After Caroline

by Kay Hooper

  Deciding not to question him on that point, Joanna leaned an elbow on the carousel horse with the air of someone making herself comfortable. “I met Regan here the other day. I hope you don’t mind my trespassing.”

  “And if I do mind?”

  “I’ll remember that. The next time I walk over here.”

  “I could call the sheriff,” he said.

  “Yes, you could. He warned me himself, as a matter of fact, that trespassing was discouraged.”

  “Well,” Scott said, “just as long as you know that.”

  “I do. I don’t care, mind you, but I know.”

  As with Regan, his smile was unexpected. “You don’t like me very much, do you, Joanna? I wonder why—since you’ve known me a grand total of about four minutes.”

  “I have such a character flaw, I’m afraid. I make snap judgments.”

  “And I’ve been found wanting?” Still smiling very slightly, he said, “Things always appear distorted when outsiders try to look in—especially into a marriage.”

  Since she had said something very similar to someone recently, Joanna could hardly disagree with that. But she could question. “Is that what I’m looking into?”

  “Oh, I think so. You hear from people around here that Caroline was unhappy and I was … distant. You see Regan look at me with no feeling. And you assume I’m at fault. That I’m the ogre, the villain of the piece.”

  “And are you?” she asked.

  Scott McKenna’s smile deepened for a moment. “Why, yes, Joanna. I am. Just because everybody says I’m a cold bastard doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

  For one of the very few times in her life, Joanna couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  Scott glanced toward the setting sun, and said, “It’ll be dark soon. The cliffs are more than usually dangerous after dark. You’d better go back to The Inn, Joanna. It was a pleasure meeting you.” He turned around and walked away.

  Joanna stared after him.

  Sunday was a rainy, intermittently stormy day, which did nothing to allay Joanna’s uneasy restlessness. She couldn’t go outside for more than ten minutes at a time, and her room had begun to feel very small and unbearably close to her. It was as if the walls were closing in on her, adding their pressure to the tension already stretching her nerves taut. And there was something else.

  Tick. Tick. Tick. Just as in the dream, there was a clock ticking in her head now, a constant reminder of time passing. And she had the unnerving idea that it was ticking faster today than it had yesterday and the day before that. Urging her on, compelling her to do … something.

  And not knowing what the something was was driving her crazy.

  When she did finally escape her room, it was to find a few townspeople along with hotel guests in the game room playing poker, apparently a frequent event. It gave her an opportunity to talk to some new faces, to try to get more information about Caroline; more than anything else, it gave her something to do.

  Not that she was very successful—at gathering more facts, that is. She won huge imaginary stakes in several games, but the perfectly pleasant people she talked to had nothing to say about Caroline. And they had nothing to say in a rather pointed fashion, deflecting the subject neatly when Joanna managed to raise it. They offered her friendly smiles and guarded eyes and asked if she wanted another card.

  Joanna realized she was biting her nails again.

  Amber had never been so bored in her entire life. There was nothing to do in this godforsaken place, absolutely nothing. She shifted in her chair for the third time and sighed heavily.

  Her mother looked up from the book she was reading and, patiently, said, “Honey, why don’t you go and find something to do?”

  “Like what? Drown? In case you hadn’t noticed, only the ducks are happy out there.”

  “I didn’t say go outside, Amber. It’s after eight o’clock anyway, too late to go outside. But the game room is still open, and the gym. They’re having those card games still. Or you could go swimming. You’re always wanting to go swimming at home.”

  “Because of the lifeguards,” her father said without taking his gaze from the television. “None here to watch her model that almost bathing suit of hers.”

  Amber felt her face flame, hating him because he was right. The indoor pool here had no lifeguard, just a middle-aged security guard keeping an eye on things from behind the glass of his office. It was disgusting. And not at all like home, where the local pool had college boys for lifeguards.

