After Caroline Read online

  Joanna nodded. “I was certain he had.” Then she smiled wryly. “But then, I also felt that I had seen through Caroline’s eyes. I mean, I felt sure I’d seen something that had already happened, something she had seen.”

  Griffin’s hands tightened briefly on her shoulders, and then he released her. “I don’t know which I’d rather try to believe—that you saw some past scene through Caroline’s eyes or that you somehow witnessed Amber’s death before it happened.”

  Try to believe. Not that Joanna could blame him, really. She had some pretty uneasy doubts herself. But she couldn’t help feeling that the distance between them was more than just a couple of feet. “Probably,” she said, “the best explanation for the dream is that I felt sure there was something wrong about Caroline’s death, something inherently deadly about the cliffs, and all my worries kept my mind active all night. The blonde probably was me—just like the watcher was me. And the dark man on the cliff was probably the … the subconscious manifestation of my uneasiness. That’s probably what I’d learn in Psychology 101.”

  He looked at her steadily. “Trying to convince me—or yourself?”

  “Both, maybe?” She shrugged, but still felt compelled to try once more to make him believe her. “All I know is what I told you before. There’s something wrong here in this town, something bad, and it has something to do with Caroline and her death. I know that. I feel it. Griffin, even you have to admit that three people going over the cliffs in only a few months—”

  “Three people with no apparent connection to each other,” he interrupted. “And there’s absolutely no evidence that the first two deaths were anything but accidents.”

  Joanna frowned at him, tense with frustration. “No apparent connection. But what if there’s one we just haven’t found yet?”

  “We? Joanna—”

  Without giving him a chance to continue, she quickly laid out some of the thoughts she’d gone over and over in her head. “What could those three people have in common? Other than being here in Cliff side, I mean. We have a male tourist in his thirties, a female citizen of the town, twenty-nine, and an eighteen-year-old female tourist. Two of the three were staying here at The Inn, which is owned by the second’s husband—but it’s the only hotel in the town, so we probably can’t call that significant. The first was killed early in June, the second on July first, and the third in early October. The first and third went over the cliffs within a couple hundred yards of each other, but the second was killed miles away.”

  Griffin didn’t continue his objection. Instead, methodically, he said, “Two were on foot when they were killed, and one was in a car. One died about half past noon, one in the late afternoon, and one during the night.” He paused. “So far, I don’t see a connection.”

  “Well, if it was obvious, you would have seen it before now.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He sighed. “Yeah. Look, I’ve gone all through the file on the first death—which, I gather, you’ve researched.”

  It wasn’t quite a question, but Joanna nodded.

  “Right. I didn’t find anything odd.”

  “Neither did I,” Joanna admitted. “But all I had to go on was newspaper reports. Were his belongings here inventoried?”

  “As a matter of fact, they were, generally speaking. It wasn’t a suspicious death, but his room here had to be cleared out. Why?”

  “Was there any evidence he was here for the usual tourist activities? Did he have any fishing gear?”

  “No. But before you call that suspicious, remember that some people actually want to rest on their vacation—and I recall his sister saying he’d been involved in an exhausting business deal just before he came up here.”

  Joanna signed, feeling frustrated. “So his death was a simple accident. Caroline was driving too fast on a slippery road. And Amber … what about Amber? You don’t think she fell or jumped, so—”

  “So maybe—maybe—somebody pushed her. Maybe Doctor Becket will find some evidence of murder in the postmortem. Maybe we’ll eventually find a witness. Or maybe not.”

  He sounded as frustrated as she felt, so Joanna didn’t criticize his attitude; he was a hardheaded realist, after all, and with no witnesses and no real evidence pointing to anything but an accident, there wasn’t a great deal he could do.

  Griffin rubbed the back of his neck in a brief, weary gesture. “I could use a cup of coffee. How about you?”

  “Definitely.” She turned away from the railing and walked with him back up the lawn toward the hotel’s veranda. They were both silent for some minutes, until they had their coffee and were seated at a small table under the shelter of the roof. It was still a chilly day, but away from the cliffs and the steady breeze out there it was much more comfortable.

  “So what’s next?” Joanna asked, sipping hot coffee gratefully.

  Griffin took a swallow of his own before replying. “More of the same. Asking more questions, studying the medical evidence—trying to figure out what the hell happened to that girl.”

  Joanna didn’t have to ask to know that he would concentrate his investigation on the victim. In the mind of most cops—and in reality—most deaths, even murders, were simple ones. Few were planned, with the vast majority occurring in the heat of emotion, on impulse. Somebody got mad, and somebody else got dead. Griffin had to assume that Amber had made somebody mad, and that’s what he’d be looking for. He wouldn’t look for a connection to Caroline, or to the man who had died here weeks before she had, because he didn’t consider the deaths related.

  It hadn’t come together in her mind before now, but Joanna had a feeling—a strong but unaccountable and perhaps unreasonable feeling—that the deaths were connected. She didn’t know why or how, but she was certain Amber had died because Caroline had died, and Caroline had died because a man named Robert Butler had died. Somehow, in some way she didn’t yet understand, there was a pattern here, a series of connections tying the whole thing together.

