After Caroline

by Kay Hooper

  Scott was still frowning, but answered readily enough. “I was very busy that week, and we hardly saw each other. But … the day she was killed, I happened to look out the window in here when she left in her car hardly more than an hour before the accident. I thought at the time that she was upset or angry, because she gunned the engine and pulled out much faster than usual.”

  Joanna thought about that. Caroline had already sent Griffin the note asking him to meet her, indicating that she had been ready to confide her problem to him. She had, in effect, burned her bridges, so it was entirely likely that she’d been nervous, even frightened that day.

  It was also possible that something had happened here just before Caroline had left to meet Griffin, something that had upset her even more.

  She looked at Scott steadily. “You two didn’t have an argument or anything?”

  “We never argued,” Scott said.

  “Never? I find that hard to believe.”

  Scott’s smile was thin and without amusement. “Believe it. It takes feeling for two people to argue.”

  “And there was none between you and Caroline?”

  He shrugged. “It happens sometimes.”

  “Then why did you stay together? Because of Regan?”

  “No. Because there was no compelling reason to separate.”

  To Joanna, that was a lousy reason to remain in a loveless marriage, and one she hardly understood. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed Scott, at any rate. He struck her as a proud man, and proud men generally didn’t suffer their wives to conduct affairs, however discreetly. Unless, of course, he hadn’t known.

  “You told me the day we met that you were the villain of the piece,” she reminded him. “Were you?”

  He shrugged. “To Caroline, certainly. I was incapable of feeling, she said. I didn’t care about anyone except myself. I couldn’t make her happy.”

  “You didn’t worship at her feet?” Joanna murmured.

  His eyes narrowed slightly, as if she had struck a nerve, but he only repeated, “I couldn’t make her happy.”

  Joanna thought about it for a moment, wondering if her guess bad been on the mark. If Adam Harrison’s experience with Caroline was not unique, then it seemed she had enjoyed being the focus of a man’s obsessive love and desire, only to grow bored eventually and break off the relationship. Was that it? Had Scott held on to his wife by showing her a remote face and a cool indifference to her affairs? Had he been the only man in her life who had loved her enough to keep that love a secret she had never guessed?

  His remoteness had clearly bothered her, judging by the things Regan had overheard, and possibly had frustrated her. With a husband resistant to her charms, she might in fact have found the marriage more of a challenge than it would have been if he had loved her openly with Adam Harrison’s devotion.

  It was certainly not the kind of marriage Joanna would wish for herself, but she wondered if, for Scott, it might have been enough. Even if he had known about her affairs, perhaps he had found consolation in the knowledge that she was his in a way no other man could claim, because he was the only one she had not been able to emotionally destroy.

  Was that the answer?

  Joanna braced herself mentally and said in a very neutral tone, “Was it possible she was having an affair?”

  “Likely,” he replied without hesitation or visible distress. “But I have no idea who he was.”

  “And that didn’t bother you?”

  Scott shrugged again. “I accepted Caroline for what she was, Joanna. It became … obvious early in our marriage that one man couldn’t satisfy her needs. She made no secret of that, not to me. Her affairs tended to be brief and relatively infrequent. I doubt there were more than half a dozen during our marriage. As long as there was no gossip, I accepted them.”

  Joanna nodded, still wondering if she was right about their relationship but not ready to ask or comment just yet. “Would she have told you if, say, an affair was going badly? If she was frightened of a lover for some reason?”

  He was frowning again. “Frightened? I don’t know, but probably not. She didn’t talk about them to me. Acceptance is one thing; I didn’t want details, and I made that very clear to her. But I certainly never saw a sign of physical abuse.”

  “And you have no idea what she was upset about the week she died?”

  “I don’t know that she was upset. But as I said, we barely saw each other.” He paused and then said, “You’re convinced her death wasn’t an accident?”

  Steadily, Joanna said, “Yes, and I’m convinced somebody tried to kill me because I’m getting too close to the reason Caroline died. Whether it was caused directly or indirectly, somebody had a hand in her car going over the cliffs. And I have to find out who that was.”

  Scott’s gaze remained on her face for a long moment, then shifted away. “I’m sorry, but I obviously can’t help you.” He rose to his feet.

  It was a dismissal.

  Joanna could have protested, but all she said as she rose was, “Did Caroline keep a diary or journal?”

  “No,” he replied.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  She nodded, then lifted a hand when he started to come around the desk toward her. “It’s all right—I remember the way out.”

  Accepting that with a nod, Scott turned instead toward the window near his desk and stood gazing out.

  At the door, Joanna paused and looked back at him. “You know, it’s funny. Of all the people in this town, all the people who knew Caroline, you’re the only one who wasn’t shocked, or even surprised, when you saw me.”

  “I was warned,” he said indifferently without looking at her. “I expected you.”

  She shook her head. “Other people were warned, but they were still surprised when they saw me. But you weren’t. I think it was because you hardly noticed the resemblance. Because you had known Caroline inside and out, better than anyone else ever could have. You didn’t have to wait and get to know me to see the differences in us. I wasn’t Caroline; you knew that. You felt that. Because you loved her.”

