After Caroline

by Kay Hooper

  Shrugging it off, she finished undressing and climbed cautiously into the big tub. The water was perfect, hot without being too hot, and she felt muscles she hadn’t even realized were tense relax. She turned off the faucets and leaned back, resting the nape of her neck against the rim of the tub.

  She thought she was fine. She thought she’d handled the shocks of the wreck and the knowledge that someone had tried to kill her very well. But as her body relaxed in the hot water, she felt wetness on her face and realized that she was crying. She didn’t sob out loud, but she couldn’t seem to stem the flow of tears. They streamed down her cheeks as if a dam had burst inside her.

  Fine? She wasn’t fine at all. She was shaken and frightened and feeling overwhelmed. Someone had tried to kill her? But why? Because she was asking questions about Caroline? Because she had somehow gotten too close to somebody’s secret?

  She lay there with her eyes closed, not even trying to stop the tears now and seeing face after face in her mind’s eye. Who? Who was so intent on hiding their secret that murder was acceptable to them? She had met so many people since coming here, most of whom had known Caroline; how could she even begin to guess which one of those seemingly ordinary people might have a secret worth killing for?

  She didn’t know how much time had passed when a soft knock at the bathroom door and Griffin’s voice roused her.

  “Joanna? Coffee’s hot, and supper will be ready in about ten minutes.”

  She cleared her throat. “Okay.”

  There was a brief silence, and then he said, “Are you all right?”

  She looked at the bathroom door, blurred because of the tears still trickling from her eyes, and had to fight an impulse to tell him the truth. “I’m fine,” she said, holding her voice steadier this time. “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t sound as if he really believed her, but she heard him move back down the hall toward the great-room.

  Joanna wet a washcloth with cold water and held it against her eyes, repeating the action several times until her eyes felt less puffy and the tears had finally stopped. She was very much afraid it was only a lull, because she felt horribly precarious, but there was little she could do about it.

  She got out of the tub and let the water drain while she was drying off, then got into the dark blue pajamas. Griffin had been right; they swallowed her whole. But she managed to tighten the drawstring waist of the pants enough to keep them from falling off her, and rolled up the sleeves of the shirt several times so that the cuffs didn’t dangle past her fingertips.

  He had also provided a thick pair of socks, and Joanna couldn’t help but smile as she put them on. Warm, yes, like the pajamas—and just about as sexy.

  She borrowed his comb to straighten her hair a bit, then left her clothes folded on the wicker hamper and went out into the greatroom.

  He had built a fire in the fireplace, and the big room smelled pleasantly of wood smoke and cooking. The table was already set. He was in the kitchen, efficiently beating eggs in a bowl, and paused to look at her intently as she came in.

  “Feeling better?”

  Joanna nodded, not quite trusting her voice. He sounded gentle, more so than she’d ever heard him, and for some reason it made her throat hurt.

  He looked at her a moment longer, then nodded toward the counter beside the sink, where a coffeemaker sat. “Help yourself.”

  She nodded again and went to pour herself coffee.

  Griffin watched her as the omelette began cooking. It didn’t take any special perception to see that her hands were unsteady, or that her big golden eyes were wet, the lids pink and a bit swollen. She’d been unnaturally calm since the wreck and had accepted the news that someone had tried to kill her with no more than a blink and a somewhat dazed nod, so Griffin had fully expected her to feel the shock sooner or later.

  What he hadn’t expected was that he would feel this way when he looked at her, seemingly so fragile in the too-big pajamas, vulnerable in a way he guessed was completely alien to her. He was in danger of forgetting about everything but the overwhelming need to feel her against him, warm and real and alive. It was the way he had felt in the clinic, when holding her in his arms had been more important, more vital to him, than anything else.

  She sipped the coffee, then turned to look at him. With a slight nod toward the stove, she said, “It smells good.”

  The omelette did smell good, but Griffin was afraid he’d burn it if he kept staring at her. With an effort, he paid attention to his cooking. “It’ll be ready in just a minute. Why don’t you sit down at the table?” His voice sounded normal, he thought.

  She accepted the suggestion and sat there with both hands wrapped around her coffee cup, staring down at it. She was too silent, he thought, too still. Sometime in the past few minutes, it had hit her that someone had just tried to kill her, and she was struggling to face that knowledge. He wanted to say something—anything—to banish the haunted shadows from her eyes, to make them smile as they often did, but instinct told him to let her get to the subject of the attempt on her life in her own time and her own way.

  When he put a plate in front of her, she began to eat automatically. And it must have been the manners drummed into her by the redoubtable Aunt Sarah, he thought with a flicker of amusement, that enabled her to compliment him in a polite voice on his cooking, because it was fairly obvious she was eating because he wanted her to and that she didn’t notice or care how it tasted. He thanked her gravely, however, satisfied that she was eating, and then filled the silence with casual talk she didn’t have to respond to about unimportant things.

  When they were finished, Griffin sent her into the living room with a fresh cup of coffee despite her—again, automatic—protests, and cleared up in the kitchen himself. He wanted to give her a little time, to not crowd her, because he felt it was very important that she not see him as a cop asking questions when they finally did talk about this, but as a man genuinely concerned about her.

