After Caroline (19 page)

Deciding to go downstairs for her morning coffee rather than call room service, she took a hot shower that failed to relax her, and dried her hair, leaving it loose this morning mostly because she was too jittery to do anything with it. Once or twice while she was using her loud dryer, she thought she heard that gull screaming again, and it occurred
to her that maybe what she was hearing was an emergency siren.

Accustomed to the sounds of sirens in Atlanta, she found the thought of them here oddly disconcerting. Even upsetting. Fire trucks? Ambulance? Griffin’s Blazer?

When she came out of the bathroom, she didn’t hear anything that sounded even vaguely like a siren, but got dressed quickly nonetheless. She put on jeans and a ribbed turtleneck sweater with a flannel shirt worn open, and laced up her walking shoes because she intended to get out of the hotel even if she had to walk in the rain.

It was only then that she went to her bedroom balcony and opened the doors to look outside.

It wasn’t raining, though the sky was gray and a brisk breeze was blowing in off the ocean, laden with moisture and salt. And though the surf pounded out there with its usual fury, it seemed oddly quiet. Joanna couldn’t see anyone on the veranda below, but to the north of The Inn, just off hotel grounds, there was quite a crowd.

A rescue vehicle. A fire truck and ambulance. Griffin’s Blazer.

She didn’t meet anyone at all in the hall or elevator, and the lobby was deserted when she hurried through it toward the veranda. At one side of the veranda, those hotel guests and staff members up early enough to be aware of what was happening were gathered together under the shelter of the roof, drinking coffee.

Joanna saw Holly and her assistant, Dana, standing with the group, both looking very subdued. Everybody looked very subdued. In fact, one woman seemed to be crying. Joanna started to head toward them, but then she caught sight of Griffin out at the edge of the hotel’s lawn.

The guests might have been warned to keep back, but Joanna didn’t care. She hurried across the veranda, down the steps, and onto the wet grass, her gaze fixed on him. He was wearing a long black rain slicker this morning but was bareheaded, unlike the deputies out near the edge of the cliff who wore broad-brimmed, plastic-covered hats with
their slickers. The stiff breeze ruffled his hair, and as she approached him, Joanna thought he looked tired and grim.

“Griffin?”

He half turned quickly, and though his expression didn’t change, something seemed to flare in the darkness of his eyes when he saw her. He didn’t move to meet her, but when she reached him, he rather surprisingly took one of her hands in his, the grip strong.

“What’s happened?” she asked.

“You shouldn’t be out here, Joanna,” he said quietly. “We’ve asked everyone to keep back.” But he didn’t release her hand.

“But what—”

“Griff?” A tall, rather thin man with wet dark hair approached them from the cliffs, his slicker flapping against his legs. Joanna had dimly been aware that he had just been pulled by rope up over the edge of the cliffs by rescue workers, and she thought he had been lowered the same way.

“Let’s have it, Doc,” Griffin said to him.

The doctor sent Joanna a look of faint surprise out of tired blue eyes, but then shook his head and said, “You saw what I did. What do you need me to tell you?”

“Was there any evidence she’d been drinking?”

She?
Joanna began to feel very cold.

“Griff, you know she had been soaked from the surf, so there wouldn’t have been a smell if she’d drunk gallons. I can’t tell about alcohol or drugs without lab tests.”

“How was she killed?”

The doctor glanced again at Joanna, then said flatly, “The fall killed her, unless I find something I’m not expecting in the post. Jesus, Griff, she fell about a hundred and thirty feet.”

“Was she pushed?” Griffin’s voice was unemotional.

Startled, the doctor said, “I don’t know. With all the damage from the fall, it’ll be difficult to find any evidence if she was. But I’ll look.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

The tall man lifted a hand in acknowledgment and turned back toward the cliffs, just as the men on the edge there began working the ropes again.

“Griffin? Who is it?” Joanna asked.

