by Kay Hooper
“Yeah.” Joanna brooded for a moment, not quite sure she wanted to bring up the next subject but having already talked herself into it.
“What’s on your mind, Joanna?”
She looked around them at the nice, peaceful little town of Cliffside, at the few people moving about on this cool October afternoon, and sighed. Just how much did go on under the surface here, undetected by the sharp-eyed gossips of Cliffside? With every day that passed, she was more and more certain the answer was a lot. This place had secrets. Secrets people were no doubt anxious to preserve. And what would happen if any of those well-protected secrets was exposed?
Especially to the wrong person.
You’re the logical person to ask questions of Griffin. But what if some of this town’s secrets are yours? What if I can’t trust you?
What choice did she have, really?
Joanna fished in the pocket of the flannel shirt she was wearing in lieu of a jacket and held up the necklace she’d found in the old barn. “Recognize this?”
He looked at the heart charm for a moment, then took the necklace from Joanna’s fingers and examined it more closely, checking the inscription before he answered. “Caroline’s. She wore it a lot.” His tone was impersonal.
Joanna struggled to match his tone and kept her gaze fixed on his expressionless face. “Uh-huh. According to Mr. Landers in the jewelry store, Caroline had one inscribed from her for Regan’s birthday a couple of years ago. Then, for Caroline’s next birthday, Regan marched into the jewelry store, dropped a handful of quarters on the counter, and asked that an identical heart be inscribed from her. Mr. Landers complied, accepted about three bucks’ worth of quarters with a grave face—and held the bill for the difference, knowing that either Scott or Caroline would come in later and pay him. Caroline did.”
“Yeah, that story made the rounds. So?”
Joanna took the necklace back from him and absently wound the chain around her fingers. “So when was the last time you remember Caroline wearing this?”
“How would I remember—”
“Come on, you’re a cop. You notice details. When was the last time you saw Caroline wearing this?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Just answer the question—please, Griffin.”
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and frowned at her with the inward-turned gaze of someone concentrating. “It was … okay. Okay, I’ve got it. This past Easter Sunday. I saw her here in town, with Regan, both of them dressed for church—and they were both wearing the heart necklaces.”
“You don’t remember seeing Caroline wearing the necklace after that?”
“No. Why, Joanna? And where did you get it?”
“I found it.” She stared at the little heart charm. Easter Sunday. So, Caroline had had the necklace in early April and could have lost it anytime between then and her death on July 1. Sometime during those three months she must have been in that little room in the old barn where lovers met.
“Found it where?”
Joanna dropped the necklace back into her pocket. “I’ll give this to Regan the next time I see her. I think she’d want to have it.”
“Joanna, where did you find the necklace?”
She met his frowning gaze and wished she could believe that he had not been Caroline’s lover. It would, she thought, help make all this so much easier if she could believe that. If she could trust him. But the doubts wouldn’t leave her alone. Caroline had, after all, asked him to meet her at the barn the day she was killed, at least according to him.
Steadily, trying her best to read his reaction, Joanna said, “I found it in the old barn. There’s a little room in one of the back corners, a room formed and hidden by bales of hay. Did you know?”
“I haven’t been near the place since some kids cornered a loose horse in there summer before last,” he said, with nothing in his face to suggest a lie. “A room?”
Even assuming he was being truthful, Joanna wondered why he hadn’t checked the barn out just as a matter of course when Caroline was killed. The only answer she could come up with—and it assumed his innocence in Caroline’s death—was the guilt he seemed to feel about what had happened. Maybe, she thought, his guilty conscience had made him consider the barn as only a place where he should have been, not where Caroline had been minutes before her death.
If he had nothing to do with that death, of course.
“A room,” she confirmed. “A room where at least one pair of lovers has been meeting.”
“How do you know that?”
“Evidence, Sheriff.” Joanna managed a wry smile. “A nice thick blanket—and a box of condoms.”
He let out a short laugh. “Well, at least they’re being careful.”
As far as Joanna could tell, his amusement was genuine and completely unself-conscious, but it didn’t do much to ease her tension. She kept her attention fixed on his face when she said mildly, “Considering that I found the necklace in the hay back in that little room, does it occur to you that Caroline might have been one of those lovers?”
He looked surprised, but not shocked or disbelieving, and even his surprise was brief. “I suppose she could have been,” he said slowly. “Most of the people in this town would probably tell you she wasn’t happy in her marriage.”
“Is that true or just gossip?”
“If you’re asking me if Caroline confided in me about her marriage,” Griffin said, “she didn’t. I know she was unhappy years ago, but after Regan came along, she seemed to … I don’t know … focus all her attention on the kid. She and Scott seemed fairly distant with each other, at least in public, but maybe that was the kind of marriage she wanted.”
“Or maybe just the kind of marriage she had.” Joanna didn’t wait for a response, but added, “So she might have been meeting someone at the old barn?”
Griffin shrugged. “Maybe. It doesn’t seem like the sort of place she’d pick, but there aren’t many places around here where she would have had a decent chance of keeping the meetings secret. Anyway, if she did have a lover, so what?”