  Finding out why any one of them had died, she was sure, would provide the key to understanding why all of them had died.

  She also had a feeling it would be better to keep her feelings to herself, for the time being at least. Griffin hadn’t openly scoffed this time, but he didn’t believe her, and he’d never be convinced by dreams and feelings, not when it came to murder. To satisfy him, she would need something more tangible. Something he could hold in his hand and say, “Yeah, this is real.”

  “Joanna?”

  She blinked at him. “Hmm?”

  “Where were you?”

  “Oh, just thinking.” She couldn’t help but recall Amber’s habit of saying “oh,” and it made her suddenly self-conscious. She caught herself looking at Griffin’s mouth and hastily lowered her gaze to her coffee cup. What was wrong with her, anyway? Even if she were in the market for a lover—which she wasn’t—the last man in the world she had any business getting involved with was this one. Aside from his distrust, she had a job and a life three thousand miles away, and she’d return there in a week or two. Alone.

  And then there was Caroline. The ghost of Caroline. She had known this man for years, and on the last day of her life she had arranged to meet him. Why? Had she trusted him enough to tell him what was wrong? Or had she wanted to meet him for more personal—and intimate—reasons?

  Joanna felt a little chill as she reminded herself that she had only Griffin’s word for most of this. He said Caroline had asked to meet him; he said he had been tied up and had missed the rendezvous; he said they had not been involved with each other; he said he had not been in love with another man’s wife.

  And it was his report that had labeled her death an accident.

  Griffin leaned toward her and spoke just then, his deep voice holding a cop’s hard-edged command. “Listen to me. You are not part of this investigation.”

  “Did I say—” She looked up at him to find his face as hard as his voice,
and felt another touch of coldness that owed nothing to the weather. She didn’t want to think this way, she didn’t, but she couldn’t help wondering if Griffin was warning her off because he didn’t want her to find out the truth.

  “You didn’t have to say a word, it was written on your face.” His voice remained stony. “Joanna, we have to assume Amber was killed—murdered. That means there could be a very dangerous person in this town, and I don’t want you looking for him.”

  Joanna hesitated, but then nodded quickly when his eyes narrowed. “I know.” And when he continued to stare at her, she added, “Look, I’m not a fool, and I don’t have a death wish. Believe me, I don’t want to meet up with a murderer.”

  Finally satisfied, Griffin relaxed and nodded. “Good.”

  “But I hope you mean to let me know what’s going on while you investigate,” she told him casually.

  His smile was a bit crooked. “It’s a small town, remember? Everybody will know what’s going on while I investigate.”

  “They won’t know what’s going on in your head.” She kept her voice mild. “And I have a hunch that’s where all the important stuff will be.” Did you meet her that day, Griffin? Was it you she was trying to get away from when her car went over the cliffs?

  He lifted his coffee cup in a slight gesture that was an acknowledgment of her observation, but all he said was, “There won’t be any important stuff unless I get cracking.” He finished his coffee and pushed back his chair. “I’ll see you later, Joanna.”

  “Sure.” She watched him until he disappeared inside the hotel, then turned her blind gaze out to sea. No, she didn’t have a death wish; she had already been as close to death as she wanted to get for a while. A long while. And she wasn’t a fool. But she also couldn’t sit idly by and wait for someone else to solve this puzzle, not when she felt so certain that it was the reason she was here. And not when she had her doubts even about the sheriff of Cliffside.

  But she had no intention of angering Griffin by horning in on his investigation of Amber’s death. No, she’d stay away from that one, at least for now. And try her best to stay out of Griffin’s way. But she wouldn’t sit idly by. Instead, she would concentrate her efforts on the two “accidents” Griffin considered closed cases. The death of a tourist named Robert Butler and the death of Caroline McKenna.

  Investigating Butler’s death would be more difficult, she thought, because he had been a stranger here and that meant almost all relevant information about him—and any connection between him and Scott, for instance—would be found in San Francisco, where he had lived.

  Joanna wasn’t quite prepared to go to San Francisco at the moment, or even to begin trying to get information by phone.

  Which left Caroline.

  She couldn’t help but wonder about that. No matter what happened here, it always seemed that her focus was returned to Caroline eventually. Either I’ve got a one-track mind, or … Or what? Or fate was taking a hand?

  Fate … or Caroline.

  By the time Joanna finished her breakfast, the weather had improved considerably; the sun was shining, and the temperature climbed slowly toward sixty. She only wished she could say the same about her mood, that it had improved. But it hadn’t. Amber’s death had added more tension when she already felt as though she would snap at any minute.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  The sound in her head drove her out of the hotel, urging her to hurry. She only just managed to stop herself from running to her rental car, but it required an effort she was all too conscious of. And only the vivid awareness of what could happen to a speeding car on the winding coast road enabled her to drive slowly as she left The Inn.

  I have to find out what’s going on here. I have to. Before it drives me mad.

  She intended to check out a couple of places outside town. The first place was one Griffin had mentioned, the old barn just off the coast road, where Caroline had wanted to meet him just minutes before her car went over the cliffs. It was her uneasiness about Griffin and his relationship with Caroline that made Joanna want to see it, as well as her puzzlement about the place he claimed Caroline had chosen to meet him. An old barn? It seemed unlike Caroline to consider a deserted barn on the side of the road to be useful for anything at all. And to ask a man to meet her there?

