After Caroline

by Kay Hooper

  “I guess that depends on whether they want to be,” Joanna said. “Is a friend what you want, Griffin?”

  “I have friends. What about you, Joanna? Is there a man waiting for you back in Atlanta?”

  For the first time, she looked away from him, not quite nervous but definitely guarded. “Flirting in the sheriff’s office. There’s probably a town ordinance against it.”

  “Not since 1879. Answer the question.”

  “All right. No, there isn’t a man waiting back in Atlanta.” The golden eyes that met his were unreadable. “It’s been a couple of years since I was involved with anybody. Satisfied?”

  “Almost.” He kept his voice dispassionate. “What ended the last relationship?”

  She frowned at him. “I murdered him and buried his body in the rose garden.”

  “I’m serious.”

  With a sigh, she said, “Call it basic incompatibility. He thought I needed a life. His. Problem was, I sort of like to think for myself—decide what I’m going to wear or do or say. So the second time he suggested that I not wear pants and try not to just blurt out what I was thinking, I told him to take a walk. A long walk. Satisfied now?”

  “Satisfied he was an idiot.” Griffin didn’t give her a chance to respond to that comment, but went on immediately. “Aunt Sarah would have been proud of you, I’d say.” He was backing off and he knew it; Joanna was just wary enough to make him cautious.

  With a laugh that sounded relieved, Joanna said, “She would have scolded me for getting involved with him in the first place. You, on the other hand, she would have liked.”

  He smiled. “Because of my charming ways?”

  “Those would have been a plus. No, she would have liked you because she favored dark men with dark eyes. The interesting thing was, none of her husbands were dark. She always said the only really interesting men in the South were blond men.”

  “Sounds like blatant prejudice to me,” Griffin decided.

  “Maybe so, but she obviously believed it. All four husbands were blonds.”

  “And she outlasted all of them. That should have told her something.”

  Joanna chuckled again, but before she could comment on that, one of Griffin’s deputies knocked briskly on the open door and came into the office.

  “Sorry, boss,” she said, “but I thought you’d want to see this.”

  He felt his good humor seep away as he accepted the piece of paper. He knew what it was, but asked anyway. “Bad news?”

  “It could have been better,” she returned wryly.

  “Okay. Thanks, Megan.”

  She left after a brief glance at Joanna, and Griffin read the short message called in by one of his other deputies with a sense of fatalism. As Megan had said, the news could have been better. It could have been a lot better.

  “Griffin?”

  He looked up to meet Joanna’s concerned gaze. “Sometimes,” he said, “I really hate being a cop.”

  After a moment, she said, “I know you told me to butt out of your investigation, but if there’s been some kind of breakthrough, I’d really like to know what it is.”

  He realized that he wanted to talk to her about this, and wasn’t sure if it was because he valued her insights and judgment or simply because he found himself wanting to talk to her about everything. Either way, it bothered him.

  “I promise I won’t share anything with the gossips of Cliffside,” she said.

  Griffin put the message aside and looked down at the diary lying open on his blotter. “Mrs. Wade came into the office this morning,” he said. “She’d been packing up her daughter’s things and found her diary.” He turned the small book around and pushed it across the desk toward Joanna.

  She leaned forward and started to reach for it, then hesitated and looked at him with troubled eyes.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Mrs. Wade hadn’t looked inside, and I didn’t want to read it either. But Amber’s dead. And if anything she confided in the diary can help us find out what happened to her … Anyway, I haven’t backtracked—yet. Just read the final entry.”

  Joanna almost wished she hadn’t asked to know what Griffin had found out. But she had asked. Telling herself he was right in saying they needed information to find out what had happened to Amber, she took the diary and began reading the final entry. It was dated Sunday, eleven P.M. Her handwriting had been large, round, and somewhat childish, and she had drawn little hearts over her i’s and j’s.