“So maybe that’s someone you should have talked to about her death.”
“With no evidence it was anything but an accident? And ask what, Joanna?”
“I don’t know. If he saw her that day. If she’d seemed upset—you said she might have been more nervous than usual in the days before she was killed. So, why? What was on her mind? Don’t you think that’s important to know, Griffin? And don’t you think a lover might have known?”
“I think a lover might have known,” he agreed. “If something was bothering her. But even supposing I knew who the lover was—and if he exists, he’s sure as hell kept the relationship to himself—what justification do I have to ask him anything at all? Even if we assume that Caroline lost control of her car because she was upset, there’s absolutely no evidence it was anything but an accident—and the law doesn’t prosecute people for saying the wrong thing or not offering a shoulder when one’s needed.”
“What if her having a lover means something else?” Joanna kept her voice matter-of-fact and speculative. “Maybe just having a lover is what got her killed. What if Scott found out? Where was he when Caroline’s car went over the cliffs?”
“He was at the house, as usual on a weekday.”
“Was he there alone?”
Griffin nodded. “Pretty much. It was the housekeeper’s day off. Regan was home, but she’d had a cold, and she spent the afternoon in her bedroom. Lyssa was here in town at the store, and Dylan was in Portland. There was a gardener working at the house, but he couldn’t say if Scott had left anytime that day. I did check all this out, you know. And so what? Like I said, her death was an accident, Joanna. She was driving that car. Nobody tampered with it, and there’s no evidence anyone drove her over the cliffs. Which means no crime was committed”
Something he’d said sounded a false note in Joanna’s mind. “Regan was home sick? And Caroline wasn�
��t there for her?”
Griffin frowned a moment, then shook his head. “The kid wasn’t that sick. I mean, Caroline probably wouldn’t have hesitated to leave her there in the house with Scott for a few hours. Regan was getting over a cold, that’s all.”
Maybe that was all, Joanna thought, but it still seemed to her that Caroline wouldn’t have left her child without a very good reason, not if she’d been ill. Which was a bit of evidence—in her mind anyway—that Caroline had been upset about something that day.
But it was obvious Griffin didn’t agree with that. And it was equally obvious to Joanna that he wasn’t going to pursue new information about Caroline’s life unless and until he could be convinced her death had not been an accident.
He hadn’t been Caroline’s lover, he said. Maybe that was true. Or maybe it wasn’t. He probably hadn’t been involved in her death. Probably. Which wasn’t to say, of course, that he hadn’t covered up one or more facts about that death, for whatever reasons. So Joanna still couldn’t trust him. Still couldn’t completely believe what he told her.
And yet she wanted him to believe her. Wanted him to put aside his cop’s training and instincts and believe something he couldn’t hold in his hand. He didn’t have to believe in her dreams, but … but he could believe in her. Couldn’t he? She wanted him on her side in this, however illogical that was.
“All right,” she said with a shrug, deliberately nonchalant. “But I think even the possibility she had a lover should tell us something important.”
“Like what?”
“Like there are definitely secrets in Cliffside. If a woman like Caroline could have an affair that nobody caught on to, then we have to assume there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of this town.”
“Maybe.”
Since she didn’t want him getting the idea she intended to go on probing into Caroline’s life and death, Joanna deliberately directed his attention to the most recent death. “So what does that say about Amber’s death? I mean, the reason it happened. Awful as it is, could you have a closet rapist around here?”
“If so,” Griffin said unemotionally, “and she was attacked by him, she either managed to fight him off or else she went over the cliffs during the struggle. Amber was a virgin.”
Joanna got a sudden, vivid image of Amber saying “oh,” in what she probably had imagined to be a sexy manner, her lips pursed and eyes liquid, and felt unexpectedly shaken. All the dumb clichés echoed in her mind, poignant because they were so damned true. Died before she lived…innocence preserved forever…more child than woman …
“Joanna?” Griffin reached out to grip her shoulder with one hand. “Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not.” She managed a shaky smile. “How long do you have to do this kind of thing before you can look at investigating somebody’s death as just an interesting puzzle?”
“I’ve been in police work more than fifteen years.” He paused, then added, “It’s not getting any easier.”
“Then how do you back away from it? How can you be objective if the—the living presence of the victim won’t leave your mind?” She was asking the question of him personally, and he seemed to realize that.
“A basic rule of police work is that you can’t be effective as a cop if the case or the victim is too close to you. If it’s too personal, you can’t be objective at all, and there’s a danger of seeing things the way you want them to be instead of the way they are.”
“You mean like ‘Caroline’s death was an accident’?” The words were out before Joanna could stop them, and she regretted saying them the instant he let go of her shoulder and shoved his hand back into his pocket.
“Is that what you think? That I missed something because I was too close? I told you, Joanna, I wasn’t involved with Caroline.”
