After Caroline

by Kay Hooper

  She was right. She had been right about everything.

  “Jesus,” Griffin muttered. He looked at his watch and suddenly felt cold. Ten minutes after two. He was late.

  He reached for the phone with one hand and with the other opened the bottom drawer of his desk and closed his fingers around the gun he hadn’t worn since he’d left Chicago.

  THE COOL BREEZE had become gusty, and the dampness had become droplets of rain by the time Joanna was halfway to the gazebo. She hurried on, automatically staying back from the cliffs, and wished the storm clouds clashing overhead hadn’t turned the afternoon dark and eerie, because it seemed to have an odd effect on her mind.

  Bits and pieces of information and conversation kept flitting through her mind just as the images in her dream had, and she couldn’t seem to shut them out. It was as if her subconscious were searching for something, flipping over the pages of memory. Then, when Joanna was nearly at the gazebo, the correct page was found, the relevant memory surfaced, and she came to a dead stop.

  How had he known what she was wearing?

  Jeans and a sweater, he’d said. She hadn’t been dressed for a trip to town that morning, because she’d been wearing jeans and a sweater. But he hadn’t been there that morning, Joanna remembered that from the statements in Griffin’s files. He had gone to Portland the day before and had stayed there overnight, returning only in the late afternoon after Caroline’s accident. And he couldn’t have seen her after the accident, because only Griffin, the rescue people, and Cliffside’s doctor had seen her. Identification hadn’t been in question, so even Scott had not seen his wife’s body that day.

  And there had been no mention in the newspapers of how Caroline had been dressed the day she had died.

  So how could Dylan have known what she was wearing when she was killed—unless he had seen her earlier that day, perhaps at the old barn… ?

  Joanna had an almost overpowering impulse to look back over her shoulder, but instead hurried on. She had no way of knowing if he even meant to come after her again, far less that he would make an attempt in the middle of the afternoon, she reminded herself. But if he intended that, then he was probably somewhere between her and the hotel, and she had no desire to try to get past him. No, the best thing to do, she thought, was to keep going, to go past the gazebo and head for Scott’s house, where there were people, where she would be safe until she could call Griffin.

  But when she burst into the clearing, she saw Regan. The little girl was in the gazebo, huddled on the floor beside the carousel horse, and every line of her small body spoke of pain and grief.

  Joanna didn’t hesitate; the instinct to go to the child was so strong Regan might have been her own flesh and blood. Just as she stepped up into the gazebo, the skies opened up, rain drumming fiercely on the roof and sheeting downward so hard that visibility was limited to only a few feet.

  She knelt beside the child, putting a hand out to touch her gently, thinking only that the little girl had at last given in to her sorrow for the loss of her mother. “Regan? Honey—”

  Regan looked up, her small, pale face tearstained, and with a sob threw herself into Joanna’s arms. “Not mine,” she wailed miserably, her voice choked. “He’s not mine, Joanna!”

  “Not yours? Regan—”

  Still sobbing, her voice hardly audible above the sounds of the rain and wind, Regan said, “I heard him talking to Lyssa just now, and he told her. He said Mama put a stake in him, and that I wasn’t his child. He’s not my daddy, Joanna. I don’t have a daddy!”

  Joanna couldn’t know for certain what Regan had overheard, but she had to believe that Scott had been explaining the situation to Lyssa for whatever reason, and that Regan had heard only snatches of it. “Listen to me, honey,” she said, making the little girl look at her. “You just heard part of something again, that’s all. You didn’t hear everything, and so you misunderstood. He is your daddy, I promise you—and he knows he is.”

  “He said—”

  “Never mind what he said. Regan, he’s your father. And he loves you, I know he does.”

  Regan shook her head stubbornly. “No, he’s not. Not anymore. I was bad, Joanna, and God took them both away from me.”

