After Caroline Page 9

  “No. I just find it rather surprising. I would have sworn you weren’t the kind of woman who would buy tacky tourist souvenirs.”

  “Well, obviously you were wrong.”

  “That is possible. I’ll even admit I was wrong—if you can explain to me what possessed you to buy the little box covered with seashells.”

  “A … souvenir for a friend back home?” she ventured.

  “Male or female?” he asked with detachment.

  “Female. Why?”

  “She likes poker?”

  Joanna blinked. “She wouldn’t know a straight flush from three of a kind. Why?”

  “You didn’t even bother to look inside it, did you?”

  “Well…”

  “Joanna, if you’ll open that little box, you’ll find a deck of very … adult playing cards inside.”

  “No wonder Tony asked me if I was sure that was what I wanted,” Joanna murmured, remembering the clerk’s uncertainty.

  “And would your friend enjoy the gift?” Griffin asked politely.

  Joanna sighed. “Let’s just say I should have been paying closer attention.”

  “You know, you didn’t have to buy something in every store just because you went in.”

  “What makes you think—”

  “I believe it was the box of nails you bought in the hardware store that finally convinced me. I think they have nails in Atlanta, don’t they? Probably not much different from the ones we have here.”

  Joanna was trying hard to keep a straight face, but he began smiling then and she lost it. She had a niggling suspicion that her laughter had an edge of hysteria to it, but he didn’t seem to notice and at least it eased the tension inside her. When she finally leaned against one of the railing’s posts and tried to catch her breath, he held out his handkerchief with a grin.

  “Didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  She wiped her watering eyes and sniffed, trying to swallow a final giggle. Definitely hysteria. “Oh God, don’t start me off again. You don’t play fair, you know that?”

  “Hey, you could have explained the nails,” he said. “A loose floorboard in your room at The Inn, for instance. It’s not my fault you couldn’t think on your feet.”

  “Don’t give me that. You were determined to break me up, weren’t you? Completely deadpan, and me trying to explain absurdities.” Keep it light Keep it casual.

  Griffin accepted his handkerchief when she returned it, and said a bit ruefully, “I was half hoping you could explain them. Joanna, did you take a course in how to get information, or does it just come naturally?”

  She sighed. “I didn’t upset anyone with questions, Griffin, I promise. Is it my fault if they just started talking about Caroline? With me looking so much like her, it’d be a miracle if nobody said anything. What was I supposed to do, interrupt whenever anyone said her name?”

  “Don’t try to tell me all this was accidental,” he said. “You’ve been working this town with all the deliberation of a census taker.”

  “Let’s not get nasty, Sheriff.”

  “Am I smiling?” he demanded.

  She looked hard. “Well, a little bit—behind the eyes.”

  He closed the eyes briefly and sighed. “We’ve got to talk about this. Look, why don’t I buy you lunch? I know you haven’t eaten yet, and I’ve…”

  “You’ve been following along behind me and missed lunch too,” she said when he broke off.

  “Something like that,” he said, unrepentant. “I feel like Italian. How about you?”

  “I haven’t seen a sign of an Italian restaurant in town,” she said, looking around. “Where is it?”

  “About fifteen miles up the coast highway toward Portland. What do you say? Want to save the other side of the street for tomorrow?”

  “What’ll everybody think if we just drive off?” she asked.

  “They’ll think we’re hungry,” he said dryly. “I’ll have to let my office know where I’ll be—and you don’t seriously believe that information will stay inside the Sheriff’s Department, do you?”

  After all the conversations behind her, Joanna knew exactly what he meant. “No. Oh, no. There don’t seem to be very many secrets in this town.” Except the one that counts?

  “Not many.” He took her arm and began leading her down the sidewalk in the direction of the Sheriff’s Department. “By the way, I do wish I’d been privileged to meet your Aunt Sarah. Sounds like quite a lady.”

  They were about ten miles from Cliffside when Griffin pulled the Blazer off to the right side of the road where the shoulder was wide and cut the engine. Joanna looked around, seeing only the twisting road beginning to climb ahead of them, a sheer drop to the ocean on their left, and a forest on their right.

  “Why are we stopping?” she asked.

  “Something I thought you should see. It’ll just take a minute.” He got out of the Blazer and walked across the street to the narrow shoulder on that side, where a low guardrail was the only barrier.

  Joanna followed him slowly, reluctant. She knew what he was about to show her, and she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to see it. She looked at him rather than anything else when she joined him, watching the ocean breeze ruffle his dark hair, noting the distant look in his dark eyes.

  What did she mean to you, Griffin? Were you lovers?

  “This is where her car went over,” he said. “She was heading toward town and apparently lost control on that last turn over there. The car was going so fast that the guardrail was no barrier at all, it just sheered off.”

  Is that pain in your voice or anger?

  Joanna looked at the long section of guardrail that was newer than the rest, then swallowed and looked past it and over the cliff.

  This section of the cliffs was even higher than those behind The Inn, and far below, the rocks were incredibly jagged, vicious points thrusting upward. They would have torn a car to pieces.

