After Caroline (3 page)

“Cliffside.”

Like a weird movie signpost, crooked letters on an old splintered board.
Cliffside
. It wasn’t very much to go on. There were probably hundreds, if not thousands, of towns bearing that name in the United States alone.

But a research librarian had the tools and knowledge to sift through all the possibilities, and Joanna wasted no time beginning what she expected to be a lengthy search. Luckily, her workload was light at the moment, and so she was able to spend hours at the computer and microfiche machine.

It was a customary part of her job, spending hours combing through information, and Joanna was glad. Not only because it made her task easier, but because she could search for a dream signpost without arousing any undue suspicion. No one around her could possibly guess what was going on in her head, the anxiety and uneasiness. No one could possibly imagine that she woke each night from an eerie dream with a cry locked in her throat and panic tearing at her breathing.

By every outward sign, Joanna’s life was normal. She went to work each day and home each evening. The face she saw in the mirror was unchanged, her smile nearly as quick and easy as it had always been. Her coworkers noticed nothing unusual about her intense focus or the preoccupation that often kept her working through her regular
lunch hour. And since she had no family and had kept herself too busy recently to see much of her friends, no one spent enough time with her to realize that in actuality her life was anything but normal.

But Joanna knew. She felt oddly out of control, as if she were adrift in a current, helpless to choose her own direction. She was being carried along, whether she wanted to be or not. Toward a place named Cliffside. She had never really believed in fate, but as the days passed, it began to seem to her as though fate demanded that she concentrate all her energies on one thing alone. Finding Cliffside.

But why? Haunted by a dream, her life virtually taken over by it, Joanna couldn’t begin to understand what was happening to her. She had to believe it had something to do with her accident, since the dream had started afterward, but that didn’t explain
why
. In her more frustrated moments, she couldn’t help but wonder if all that electricity had simply scrambled her brain, yet even then something deeper inside her refused to believe that. Her accident had somehow been a catalyst, but the dream was no mere accidental pattern of electrical impulses in her brain.

It meant something. And until she understood what that was, Joanna knew that her life would not be her own again.

She threw herself into the search for Cliffside, trying to match the rocky, surf-pounded shoreline in her dream to an actual place. By eliminating all the landlocked Cliffsides from her initial list, she was able to cut the list in half, and eliminating all states with a low-lying coastal plain cut it again, but there were still dozens of towns named Cliffside left, each of which had to be checked out individually for characteristics matching those in her dream.

It was a slow, painstaking process. And by the middle of the third week in September, with Cliffside still elusive, Joanna had begun to seriously question her sanity. She didn’t feel like herself anymore. Favorite foods no longer appealed to her. She found herself drawn to colors she had never cared for. And for the first time in her life, she’d
begun to bite her nails, a nervous habit so unlike her that it frightened her. She was filled with anxiety and tormented with a sense of urgency that was knife-sharp each morning when she woke from the dream and diminished only a little throughout the day.

Cliffside
. It was like a lodestar, hovering before her to entice and compel. Everything else in her life had shrunk to insignificance.

By the following Sunday afternoon, she had to take a break from the pile of books and clippings cluttering the living room of her apartment, and drove to a shopping center a few miles away. She didn’t need to buy anything in particular, but she was tired and discouraged and not looking forward to the coming night, and splurging on a new bottle of perfume or bath oil sounded like a good idea.

It felt like a good idea too. Then, as she came out of the department store with her purchases in one of those little paper bags with twine handles and the store’s elegant logo printed in foil, a chilly hand grasped her arm.

“Caroline?”

This time, a woman’s shocked face met Joanna’s startled gaze. She was a beautiful and exotic looking blonde with catlike eyes the slightly unreal green of tinted contact lenses, wearing a two-hundred-dollar silk blouse over faded blue jeans.

“No,” Joanna said. “Sorry.”

The woman’s hand fell and her shock faded as she smiled politely. “Excuse me, I thought you were—someone else.” She laughed a little, obviously still shaken, then murmured another apology and went into the store Joanna had just left.

Joanna found herself looking at her own dim reflection in the glass of the door as she gazed after the stranger. Caroline again. That, she thought, stretched coincidence a bit thin, to be mistaken for this Caroline twice in such a short span of time. But even that didn’t bother her as much as the shock of the man and woman who had mistaken her for Caroline. Why had they looked that way? Why would
they feel such stunned incredulity at believing she was this woman?

Who was Caroline? And why did Joanna have the feeling that that was the most important question of all?