  Finished in the kitchen, he turned off the light and carried his own coffee into the living room, which was lit only by the fire and a single lamp at Joanna’s end of the sofa. She was sort of curled up, her feet tucked under a pillow beside her, and she looked very withdrawn as she gazed into the fire. But when Griffin sat down about a foot away and set his cup on the coffee table beside hers, she spoke in a measured, careful voice.

  “When you warned me not to ask questions about Caroline, were you afraid this would happen?”

  “No.” He kept his voice quiet. “I didn’t believe there was anything in her life—or her death—worth a murder attempt.”

  Joanna turned her head and looked at him, the firelight igniting golden sparks in her darkened eyes. “And now?”

  He drew a breath. “And now, I can’t think of a single damned reason why anyone would want to kill you—except that you’ve been asking questions about Caroline and her death. You haven’t made enemies here, Joanna, not as far as I can see. The only thing that makes any sense is that there’s some information connected to Caroline that somebody doesn’t want you to find. And they’re willing to do anything to stop you.”

  “I haven’t found out anything,” she said. “Not anything anyone would want to keep me from finding out, I mean. Innocuous things, things that wouldn’t have mattered to anyone but her. Things that wouldn’t have damaged anyone but her, even in a small town. Except … I did find out that Caroline … had affairs.”

  “Was that what you weren’t willing to tell me earlier today?”

  Joanna nodded. “I talked to somebody. He’s … still haunted by her, even though their affair ended more than a year ago. He had some pretty brutal things to say about her, but I think he’s still in love with her. And he said there were others, at least one other he was certain about because the man confided in him. He wouldn’t give me a name, but I think I know who the other man was.” She shook her head. “But why would either one of them have gone after me
? The first man didn’t care who knew about the affair, and the second … well, he never admitted to knowing Caroline well, but I can’t believe he’d try to hurt me, not because I might have suspected he’d had an affair with her.”

  Griffin didn’t interrupt, realizing that all this was pouring out of her because she couldn’t hold it in, because it had gone around and around in her mind since the wreck and she needed to put it into words.

  “Caroline saw them both the last week of her life, that was the only thing I fixed on, the only thing that seemed odd. She went to each one of them, maybe needing to talk, maybe needing their help. But neither one gave her the chance to tell them anything. One was too mad at her, the other one in too much of a hurry. And you were too busy.”

  It wasn’t an accusation, just a simple statement of fact, but Griffin felt defensive all the same. “If I’d known she was in trouble—”

  Joanna nodded gravely. “I know you would have helped her. The other two men would have, too, I think. She seemed to have had a powerful hold over some of the men in her life.”

  Again, there was no accusation in her quiet voice, but Griffin felt compelled to say, “I was not her lover, Joanna.”

  Her gaze searched his face for a moment, but he couldn’t tell what she was looking for. Or if she found it. “But there was something there, wasn’t there? A reason why she turned to you when she needed help?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Once, a long time ago, maybe there was something. Or maybe she sent me that note because I’m the sheriff, the logical person to turn to if she needed help.”

  Joanna nodded. “I’ve thought of that, of course. As the sheriff, you might have been her last resort, after those other men turned away. If her problem was something dangerous or illegal, she must have been awfully scared to send you that note.”

  Griffin shook his head. “Her last resort? She had to know I’d have done my best to protect her if she knew something that could have driven someone to murder. That is what we’re talking about, isn’t it?”

  Joanna returned her gaze to the fire. “That’s what we’re talking about. Caroline was involved in something, or found out something dangerous, that’s what I think. She was nervous at least, probably scared, the last week or so of her life. She didn’t come to you right away. To me, that means either that she was involved so deeply in whatever it was that she feared arrest or scandal, or feared that the knowledge she had could have hurt someone she cared about, or that she couldn’t make up her mind what to do because she had been hurt, betrayed by someone she loved. I also think she was having an affair when she died, or shortly before, so it’s possible her lover knows something.”

  “You’re supposing a lot,” he reminded her. “There’s no proof any of that is true.”

  “I know. But what else can I do? I’m trying to put a puzzle together, piece by piece. And somebody doesn’t want me to see the finished picture. Somebody tried to kill me today.”

  “And tried to kill you Sunday night.”

  She turned her head again, quickly, her eyes once more reflecting the firelight in bright sparks. Softly, she said, “You mean Amber died because somebody thought she was me?”

  “I wish I could say no.” Griffin wanted to touch her, but held himself still. “But nothing else makes sense, Joanna. Aside from the fact that I’ve known Cain a long time and simply can’t make myself believe he could do that just because the girl had a crush on him, today someone tampered with your car. And as soon as that happened, I knew all this had to be connected somehow, just the way you said from the beginning. So what could Amber’s connection be? Nothing—except that she looked like you from behind.”

  “But Amber was killed in the middle of a stormy night. Surely nobody would have just waited outside the hotel on the chance I’d come out?”