  Joanna stared down for a moment, feeling dizzy, feeling her heart thudding rapidly. Is this why I’m here, Caroline? To prove you died here by someone else’s hand? Because she was sure, suddenly. Sure that Caroline McKenna had been murdered.

  She closed her eyes for an instant, and half turned as she opened them so that she was looking at him. His face was hard. “Why did you think I should see this?” she asked, her voice sounding more normal than she had any right to expect.

  “You’re so curious about Caroline.” His voice was a little harsh, matching the stone of his face and the bleakness of his eyes. “This is where she died. There wasn’t much left of the car, and even less of her, but we managed to piece together enough of both. Enough of her to identify her, and enough of the car to figure out what had happened.”

  “You’re sure it was an accident?” she asked, unable to keep from asking the question.

  Griffin frowned at her. “She didn’t try to kill herself, if that’s what you’re suggesting. They aren’t very visible now, but there were clear skid marks from the middle of that last curve all the way to this point. She was trying to stop the car—she just didn’t get it done.”

  “Do you think—” Joanna bit her lip for a moment, then went on. “Is it possible that someone could have forced her off the road? That someone could have caused the accident?”

  “You mean another driver, drunk or playing insane games?”

  Joanna hesitated, then nodded. “Is it possible?”

  “Anything is possible, Joanna. But it isn’t very likely. There were no signs of anything like that.”

  “You looked?”

  “Of course I looked—what kind of cop do you think I am? I had to explain what must have happened to a number of people, including her husband. They pay me to know how to figure that stuff out.”

  “I only meant—”

  “Look, nobody had tampered with the car. We found no damage not consistent with the car hitting the rail and going over onto the rocks; no flecks of paint from another car, no sign of a blowout prior to
the crash, nothing. It had been raining. The road was wet, she was driving too fast and lost control. End of report, Miss Flynn. End of story.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, reaching out instinctively to touch his arm. “I didn’t mean to imply anything, to question your competence. It’s just that everybody said she was a safe driver, and—”

  “She made a mistake. It happens.”

  “I guess you’re right.” Joanna didn’t say anything more while she followed him back to the Blazer and got in on her side. Then she said, “You were definitely right to warn me about the cliffs being dangerous. First that other woman, and then Caroline.”

  “What other woman?” Griffin paused after putting the vehicle in gear to frown at her.

  “You said somebody had fallen four or five months ago,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Griffin said, pulling the Blazer back onto the road and continuing on their way. “But it wasn’t a woman. The victim was a man.”

  IT WAS DIFFICULT for Joanna to enjoy lunch after that, but she tried. She told herself that the dream had most likely been caused by her own unsettled state of mind. Caroline had died going over the cliffs, Joanna knew that at least one other person had also died on those jagged rocks, and so her own anxious emotions had conjured a nightmare vision of a woman—a blond woman—also plummeting to her death.

  Simple. Probably, she decided, the dream had been wholly hers and none of Caroline’s—and just a dream. A nightmare welling up out of tensions and fears, as most nightmares did. After all, she had dreamed virtually meaningless dreams for most of her life, and just because one particular dream had sent her here didn’t mean that all her other dreams had to be anywhere near as unusual.

  It didn’t convince her, but Joanna’s ability to focus helped her to concentrate on the here and now. And since Griffin’s mood seemed to change once they reached the restaurant, she forced herself to at least appear relaxed and untroubled.

  “My Aunt Sarah would say that when a cop buys you lunch, he’s probably just trying to get your fingerprints,” she said when the waitress had left them in a corner booth at Donatelli’s with menus. With the lunchtime rush over and the dinner crowd still a couple of hours away, they had the place virtually to themselves.

  “Did she offer that along with lessons on keeping your elbows off the table?” Griffin asked dryly.

  “Absolutely. She also taught me how to cook, sew, drive, dance, sail a boat, and ride a horse.”

  Griffin’s brows went up. “You know, I had the impression your Aunt Sarah was the elderly-maiden-aunt type—hair in a little bun, specs on the nose, support stockings—but I think I was off base.”

  “Wildly.” Joanna could hardly help but smile. “First of all, she was no maiden; she buried four husbands. And she was barely sixty when she died four years ago. She had bright red hair and favored short skirts and high heels—and since her second husband was a cop, I imagine she knew what she was talking about when it came to you guys.”

  “You mean she specifically warned you against cops?”

  “Against cops, no. But I do recall her saying that a cop’s natural instinct was to be suspicious. So if you brought me all the way out here just to get my fingerprints…”

  “I could have got them before now if I’d wanted to,” Griffin responded with a faint smile. “Why should I? Something tells me you don’t have a criminal past.”

  “Cop’s intuition?”

  “Whatever. Am I wrong?”

  “No. I’ve never even cheated on a parking meter.” Joanna sighed. “God, that sounds dull.”

  “Law-abiding, not dull. Speaking on behalf of policemen everywhere, I thank you.”

  Joanna chuckled and then looked down at the menu. “What’s good here?”