“I thought it was you at first,” he told her in that same unemotional voice, his grip on her hand tightening a bit. “But it’s a girl staying here. Amber Wade.”

Joanna turned her shocked gaze back to the cliffs in time to see a rescue basket hauled up over the rocks. The body strapped into it was wrapped completely in a fluorescent orange blanket, but from one end trailed long blond hair.

“
Y
OU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING
,” Cain said.

Griffin Sighed. “I’m doing my job, Cain. Answer the question.”

Cain glanced at Holly, who was sitting beside him at a table on The Inn’s veranda, then looked back at the sheriff, who was sitting across from them. “You’re asking me if I pushed that kid over the cliff?”

“I’m asking where you were from about eleven last night until seven this morning,” Griffin repeated. “Look, everybody knew she was after you. Her father said she could have slipped out last night after they thought she was asleep. Her room is separate from theirs, it has a private door opening onto the veranda, and she’s apparently slipped out before.”

“She didn’t come to see me,” Cain said. “Last night or any other night. For God’s sake, Griff, do you honestly believe I encouraged that poor kid? That I asked her to
meet me somewhere—while it was raining cats and dogs, let me remind you—and then killed her?”

“Where were you, Cain?”

“I was at home. At the cottage, all night.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, alone, damn you.”

Holly leaned forward. “Griff, surely it was an accident?”

He looked at her for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. If she had slipped, she would have fallen straight down. We found her so far out that she must have gone over with some force.”

“Then maybe she jumped.”

“It’s a possibility. Teenagers commit suicide every day, unfortunately.” He returned his steady gaze to Cain. “But I have to cover all the possibilities. Consider all the imaginable equations. And one of those is that somebody pushed her.”

Spacing every word for emphasis, Cain said, “It was not me.”

Holly was shaking her head. “You can’t think Cain would have hurt Amber. She had a crush, that’s all. A teenage crush, the kind we all had growing up. Even if anyone had considered that a problem—and no one
did
—she was leaving here with her parents in another week.”

“I’m not saying someone planned to kill her, Holly,” Griffin said. “It could have happened in a moment of rage.”

Cain stiffened, his vivid eyes fixed on the sheriff, and his voice was very quiet when he said, “Oh, now I get it. I lost my temper—once—and decked some guy acting like an asshole at one of my showings, and now I’m labeled as somebody who can’t control his rage.”

“You put him in the hospital, Cain,” Griffin observed just as quietly.

“He hit his head on the corner of a table when he fell.”

Griffin nodded. “I know that. And I doubt you’re any more likely to act out of rage than I am myself. But look at
this from my perspective. Everyone in this hotel—and half the people in Cliffside—knew how Amber felt about you, because she made it obvious. She did everything but hang around your neck whenever she was near you, and if you were here, she was somewhere nearby. Whether or not you encouraged her, she
could
have become a problem. I have to take that into account.”

“Fine,” Cain said. “But take this into account as well. I didn’t consider Amber a problem. She was a kid with a crush—period. It was easy enough for me to avoid any difficulty by not being alone with her, and that wasn’t hard at all. Ask Joanna, if you don’t believe me; she helped me out—it must have been Friday—when Amber paid me a visit at the cottage.”

“What was Joanna doing at the cottage?” Griffin asked before he could stop himself.

There was a sudden glint of amusement in Cain’s green eyes. “Want me to paint the heart on your sleeve so everybody can see it?”

“Answer the question, Cain.”

“She was just walking along the cliffs and stopped when she saw me working outside,” Cain told the sheriff dryly. “And she was nice enough to walk back here with us when Amber made an appearance.”

“I thought you said Amber didn’t slip out to meet you,” Griffin said.

Still a little amused, Cain wasn’t disturbed by that accusing statement. “That’s what I said, and what I meant. I never arranged to meet Amber anywhere at all, far less at the cottage. Friday was the second time she showed up there unannounced; the first time, I didn’t answer when she knocked on the door.”