  A bit plaintively, her mother said, “Well, then, why not the game room? They have lots of stuff in there, Amber. Jigsaw puzzles. Video games. Table tennis. You could—”

  Amber lurched to her feet, the picture of a teenager willing to go anywhere if she could only escape from that pathetic note in her mother’s voice. “Oh, all right. I’ll go.”

  She thought it was an excellent performance.

  “Be back by eleven,” her mother reminded her.

  Amber left the living room of the two-bedroom suite and went into her room, shutting the connecting door behind her. She picked up her keycard from the dresser and slipped it into her pocket, wondering if either parent would bother to look into her bedroom before they went to bed as usual at eleven.

  Yes, of course her mother would.

  Amber smiled as she left her bedroom. Okay, then, she’d be in her bedroom, as ordered, by eleven. Innocent as the driven snow. She’d be freshly showered and sweetly perfumed, smelling good in all the right places. And when her parents went to bed, she’d put on that lovely dress she’d bought yesterday in town, the filmy one with the short skirt, and then she’d slip out the terrace door, so nobody in this nosy hotel would see her. And she’d leave.

  And with any luck at all, she’d never come back. Never.

  She went down the carpeted hallway toward the lobby and the game room, feeling so restless and edgy that she didn’t know if it was laughter or tears simmering beneath the surface. But definitely excitement. The whole world looked different to her tonight, and she said hello brightly to a few fellow guests as she made her way to the game room, amused when they were surprised by her friendliness.

  They don’t know. Nobody knows.

  How wonderful to have such a delicious secret! She looked with pity and triumph at the ordinary people in the game room, vaguely sorry that they had not—surely had not—felt what she felt now. They couldn’t possibly know, couldn’t understand.

  It was thundering. She loved the sound. But the storm would be over long before midnight, of course. It had to be. This was her night, and her night would be perfect.

  Cheerful, she accepted a challenge from a middle-aged woman to play Ping-Pong, and even let the older woman win. Feeling generous, she even played a second game, and lost that one as well. Then she spent a few minutes working on a jigsaw puzzle someone had left uncompleted on the puzzle table. She played a video game for half an hour or so but was unable to sit still for long.

  Restless, she wandered around, watching the poker players for a while and going often to the terrace doors to look out at the darkness where the storm wailed and grumbled. She got a Coke for herself and continued to wander around as she sipped it.

  It was after ten when she finally headed toward the lobby and the hallway that would take her back to her room. Because her mother would have to find her innocently in her room at eleven, of course.

  She giggled to herself, pausing in the lobby to glance back once more at the ordinary people, pathetically content with their ordinary lives. But what she saw was something else. She probably wouldn’t have noticed anything odd about it if she hadn’t been so edgy and excited, but she was and so she noticed.

  “Wonder what he’s doing with that,” she mused under her breath. Then she shrugged, her interest fleeting, and continued on toward her room. She was already trying to decide which of her three favorite perfumes she should wear tonight.

  By late that evening, with rain blowing against
the windows and thunder rolling almost continuously, and her thumbnail gnawed down to the quick, Joanna was more than ready for bed.

  That night, the dream was a bit different. All the symbols were there, looming and contorting like objects in a funhouse mirror. Ocean waves crashed, the big house overlooked the sea, rose petals drifted downward. The colorful painting, now clearly the little-girl-with-flowers done by Cain, sat on its easel. The clock ticked loudly, a child sobbed miserably. The colorful carousel horse bobbed and spun on its striped pole, and a paper airplane soared and swooped as if on manic air currents.

  But this time, a gull was screeching loudly, angrily, the sound violent and repeating over and over, like an echo ….

  Joanna woke with a start to see the gray light of an overcast morning outside her window, and even though it was only a little after seven, she didn’t try to go back to sleep. She was wide awake and already so tense that she caught herself chewing on the other thumbnail. Swearing, she threw back the covers and got up. Anything was better than lying in bed feeling overwhelmed.

  Even being on her feet feeling overwhelmed.