  Mom and Dad have gone to bed already, but to me the night feels so alive …. Has Cain read my note? He must have by now. So he must know how much I love him. How much I need him. And now that he knows…Oh God, now that he knows…He’ll meet me tonight, I know he will. We’ll make love in his cottage with the storm all around us, and then we’ll go away together.…It’s supposed to storm all night, but there’s a lull now. I’ll slip out the terrace door now, while it’s stopped raining, I’m sure I can make it …. I’m sure the storm will wait for me to reach my love ….

  Joanna placed the diary gently on Griffin’s desk and pushed it back toward him. Melodramatic and self-important as the feelings were, she knew they had been very real to Amber, and she felt so sorry for the girl it made her throat hurt. The desperate pangs of a young love were normal and to be expected at eighteen; dying was not.

  “So now we know why she went out that night,” Joanna murmured. “And when.”

  “And who she planned to meet.”

  “Griffin, she wasn’t sure herself that Cain had read the note, so—”

  Unemotionally, Griffin said, “Funny that he never mentioned a note, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe he never got it.”

  “And maybe he just didn’t want to tell me about it. The same way he didn’t want to tell me he left his cottage Sunday night.”

  “He left his cottage? How do you know that?”

  “Somebody saw him.” With an index finger, Griffin tapped the message brought in earlier. “Cain drives a silver Jaguar. It’s very noticeable—and, due to a faulty muffler, very loud. One of his neighbors had gone to a window to see if the storm was really over or just pausing for a minute. His car backfired, catching her attention. He was heading for the coast road.”

  “What time was it?” Joanna asked slowly.

  “Eleven forty-five, give or take ten minutes.”

  “But wasn’t that too early? I mean, I thought Amber was killed hours later, closer to dawn.”

  Griffin shook his head. “I just talked to Doc Becket, and he says it could have been anytime between ten P.M. and four A.M. The diary entry tells us she was alive at eleven, so she was killed after eleven and before four. That’s the official line. Off the record, Doc says it was probably nearer midnight.”

  Joanna linked her fingers together and looked down at them for a moment, then returned her gaze to Griffin’s impassive face. “Okay, having done it, I know you can walk from Cain’s cottage to The Inn in about fifteen minutes—and that’s just a leisurely stroll. Hurrying, you could do it in less. So, if she left the hotel within minutes of writing that entry—”

  “Which she most likely did,” Griffin interrupted. “The storm had died down, but she expected it to start up again. She didn’t strike me as the sort who would have wanted to get caught in a downpour, especially on the way to meet a man.”

  Joanna nodded. “Then there would have been enough time for something to happen before Cain drove away. Time even for her to have walked to his cottage and back—either alone or with him. Maybe time for him to have walked her back to the hotel and then make it back to his cottage, if he hurried. But Griffin, that’s assuming an awful lot.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I have a couple of cold, hard facts as well. Amber died that night. And Cain lied to me about where he was when it happened.”

  “He might have had a perfectly innocent reason for not telling you the truth.”

  “Reasons for lying are seldom innocent,” he said dryly.

/>   “You know what I mean.”

  “And you know what I mean. Joanna, I don’t want to believe Cain killed that girl—deliberately or accidentally. But I’ve got a gut feeling she was pushed or thrown over the cliff, and Cain wasn’t where he claimed to be. So what am I supposed to think?”

  “Maybe he left to get away from her, have you thought of that? Maybe she came to his cottage that night, and to get rid of her he told her he had to go somewhere. So he drives off and she has no choice except to go back to the hotel. And … maybe she slipped. Or maybe she jumped.”

  Griffin shrugged. “Maybe. But if he did see her, I want to know why Cain lied about it.”

  “Because he knew you’d suspect him?”

  “He was a suspect anyway, as far as I was concerned, and he knew it. Finding out he lied to me hasn’t exactly cleared him in my book.”

  Try as she might, Joanna couldn’t discard the conviction that Amber’s death was somehow connected to Caroline’s, and to Robert Butler’s, and if that was the case, what motive could Cain have had to cause the deaths of three people? It just didn’t make sense.

