After Caroline (2 page)

“C
AROLINE?
”

It wasn’t the hand on her shoulder that made Joanna Flynn turn; it was the utter astonishment in the voice that had called her by another woman’s name. Astonishment and something else, something she sensed more than heard. Whatever the emotion was, it prompted Joanna to respond.

“No,” she said. Then, driven by something she saw in the man’s face, she added, “I’m sorry.”

He, a fairly nondescript man with reddish blond hair and blue eyes that were only now losing the expression of shock, took his hand from her shoulder and nodded a bit jerkily. “No,” he agreed, “you couldn’t be. …
I’m
sorry. Sorry. But you look so much like—” He stopped, shook his head. He offered her a polite, forgive-me-for-bothering-you smile and brushed past her to keep walking.

Joanna watched him striding away and felt vaguely troubled without even knowing why. People were mistaken
for other people all the time, she knew that, and just because it had never happened to her before was no reason to let it bother her now. But she couldn’t seem to get his shocked expression out of her mind.

She stood there on the virtually deserted Atlanta sidewalk in the hot September sunlight for much longer than she should have, gazing after the stranger she could no longer see, before she finally managed to shake off her uneasiness enough to continue on toward the private library where she worked as a researcher.

It was just another odd thing, that was all. Just another item to note in the column of her life reserved for strange occurrences—the column that had been filling up with items since her accident two months before.

Some of the items were minor ones. Her restlessness, very unusual for her. The vague but increasingly strong sense of urgency she felt. Her anxiety, churning within her for no reason she could pinpoint.

But the biggest item was the dream. It had begun the very night of her accident, and though it had been sporadic those first few weeks, it was a nightly occurrence now. Always the same, it presented a sequence of images and sounds, always in the same order. It was not a nightmare; there was nothing innately terrifying about the images or how they were presented. Yet Joanna woke each morning with her heart pounding and a sense of fear clogging her throat.

Something, somewhere, was wrong. She knew it. She
felt
it. Something was wrong, and she had to do something about it. Because if she didn’t … something terrible would happen.

She didn’t know what, but she knew it would be something terrible.

It was so damned vague, it was maddening. So vague that it should have been easy to dismiss as nothing more than the distorted but unimportant ramblings of the unconscious mind. Joanna had never paid much attention to
her dreams, and she wanted to be able to ignore this one as easily. But she couldn’t.

Her doctor said that odd dreams were to be expected. After all, she had suffered a blast of electricity strong enough to stop her heart. The brain was filled with electrical impulses, and it made sense that those impulses could have been scrambled by thousands of volts from a power line. He was sure there was nothing for her to worry about.

Joanna just wished she was as sure.

The roar of the ocean was deafening at first, smothering all other sounds. The house, perched high above the sea, was beautiful and lonely and awoke in her a confusing jumble of feelings. Admiration, pride, and satisfaction clashed with uneasiness and fear. She wanted to concentrate on the emotions, to understand them, but felt herself abruptly pulled back away from the house. It receded into the distance and grew hazy. Then a brightly colored carousel horse passed in front of her, bobbing and turning on its gleaming brass pole, as if to music she couldn’t hear. She smelled roses and from the corner of her eye caught a glimpse of the flowers in a vase. Then the roar of the sea abruptly died down until the loud ticking of a clock could be heard. She walked past a colorful painting on an easel, her steps quickening because she had to … get somewhere. She had to … find … something. She heard sobs, and tried to run forward
—

Joanna sat bolt upright in bed, her arms reaching out, her heart pounding against her ribs. She was shaking, and her breath rasped from her tight throat. And inside her was pain and a terrible grief, and over everything else lay a cold, black pall of fear.

Her arms slowly fell while she tried to calm down. The fear and pain and grief faded slowly, leaving only the familiar uneasiness behind, and Joanna tried to reassure herself. It was a dream. Just a dream.

But the dream had changed, and its impact on Joanna had changed as well. The sense of fear had been a part of
the dream all along, but this time there had been more. The grief was new, and the pain, and what she had felt while the dream had played out before her, the overwhelming feelings of anxiety and urgency, that was different, too, so powerful now that she couldn’t even try to ignore what she felt.

More than ever, she was certain there was something she had to do. She didn’t know what it was, but the urgency was so strong that she actually threw back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She hesitated for a moment when she realized what she was doing, then went ahead and got up. It was morning anyway—albeit very early morning. Five-thirty.

In the kitchen of her small apartment, she put coffee on, then wandered into the living room and turned on a couple of lamps. It was a pleasant room, with comfortable overstuffed furniture and an eclectic collection of knickknacks from all over the world. Aunt Sarah had loved to travel, and every summer she had packed up her niece and jetted off to some remote corner of the globe.