  Deciding to go downstairs for her morning coffee rather than call room service, she took a hot shower that failed to relax her, and dried her hair, leaving it loose this morning mostly because she was too jittery to do anything with it. Once or twice while she was using her loud dryer, she thought she heard that gull screaming again, and it occurred to her that maybe what she was hearing was an emergency siren.

  Accustomed to the sounds of sirens in Atlanta, she found the thought of them here oddly disconcerting. Even upsetting. Fire trucks? Ambulance? Griffin’s Blazer?

  When she came out of the bathroom, she didn’t hear anything that sounded even vaguely like a siren, but got dressed quickly nonetheless. She put on jeans and a ribbed turtleneck sweater with a flannel shirt worn open, and laced up her walking shoes because she intended to get out of the hotel even if she had to walk in the rain.

  It was only then that she went to her bedroom balcony and opened the doors to look outside.

  It wasn’t raining, though the sky was gray and a brisk breeze was blowing in off the ocean, laden with moisture and salt. And though the surf pounded out there with its usual fury, it seemed oddly quiet. Joanna couldn’t see anyone on the veranda below, but to the north of The Inn, just off hotel grounds, there was quite a crowd.

  A rescue vehicle. A fire truck and ambulance. Griffin’s Blazer.

  She didn’t meet anyone at all in the hall or elevator, and the lobby was deserted when she hurried through it toward the veranda. At one side of the veranda, those hotel guests and staff members up early enough to be aware of what was happening were gathered together under the shelter of the roof, drinking coffee.

  Joanna saw Holly and her assistant, Dana, standing with the group, both looking very subdued. Everybody looked very subdued. In fact, one woman seemed to be crying. Joanna started to head toward them, but then she caught sight of Griffin out at the edge of the hotel’s lawn.

  The guests might have been warned to keep back, but Joanna didn’t care. She hurried across the veranda, down the steps, and onto the wet grass, her gaze fixed on him. He was wearing a long black rain slicker this morning but was bareheaded, unlike the deputies out near the edge of the cliff who wore broad-brimmed, plastic-covered hats with their slickers. The stiff breeze ruffled his hair, and as she approached him, Joanna thought he looked tired and grim.

  “Griffin?”

  He half turned quickly, and though his expression didn’t change, something seemed to flare in the darkness of his eyes when he saw her. He didn’t move to meet her, but when she reached him, he rather surprisingly took one of her hands in his, the grip strong.

  “What’s happened?” she asked.

  “You shouldn’t be out here, Joanna,” he said quietly. “We’ve asked everyone to keep back.” But he didn’t release her hand.

  “But what—”

  “Griff?” A tall, rather thin man with wet dark hair approached them from the cliffs, his slicker flapping against his legs. Joanna had dimly been aware that he had just been pulled by rope up over the edge of the cliffs by rescue workers, and she thought he had been lowered the same way.

  “Let’s have it, Doc,” Griffin said to him.

  The doctor sent Joanna a look of faint surprise out of tired blue eyes, but then shook his head and said, “You saw what I did. What do you need me to tell you?”

  “Was there any evidence she’d been drinking?”

  She? Joanna began to feel very cold.

  “Griff, you know she had been soaked from the surf, so there wouldn’t have been a smell if she’d drunk gallons. I can’t tell about alcohol or drugs without lab tests.”

  “How was she killed?”

  The doctor glanced again at Joanna, then said flatly, “The fall killed her, unless I find something I’m not expecting in the post. Jesus, Griff, she fell about a hundred and thirty feet.”

  “Was she pushed?” Griffin’s voice was unemotional.

  Startled, the doctor said, “I don’t know. With all the damage from the fall, it’ll be difficult to find any evidence if she was. But I’ll look.”

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  The tall man lifted a hand in acknowledgment and turned back toward the cliffs, just as the men on the edge there began working the ropes again.

  “Griffin? Who is it?” Joanna asked.