  Scott didn’t turn around or react in any way. He merely said, “Good day, Joanna.”

  Had she struck a nerve? Joanna didn’t know. But when she left the house, without seeing anyone else, she followed an impulse she couldn’t explain and went to the corner of the house where she could see the window of Scott’s office. And somehow, she wasn’t surprised to see that the window where he stood looked out over what would be, in spring and summer, a lovely rose garden.

  “Your mind isn’t on business,” Lyssa said, closing the folder containing the store’s inventory lists and leaning back in his desk chair. Not only didn’t he have his mind on business, but he was visibly restless—very unlike him. She watched him wander over to the fireplace for the third time in ten minutes.

  “We can go over the inventory later,” he said.

  Lyssa would have loved to believe that she was responsible for his distraction, but knew better. He had hardly looked at her since she had arrived an hour ago. “We need to go over everything soon so we’ll have a good idea of what the accountants will see next month,” she reminded him.

  He shrugged, frowning as he gazed into the fire.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked tentatively, aware that she was straying from their established script.

  “No.”

  She hesitated, then said, “I’ll leave if you want me to.”

  “We were going to have dinner,” he said.

  It was one of the nights they usually drove up toward Portland to have dinner, leaving Regan in the capable care of Mrs. Ames. “We don’t have to,” Lyssa told him.

  There was a short silence, and then he said, “I’m a little tired.”

  Hiding her disappointment beneath a casual smile, Lyssa said, “Okay. I should copy a couple of the disks I brought to the mainframe, though. Do you mind if I work here another hour or so?” She had a
computer at the store and also a laptop at home, but all Scott’s business information was stored here on his computer—especially important now with the audit he commissioned yearly about to be conducted.

  “No, go ahead,” he replied. Then, with sudden briskness, he turned away from the fire and headed for the door. “I’ll leave you with it.”

  Lyssa didn’t get a chance to say good-bye or even “Okay”; abruptly, she was alone in his office. “So long to you too,” she muttered.

  It required only a few minutes to start the computer downloading the information she had brought, and while the machine hummed it left Lyssa with nothing to do. She brooded for a short time, then swore under her breath and left the desk, and the office.

  She was deviating from the accepted script again and knew it, but she didn’t care. She’d never seen Scott so unsettled, and she was determined to find out what was going on. She went upstairs, being quiet because the house was quiet and because she was very aware of trespassing in a way he would certainly not appreciate.

  She turned down the hallway leading to Scott’s bedroom, but halted in surprise when she realized that the door to Caroline’s bedroom was ajar. That door had been locked since Caroline’s death, the room undisturbed.

  Lyssa crept closer until she could peer inside, and what she saw wrenched at her heart. Scott was sitting on the bed in the ultrafeminine room, one of Caroline’s filmy nightgowns in his hands. His head was bowed, and as she watched, he lifted the pale green material to his face, obviously breathing in the ghostly scent of his wife. Abruptly, his broad shoulders began to jerk, and a low, harsh sound of pain escaped him.

  Lyssa drew back away from the door and went back down the hall almost blindly. She paused at the top of the stairs, staring at nothing through hot eyes, and whispered, “Damn you, Caroline.”

  “WHAT THE HELL were you thinking of?”

  Joanna sat in Griffin’s visitor’s chair, nodding with perfect understanding of and commiseration with his anger. “I know, it was stupid.”

  “Then why did you do it? Joanna, Scott is still a suspect as far as I’m concerned, and for you to just waltz over there alone and talk to him—let alone tell him every damn thing we’ve considered as possible—”

  “I know,” she repeated. “I knew at the time you wouldn’t like it. But Griffin—”

  He held up a hand to cut her off and almost visibly counted silently to ten. Or twenty. Then he settled back in his chair and took a deep breath. “All I can say is that you’d better have a damned good reason. I’m not kidding, Joanna. Because if Scott had anything to do with Amber’s death, you could have just wrecked the case against him.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Oh? He told you that, I suppose?”

  “He didn’t have to.” Joanna smiled. “Griffin, I know it’ll madden you to hear this, but I know Scott didn’t have anything to do with Caroline’s death, or Amber’s. I have no proof to offer you. I just feel it.”

  Griffin closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “I’d like to see the judge’s face if you offered that as evidence,” he said.

  Joanna felt a bit cheered, because his voice was definitely milder than it had been these last few minutes. “Look, I have to follow my instincts, and they say he didn’t do it. Of course, I wasn’t sure of that until I actually sat there in his office and talked to him, but I knew I had to talk to him sooner or later, and I felt sooner was better. I just … I had to do something, and that seemed at the time to be the best thing.”

  Griffin sighed. “Did he tell you anything that might help us?”

  “Not really.” She thought about it for a minute, then shrugged. “I think I understand his relationship with his wife a little better now, but he doesn’t know why—or even if—Caroline was upset before she was killed. And I’ll swear he was completely surprised by the knowledge that her death might have been something other than an accident.”

  “He doesn’t have a good alibi for either of the deaths,” Griffin reminded her.

  “Maybe not, but yesterday when my car was tampered with, he was in Portland. All day, on business. With witnesses.”

  Griffin frowned, but said, “He could have hired someone to do it.”

