After Caroline (37 page)

Did you love your wife?

Did you cause your wife’s death?

Did you try to kill me?

She was still uncertain when they walked across the immaculately landscaped yard and climbed the steps onto the porch. Regan led the way through the front door and into a lovely but formal foyer, then down a hallway to the left of the stairs.

“His office is this way,” she said over her shoulder to Joanna. “Dylan’s office is at the end of the hall, but I think he’s in town. And Lyssa only comes here sometimes. So Daddy’s by himself right now. I’ll take you before I go back to Mrs. Porter.”

Joanna didn’t object. Though she did feel a bit rueful when Regan opened the door of her father’s office and announced without preamble, “Joanna’s here to see you.”

Alone in the room, Scott rose from behind his desk and looked at Joanna with his usual impassivity. “Joanna. Come in.”

Said the spider to the fly
.

It was the way she should have felt, but for some reason Joanna’s concern about being here faded. She couldn’t explain it, couldn’t even begin to understand it, but she felt absolutely no threat from Scott.

“I’ll see you later, Joanna,” Regan said, looking up at her.

“You bet.” Joanna watched the little girl turn away without another word for her father and disappear down the hall. She closed the office door and walked across to one of the visitor’s chairs in front of Scott’s big desk. The room didn’t surprise her very much. It was neat and organized
and very masculine, with expensive leather-bound books lining the shelves and a gleaming wood floor. The desk was uncluttered.

“Do you think it’s wise to see so much of Regan?” he asked.

“Do you care?” she shot back.

Scott actually looked taken aback for a brief instant, but then he shrugged and said something Joanna would rather not have heard. “Touché. Sit down, Joanna.”

How can he not care about that little girl?
Joanna simply couldn’t comprehend it. She sat down and watched him do the same, wondering if she had even a hope of understanding this remote man.

“What can I do for you?” he asked politely.

Burning her bridges, Joanna said, “You can talk to me about Caroline.”

Scott leaned back in his chair and gazed at her, seemingly as unsurprised by the request as he had been by her sudden appearance in his house. “Would you mind explaining your excessive interest in my wife?”

“I don’t think it is excessive,” Joanna replied. “I was interested at first because I look so much like her.”

“At first. What about now?”

“Now…” Joanna shook her head. “I can’t explain; I’d probably sound crazy to you if I tried.”

“Try anyway,” he invited.

Joanna hesitated, trying to weigh the danger of confiding too much to this man against the import of the information he might possibly provide. Beyond the risk she ran of confiding in precisely the wrong person—the murderer, for instance—the problem was that Joanna had no idea if Scott could or would tell her anything of value. At the same time, he had to be a good source of information about Caroline, and it was clear he wasn’t about to talk without knowing her reasons.

Griffin was
definitely
not going to like this.

“Were you in town yesterday afternoon?” she asked him.

Scott lifted an eyebrow in surprise. “No. Why?”

“You were here?”

“No, I was in Portland.” His tone was one of infinite patience. “A law firm there handles my legal affairs, and there were documents to go over. I didn’t get back here until last night around seven. And I repeat, why?”

An alibi Joanna assumed could have been easily disproven if not true. And though he could have hired someone to do his dirty work, Joanna didn’t think it likely that he had. “Someone tampered with my car,” she said. “The accelerator jammed, and I couldn’t stop it. Went right through the middle of town like a bat out of hell. If I hadn’t been able to steer the car into a pasture and into a few haystacks, I probably would have been killed.”

Both his brows went up this time. “And you suspect me? Joanna, aside from the fact that I can’t imagine why I would try to hurt you, I don’t know the first thing about cars beyond how to drive them.”

“I see.”

“It couldn’t have been a simple mechanical failure?”

Joanna hesitated again, mentally apologized to Griffin (not that it would do any good), and said, “We’re sure it was tampered with. Which means somebody tried to kill me. And because of that, there’s a chance that Amber Wade was killed Sunday night because she was mistaken for me. From behind, we looked enough alike to make that a logical possibility, and so far there doesn’t seem to be a reason anyone would have wanted to kill her.”

He frowned slightly. “Have you been making enemies here?”

“All I’ve been doing is asking questions about Caroline.”

Scott’s frown deepened. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying Caroline’s death may not have been the accident it appeared. Something was going on in her life that last week or so, something that made her uneasy, that frightened her.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve been piecing it together since I got here. Talking to people. Asking questions. So far, I haven’t been able to figure out what was going on, but I know something was.” She paused, then asked, “Did her mood seem different to you before she was killed?”

Scott was still frowning, but answered readily enough. “I was very busy that week, and we hardly saw each other. But … the day she was killed, I happened to look out the window in here when she left in her car hardly more than an hour before the accident. I thought at the time that she was upset or angry, because she gunned the engine and pulled out much faster than usual.”

Joanna thought about that. Caroline had already sent Griffin the note asking him to meet her, indicating that she had been ready to confide her problem to him. She had, in effect, burned her bridges, so it was entirely likely that she’d been nervous, even frightened that day.

It was also possible that something had happened
here
just before Caroline had left to meet Griffin, something that had upset her even more.

She looked at Scott steadily. “You two didn’t have an argument or anything?”

“We never argued,” Scott said.

“Never? I find that hard to believe.”

Scott’s smile was thin and without amusement. “Believe it. It takes feeling for two people to argue.”

“And there was none between you and Caroline?”

He shrugged. “It happens sometimes.”

“Then why did you stay together? Because of Regan?”

“No. Because there was no compelling reason to separate.”

