo. He was virtually expressionless, only a slight frown drawing his brows together. He gave Joanna one very long, direct look, and if her resemblance to Caroline disturbed him in any way, it wasn’t apparent. His gaze went to Regan, and he spoke in a measured tone.

  “Mrs. Ames has your supper ready now, Regan. It’s time to go home.”

  There was no fear in Regan when she looked at the man who could only be her father, which rather relieved Joanna. In fact, there was a feminine version of his own measuring consideration in her darker eyes, and her more delicate brows had something of the level command of his.

  She looks more like him than Caroline, even if it’s more expression than features.

  Regan turned her gaze to Joanna and smiled unexpectedly. “I have to go now, Joanna.”

  “I’ll see you later then, Regan.”

  “Okay. Bye.” Solemn once more, Regan left the gazebo and walked past her father without looking at him. She disappeared into the woods between the little clearing and the McKenna house.

  “The resemblance,” Scott McKenna said, “is remarkable.”

  Fairly or unfairly, Joanna had formed an opinion of this man, and it wasn’t a positive one. So when she met his intent gaze now, it was with the first feeling of real hostility she had known since arriving in Cliffside. “I’m more different from Caroline than like her,” she said flatly.

  Scott’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, I see that.”

  “Do you?”

  He nodded. “Caroline was almost always reserved and seldom showed her emotions. Somehow, I doubt the same could be said of you. What you feel shows plainly in your eyes.”