  It struck an off-key note, and all Joanna had to go on was her intuition about things in Caroline’s life—especially those last few weeks—that seemed odd or out of character.

  She didn’t bother to ask directions of anyone; she just began driving up the coast road toward Portland and kept her eyes open. She expected to find it easily and did; no more than a mile or so from the place where Caroline had died, and hardly more than a hundred feet off the road, was a ramshackle and apparently unused barn.

  Joanna pulled her car off the road and parked near the structure. For a few minutes she wandered around outside, studying the area without looking for anything in particular. The place had a deserted feel to it, and it was very quiet except for the rumble of the surf. A very unlikely place to meet someone, she thought at first. But when she walked around it, it appeared to her that there was an ideal parking place on the far side of the barn where a car—or even two—wouldn’t have been seen from the road, and it looked as if it might have been used for that purpose. A favorite parking place for teen lovers, perhaps?

  Perhaps. She had known a few every bit as unlikely during her own teen years.

  The warped door opened easily, and inside, Joanna found that the building was being used to store hay. Bales were stacked high, leaving only a relatively small space roughly in the center of the building clear. The air was thick with the slightly musty but sweet-smelling scent of hay, and the interior was perfectly dry.

  She didn’t hesitate to explore, recalling from childhood visits to hay barns how small “rooms” and chambers could be made by arranging bales of hay. And sure enough, she found one. The entrance wasn’t obvious, and it didn’t appear to her to be an accidental arrangement of the bales, especially when a short “corridor” led her to one of the back corners of the barn where an eight-by-eight-foot-square room had quite obviously hosted more than one secret—or at least secreted—meeting.

  It was a dim, shadowy place with barely enough light to see, the slight illumination provided by what little sunlight could find its way in between the warped boards of one outside wall. The loose hay on the floor was thick enough to provide a fairly comfortable bed, and Joanna found a rather luxurious plaid blanket folded neatly on a high shelf of hay bales. On the same shelf, she also found a shoe box containing an economy-size pack of moist towelettes and a varied selection of condoms.

  “All the modern conveniences,” she heard herself murmur aloud. Practical if not terribly romantic.

  Common sense told her this was indeed a try sting place for teenagers, but the expensive quality of the blanket prompted faint uncertainty. It seemed to her more something an adult would have brought out here. She supposed a boy or girl could have brought it from home, but it didn’t seem the sort of thing that wouldn’t be missed from an average house, and why take the chance? A cheap blanket or throw bought new would have done just as well.

  Possibly, her inner voice mused, but that’s just a guess. There’s no evidence at all that sixteen-year-old Suzie didn’t filch the thing from her mother’s linen closet because all this hay was just too damned scratchy against her tender bottom.

  No evidence.

  But somebody like Caroline, a fragile and dignified older woman, would certainly have thought of a blanket if this was her place to meet a lover. And she would have wanted to be prepared, to use protection and to have the means at hand to wipe away the damning evidence left by a lover. So a husband would suspect nothing.

  And she might well ask that lover to meet her here on a warm July afternoon. A meeting that somehow went terribly wrong…

  The possibilities were worse than disturbing; they made something inside Joanna tighten in
pain. She couldn’t be sure who Caroline might have met out here, but Griffin claimed she asked to meet him the day she died, and it seemed to Joanna that a woman wouldn’t invite a man into her secret place unless it was a place he knew. A place he had visited before.

  She left the box and blanket where she’d found them, turning away with even more uneasiness clawing at her. She didn’t immediately leave the little room. Instead, she stood looking down at the thick hay underfoot for a moment. She couldn’t have said what prompted her to begin scuffing her shoe through the stuff, and it was only after several minutes that she realized she was looking intently for … something.

  No sooner had the awareness of her own actions penetrated than she caught the glint of light on something metallic, and she realized that her foot had uncovered a delicate piece of jewelry. It was a necklace, a fine gold chain with a small heart-shaped pendant.

  Joanna knelt there in the hay and held it, squinting a bit in the dimness as she tried to make out the engraving on the front of the heart. Then she turned it slightly, and the words I love you seemed to jump out at her. After a moment, she turned the heart completely over, and saw more engraving on the back. This was more difficult to read, but finally she made it out. Two words only, engraved in script.

  Love, Regan.

  “TALK TO ME, DOC.”

  Doctor Peter Becket pushed his chair back as far as he was able in the tiny cubicle he used for an office whenever he was forced by circumstance to work in the basement morgue of the clinic. He rubbed his thin face with both hands, the gesture one of sheer weariness, and then peered up at Griffin standing in the doorway.

  “We just brought her in a couple of hours ago. I haven’t even opened her up yet, Griff.”

  “I know that. But you’ve done the preliminary exam, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Griffin shifted impatiently. “Well?”

  “Why’re you pushing on this?” Becket asked, his voice mildly curious. “I mean, hell, I know she was just a kid, and I feel as bad about it as anybody else—but why does this matter so much to you?”