Joanna’s friends had always envied her her Aunt Sarah, who had certainly not been a conventional parent. And Joanna had enjoyed her unorthodox upbringing. But in a small, secret corner of her heart, she had envied her friends, because all of them had a mother and father.

She wandered over to the cold fireplace and, with her index finger, traced the edge of a silver-framed photo of her Aunt Sarah that was on the mantel. The shrewd eyes gazed out at her, and the warm smile stirred memories, and Joanna felt disloyal somehow for the childish idea that her aunt had not been enough, that her childhood had been missing something vitally important.

Still touching her aunt’s photo, Joanna turned her gaze to the other silver-framed picture on the mantel. Her parents. Her mother had been younger than she was now when the photo had been taken. Fair and delicate, she stood in the protective shelter of her husband’s arm, her smile glowing. Lucy Flynn had married her childhood
sweetheart, and had been head over heels in love with him until the day she died. One of Joanna’s most enduring memories was of the sound of her mother’s voice speaking softly to her husband and calling him “darling.”

As for Alan Flynn, what Joanna remembered most about him was his laugh, deep and contented. He had adored his wife and child, a fact neither had questioned. He had always been there, for both of them, never too busy or too preoccupied by his job as an attorney to spend time with his family.

Joanna reached over to touch the silver frame holding her parents’ picture and wondered, as she had so many times before, what would have happened if a judge’s illness had not given her father time off on that sunny June morning. Time to happily gather up his wife and take her sailing in their small craft. She wondered why fate had placed her far away that day, gone with Aunt Sarah on an impulsive trip to Disney World. She wondered why the weather service had not warned of a storm coming or, if it had warned, why her father had not taken heed. She wondered why he, an expert and experienced sailor, had been unable to bring the little boat safely back to shore.

With a little shock, Joanna realized that it had been twenty years.

She was roused from her thoughts by the coffeemaker hissing as it completed its cycle, and she turned away from the mantel and her memories. The dream had left her in an odd mood, she decided. That was all, just an odd mood.

But she was more uneasy than ever as she went to fix herself the first cup of coffee of the day, because the feelings she remembered from that tragedy of her childhood had not felt so strong since then as they did on this quiet morning. She felt pain, grief, wordless anger. She felt bereft, abandoned. It was as if something had ripped open an old, old wound inside her, and Joanna felt as raw and adrift as she had felt on that June evening when Aunt Sarah had held her and cried.

As if it had happened again.

The first week in September passed, then the second. Joanna managed to keep up a good facade, she thought, but inside, her nerves were jangling. The dream came nightly, and with it the anxiety she couldn’t shake, the sense that something was very, very wrong. More than once, she caught herself looking up from her work and listening intently, almost straining to hear something, and yet with no idea what it was she tried so hard to hear.

And then there were the other things. Odd things she couldn’t explain. Like why a child sobbing in a grocery store because its mother wouldn’t allow candy suddenly had the power to yank at her emotions. And why a whiff of cigarette smoke awoke in her an urge to inhale deeply. And why she began wearing skirts more often than slacks, when she had always disliked skirts. And why she felt a jolt of surprise whenever she looked in a mirror, as if what she saw wasn’t quite right.

She felt like a pressure cooker, the force inside her building and building until she could hardly bear it, until it was dangerous, until she knew she had to do something about it. But she didn’t know
what
to do, and the frustration of that ate at her. It wasn’t until the middle of September that the dream haunting her offered a clue.

The roar of the ocean was deafening at first, smothering all other sounds. The house, perched high above the sea, was beautiful and lonely and awoke in her a confusing fumble of feelings. Admiration, pride, and satisfaction clashed with uneasiness and fear. She wanted to concentrate on the emotions, to understand them, but felt herself abruptly pulled back away from the house. It receded into the distance and grew hazy. Then a brightly colored carousel horse passed in front of her, bobbing and turning on its gleaming brass pole, as if to music she couldn’t hear. She smelled roses and from the corner of her eye caught a glimpse of the flowers in a vase. Then the roar of the sea abruptly died down until the loud ticking of a clock could
be heard. A paper airplane soared and dipped, riding a breeze she couldn’t feel. She walked past a colorful painting on an easel, her steps quickening because she had to … get somewhere. She had to … find … something. She heard sobs, a child’s sobs, and tried to run forward, but she couldn’t move—and then she saw the signpost, and she knew where she had to go
—

Joanna woke to find herself sitting bolt upright in bed, her arms outstretched and her heart pounding painfully. Slowly, her arms dropped, and in the silence of the dark bedroom, she heard herself whisper a single word.