  “He might have just lost it,” Griffin said, seemingly reading her mind. “Amber wouldn’t take rejection well, from all I’ve heard of her. Maybe she got hysterical and wouldn’t let go no matter what he said. Hell, maybe he just shoved her—a little too hard.”

  “If he did, you’d never be able to prove it in court, would you? I mean, no matter what happened, you have no real evidence. You can’t actually place Cain at the scene of Amber’s death or even with her anywhere that night; there were no witnesses to what happened; the postmortem findings say death from a fall. A little churned-up ground might mean a lot—or nothing. So unless somebody breaks down and confesses, you haven’t got anything you could take to court.”

  “That’s about the size of it.” Griffin smiled without amusement. “No matter what Cain tells me, a confession isn’t likely, I’d say. And I have, as you say, no hard evidence that she was murdered. So my final report will likely state that Amber Wade’s death was most probably the result of an accident or suicide. That she was most probably alone out there when she went over the cliffs. That I don’t know, for sure, what happened out there. And the cold comfort of that her parents can take home with them. Along with her body.”

  Looking at him, Joanna realized for the first time just how deeply Griffin Cavanaugh felt things. Amber had been a stranger to him, and investigating her death was his job, and yet what ate at him about his inability to fix the blame for her death wasn’t professional pride but a very real and deep compassion. Her parents would live the rest of their lives wondering if she had fallen or jumped to her death, would no doubt question and blame themselves for what had happened to their daughter, haunted by the possibility that they might have been able to prevent it—and Griffin knew it. He knew it, and he hated it.

  The word these days was closure. Griffin wanted to give those grieving parents closure. He wanted to be able to offer them a reason, an explanation for the senseless death of their daughter. He wanted to be able to say to them, “This is what happened … and this is why it happened … and I’m sorry as hell none of us could stop it from happening.”

  Joanna hadn’t looked deep enough, she realized. She had picked up on his guilt and anger over Caroline’s death, but hadn’t seen what was really there. Something deeper and more painful than the events of this last summer.

  “You lost somebody, didn’t you?” she said slowly. “You lost somebody, and nobody could tell you why.”

  “DOES SHOW SO PLAINLY?” Griffin asked finally, his voice a little rough.

  Joanna shook her head. “No.” She didn’t elaborate, didn’t explain that it was something she felt in him rather than something she saw.

  “I guess we all carry baggage with us,” Griffin said. He linked his fingers together on top of his blotter and looked down at them for a moment, then met Joanna’s gaze steadily. “It’s been more than twenty years. Twenty-two, as a matter of fact, this past August. I was fifteen. My sister was twelve.”

  Joanna listened to his voice, stony with control now, and felt a chill because she knew what was coming.

  “We were close. Army brats tend to stick together, I suppose because we’re always being yanked out of one place and dropped into another. Anyway, we were in a new town and about to start at new schools; we’d just been there a few weeks and had barely met some of the other kids on the base.” He paused, then went on, his voice still deliberate. “Lindsey had made a friend of another girl her age, and that day she told our mother she was walking over to play with the girl. Their house was on base, like ours, and it was hardly more than a few blocks away.”

  Griffin paused again, and this time when he continued it was with more difficulty. “We knew something was wrong within an hour, because Lindsey’s friend called asking where she was. But it was three days before her body was found about a mile from the base.” His face tightened and those dark eyes were bleak. “She’d been … hurt for a long time before she finally died, according to the newspapers. That was how I got the few facts I did, from the newspapers and television. The police and military officials investigating her death wouldn’t tell me much of anything, and my parents were so shattered they couldn’t see beyond the fact of her dying.”

  “I’m sorry,” Joanna said quietly. “You must have gone through hell.”

  “I think the worst of it was the sheer bewilderment. It happened so suddenly, without warning. She was alive—then she wasn’t. And it was so damned senseless.”

  “Nobody could tell you why.” Joanna was aching inside, for the pain of that boy and the pain of this man. No wonder he felt so deeply about Amber’s death; he understood loss all too well.