To Joanna, that was a lousy reason to remain in a loveless marriage, and one she hardly understood. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed Scott, at any rate. He struck her as a proud man, and proud men generally didn’t suffer their wives to conduct affairs, however discreetly. Unless, of course, he hadn’t known.

“You told me the day we met that you were the villain of the piece,” she reminded him. “Were you?”

He shrugged. “To Caroline, certainly. I was incapable of feeling, she said. I didn’t care about anyone except myself. I couldn’t make her happy.”

“You didn’t worship at her feet?” Joanna murmured.

His eyes narrowed slightly, as if she had struck a nerve, but he only repeated, “I couldn’t make her happy.”

Joanna thought about it for a moment, wondering if her guess
bad
been on the mark. If Adam Harrison’s experience with Caroline was not unique, then it seemed she had enjoyed being the focus of a man’s obsessive love and desire, only to grow bored eventually and break off the relationship. Was that it? Had Scott held on to his wife by showing her a remote face and a cool indifference to her affairs? Had he been the only man in her life who had loved her enough to keep that love a secret she had never guessed?

His remoteness had clearly bothered her, judging by the things Regan had overheard, and possibly had frustrated her. With a husband resistant to her charms, she might in fact have found the marriage more of a challenge than it would have been if he had loved her openly with Adam Harrison’s devotion.

It was certainly not the kind of marriage Joanna would wish for herself, but she wondered if, for Scott, it might have been enough. Even if he had known about her affairs, perhaps he had found consolation in the knowledge that she was his in a way no other man could claim, because he was the only one she had not been able to emotionally destroy.

Was that the answer?

Joanna braced herself mentally and said in a very neutral tone, “Was it possible she was having an affair?”

“Likely,” he replied without hesitation or visible distress. “But I have no idea who he was.”

“And that didn’t bother you?”

Scott shrugged again. “I accepted Caroline for what she
was, Joanna. It became … obvious early in our marriage that one man couldn’t satisfy her needs. She made no secret of that, not to me. Her affairs tended to be brief and relatively infrequent. I doubt there were more than half a dozen during our marriage. As long as there was no gossip, I accepted them.”

Joanna nodded, still wondering if she was right about their relationship but not ready to ask or comment just yet. “Would she have told you if, say, an affair was going badly? If she was frightened of a lover for some reason?”

He was frowning again. “Frightened? I don’t know, but probably not. She didn’t talk about them to me. Acceptance is one thing; I didn’t want details, and I made that very clear to her. But I certainly never saw a sign of physical abuse.”

“And you have no idea what she was upset about the week she died?”

“I don’t know that she was upset. But as I said, we barely saw each other.” He paused and then said, “You’re convinced her death wasn’t an accident?”

Steadily, Joanna said, “Yes, and I’m convinced somebody tried to kill me because I’m getting too close to the reason Caroline died. Whether it was caused directly or indirectly, somebody had a hand in her car going over the cliffs. And I have to find out who that was.”

Scott’s gaze remained on her face for a long moment, then shifted away. “I’m sorry, but I obviously can’t help you.” He rose to his feet.

It was a dismissal.

Joanna could have protested, but all she said as she rose was, “Did Caroline keep a diary or journal?”

“No,” he replied.

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

She nodded, then lifted a hand when he started to come around the desk toward her. “It’s all right—I remember the way out.”

Accepting that with a nod, Scott turned instead toward the window near his desk and stood gazing out.

At the door, Joanna paused and looked back at him. “You know, it’s funny. Of all the people in this town, all the people who knew Caroline, you’re the only one who wasn’t shocked, or even surprised, when you saw me.”

“I was warned,” he said indifferently without looking at her. “I expected you.”

She shook her head. “Other people were warned, but they were still surprised when they saw me. But you weren’t. I think it was because you hardly noticed the resemblance. Because you had known Caroline inside and out, better than anyone else ever could have. You didn’t have to wait and get to know me to see the differences in us. I wasn’t Caroline; you knew that. You
felt
that. Because you loved her.”

Scott didn’t turn around or react in any way. He merely said, “Good day, Joanna.”

Had she struck a nerve? Joanna didn’t know. But when she left the house, without seeing anyone else, she followed an impulse she couldn’t explain and went to the corner of the house where she could see the window of Scott’s office. And somehow, she wasn’t surprised to see that the window where he stood looked out over what would be, in spring and summer, a lovely rose garden.

“Your mind isn’t on business,” Lyssa said, closing the folder containing the store’s inventory lists and leaning back in his desk chair. Not only didn’t he have his mind on business, but he was visibly restless—
very
unlike him. She watched him wander over to the fireplace for the third time in ten minutes.

“We can go over the inventory later,” he said.

Lyssa would have loved to believe that she was responsible for his distraction, but knew better. He had hardly looked at her since she had arrived an hour ago. “We need to go over everything soon so we’ll have a good idea of
what the accountants will see next month,” she reminded him.

He shrugged, frowning as he gazed into the fire.

“Is something wrong?” she asked tentatively, aware that she was straying from their established script.

“No.”

She hesitated, then said, “I’ll leave if you want me to.”

“We were going to have dinner,” he said.

It was one of the nights they usually drove up toward Portland to have dinner, leaving Regan in the capable care of Mrs. Ames. “We don’t have to,” Lyssa told him.

There was a short silence, and then he said, “I’m a little tired.”

Hiding her disappointment beneath a casual smile, Lyssa said, “Okay. I should copy a couple of the disks I brought to the mainframe, though. Do you mind if I work here another hour or so?” She had a computer at the store and also a laptop at home, but all Scott’s business information was stored here on his computer—especially important now with the audit he commissioned yearly about to be conducted.