After Caroline (26 page)

“Jesus,” he said softly. “They said you looked like her, but…”

It had been a few days since Joanna had encountered shock at her appearance, so she was taken aback for a moment. But just a moment. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Joanna Flynn.”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I know. Uh—sorry for staring, but—”

It was Joanna’s turn to nod. “It’s okay, this has been happening to me for a week now.”

“You don’t sound like her,” he murmured, then shook his head and shifted his shoulders as though throwing off something bothersome. “I’m Adam Harrison. I manage the greenhouse.”

She shook hands with him, then nodded toward the rosebush. “I was just admiring all of them, but especially this one. And I couldn’t help but be curious about the name. If I remember correctly, roses are named by whoever creates them. Do you happen to know who created this one?”

“I did,” he said. “When we opened this place a few years ago, I promised Scott that I’d name the first new plant we developed for Caroline.” He shrugged slightly. “So that’s what I did. She was the inspiration, after all.”

“So it’s true that he went into the greenhouse business because Caroline loved roses?” Joanna asked.

Adam Harrison smiled as though he found the subject somehow amusing. “Yeah, it’s true. When they were first married, he sent all the way to Portland for roses a couple of times a week. But sometimes they were hard to find, or the variety wasn’t good. So he decided Cliffside needed a plant nursery, and brought me up from San Francisco to run it. I’d done some work for his family there, so he knew what he’d be getting.”

Another one from San Francisco
.

“I see.” Joanna couldn’t be sure how deeply she could or should probe with this man, but she felt an odd sense of urgency to keep going, to keep asking questions. Because she had dreamed of roses and now found one named for Caroline here, she assumed. Because somehow this place—or perhaps this man—was important in her search for information about Caroline and her death. Otherwise, why would the vase of roses have been a part of the dream? “You seem to find that amusing, Mr. Harrison.”

“Adam. Miss Flynn, I find it a scream.”

She blinked in surprise at his sardonic tone. “Uh—call me Joanna, please. Forgive me, but—you didn’t like Caroline?”

He looked at her for a moment as though weighing her curiosity. Not guarded, as so many others had been, just thoughtful. “I heard you were asking questions about her. Mind telling me why?”

Joanna hesitated, but then, as she so often had since arriving in Cliffside, and, really, for most of her life, she followed her instincts. “Because I look like her. Because ever since I got here, people have assumed things about me, things Caroline would have found familiar. I … need to know who she was, what she was like. I need to know more than just her favorite color or the perfume she wore.”

He nodded, then shrugged as if the subject hardly interested him. “Makes sense. Okay, then—I’m in the minority, I know, but no, I didn’t like Caroline. For all her sweet smiles and soft voice, she was a cruel, destructive woman who did whatever was necessary to get what she wanted, and she didn’t care who she hurt.”

Joanna heard bitterness in his voice, a lot of it, and it didn’t take intuition to tell her a likely reason for it. “So what was it she wanted from you?”

He let out a short laugh. “Complicity. She got it too.”

“Complicity in what?” Joanna asked, not sure he’d be willing to tell her that much. But whether it was because she looked so much like the woman he had such strong feelings about or because he had held it all inside him for too long, it was obvious he wasn’t going to stop talking now.

“Cheating on Scott. She needed a place to meet her lover, you see, a place unlikely to cause her problems. And I have no doubt she enjoyed the irony of doing it here—a place her husband built for love of her.”

Joanna hardly knew what to say. The picture he was drawing was not of the woman so many others in this town had seen, and so she had to believe his view was either twisted by his own emotions or else that only he had seen an ugly side of Caroline’s personality—which seemed unlikely but not impossible, depending on just how well he
had known her. And Joanna had a very good idea how well he had known her.

“The office has a back room,” Adam went on flatly, as if he saw or sensed her doubt, “used mostly for storing the supplies we’ve no space for out front. She kept a blanket there on an old cot of mine and came here to meet her lover a few times a week.”

The storage room of the greenhouse—
and
the old barn? It felt wrong to Joanna, and so she asked, “You mean before Caroline was killed she came here several times a week?”

