After Caroline Page 4

  His hard mouth curved in a faint smile at that, but the amusement was short-lived. “You’ve come a long way just to spend your vacation in a place with nothing to recommend it but the scenery.”

  “That is surely my own business, Sheriff. But if you must know, I plan to vacation in every state eventually. It’s the best way I can think of to see the country. Oregon just happened to be my first choice in visiting the West Coast.”

  “And Cliffside?”

  Joanna couldn’t tell if he believed her or not. She shrugged. “The Chamber of Commerce made it sound like a nice place, and all I wanted was a pretty coastal spot where I could relax. Good enough?”

  “For now,” he said. “Good day, Miss Flynn.”

  “Sheriff.” She turned and headed toward the hotel, making a determined effort to move casually. At first, she was tempted to chalk the sheriff’s interest up to smalltown caution, but that reasoning didn’t hold water when tourism was so vital to the local economy. A more likely possibility was that he found the sudden appearance of a woman who looked eerily like Caroline McKenna to be far more than coincidental.

  It occurred to Joanna only then that there would no doubt be many people in Cliffside who would feel the same suspicion.

  She reached the neatly trimmed lawn of The Inn and paused to look back. The sheriff was still standing there where she had left him, but he wasn’t looking after her. He was instead gazing off toward that lonely house in the distance.

  For the first time in weeks, Joanna slept all night without waking, but when she did wake around eight the following morning, it was with a niggling sense of unease as well as the memory of having dreamed again. Not everything this time, at least not that she remembered, but definitely the carousel horse and paper airplane, and there had been rose petals drifting downward like rain.

  She lay there for a long time in her comfortable bed, listening to the low roar of the ocean and staring at the ceiling, thinking about the previous day and trying to weigh her impressions of Cliffside and the people she’d met. Judging by all the reactions she’d earned, it seemed obvious that Joanna was going to find many people who had known Caroline. Which meant there would be many sources of information.

  If Joanna could only figure out what questions to ask.

  She got up, showered, and ordered breakfast from room service. And she drank her final morning cup of coffee while standing in the open door of her balcony and looking off toward Caroline’s house. She continued to feel uneasy when she looked at it. But that didn’t stop her from considering the best way to approach the place.

  Trespassing was “strongly discouraged,” Sheriff Cavanaugh had said. Okay, but he’d also said the land wasn’t posted. So legally she wouldn’t be breaking any laws if she just wandered along the cliffs in that direction. Of course, the good sheriff could argue that she’d known better—if she got caught.

  Briefly and somewhat ruefully amused at herself and this unfamiliar recklessness, Joanna left her room and took the elevator down to the lobby.

  Holly Drummond was standing near the front desk and greeted her cheerfully. “Good morning, Joanna.”

  Joanna was very aware that the other woman was looking at her in a measuring way that was probably completely unconscious and doubtless due to the resemblance to Caroline. It made her a bit uncomfortable, but she reminded herself silently that she had better get used to it.

  “Hi, Holly. Listen, I was wondering. If there’s any information I need about Cliffside and the surrounding area—”

  “You can ask me or whoever’s running the front desk,” Holly said. “Most of the staff know the area pretty well, in fact. We don’t have a concierge, but there are lots of brochures over there by the house phones, and any of us would be happy to help you. What do you want to know?”

  That’s a good question. “Oh … nothing in particular, at least right now.” Reading curiosity in Holly’s expression, Joanna managed a laugh. “I’m a research librarian back home, so I guess it’s an occupational hazard that I tend to research the places where I spend my free time. No matter how hard I try to relax, I always end up in a library reading about the town founders. Absurd, I know.”

  Holly smiled. “I don’t know, it sounds more enjoyable to me than playing golf or buying a lot of junk you don’t need, which is what most people seem to do.”

  “Yeah, but my friends tell me I really should stop working when I’m not getting paid for it.”

  “I know the feeling.” Holly glanced somewhat ruefully down at her ever-present clipboard. “I never seem to be off duty. But, hey, who promised us life would be fair?”