  Joanna smiled. “In Atlanta and other big cities, you could practically look up Thugs-R-Us in the Yellow Pages, but here? Who could Scott hire to do that kind of job? Putting aside the fact that it’d have to be somebody he trusted enough, who’d be willing to do it?”

  “You have a point,” Griffin admitted.

  “And that’s not all. Why would Scott want me dead? Because I’ve been asking questions about Caroline? As far as I could tell, nothing I found out about Caroline would surprise him—or particularly disturb him. He knew her awfully well, Griffin.”

  “Okay,” Griffin said slowly. “I admit, the thought of Scott of all people waiting outside The Inn in the rain for you to come out boggled my mind. And nobody saw him anywhere around the hotel on Sunday. So consider him off my list, at least unless we find some evidence pointing his way.”

  “Good. Have you talked to Cain yet?”

  “No, dammit, he’s made himself scarce.”

  “Holly said he often goes off painting, sometimes for days,” Joanna said.

  “Yeah, it’s a habit of his. But I’ve had one of my deputies out all morning looking for him, and there hasn’t been a sign.”

  “You realize a number of the people around here are convinced he killed Amber?”

  Griffin nodded. “Another hazard of small towns; once gossip spreads, people tend to make up their minds quickly. I’m trying not to make the situation worse; my deputy isn’t asking anyone if they’ve seen Cain, he’s just cruising around town keeping his eyes open.”

  “So you’re stuck until he shows up?”

  “Or until I get desperate enough to put out an all points bulletin for him.”

  Joanna eyed him. “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “Oh yes I would. The mechanic’s reported in, Joanna—somebody did a fine job sabotaging your car. And Cain could have done it with his eyes closed; he spends as much time working on the engine of that little car of his as he does painting. I want to know where he was yesterday afternoon. I want to know where he was Sunday night when he claimed to be home alone. And I’m not going to wait much longer for those answers. Not with your life at stake.”

  “Somebody would have to be awfully dumb to try to kill me again,” she said reasonably. “Yesterday, okay; there was a strong possibility nobody suspected Amber was mistaken for me, so an attempt on my life might not have been connected. But yesterday’s attempt failed, and he can’t be sure you don’t suspect sabotage—which might logically make you wonder if somebody had wanted to kill me instead of Amber. Why would he risk another attempt, right away at least?”

  “You’re the one who said we’re running out of time,” Griffin reminded her. “Maybe he has some kind of deadline. Or maybe he’s just plain scared that you’ll discover his secret.”

  Joanna sighed and glanced down at the ragged fingernails that were clear evidence of nerves rather than effectiveness. “He shouldn’t worry. I don’t seem to be getting any closer to finding it.” She brooded for a moment while he watched her. “Without knowing who she was involved with when she died, I don’t even know where to begin looking for that secret.”

  “Well, in the meantime,” he said, “I’m following a different track. You said you believed our dead tourist last spring could have been the beginning of all this, so I’m having my people dig into his background. I told them to pay special attention to any connection, however tenuous, between Robert Butler and anyone here in Cliffside.” “That sounds like a good idea. Any luck yet?” “No. It’ll probably take at least a day or two, and I may even have to send someone down to San Francisco. But if there’s a connection there, I intend to know about it.” Nodding, Joanna said, “Maybe that’ll give us the key.” “Maybe.” He smiled at her. “But for now—are you rea
dy for lunch?”

  “Definitely. As long as you aren’t still mad at me?” “Of course I’m still mad at you,” he said, rising from his chair and coming around the desk to pull her up from hers. “If you don’t stop risking your neck the way you did this morning, I’m going to lock you in my jail.” He surrounded her face with his hands and kissed her.

  When she could breathe again, Joanna murmured, “How’re the beds in there?”

  “Lousy. And we’d shock my deputies. So don’t make me do that, okay?”

  She smiled at him. “I’ll be careful, I promise.”

  “Your idea of careful and mine,” he said, “appear to be miles and miles apart.”

  “We’ll argue about it over lunch,” she suggested.

  She ended up spending the remainder of the afternoon with Griffin in his office, mostly because she felt contrite about having upset him earlier. There was plenty to do. For the first time, he let her see all the paperwork on the Butler investigation, as well as Caroline’s death, and she was surprised at the amount of paper produced by a police investigation.

  The papers themselves, unfortunately, produced no surprises, at least not for her. As Griffin had told her, both deaths appeared to have been accidents, with absolutely no evidence pointing any other way.

  Information about Robert Butler began to come in toward the end of the day, but this first stuff at least didn’t seem to be useful to them. It was culled from public records, detailing where and when he was born, who his parents had been, where he had gone to school. There was nothing odd in the information, and definitely no connection to anyone in Cliffside.

  By five o’clock, Griffin called a halt and suggested to Joanna that they go back to his place. But Joanna said that since they weren’t being discreet, her hotel had certain amenities they would both appreciate. Like room service. If, that is, he thought he could walk across the lobby with his dignity intact.

  “Let’s go,” Griffin said.

  His bravery was wasted, since the lobby was deserted when they arrived, except for a desk clerk who didn’t even look up as they passed.