  “Honey—”

  “You don’t know! I thought it was a game, another game, like Mama and me played all the time. I thought she hid the box for me to find. So I got it when she left, but it was locked and I didn’t know what was inside. I looked for the key, but I couldn’t find it. Then I saw Mama come out here, and I knew she was scared when she didn’t find the box, I knew it, because her face was all white and she looked like she wanted to cry. And when she left in her car, she was driving awful fast—and she never came back, Joanna! She never came back, and it’s all my fault! I brought the box back here after, and put it back in the little hidey-hole where I found it, but Mama never came back ….”

  Joanna held the sobbing child, thinking how damnably easy it was to miss the most vital clue of all. I was bad, Joanna. A child’s guilt, and she should have paid far more attention to it.

  “Regan, none of it was your fault—” she began, but was cut off by an eerily casual voice so close it made her jump.

  “How very touching.”

  It was Dylan, and he was holding a gun. He was outside the gazebo but still under the shelter of the roof, resting a forearm on the railing with the gun trained precisely on her.

  Joanna managed to get to her feet still holding Regan, and instinctively pushed the child around behind her as she backed away from him. He was smiling, and she’d never realized how terrifying a smile could be until that moment. His eyes were—dead. Just dead.

  “Dylan, don’t be stupid,” she said as calmly as she could manage. “It’s over. You think another death could be called an accident? You’ve been lucky so far, but—”

  “Lucky? Is that what you call it?” He laughed bitterly, shaking his head. “I’ve been looking high and low for that disk for months, and all the time the kid had hidden it here? Jesus.”

  Disk? Joanna wasn’t about to ask. “Let Regan go back to the house,” she said without much hope.

  Dylan smiled again. “No, I don’t think so. See, I heard enough to know the kid ran from the house in a panic, so it seems likely to me she’d maybe get too close to the edge, what with the rain and all. And here you are, Joanna, the living image of her mother, already attached to her—isn’t it sweet? I think you’re going to try to save Regan, Joanna. And neither one of you is going to make it.” He shook his head with a concerned little frown. “Dangerous cliffs we have here. Very dangerous. I believe I’ll petition the town council to put up permanent barriers after this latest tragedy.”

  Regan was utterly silent, her arms wrapped around Joanna, but she was shaking and Joanna had no doubt she was in shock. She surreptitiously slid her hand over Regan’s ear and held the child’s head close to her side, hoping to shut out the things she didn’t need to know about her mother and what had happened. The only thing she could think of to do was stall, to get Dylan talking and keep him talking as long as possible.

  “You lied to me about the affair, didn’t you, Dylan? It didn’t happen years ago. It happened months ago. Just before Caroline died.”

  He inclined his head slightly in an obscene parody of polite acknowledgment. “Well, I had to lie, Joanna. I didn’t want to stick out in your mind as the man closest to Caroline when she died. You might have told Griff before I could get you out of the way, and I couldn’t have that. And I knew what you wanted to hear, of course. That Caroline had used me for stud service and then walked away, leaving me in pieces. That is what the others told you, right?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because I watched her for years. I watched what she did to her previous lovers. I watched what she did to Scott. I thought all my knowledge might come in handy one day—and it did, the day I decided to seduce the lady of the manor.” He smiled. “I knew just which buttons to push, bel
ieve me. Caroline found herself used for a change.”

  Something in his voice when he said that, something eager and pleased, sent an icy chill through Joanna. She drew a breath, and heard the fear in her own voice when she said, “Just get the disk and leave us alone. We aren’t a threat to you, Dylan.”

  “Of course you are, Joanna. You’ve been a threat from the day you got here—think I don’t know that? Asking questions, sticking your nose in where it didn’t belong, almost as if you knew…” He tilted his head to one side suddenly, curious. “Right from the start, you thought Caroline’s death wasn’t an accident, didn’t you? Why did you think that, Joanna?”

  “Caroline told me,” she replied. I have to stall him, she reminded herself desperately, pushing the fear aside. She had to stall him just long enough to give Griffin the time to reach the hotel—surely it was two o’clock? She didn’t dare look at her watch.

  His eyes narrowed. “Caroline was dead.”

  Joanna managed to produce a smile. “Yes. She was. But an odd thing happened, Dylan. Last summer, when Caroline was killed, so was I.”

  “What?”