  “I thought it was you at first,” he told her in that same unemotional voice, his grip on her hand tightening a bit. “But it’s a girl staying here. Amber Wade.”

  Joanna turned her shocked gaze back to the cliffs in time to see a rescue basket hauled up over the rocks. The body strapped into it was wrapped completely in a fluorescent orange blanket, but from one end trailed long blond hair.

  “YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING,” Cain said.

  Griffin Sighed. “I’m doing my job, Cain. Answer the question.”

  Cain glanced at Holly, who was sitting beside him at a table on The Inn’s veranda, then looked back at the sheriff, who was sitting across from them. “You’re asking me if I pushed that kid over the cliff?”

  “I’m asking where you were from about eleven last night until seven this morning,” Griffin repeated. “Look, everybody knew she was after you. Her father said she could have slipped out last night after they thought she was asleep. Her room is separate from theirs, it has a private door opening onto the veranda, and she’s apparently slipped out before.”

  “She didn’t come to see me,” Cain said. “Last night or any other night. For God’s sake, Griff, do you honestly believe I encouraged that poor kid? That I asked her to meet me somewhere—while it was raining cats and dogs, let me remind you—and then killed her?”

  “Where were you, Cain?”

  “I was at home. At the cottage, all night.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, alone, damn you.”

  Holly leaned forward. “Griff, surely it was an accident?”

  He looked at her for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. If she had slipped, she would have fallen straight down. We found her so far out that she must have gone over with some force.”

  “Then maybe she jumped.”

  “It’s a possibility. Teenagers commit suicide every day, unfortunately.” He returned his steady gaze to Cain. “But I have to cover all the possibilities. Consider all the imaginable equations. And one of those is that somebody pushed her.”

  Spacing every word for emphasis, Cain said, “It was not me.”

  Holly was shaking her head. “You can’t think Cain would have hurt Amber. She had a crush, that’s all. A teenage crush, the kind we all had growing up. Even if anyone had considered that a problem—and no one did—she was leaving here with her parents in another week.”

  “I’m not saying someone planned to kill her, Holly,” Griffin said. “It could have happened in a moment of rage.”

  Cain stiffened, his vivid eyes fi
xed on the sheriff, and his voice was very quiet when he said, “Oh, now I get it. I lost my temper—once—and decked some guy acting like an asshole at one of my showings, and now I’m labeled as somebody who can’t control his rage.”

  “You put him in the hospital, Cain,” Griffin observed just as quietly.

  “He hit his head on the corner of a table when he fell.”

  Griffin nodded. “I know that. And I doubt you’re any more likely to act out of rage than I am myself. But look at this from my perspective. Everyone in this hotel—and half the people in Cliffside—knew how Amber felt about you, because she made it obvious. She did everything but hang around your neck whenever she was near you, and if you were here, she was somewhere nearby. Whether or not you encouraged her, she could have become a problem. I have to take that into account.”

  “Fine,” Cain said. “But take this into account as well. I didn’t consider Amber a problem. She was a kid with a crush—period. It was easy enough for me to avoid any difficulty by not being alone with her, and that wasn’t hard at all. Ask Joanna, if you don’t believe me; she helped me out—it must have been Friday—when Amber paid me a visit at the cottage.”

  “What was Joanna doing at the cottage?” Griffin asked before he could stop himself.

  There was a sudden glint of amusement in Cain’s green eyes. “Want me to paint the heart on your sleeve so everybody can see it?”

  “Answer the question, Cain.”

  “She was just walking along the cliffs and stopped when she saw me working outside,” Cain told the sheriff dryly. “And she was nice enough to walk back here with us when Amber made an appearance.”

  “I thought you said Amber didn’t slip out to meet you,” Griffin said.

  Still a little amused, Cain wasn’t disturbed by that accusing statement. “That’s what I said, and what I meant. I never arranged to meet Amber anywhere at all, far less at the cottage. Friday was the second time she showed up there unannounced; the first time, I didn’t answer when she knocked on the door.”