After Caroline (16 page)

“I thought it had to be you,” Dylan York said as he reached them. “When I got back home this morning, and everybody was talking about you, said you were Southern—”

“Have you two met?” Griffin asked with stony control.

“Not exactly,” Joanna murmured.

Dylan stuck out his hand and introduced himself, adding to Griffin, “I saw her in Atlanta, Griff. Lyssa and I both saw her within a week. And both of us called out Caroline’s name without thinking—it was such a shock, you know? Of course, we got hold of ourselves pretty quick, but it was really unnerving. Nice to meet you, Joanna, believe me; I had half convinced myself you were a figment of my imagination.”

“I’m … glad to be real,” she told him with one of her brief smiles.

“It can’t be an accident you’re in Cliffside, Joanna,” he said, finally releasing her hand. “Do you mind if I call you Joanna?”

“Of course not.” She had not looked at him, Griffin realized, since that first guilty glance.

“Good, I’m Dylan. Lyssa’s not going to believe this. We both work for Scott McKenna, you know.”

“So I heard,” Joanna said. “As for why I’m here … let’s just say I was curious.”

He frowned. “I’ll buy that, but how did you know where to go? I mean, neither Lyssa nor I told you Caroline’s last name or mentioned this town at all. And you didn’t know who we were, since we didn’t bother to introduce ourselves. Neither of us said much to you beyond Caroline’s name before we bolted. So how did you know to come to Cliffside?”

That’s the best question I’ve heard lately
. Griffin waited for her to answer it, and he wasn’t surprised when she managed to avoid doing so.

“Don’t you believe in fate, Dylan? I’m beginning to.” She smiled.

Obviously charmed by the smile, Dylan said, “I’ve never really thought about it, but—”

“Sometimes the place you end up in by accident is the very place you were meant to visit,” she said lightly. “I have a friend who claims there are patterns in life, and that sometimes we get caught up in them. I guess that’s what I’m doing here.”

“Okay,” Dylan said, clearly baffled. “But how did you—”

He hadn’t intended to say anything to get her off the hook, but Griffin heard himself ask, “Dylan, is that your car parked across two spaces? What’s wrong with you?”

“Hell, Griff, I saw Joanna and—”

“Joanna isn’t leaving Cliffside today, you know; you can talk to her later. But if one of my people drives by and sees you parked illegally—”

“Okay, okay. I
do
want to talk to you later, Joanna.”

“Anytime,” she said.

Griffin watched the other man lift a hand and head back toward his car. Then, not particularly giving a damn what anyone thought, he put his hands on Joanna’s shoulders, turned her to face him fully, and said, “Let’s have it, Joanna.” He knew his voice was harsh, and he probably looked mad as hell, but he didn’t give a damn about that, either. Right now, all he cared about was getting a few answers.

She shook her head slightly with a rueful look. “You know, I knew it made sense that the two people who called me Caroline in Atlanta
had
to be from Cliffside. Had to live here. Must have known her. And just happened to be in Atlanta for some reason. It made sense. In fact, it was the only thing that made sense. And that meant, of course, that eventually they’d have to come home. I was just sort of hoping it wouldn’t be quite this soon.”

Griffin shook her, and he didn’t try to be gentle about it.
“Goddammit, Joanna, I want to know what you’re doing here!”

“I told you what I’m doing here. I’m on vacation and I’m finding out about Caroline.” Her voice was steady, and her gaze met his calmly. “Want to call the library where I work and ask them if I’m on vacation? I’ll give you my boss’s name.”

He didn’t let her distract him. “You came here deliberately, didn’t you? You came here knowing you looked like a dead woman.”

She hesitated, but finally nodded. “Yes, I knew I looked like Caroline after Dylan and Lyssa mistook me for her. And—I found out she’d been killed. That’s one of the reasons I came.”

He stared down at her, trying to understand this. “How did you know who Caroline was, where she was from? How did you find out she’d been killed?”

Joanna glanced around as if she felt the weight of watching eyes, then looked back at him. She didn’t seem so calm now. She seemed uneasy, guarded. “I … found out.”

“How?”

“Newspapers, public records.”

“Joanna, if all you knew was the name Caroline, how in hell could you find out anything more?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she said.

“Try me.”

Joanna lifted her chin. “All right, dammit. I started having the same dream, over and over. And in that dream, I saw a signpost, and the sign said Cliffside. And when I finally managed to track down Cliffside, I saw her picture in a newspaper and Caroline’s obituary. That’s when I decided to come here.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked slowly, not at all sure he was believing any of this.

“Tell you what? That I came three thousand miles to find out all I could about a dead woman because we looked alike and because—”

“Because?”

She drew a breath. “Because, as near as I can figure, Caroline and I died on the same day. But I was luckier than she was. They brought me back. And that night, I had the first dream about Cliffside.”

T
HE SAT BACK
in the visitor’s chair in his office and said, “What’s everybody going to think? That you’re arresting me?” Not that she really cared, and she doubted he did.

“It was the closest private place I could think of,” he said, repeating what he’d told her when he had marched her in here nearly fifteen minutes ago. The door was closed, and so far they hadn’t been disturbed by deputies or anyone else.

“You’ve just started a new round of gossip,” she told him.
I’ll bet
nobody
talks to me after this
. “You looked very fierce out there.”

“I think I had a damned good reason to look mad as hell.” His voice was still harsh.

“And I’ve said I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you all the truth before now, but I just didn’t want to sound like a lunatic.” She eyed him thoughtfully, frowning. “And since I think you’re still reserving judgment on that question, I was probably right to keep quiet.”