“Oh my God.” Joanna was hardly aware of speaking aloud, but since she was alone in the microfilm room, it hardly made a difference. There was no one to hear her. No one to see the shock she knew her face held. Checking references to Cliffside in Oregon in
The Portland Citizen-Times
, she had reached the previous July without a reference. Then she had found something.

Caroline.
Killed the day of my accident
.

A woman named Caroline, who had lived in Cliffside, Oregon. A woman who had been killed in a car accident on July 1. A woman who might very well have looked enough like Joanna that two people had been shocked to have seen her—alive and walking the sidewalks of Atlanta.

And a haunting, compelling dream containing a signpost that said Cliffside.

Joanna stared at Caroline McKenna’s obituary, reading it again and again. It wasn’t much information to sum up a life—or a death. A car accident. A young and vital woman killed before her time who had left behind a husband and daughter. An end to promise.

Why did it tug at her so? In many ways, their lives seemed opposite. Caroline married with a child, Joanna single and childless. Joanna with a career, Caroline apparently occupied by community concerns. They lived on opposite
sides of the country, one in a small town and the other a major city. Yet on the same July day, both had been involved in car accidents. One had survived. The other had not.

A woman she had never known had died three thousand miles away, their lives seemingly unconnected despite their being the same age and possibly being physically similar—and yet Joanna felt the strongest compulsion she had ever known to learn more, to find out about Caroline and Cliff-side. It made no sense to her, no sense at all.

She made a copy of the obituary and automatically labeled a new file folder to add to the others containing material she had collected. This folder was labeled simply
Caroline
, and it struck Joanna powerfully that the first item of information to be placed into it was Caroline McKenna’s obituary.

She closed the folder and set it aside, then went back to scanning the newspaper for any references to Cliffside and Caroline. Nothing. As far as
The Portland Citizen-Times
was concerned, the only thing of consequence to happen in Cliffside during the entire year through July was Caroline’s death.

In August, however, there was a brief article about the planned expansion of Cliffside’s small medical clinic; a new wing would be added, thanks to a bequest from Caroline McKenna. In her will, she had left to the clinic a piece of land adjoining the existing structure and more than enough money to build, equip, and staff the new wing. It would contain a lab and the latest diagnostic tools, as well as a cardiac care unit and trauma center.

The article, which Joanna copied and added to Caroline’s file, offered at least some information about Caroline, however indirectly. She’d had money, that much was certain; the projected cost of the clinic’s wing was somewhere in the neighborhood of three million dollars.

Three million dollars
.

“There’s one difference between us,” Joanna heard herself murmur wryly.

The article also seemed to indicate that Caroline either had been interested in funding medicine in general or had felt pretty strongly that her community had needed its medical services expanded. But whether she had funded other causes wasn’t clear; there was no mention of any other charitable bequest. And no mention of whether Caroline had left any part of her estate to her husband and child.

It wasn’t until the following day, when she was working through her lunch hour, that Joanna gained computer access to Cliffside’s newspaper and town records and began to find the information she had been looking for. Information about the town and its people, from climate and economy to how many marriages, baptisms, and burials were recorded at City Hall.

And a photograph of Caroline McKenna, taken the previous year when she and her husband had posed with a group supporting Cliffside’s community theater.

She could have been Joanna’s sister.

Dark rather than fair, the dead woman nonetheless shared Joanna’s features, the shape of her face, even her slender build. On the computer screen, Caroline’s delicate features were distinct. Her face was slightly heart-shaped, her dark hair worn in a smooth shoulder-length style some inches shorter than Joanna’s much lighter blond hair. She had large eyes and a tender, almost childlike mouth, and there was an air of fragility about her.

Her husband, Scott McKenna, stood on her right. He was a darkly handsome man in his mid-thirties, well built and taller than Caroline by some inches despite her high heels. The dark suit he wore made him look not so much somber as … aloof. He was smiling faintly, but there was an odd aura of remoteness surrounding him, and though he and his wife stood side by side, they were not touching.

As she looked at the two people and the group around them, Joanna slowly became aware that the restless urgency she had felt for so many weeks had become a conviction
so powerful she didn’t even try to fight it. For the first time since waking from the accident, she knew exactly what she had to do, and the relief of that was stunning.

In order to get her own life back, she would have to go to Cliffside and explore the life of another woman, a woman who had died the day they had both been involved in car accidents. Joanna didn’t know why, but she was certain that she and Caroline were somehow connected, and that until she understood that connection and the reason for it, she would never be at peace again.