Adam shook his head. “No, not then. It was about a year ago. Only lasted a few weeks, but hell, cheating is cheating, as far as I’m concerned. She wanted to hurt Scott, that was her reason. Wanted to use this place to hurt him.”

“And did she? Hurt Scott?”

Adam let out another short laugh. “You see, Joanna, the problem with Caroline was, she was a coward. Couldn’t stand confrontations. So even though she wanted to hurt Scott, she wasn’t brave enough to tell him about her affairs. I don’t know, maybe just having them satisfied a sick need inside her, that secret knowledge that other men were getting what was rightfully his. Maybe that was what she got off on.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I doubt she ever told him. Probably expected her lover to after she’d finished with him. Probably figured he’d be mad enough to want to get even with her after she’d dumped him.”

Joanna asked the question quietly. “And did you?”

He didn’t seem surprised by her perception. “No.” His voice was flat, his face wearing a faint smile that held no amusement. “But maybe one of the others did. I was only one of many, I knew that. I asked her once if she always bedded her lovers in dingy back rooms or cheap motels because of the contrast between that and her husband’s fine house on the cliffs. She laughed.”

Questions swirled around in Joanna’s mind, and she chose one at random. “Why did it end?”

“Because she got tired of me. Because it didn’t excite her
anymore. Because I couldn’t satisfy her. Because she was ready to move on to the next lover. Take your pick.”

“And you weren’t tempted to tell Scott?”

Adam’s sardonic amusement faded, and he looked away from Joanna at the rose named after his onetime lover. He took a step toward it and almost unconsciously reached out a hand to gently groom the plant, removing a dying petal. “I was tempted. If it had only been a matter of getting back at Caroline, I would have. But I like Scott, and I owe him a lot.” Those pale blue eyes, miserable now, shifted their attention back to Joanna. “That’s why she picked me, you see. It wasn’t just this place she wanted to use to hurt him—it was me too. I was his friend, and I betrayed him as surely as she did.” His mouth twisted.

After a moment, Joanna couldn’t help but say, “You talk as if you were helpless in her toils.”

He shook his head immediately. “No, I don’t claim the affair was all her fault. Hell, she didn’t rape me. Didn’t even seduce me. She just saw I wanted her and she offered, the way you’d offer somebody a ride in your car if you saw them with their thumb sticking up.”

It was only then that Joanna understood the truth. Adam Harrison didn’t hate Caroline, or at least didn’t
only
hate her. He loved her. Even now, more than three months after her death and a year after their affair, he loved her. He was bitter because she hadn’t felt the same way about him, but the bitterness hadn’t destroyed his feelings for her, only twisted them into complex and obviously agonizing knots. He was torn with guilt about having betrayed Scott, but if Caroline hadn’t broken it off, Joanna had no doubt they’d still be using that “dingy” back room.

It also made his willingness to talk to Joanna so immediately and frankly more understandable, she thought. Because she so resembled the woman he couldn’t forget, the information he offered so voluntarily was almost in the nature of a confession.

Joanna wasn’t a priest, able or willing to offer him absolution—and she wasn’t Caroline. Her knowledge of his turbulent
feelings for Caroline made her uncomfortable, made her look away from him as one would look away from something too naked to be seen by a stranger.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Roughly, he said, “Goddammit, don’t you pity me too!”

She braced herself inwardly and looked at him again, relieved to see only his anger rather than his anguish. “I’m not Caroline,” she said very deliberately. “I’m just a woman who looks a bit like her, a woman who’s curious about her life.”

“And her death?”

Joanna’s inner debate lasted only a few seconds, and she couldn’t have said what it was that made her certain this man had not been involved in Caroline’s death. His aching misery, perhaps, or just her own instincts. All she knew was that her dream had brought her here, to him, and she had to get whatever information he had to give her.

“Yes,” she said. “And her death.”

“It was an accident,” Adam said. “Everybody says so.”

“You don’t sound so sure.” Joanna studied him thoughtfully. “Why?”

He shrugged. “Oh, I think it was an accident—in a manner of speaking. It seems clear she was driving that car, and that she was alone. But I think something was bad wrong the last couple weeks of Caroline’s life, that she was worried and she was scared.”