  “No, I doubt it. But somebody could have been watching from inside the hotel and seen Amber leave. A guest or just somebody who happened to be there that night; there had been several poker games going on, I believe, and quite a few people from the town were there. Or … it could have been Cain.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I said I couldn’t believe he’d kill Amber because she had a crush on him, not that I believed he was incapable of killing. For a good enough reason, he could have done it. And that might explain why he left that night, to give himself an alibi. Whether or not he knew after he’d pushed her that it was Amber, he couldn’t have known we’d find a diary that would offer evidence of the time she left the hotel.”

  “Then why didn’t he give you that alibi when you questioned him? Why did he say he was alone at the cottage all night?”

  “If I had an alibi for a murder,” Griffin said, “I might think it was smart to hold it in reserve, at least unless and until I became a prime suspect. Especially if, say, I’d spent the night with another woman. He could always say he didn’t want to admit that because it would have hurt Holly—and she was sitting right there when I talked to him. Hell, it’s even believable. Maybe that’s his game.”

  “Amber sent him a note,” Joanna objected. “If he expected anyone outside the hotel, it must have been her.”

  “If he got the note.”

  “You’re saying he didn’t get it?”

  Griffin nodded. “On a hunch, I sent one of my deputies out to look around his cottage this afternoon just after you left my office. I wanted to check before I asked Cain about the note. My deputy found Amber’s note in an envelope underneath a flowerpot out on his deck. From the condition of it, it was pretty obvious it hadn’t been moved since it was left there, and it certainly hadn’t been opened.”

  After a moment, Joanna asked, “Was Cain at the hotel Sunday night? I didn’t see him.”

  “He had dinner with Holly, I know that much. He could have hung around the hotel, especially since it was storming off and on. If he caught a glimpse of Amber leaving the hotel, he could have thought she was you. Followed her out to the edge of the cliffs—and pushed her over before he got a good look at her.”

  “Now you’re supposing,” Joanna said.

  “Yeah, I know.” Griffin swore under his breath. “I’ve got to talk to him. I’ve got to make him talk to me, make him tell me where he went Sunday night. And I have to know if he was having an affair with Caroline when she was killed. If he was, he has to know something, even if only her state of mind in the days before she died.”

  “Hasn’t he been involved with Holly since before then?”

  Griffin nodded. “A point in his favor, since I don’t know of many men stupid enough to juggle two women in a small town.”

  “Cain isn’t stupid.”

  “No. But he’s my best suspect right now, Joanna. If he can explain where he went Sunday night, and convince me he wasn’t having an affair with Caroline and knew nothing about why she was upset, then I’ll knock him off my list for the time being.”

  “Who else is on your list?” Before he could answer, she said, “Scott, I guess.”

  “If Amber was killed because somebody mistook her for you—and I believe that’s true—and we assume it’s somehow connected to Caroline and her death, then he has to be a suspect. I have no proof he was at home like he claimed when Caroline was killed, and he says he was home alone Sunday night with, again, no witnesses to verify. He’s another one capable of killing with a good enough reason.”

  “What would be a good enough reason? It couldn’t be just that he found out Caroline was having an affair. He might have chased her down the coast highway because of that, but why try to kill me?” She shook her head. “There’s a secret here somewhere, one somebody’s willing to do anything to protect. I think if we can just find out why Caroline was afraid, all the rest will fall into place.”

  “That ought to be a snap,” he said. “Know any good mediums?”

  Joanna turned her head back toward the fire, a brief smile appearing on her lips. “I have some friends into that stuff. Me, the only medium I know is w
hat’s in the middle.”

  Griffin watched her profile as she fell silent. It was better for her when she was talking, he thought. When she could focus her agile mind on the intellectual puzzle of what was going on in Cliffside. It was the best way, the way most cops operated, and it usually succeeded in lending a bit of detachment when it was desperately needed. But they had talked it through now, at least as far as they could for the moment.

  Then, remembering, he said, “When I opened your car door today, you said this was the third time. What did you mean?”

  “The third time I’ve cheated death,” she said softly. “But if poor Amber died in my place, I guess it was the fourth time.” She looked at him, and that little smile wavered on her lips again. “How many more chances do you think I have left?”

  This time, Griffin didn’t fight the urge to touch her. He slid across the space separating them and surrounded her face with his hands. Her lips were warm and trembled under his, and he felt the pulse in her neck throbbing rapidly. She made a little sound, then leaned into him, fumbling to push the pillow between them out of the way and turning fully toward him, lifting her hands to touch his chest.

  He knew she was vulnerable tonight, knew she might willingly accept something else when it was simple comforting she needed, but when her mouth opened beneath his and her tongue glided along the inner surface of his lips with a featherlight and wildly arousing touch, all he could think of was how much he needed her.

  “Joanna…”He could barely force himself to lift his mouth off hers long enough to whisper her name, but he needed that, too, needed to say her name, and then he was kissing her hungrily again. One of his hands slipped around to tangle in her silky hair, and the other moved to her back, drawing her closer.

  She made another of those throaty, sensuous sounds, and her back arched beneath his touch. Her instant and total response wrenched a groan from him, yet at the same time brought him at least partly to his senses. He managed to draw back far enough to look at her, his hands moving once more to surround her face.