  “Just about everything, especially the shells and cheese…”

  The waitress came to take their order a few minutes later, and when she’d gone, Joanna decided it was time to try to clear the air with Cliffside’s sheriff. She was still unwilling to confess that she had come all the way to Oregon specifically to find out about a dead woman, but Griffin’s lurking distrust was something she didn’t like. She didn’t like it because he was the sheriff and could, therefore, make her life difficult; and she didn’t like it because … well, because she didn’t like it. Something about those dark eyes gazing at her in suspicion bothered her more than she wanted to admit, even to herself.

  The problem was, she wasn’t sure how much she could tell him without making him even more suspicious.

  “Tell me something,” she said. “Why does it bother you that people are talking to me about Caroline?”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” he said immediately. “And I gave you my reasons for … disliking it. People could be hurt—”

  “Griffin, credit me with an ounce of sensitivity, would you please? I’m only talking to people who talk to me, and I never bring up the subject of Caroline myself.”

  “With the resemblance, it’d be a miracle if nobody brought it up. You said so yourself.”

  “Well, but what’s wrong with talking about her? What’s the harm in Sam Atherton telling me Caroline bought books for Regan, or Mavis telling me Caroline was shy one-on-one, or Julie telling me that Caroline favored blue and green and loved silk? Who is that going to hurt?”

  “No one,” he said, admitting that with obvious reluctance. “But…”

  “But what?” Joanna waited a moment, then said, “Is it me you’re suspicious of? My motives? Griffin, what nefarious purpose could I have in asking questions about Caroline?”

  He leaned back with a sigh, and a slight smile tugged at his mouth. But his very dark eyes were abruptly shuttered. “I can’t think of a single damned one.”

  “Then what are you worried about?”

  After a moment of silence, he said, “I don’t know, Joanna. But something tells me there’s more to this than you’re willing to say.”

  It startled her a bit, but Joanna tried not to let that show. “My only interest in Caroline is that she looked enough like me to have been my sister, and I’m curious about her. I’ll probably keep on talking to people, but I promise you I’m harmless. Okay?”

  Griffin nodded slowly. “Okay.”

  “Good.” She saw their waitress approaching with salads, and added, “So we can talk about something else.”

  “Yes,” he said. With an almost visible shrugging off of his suspicion, he said lightly, “I have to hear more about Aunt Sarah.”

  “Well,” Joanna said, “when she was a teenager, she actually ran away to join the circus. I was the only kid in Charleston with an aunt who could juggle oranges and stand up on a galloping horse’s back. I was really popular in show-and-tell.”

  He chuckled. “I’ll bet you were. She raised you?”

  “Since I was nine. My parents were killed in a boating accident.” Joanna nodded her thanks to the waitress and picked up her fork. “Luckily for me, Aunt Sarah had always been a part of my life, and she was entirely willing to be my legal guardian.”

  Griffin nodded, but said, “Still, nine is awfully young to lose both parents. It can’t have been easy for you.”

  Joanna didn’t respond immediately, thinking about how fresh those old wounds felt now, and had felt since her accident. Twenty years, and yet the ache of missing her parents hurt as much now as it had when she had first realized they were gone forever. As a child, she hadn’t understood the finality of it, not really, not for a long, long time. Even with Aunt Sarah there, a loving presence, she had often thought of something she wanted to tell her mother, something she wanted her father to see, and the shock of remembering they were gone had remained sharp as a knife’s stabbing cut for years afterward.

  Three months since Caroline’s death; had Regan faced the finality of it yet? Had her father—or anyone—held her while she sobbed in grief and loss? Did she cry herself to sleep every night and wake up aching after dreams of happier times?

  “Joanna?”

&n
bsp; She looked across the table at Griffin, and scrambled to recall what he’d said. “Oh—no, it wasn’t easy. Losing someone you love never is.”

  For an instant, his dark eyes were naked with feeling, and Joanna felt caught up in what she saw there, tangled in his pain. It wasn’t so unusual for her to feel an empathic sense of someone else, to sense and understand what they were feeling, but never before had she looked into someone else’s eyes and felt his pain so acutely that she nearly cried out.

  As it was, she must have looked shocked or somehow unsettled, because Griffin leaned back suddenly and turned his gaze downward to fix on his plate. When he looked at her again, his eyes were veiled once more. “No,” he said, almost casual, “you’re right about that. I see a lot of loss in my job, and it’s never easy.”

  Joanna couldn’t have matched his feigned nonchalance to save her life. She began eating automatically, tasting nothing. Was it Caroline? Had he loved her so much that her death had caused this awful anguish inside him? Or were his feelings about her and her death more complex than simple grief? Joanna wanted to ask him, but somehow couldn’t put the question into words.

  The silence didn’t go on long—surely it didn’t—before she managed to say calmly, “Having Aunt Sarah helped a lot. She wasn’t really a motherly sort of woman, but she thought of life as an adventure, and if I learned anything from her, I hope it was that.”

  Lightly, he said, “You came three thousand miles alone just for a vacation; that sounds pretty adventurous.”

  Since she didn’t want him to think that particularly unusual, she said, “Oh, that’s nothing. My high school graduation present from Aunt Sarah was a trip to Egypt. I went alone, with nothing but her list of places to see and people to introduce myself to. She had a lot of friends over there, so I didn’t lack for escorts, but I went most places by myself.”

  Griffin was smiling. “Definitely adventurous.”