Griffin nodded and got to his feet. He realized with annoyance that he was ending the interview not because he had no more questions and was satisfied with Cain’s answers, but because he was uncomfortable beneath the other man’s perceptive scrutiny.
Heart on my sleeve. The son of a bitch
.

“Griff?” Holly hesitated, then went on carefully. “I came up behind Joanna the other day, and until she turned around, I thought she was Amber.”

It didn’t surprise Griffin. When he had first glimpsed that broken body on the jagged rocks, blond hair streaming out…

“Something else to add to your equation?” Cain mused soberly.

“Yeah,” Griffin said. “Something else.”
And it’s not adding up, Goddammit, it’s just not adding up
. “If either of you remembers anything that might be important, let me know.”

“We will,” Holly said. She watched him turn away and walk out toward the end of the veranda, obviously heading toward the cliffs directly behind The Inn, where Joanna stood alone at the railing and looked out to sea.

“Do you really think somebody might have thought they were pushing Joanna to her death?” Cain asked her.

She looked at him and sighed. “It hardly makes sense either way, does it? I can’t imagine why anyone would have wanted to murder Amber—or Joanna.”

“But you think Joanna would be more likely?”

“I don’t know.” Holly frowned. “Maybe. It’s just … well, Amber was only a tourist, a kid who hadn’t really lived long enough to make enemies, if you know what I mean. She might have jumped, but who would have pushed her? Joanna, on the other hand…”

When her voice trailed off, Cain continued in a reflective tone. “Joanna turns up here, apparently just another tourist. But she looks eerily like a woman who was killed here a few months ago. And she’s been asking a lot of questions about that woman. And maybe … somebody didn’t like her questions?”

Holly felt a little chill at hearing her own reluctant thoughts voiced aloud. “Which would indicate—what? That Caroline’s death wasn’t an accident?”

Cain was frowning now, his gaze turned inward in a way Holly recognized; he always wore that look, she had
learned, when he was listening to whatever inner voice drove him to paint.

“Maybe so,” he said at last, slowly. “If Joanna was the intended victim rather than Amber, then it almost has to be connected to Caroline in some way. Because Joanna hasn’t been making enemies around here, not that I know of. Certainly nobody’s expressed the desire to get rid of her. So … what’s wrong with this picture?” He brooded a moment. “What stands out in all this, what can’t really be explained away, is Joanna’s resemblance to Caroline, and the way she’s been asking questions about her. As if she came here specifically to find out about Caroline.”

“Did you hear about Dylan and Lyssa?” Holly asked him.

Cain nodded. “About them seeing Joanna in Atlanta, yeah. Very odd that she turned up here not long after that. Difficult to explain away as coincidence.”

“How could it be anything else? Dylan said she couldn’t have found out where he and Lyssa were from.”

“Sure she could have,” Cain objected. “If she was curious enough, she probably could have followed one or the other of them back to their hotel without being seen. And desk clerks have been known to provide information for enough bucks.”

“I never thought of that, but you’re right, of course. Do you think Griffin’s thought of it?”

“Of course he has. Our small-town sheriff is nobody’s fool—and he’s a born cop, even setting aside his well-known trait of hating unanswered questions. I don’t know what Joanna’s told him, but you can bet he doesn’t believe in the seeming coincidence of her showing up here when she looks so much like Caroline. And I can’t say I’d blame him for wondering. It’s beginning to bother me a lot.”

Holly considered the question for a moment. “Why
would
she have come all this way if it was deliberate? Just out of curiosity? Because two strangers called her by another woman’s name?”

“No, there has to be more to it.” Cain frowned.
“Maybe I should ask her to pose for me. People talk about the damnedest things while they’re being painted.”

What did Caroline talk about?
Holly wanted to ask the question, but didn’t. Instead, she said, “Griff won’t be happy with either one of us if we stick our noses into his investigation.”