  He shook his head. “There were no answers, no reasons. The authorities found no clues and had no suspects. The investigation went on for months before finally just—fading away. We buried Lindsey. And life went on. But none of us ever got over her death. Hell, we couldn’t even get past it, because all we had were questions.”

  “You never found out what happened?”

  Griffin shook his head again. “To this day, the file on the death of Lindsey Cavanaugh is still open down in Texas. There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  That must have been the worst of it, Joanna thought. Never knowing for sure what had happened. “Is that why you became a cop? Because you wanted to find the answers for other people?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t hesitate, and there was no doubt in his voice. “If I’d been older or younger at the time, maybe it would have had a different effect on me. Maybe. Or maybe not. I just knew that the worst thing in the world was not knowing why you had lost someone. There was no way to move on from there, no way to get past it. I knew right then, that summer, that I’d be some kind of cop.”

  He shrugged suddenly. “Maybe a lot of my choices were made because of what happened to Lindsey. All I know for sure is that those unanswered questions destroyed my family. My parents split about a year later, still shattered, each of them blaming the other for something neither of them could have prevented. I lived with my dad until I was old enough to join the army myself, but since then I’ve seen him maybe a dozen times. I’ve seen my mother twice in the last ten years, Christmas visits that were definitely a mistake. Her house is a shrine to Lindsey, and I’m a stranger to her. Dad retired and moved to Alaska; Mom’s living in Florida. They couldn’t have put much more space between them if they had measured it out. They’re both very, very alone.”

  One child dead and another emotionally abandoned—and two parents driven apart and left alone. Lindsey’s murderer had done more than kill her, Joanna thought. He had killed her family as well. And though Griffin had survived emotionally, he was clearly marked by what had happened.

  “Do you believe your parents would still be together if they had known who killed Lindsey?” she asked, because she felt herself that not knowing would have been
the most unbearable fact of an unbearable tragedy.

  “I believe it’s more than likely they would,” Griffin answered immediately. “As it was, they had no one to blame except each other. If there had been a villain, someone they could have at least looked at and asked why, then maybe their marriage could have survived her death. Maybe they could have survived it.”

  “Griffin … sometimes there just aren’t any answers.” Joanna wished there was something else she could say, something more, but in the face of such horrible anguish, words were completely inadequate.

  He smiled slightly. “I know that, believe me. Even if they’d found my sister’s murderer, we could never have understood why she was killed. And even if I could hand the Wades the name of someone who killed their daughter, the reasons for her death would never make any sense to them either.”

  “But you’d feel better.” She couldn’t help wondering, then, if this also helped explain why Griffin was so unyielding in insisting that Caroline’s death had been an accident. After all, though an accidental death might leave unanswered questions, they were seldom unbearable ones. Murder, on the other hand, left a host of questions scattered about it, and most of them were unbearable.

  “I’d feel useful if I could tell them what happened,” Griffin said. “I’d feel I was doing my job. And maybe the Wades could get past the loss of their daughter. Maybe they could even get over it one day.”

  Joanna nodded, understanding. The problem was, as they had agreed only minutes ago, in the case of Amber’s death there wasn’t a whole lot he could tell her parents. “It hasn’t been forty-eight hours yet,” she reminded him. “Just because you can’t tell them anything definite today doesn’t mean you won’t be able to tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, I keep telling myself that.” He looked down at the diary and sighed. “In the meantime, I have to read Amber’s diary entries at least from the day they arrived here in town. And I have to talk to Cain.”

  She didn’t envy him either task. “I’ll get out of your hair, then,” she said, getting up. Since she had decided not to talk to him about what she had learned from Adam Harrison about Caroline, and since he was so obviously preoccupied by the investigation into Amber’s death, there was little she could do except to keep pursuing her own exploration of Caroline’s life and the days before her death. Until she found something concrete she could hand Griffin, or until she discovered some tangible connection between Caroline and the other two people who had died here, there was nothing she could do to help him.