  “My Aunt Sarah,” Joanna answered seriously.

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah. She raised me, and to her dying day, she was absolutely certain that you get out of life what you put into it. Be fair to others and they’ll be fair to you. You know, I once saw her face down a mugger by asking him in her best aunt voice why he was wasting his life robbing people. He followed her for a block trying to explain his reasoning.”

  Holly laughed. “She sounds like quite a lady.”

  “She was.” Joanna smiled, then said, “Well, I think I’ll go out and look at the ocean for a while.”

  “Now would probably be better than later,” Holly said, “unless you like walking in chilly rain; the forecast promises we’ll get wet this afternoon.”

  “Thanks for the warning.” Joanna waved and started toward the veranda.

  “Joanna?”

  “Yeah?”

  Holly smiled. “Our library is three blocks down, just past the courthouse. A casual walk or a very short drive. Just in case.”

  Joanna acknowledged the information with another wave and a smile, then went onto the veranda. Had she offered a good enough explanation for her curiosity? She wasn’t sure, but it had been the best she’d been able to come up with, and would at least provide a reason for her to spend time in Cliffside’s library and to ask questions. She hoped.

  Low brooding clouds promised that the weather forecasters had gotten it right for once, and the gusty breeze carried on it the taste of salt from a rather stormy looking ocean. Joanna didn’t linger long behind the inn, standing at the railing and gazing out for no more than five minutes before turning and beginning to follow the cliffs south.

  Reaching the end of the lawn, she looked around warily, feeling absurdly guilty to be leaving hotel grounds and more than a little nervous. But that didn’t stop her from moving on briskly once she was fairly sure that no one had noticed her. She kept back from the edge of the cliffs this time but remained always in sight of the ocean, her destination the woods.

  The plan, such as it was, was to make her way through the woods until she was closer to Caroline’s house. After that, Joanna didn’t know what she would do. She had no intention of knocking on the door, of course, or even of being seen if she could avoid it. And she didn’t know what she hoped to gain by trying to get closer to the house. But the more ground she covered, the more certain she was that there was something out here she needed to see, to find.

  She had no way of knowing what that was, but she recognized it instantly when she emerged suddenly into a clearing that was separated by the lawn of Caroline’s house only by another fifty or sixty feet of forest. Built within the half-moon clearing near the cliff’s edge was a lovely gazebo, slightly oriental in design like a little pagoda.

  And inside the gazebo, in colors so bright and fresh it looked brand-new, was the carousel horse from her dreams.

  Joanna moved forward without conscious volition. She went up the two steps, across a few feet of solidly built flooring, and lifted a hand slowly to rest upon a painted forelock. As far as she could tell, it was a genuine, full-sized horse from a carousel, the pole on which it was mounted fastened securely to the floor and ceiling beam of the gazebo.

  “Now all I need is a paper airplane to sail by,” she heard herself murmur.

  “This was our place.”

>   It wasn’t difficult to tell who was more startled when Joanna turned her head. The little girl actually took a step back, her already huge blue eyes widening and her little face going paper white.

  “It’s all right,” Joanna said involuntarily, not moving because she didn’t want to frighten the child further. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “You look like my mama.”

  She hadn’t prepared herself even for the possibility of this meeting, and Joanna felt completely inadequate. She was gazing at a girl of no more than eight or nine, a girl who had lost her mother a scant three months before, and the poor kid was clearly on the verge of shock at finding her mother’s virtual twin standing in the place they had apparently loved.

  “My name is Joanna.” She kept her voice as quiet as possible and allowed her instincts to tell her what to say. “I’m just a visitor in Cliffside. But they told me when I got here yesterday that I look like someone who … used to live here. Someone named Caroline. Was she your mama?”

  The little girl nodded slowly, unblinking eyes still fixed on Joanna’s face.

  “I’m sorry you lost her. I lost my mama when I was about your age. My father too.”

  “In a—in a car accident?” Caroline’s daughter asked hesitantly.