  She nodded. “I was in a car wreck too. Survived it without a scratch, but a power line fell on my car and I was electrocuted. At the exact same moment Caroline died, so did I.”

  Dylan scowled, clearly bothered by that information as Joanna had hoped he would be. “A coincidence. So?”

  “So there’s a connection between us, and I know some of what Caroline knew. She told me, Dylan. She wanted me to help Regan, to come here and make sure she was safe. And she wanted the truth to come out. The truth about you.”

  With a short laugh, Dylan said, “Sorry, but I’m not buying it.”

  Joanna held on to her smile. “I don’t care if you buy it or not. But I know things, Dylan, things I shouldn’t know. I know you used to meet Caroline in the old barn. So you were suspicious that day, when you came back early from Portland and saw her car parked there. You suspected she was meeting someone else, so you stopped and confronted her. But Caroline didn’t like confrontations, and she wasn’t about to tell you anything, was she?”

  “She was jumpy,” he muttered, “nervous. I knew she was going to meet someone there, but I didn’t know who.”

  “And you weren’t completely sure she had the disk, were you? Not then.”

  “I thought I’d misplaced it,” he said, “until I suddenly realized why she was so nervous, why she flinched away from me like that. She had the disk. That little bitch stole the disk from me.”

  Joanna drew a breath. “She was afraid of you, wasn’t she? You were rough with her, you controlled her—and that had never happened to her before.”

  Dylan’s smile was self-satisfied. “Scott and the others let her get away with too much. But not me. I showed her who was boss.”

  Oh, Caroline, you really bit off more than you could handle with this one.

  “But that day,” Joanna said, still stalling, “you realized she had the disk. And before you could get your hands on her, she ran. Got in her car and drove toward town. And you went after her.”

  “She was spooked and lost control,” he said with a shrug. “By the time I got there and looked, I knew she was gone. So it was an accident.”

  “An accident you caused,” Joanna said. “And what about Amber? Did she die in my place, Dylan?”

  He scowled. “Another nosy little bitch. She came out onto the veranda that night and saw me. I was looking up at your balcony, trying to decide if I could take the chance of getting rid of you. She asked me what I was doing with a gun.” He shrugged. “She must have seen it earlier, when she was wandering around near the game room. I’d been keeping an eye on you before that, so I had it stuck in my belt. Wouldn’t you know the bitch would have to get a glimpse of it.”

  “That’s why you killed her? Because she knew you had a gun?”

  “She would have told somebody, Joanna, surely you see that?” His tone was eerily reasonable. “Cain probably, since she wanted him in her pants. Or Griff. I couldn’t take that chance. Nobody’d even looked at me in suspicion, and I wasn’t about to let that change. And what was one more? Especially a silly thing like her.” He shrugged again. “She didn’t matter. I had too much at stake to see it all ruined. And my luck had held so far. Caroline’s death had been an accident, Butler’s—”

  “Robert Butler? You killed him too?”

  Dylan frowned. “I just hit him, that’s all. And he fell.”

  “Another accident? I don’t think so, Dylan.”

  “Think anything you like.” He smiled again, the expression even more chilling than it had been before, because there was real admiration in it. “You’re smart, Joanna, I’ll give you that. And you’ve got the devil’s own luck. Ever since I came back here, I’ve had my eye on you, but I could never get close enough at the right moment.”

  Watched all the time, and I never knew. The coldness she felt went bone deep. It was difficult to think past her fear, but Joanna tried. She was still puzzled by the connection between Dylan and Robert Butler, but she could feel his impatience growing and didn’t know how much longer she could stall him. Hastily, she said, “You got close enough once. What about my car? You did quite a job on it.”

  “Not good enough, obviously.” He laughed with more than a touch of bitterness and irritation. “But this time, this time I’m going to make sure I get you. And the kid. Then I’ll get the disk, and no one will be the wiser.”

  “Dylan, there’s no way you’ll get away with another ‘accident.’ Griffin’s on his way here now, and he’s suspicious of the other accidents. Very suspicious. He’s been checking into them. Sooner or later, he’ll find the right connections.”