“Why do you think that?”

“She came by here three or four days before the accident—and she
never
came by here, not since we stopped using that room behind the office. She had something on her mind, that was obvious. She couldn’t be still, kept wandering around the greenhouses like she was looking for something, smoking like a chimney. And she’d bitten her nails down to the quick, I saw that.”

Almost unconsciously, Joanna slipped her hands into her pockets to hide her own ragged nails. “She didn’t tell you why she was upset?”

A bit of his earlier misery crept back into Adam’s pale
eyes, and he shook his head. “No. I didn’t give her the chance, to be honest. There were customers here when she arrived, and when they left, I … hell, I sort of let it rip, if you know what I mean. I said something sarcastic about royalty visiting the peons, and then I really got nasty. She could hardly get a word in, and I was sure as hell in no mood to listen.”

“Was that the first time you’d seen her since…”

“Since she stopped taking naps on my cot? Yeah, first time since then we’d been alone. Guess I’d bottled up a few things and had to let ’em out.”

Joanna nodded. “So she left without telling you what was bothering her.”

He nodded. “God knows why she came to me if it was help she needed. You’d think she would have realized I was still raw and pretty much hated her guts. I mean, wouldn’t any man after the way she’d treated me? She should have expected that. Why didn’t she expect that?”

It was a rhetorical question, and one filled with guilt. Joanna had heard the same emotion in Griffin’s voice, and for much the same reason. She had to wonder if all the men in Caroline’s life had felt guilty because they hadn’t been there for her at the end. And wondered even more if that had been Caroline’s fault. Certainly Adam had loved her, and Griffin might well have for all his denials, yet neither of the men had gone out of their way to help her when she might have needed them most. The way Adam talked, there had been other affairs, other men; had there been? And had she gone to other past lovers in the last days of her life, seeking their help for some problem she dared not confide in her husband, only to find that she had used them up so completely that none of them had been able to find for her even enough caring to offer a shoulder or a willing ear?

“You probably couldn’t have changed what happened,” she told Adam, not certain of that but knowing it was what he needed to hear.

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “I keep telling myself it was her
own fault. You can’t treat people like dirt and then expect them to treat you better.”

“Most of the people around here seemed to have liked Caroline,” Joanna noted neutrally. “Or, at least, had nothing bad to say about her.”

“Oh, sure, she could be sweet as honey when she wanted to—it was her public face, as a matter of fact. What most people saw. But I’ll bet you haven’t found any close friends, especially women. Caroline didn’t like other women. She was polite enough, of course—raised that way. Very civic-minded, too, always working for the good of the town. And she worshiped that kid of hers, no doubt about that.”

After a moment, Joanna said, “So, when you say she treated people like dirt, you mean she treated men that way?”

For the first time, Adam seemed hesitant. “Some men. I know of at least one other man in Cliffside she turned inside out, and I’ll bet there are others. She was … too sure of herself and her power, too casual when it ended, for a woman who wasn’t used to dumping lovers.”

Joanna accepted that opinion with a grain of salt; he was nowhere near objective about Caroline, and a discarded lover was probably not the best person to judge whether she made it a habit to cheat on her husband. Still, the opinion and feelings of at least one other discarded lover might either confirm or contradict what Adam believed of Caroline. And that other lover might have been the one Caroline met in the old barn, possibly right up until her death.

“Will you tell me who that other man is?” she asked him slowly. “I’d like to talk to him.”

Adam was shaking his head. “I don’t think I should, Joanna. His reputation here in town is a lot more important to him than mine is to me.”

Joanna felt a twinge of uneasiness, wondering if it was the sheriff’s reputation he didn’t want to harm. And wondering if she was ready to hear it if that was true.
Oh God
,
why does it keep coming back to Griffin? Why can’t I believe he didn’t love her?

In any case, she didn’t know if she could—or should—convince Adam she could be trusted not to talk about what she found out, so instead asked, “How did you find out about them?”

“He told me. When she dumped him, he got a little drunk and needed somebody to talk to. We’re friends, so he came looking for me.” Adam’s mouth twisted bitterly. “It was months before I got involved with her, so I can’t say I wasn’t warned.”