“I don’t know what I think.” Griffin shook his head without smiling. “It’s the wildest thing I’ve ever heard, Joanna. Just the incredible coincidence of you and Caroline looking so much alike and being involved in car accidents three thousand miles apart at roughly the same time—”

“Exactly the same time,” Joanna insisted firmly. “You say the doctor couldn’t determine the exact time Caroline died, that it was somewhere between noon and one o’clock that day. I was wearing a watch when that power line hit the car, and my watch—like my heart—stopped at three thirty-five. That’s twelve thirty-five Pacific time.” She would have said more, but stopped because of the look of surprise on his face. “What?”

Griffin cleared his throat. “Caroline was wearing a watch. There were no signs of damage from the accident, so we couldn’t use it for time of death, but … it had stopped at twelve thirty-five.”

Joanna laced her fingers together in her lap and looked down at them for a moment, then returned her gaze to Griffin’s face. It wasn’t so unexpected, yet she still felt shock at having it verified. She and Caroline really
bad
died at the same moment. “I couldn’t have known that,” she pointed out carefully. “It wasn’t in any of the newspaper articles.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

She nodded. “So. Caroline and I looked alike, we were born three days apart, and twenty-nine years later we both had a car accident the same day. I survived my accident without a scratch—but a power line damaged in the crash fell on the car, and I was electrocuted at three thirty-five. Very possibly the exact moment of Caroline’s death. The paramedics brought me back. Caroline wasn’t so lucky.”

“And you started having the dream that night?”

Joanna had already described the dream to him, and so nodded again. “That night. By the time it had been going on for weeks, I had to do something about it.” She hadn’t mentioned her strange compulsion about coming to this place, the overwhelming urgency, and didn’t now. Griffin
already thought she was off her rocker; there was no need to confirm that. “It was when I was trying to find Cliffside that for the second time in Atlanta, someone—Lyssa Maitland, I assume—called out Caroline’s name when she saw me. After that, I found Caroline’s obituary, and…”

“And decided to come out here. Because of a dream.”

“Because of everything.”

“Do you honestly believe Caroline is communicating with you from beyond death?”

Despite her own uncertainties on that score, Joanna felt her teeth grind together at the open skepticism in his voice. “I don’t know what’s beyond death. Maybe there’s nothing. Before July first, that’s what I thought, that death was just the end. I didn’t believe there was anything, any kind of existence after death. I don’t know what I believe now, not about that. Maybe it isn’t even about that. Maybe … maybe there was just some kind of weird resonance between her and me, a connection because of all the similarities. Maybe each of us does have a double in the world, and maybe we’re joined to those doubles in some way we’ll never understand.
I don’t know
. All I know is that on July first, I made it back from something we call death, and she didn’t. And I know that if we weren’t connected before that day, we somehow touched each other that day. In that moment. And I can’t explain any of this any better than that,
Sheriff.”

If the cold dislike in her voice bothered him, he didn’t show it. “But you think she wanted something of you?”

“I think she was afraid. I think she was in a lot of pain a long time before that car went over the cliffs. I think there’s something wrong here in your pretty little town.” Joanna drew a breath. “And I can’t show you a shred of evidence proving any of that, either.”

Griffin shook his head, but said, still with open skepticism, “Say you’re right. Say Caroline was afraid of something, that she was unhappy. She’s gone, Joanna. Nothing that you or I could do is going to bring her back. So what
do you hope to accomplish by trying to find out about her now?”

“Something’s wrong here,” she repeated deliberately. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t know who it involves. I don’t know why I can’t just pack my bags and walk away from it. All I do know is that I have to be here, and I have to try to understand who Caroline was, what her life was. I don’t have a choice about that.”

“We all have choices,” Griffin told her roughly.

“About some things. Not about this. I haven’t felt so strongly about anything in my entire life. I’m sorry you don’t understand.”

“How can I understand? You’re talking about subjective things here. Feelings, senses, beliefs. There’s not one thing in all this that I can hold in my hand and say, ‘Yeah, this is real.’”

Joanna leaned forward, planted her elbows on his desk, and said, “I’m here. I’m real. Explain that.”

As much as he would have liked to, Griffin could offer no other explanation for her presence here except an incredible string of coincidences—and if he offered that one, he’d be calling her a liar. Something he hardly wanted to do. The fact remained that if she had indeed come here deliberately,
something
had helped narrow her search for Caroline. Otherwise he didn’t believe she could ever have found this small town. He would check out her story, of course, as far as he could, but unless Joanna had excited some undue attention in getting here—like laying a heavy bribe on Dylan and Lyssa’s hotel manager, for instance—he doubted he’d find anything to either confirm or disprove what she claimed.

“All right,” he said finally, hearing the reluctance in his own voice. “I’ll accept that you came here because of a signpost in a dream. I don’t like it, but I’ll accept it. I’ll even accept that you believe there’s something wrong here, or was. You’ve been talking to people about Caroline for days now; have you found even a hint of anything wrong?”

Joanna hesitated, wanting to ask him if he’d warned the
townspeople not to talk to her. But she wasn’t quite ready to ask that question. Maybe because she didn’t want to hear the answer.

“No, not really. Vague things, but nothing you could hold in your hand. Regan thinks her mother was afraid, but you don’t have to tell me that poor kid’s swimming in grief. There’ve been a few things said about Caroline that bugged me, but nothing drastic. Maybe she didn’t have a great marriage, and maybe she wasn’t close to many people around here, but she seems to have loved her daughter and she seems to have had a busy life.”

“Well, then?”

“Don’t ask me to be logical,” she told him, trying not to sound as tense and defensive as she felt. “I can’t be. But I’m sure there’s an answer here—I just haven’t found it yet. Probably because I’m not looking in the right place.” She paused, then leaned back in her chair and said slowly, reluctantly, “And then there’s you.”