  “No, it was another kind of accident. My father liked to sail, and one day when they went out together on a little boat, there was a storm.”

  “The boat sank?”

  Joanna nodded.

  The little girl frowned slightly and looked past Joanna for a brief moment. “Aren’t you scared of the ocean now?”

  “If I’d been with them, I suppose I would be. But I wasn’t. And it was a long time ago.”

  “I’m afraid of cars. I don’t ever want to get in one again.”

  “I can see how you’d feel that way,” Joanna said, her heart going out to the grave little girl.

  “My name’s Regan. With a long e.” The last was added somewhat defensively, and that was explained when she added, “Only one e and only one a, but everybody wants to spell it with two a’s and say it with a short e.”

  “I like it much better with only one a and a long e,” Joanna said judiciously. “It’s nice to meet you, Regan.”

  “You don’t sound like my mama.” Regan tilted her dark head a bit. “You don’t sound like anybody around here.”

  “That’s because I live on the other side of the country,” Joanna explained. “In Atlanta, Georgia.”

  “Where the Braves are?”

  Joanna smiled. “Yeah, where the Braves are. You like baseball?”

  “Uh-huh. So does—so did my mama.” Regan dug her hands down into the front pockets of her jeans and hunched her shoulders. “Daddy doesn’t. He doesn’t like anything except his work.”

  Hearing more in those last two sentences than the mere words, Joanna said slowly, “Sometimes when grown-ups lose somebody they love, they spend all their time working so it won’t hurt so much.”

  Regan looked at her with an oddly adult discernment. “He worked all the time before the car accident.”

  Lesson: Don’t talk down to the poor kid. Joanna nodded. “I see. Some people are like that.”

  Regan seemed pleased by the simple statement; she didn’t quite smile, but nearly. “That’s what my teacher says.”

  “Your teacher? Say, why aren’t you in school today?”

  “I’m being home-schooled,” Regan explained. “Because of the car and the bus. School’s on the other side of town, too far to walk, and … I heard the doctor tell Daddy not to make me get in a car or the bus until I was ready. So I have a teacher at home now. Her name’s Mrs. Porter.”

  “You like her?”

  Regan hunched her shoulders again. “She’s okay. She likes one of those talk shows on TV, so I always take my morning break the same time so she can watch it.”

  “Do you always walk out here during your break?” Joanna asked.

  “No, just sometimes.” Regan hesitated, then went on a bit gruffly, “Mama’s favorite place was this gazebo. When I was little, Mama took me to a fair, and I rode on the carousel. I liked it so much that she hunted and hunted until she found a carousel horse she could buy, and then she had it put here. So her favorite place could be mine too.”

  “She sounds like a pretty terrific mama.”

  Regan’s face began to crumple, but she controlled it with a fierce effort. “Uh-huh.”

  Joanna pretended not to notice. “Regan, do you mind if I come out here sometimes? I won’t unless you say it’s okay.”

  “It’s okay. You can even sit on the horse if you want. Mama did.”

  “Thanks, maybe I will.” Before Joanna could say anything else, they heard the distant sound of a bell ringing.

  “That’s Mrs. Porter ringing the garden bell,” Regan explained. “It means her show’s over and I have to go home now.”

  “I see.” Joanna smiled at her. “It was very nice meeting you, Regan. I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

  “You’ll be in Cliffside for a while?”

  “At least a couple of weeks.”

  “Good. That’s good.” Regan half turned, then paused and looked at Joanna with an odd hesitation. She seemed to be trying to make up her mind about something, and when she spoke, it was diffidently. “Joanna? How do you know when a grown-up is afraid?”

  “I guess that depends on the grown-up,” she replied slowly. “When I’m afraid, I sit very still and hope whatever scares me will go away.”

  “I have bad dreams when I’m scared,” Regan said. “Mama did, too, I think. She had a lot of bad dreams last summer. Before the car accident.”

  “Regan—”

  The bell rang again, and Regan said quickly, “I’ve gotta go. Bye, Joanna.”