Joanna didn’t know if she should feel relieved that he sounded merely impatient rather than angry. She held her voice steady. “What I meant was, you felt—and maybe still feel—a lot of guilt about her death. You said as much, said you had a guilty conscience. And maybe it’s easier for you that it was an accident. After all, if something happened at that old barn while she was waiting for you to show up, something that directly or indirectly caused her to drive recklessly, then it might have been something you could have prevented. If you’d been there. So it’s a good thing it was an accident, isn’t it? Nothing you might have done differently would have changed the outcome. Because it was just an accident.”
Griffin turned and walked away.
She didn’t look after him. Instead, Joanna continued to lean against the railing and gaze at the spot where he had been for several minutes, until a sudden chill breeze reminded her it was getting late. And colder. Much colder.
“Damn,” she said softly.
“You could spend the night,” Lyssa Maitland said.
He shook his head slightly, the gesture controlled as all his gestures were, and stretched languidly as he sat on the edge of the bed. “No, I can’t.”
Watching well-defined muscles move under his sleek skin, Lyssa thought as she often had before that there was nothing fair in nature. It wasn’t enough that he was wealthy and a good-looking devil, but his genetic heritage had also bestowed upon him an athletic physique he maintained with almost no effort at all. It was a good word to describe him, she thought. Effortless. Everything he was, everything he did, was effortless.
Almost everything, at any rate.
“Mind if I take a shower?”
He always asked. And, as always, she replied, “Of course not. I put out fresh towels for you.”
He looked back over his shoulder at her, wearing a small half-smile. “I’m getting predictable.”
It wasn’t the first time Lyssa had wondered if he could read her mind. He hadn’t even been looking at her, for Christ’s sake! She worked herself into a sitting position, banking pillows behind her. The sheet was pulled to her waist, so that only her very long, very pale hair veiled her naked breasts.
“Everybody has habits,” she said lightly.
His eyes narrowed, though the faint smile remained. “I suppose.” He paused, then added, “You’re very beautiful.”
The remote consideration in his voice was hardly designed to flatter or even please her, so Lyssa merely shrugged and said, “Thanks. Maybe it’s just the male sex that’s predictable. You all seem to like leggy blondes.”
“In your experience?” he asked politely.
She wondered if he was making one of his sardonic references, this time to her somewhat checkered past, but chose not to question. With this man, she had learned not to look too deeply. “Sure,” she said. “In the last ten years, not one of the men I’ve met was even remotely interested in the fact that I got straight A’s at Harvard. So I drew the natural conclusion.”
He shrugged very slightly. “No one can be expected to assume that a boutique buyer would have a degree in economics.”
“Which ought to teach people not to assume.”
“Umm. In a perfect world, perhaps.” He leaned over and kissed her shoulder lightly, then got to his feet and went into the bathroom, as unself-conscious naked as he was fully clothed.
Lyssa lay there listening as he turned on the shower. He took very hot showers, so within minutes she would see steam come into the bedroom, crawling along the ceiling like some ghostly creature seeking an escape from the room. And only when the mirror above her dresser was fogged halfway down its length would he turn off the shower and get out.
One discovered such things about a lover. Just as she’d discovered that he was an astonishingly sexual creature for so seemingly remote a man, passionate and uninhibited in bed. And not a selfish lover, which had rather surprised her. Also that he never lingered in bed unless he anticipated more sex, and that he never slept here. Never.
She invariably invited him, and he always refused, both of them polite and casual, both pretending it wasn’t a conversation scripted in stone.
For more
than six months now, the script had remained virtually the same. Two or three nights a week, he either came here or else met her at a hotel somewhere outside town, where they would not be seen by anyone who mattered. At a hotel, they would often have dinner, then go to bed for a few hours, rarely spending the night there; here at her place, there was usually no food in the routine. If she was recently back from one of her buying trips, they usually met every night for several days straight; she was neither young enough nor naive enough to assume he missed her rather than the sexual release while she was gone, and never asked.
Since their affair had begun, there had been only one interval during which the routine had changed: the month following Caroline’s death. He had been distant then, even for him. So remote that Lyssa wasn’t sure the affair would have resumed at all had she not made the first move and taken advantage of the tension she’d felt building inside him.
As if there had been no interruption in the affair, they went on as before. So businesslike during the day that Lyssa was almost certain no one else had guessed they were lovers—and in Cliffside, that was saying something.
She watched the first wispy tendrils of steam grope their way from the bathroom, and thought of his body, wet and glistening, under the shower’s hot spray. There was nothing wrong with his body, absolutely nothing. He was flawless, or so close to it the difference hardly mattered. And there was magic in his fingers ….
“Damn. I’m pathetic,” she muttered aloud, then sighed and scrambled off the bed. She went into the steamy bathroom, pausing a moment to eye the ambiguous shape of movement behind the shower’s frosted glass door. Then, sighing again, she opened the door and slipped inside the hot, steamy cubicle, where his large body took up most of the available space. It was like entering a different world, and for an instant she couldn’t breathe.
“What took you so long?” he asked, reaching out to draw her body against his.
Lyssa started to remind him that this was not part of the routine, but decided not to. Even as long as she’d known him, there was quite a lot of him still marked off as private, and she was certain trespassers into those places would be kicked out of his life with no mercy. What she had with him was little enough, and precarious, but she didn’t want to lose it.