  “What connections? He doesn’t know shit.”

  “There’s a connection between you and Robert Butler,” Joanna said, guessing, hoping there was enough truth in it to make him hesitate. “A reason why you killed him. You may think it’s hidden, but Griffin will find it. And once that ‘accident’ starts to look like something else, he won’t give up until he knows the rest. Especially now, Dylan. You think he’d take my death lightly? Think again.”

  He scowled. “I’ll take my chances. Move. Out of there, now.”

  Joanna didn’t move, even though she had caught a faint glimpse of movement some distance behind Dylan. “Forget it. You think I’m going to lead Regan tamely over to the edge and let you push us over? You’re out of your mind, Dylan.”

  He cocked the pistol. “I said move.”

  “Are you going to be able to explain bullet holes in your ‘accident’ victims? And they have tests, Dylan. Ballistics tests. They’ll know the bullets came from your gun.”

  “It’s Scott’s gun,” he told her impatiently. “And since I’m wearing a pair of rubber gloves borrowed from Doc, it has his fingerprints on it. Grieving widower shoots daughter and wife’s look-alike—news at eleven.” He smiled. “The tabloids will love it, don’t you think?”

  “I think you’re insane,” she said.

  He actually laughed. “No, just determined. I’m tired of working for rich men, Joanna. It’s time I got my piece of the pie. Out of the gazebo, or I’ll shoot. And I’ll shoot the kid first.”

  “Dylan!”

  He jerked and looked past Joanna, his face darkening as he saw Scott standing just a few feet away. Then his face cleared of annoyance and assumed that eerily amiable mask, and he said, “Oh, good, you’re here. Maybe I’ll kill you too.”

  “Let them go, Dylan,” Scott said, quiet now. He stood in the pouring rain, his clothing drenched and dark hair plastered to his head, but he was still an oddly impressive figure. “It’s all over.”

  “No, it isn’t. It can still work,” Dylan said, arguing reasonably.

  “No,” said another voice from behind Dylan, implacable. “It can’t. Drop the gun, Dylan.”

  Instead of doing that, Dylan eased away from the railing, turning slightly so that he could see both Scott
and Griffin. He was in the rain now, his blond hair dark from the wetness. He held his pistol negligently, no longer pointed at anyone. “Hello, Griff. I didn’t even know you had a gun.”

  The gun was leveled at Dylan, and Griffin’s eyes were very cold. “I was a Chicago cop, remember? And I keep in practice. Don’t make me prove it, Dylan. Drop the gun. I know what you did to Robert Butler, why he came after you here. And I’m willing to bet you did the same thing to Scott. The disk will prove it, won’t it?”

  Dylan’s smile was a little sick now, and he began backing away slowly. Toward the edge of the cliffs. “I didn’t want to have to leave the country,” he said. “I thought about it for a while last summer, but I didn’t want to. Without the disk—my record of what I’d done—even those auditors of Scott’s wouldn’t have been able to find anything wrong. I would have been free and clear. And eventually, I would have given notice to Scott and moved away—and I would never have had to work again in my life. I would have had what I deserved. I would have had what be had.” He jerked his head toward Scott.

  “Drop the gun, Dylan,” Griffin told him flatly.

  “And go to jail? I don’t think so.” His mouth twisted. “I was so close. But I couldn’t resist the chance to screw the lady of the manor, and look where it got me. She ruined it. Goddamn her, she ruined everything!”

  “Dylan, don’t” Griffin ordered as the other man began to raise his gun.

  Dylan’s smile was still twisted. “Sorry, Griff.” He raised the pistol toward Griffin.

  Joanna turned instinctively, making sure Regan couldn’t see and closing her own eyes the instant after the bullet caught Dylan squarely in the middle of his chest and sent him staggering backward.

  He didn’t make a sound when he went over the edge.

  For a long moment, they stood as if frozen. Then, as if on a signal, the rain slacked off drastically. Griffin slowly returned his gun to the holster under his arm and walked forward to the edge of the cliffs. He looked over, then turned back toward the gazebo, his face grim.