  “Bye… .” Joanna stood there in Caroline’s gazebo, her hand on the carousel horse, and watched Regan run off toward home.

  GRIFFIN CAVANAUGH SAT at his desk and looked out the window. Across the street and at a slight angle to the Sheriff’s Department was the town library, the front door clearly visible from where he sat. He glanced at his watch and frowned.

  Three hours she’d been in there. Not that it was such an unusual way to spend a rainy Wednesday afternoon, but tourists seldom considered a small-town library’s resources as a possible source of entertainment when planning their vacation activities. And he very much doubted that Joanna Flynn was so bored after less than twenty-four hours in Cliffside that the prospect of spending three hours looking through back issues of National Geographic would hold much appeal.

  So what was she doing in there?

  He had noted down her license plate as a matter of course, but the car was a rental and he doubted there’d be any useful information to be had from the agency in Portland. If he were looking for information, of course. And if he had a halfway decent official reason for inquiring. Which he didn’t.

  Of course, that hadn’t stopped him from calling Atlanta first thing this morning, counting on the brotherhood of his fellow police officers to answer a few unofficial questions about Joanna Flynn. The answers had been prompt and at least somewhat reassuring. She had no criminal record, and not so much as an unpaid parking ticket against her. One traffic accident last summer, totaling the car, but no one else had been involved and no charges had been filed against Joanna. She worked at a private library in Atlanta, rented an apartment where she had lived for some years, and always paid her bills and her taxes on time.

  Born in Charleston, parents killed in a boating accident twenty years before, raised by an aunt. Had a current passport, and had traveled out of the country every summer during her teens.

  And that, as far as the Atlanta P.D. was concerned, was all the relevant information about Joanna Flynn.

  “Hey, Griff?”

  “Yeah?” He didn’t even try to pretend that he’d been engrossed in the paperwork on his cluttered desk as he turned and watched one of his deputies come into the office. Small-town life had c
ertain advantages, and one of them, he’d discovered, was a laid-back attitude toward paperwork. And there was nothing urgent, anyway. “What do you need, Mark?”

  “Ralph Thompson just called about those new parking spaces he wants beside his store; what did the town council decide to do about that?”

  “Nixed the whole idea. Said it’d cut thirty feet out of the park.”

  “Well, you told him that from the beginning.” Mark Beller sighed and rolled his eyes. “You know, I really don’t want to be the one to give him the official word, if you don’t mind. Ever since I wrote him up last month for blocking that back entrance, he’s been treating me like I poisoned his dog or something.”

  Griffin glanced out the window again; her rental car was still parked in front of the library. “I’ll go tell him myself,” he said. “In person, to demonstrate my concern; he’ll appreciate that. I need to stretch my legs anyway.”

  “It’s raining buckets out there, you know.”

  “I won’t melt.” He pushed his chair back and got up, reaching for his windbreaker. On duty today, he was wearing dark slacks and a pale blue shirt, no tie. Though his deputies wore uniforms, Griffin stuck to street clothes that tended to be on the casual side; one of the perks, he maintained, of being in charge of all the town headaches. And though the mayor sighed heavily whenever they encountered each other, so far no one had objected to the way Griffin dressed on duty.

  “I guess you’ve heard about Joanna Flynn,” Mark said. Griffin didn’t let himself react. “What about her?”

  “Well, that she’s here. That if you dyed her hair black, she’d be the image of Mrs. McKenna.”

  Griffin, who hadn’t mentioned his encounter with Joanna Flynn to anyone, wasn’t particularly surprised; Cliffside’s grapevine was second to none. “Yeah, I knew about her.”

  “People are wondering,” Mark said innocently.

  “Wondering what?”

  “All kinds of things. Reincarnation is being discussed over at City Hall, seriously from what I hear. Twins separated at birth seems to be the favorite of the guys at the fire station—some of them have put money on it. And Janie says all her ladies at the salon are absolutely positive that Mrs. McKenna faked her death for some mysterious reason and has now returned to Cliffside to haunt somebody, but Ted at the bank thinks that last sounds a bit too unlikely.”