After Caroline (44 page)

“Thanks, but I have to be going. Rain check?”

“You bet. And, speaking of rain, it’s about to start out there, in case you didn’t know.”

“I won’t melt,” she told him, then waved and hurried on, across the veranda and out into the darkening afternoon.

“You believed what you were told,” Lyssa said quietly, watching Scott pace his office.

“I ought to be shot for believing it,” he said, his low voice harsh. “I should have demanded a paternity test instead of just accepting what she said, should have made her
prove
Regan wasn’t mine. But I listened to her instead. Listened and believed her. God forgive me, I let Caroline’s poison destroy my daughter’s love for me.”

“Scott, you didn’t know it was a lie. How could you?” Lyssa went to him when he paused by the fireplace, and put a hand on his arm tentatively. This wasn’t part of the script, not any of it; he had called her less than an hour ago, asking her to come out to the house, and when she arrived he had told her what Caroline had done.

Lyssa was still coping with her own shock. She hadn’t liked Caroline one bit, but for any woman to have done to her husband what Caroline had done to Scott was so cruel it almost defied belief.

She didn’t quite know how to handle this. Handle him. She had never seen him vulnerable this way, hurting this way, and she wasn’t sure how much he would be willing to accept from her. She was reacting out of instinct and her feelings for him, letting them guide her and hoping to hell she wasn’t making this worse on him.

He didn’t respond to her touch, but continued speaking in that low voice she hardly recognized as his, his face very still but not remote as it usually was. “She knew right where to drive the stake. I already hated him, because I knew she had fallen in love with him. It wasn’t lust, like the others, it was love—or as close to it as Caroline could ever get. So when she told me it was his child she’d given birth to, that Regan was his and not mine … I was ready to believe it.”

Lyssa opened her mouth to say something, then turned her head swiftly when she heard a soft sound from the hall outside the office. “Did you hear… ?”

Scott was already moving, striding across the room to the door that was not quite closed, wrenching it open.

At first, Lyssa thought there was nothing there. But then Scott bent, and when he straightened, he was holding a Raggedy Ann doll—the only doll Lyssa had ever seen Regan carry around with her.

“No,” Lyssa whispered.

Scott turned his head to look at her, his face gray, just as they both heard one of the outer doors slam. “Oh God, she heard,” he said hoarsely.

The information faxed from San Francisco was a mishmash of subjects, from Robert Butler’s college records to the public records of his various companies and some private records as well, and Griffin got a headache as he read through the stack. He couldn’t afford to overlook anything, so he had to read every word.

The late Mr. Butler had been very wealthy, a tough businessman by all accounts. And his companies had enjoyed amazing success. Griffin read of the various successes, patiently, looking for any connection, however slight, to Cliffside or any of its citizens.

It wasn’t until he’d almost reached the bottom of the stack that a name leaped off the page at him, and Griffin went tense in complete attention. He read slowly, carefully. Then he read it again. The facts, set down in private papers of Butler’s coaxed from his sister by one of Griffin’s deputies, were quite clear.

A connection.

Dylan York had worked for Butler years before. And he had stolen money from his employer. A lot of money. Dylan had vanished one breath ahead of discovery, and Butler had been left to explain a lot of creative bookkeeping. He hadn’t made a formal charge against Dylan, probably because powerful men like him were accustomed to taking care of their own problems.

Staring down at the page, Griffin speculated. Suppose—maybe during that big business deal his sister had mentioned, or maybe just through information brokers he had hired for the purpose—Butler had somehow heard that
Dylan York lived in Cliffside. And suppose that Butler had come up here, intending to confront Dylan, to face the man who had stolen from him. Suppose they had met, by chance or design, behind The Inn, where Dylan lived, and suppose they had fought.

Speculation, Griffin reminded himself. But it wasn’t speculation that Robert Butler had ended up dead on the jagged rocks of the cliffs.

The first death? Griffin’s mind leaped ahead, tying together bits of information and speculating where he didn’t have facts. Dylan had a job with another rich man; he might well have gotten up to his old tricks. A basically greedy nature would have been sorely tempted both by Scott’s wealth and by his habit of delegating responsibility to employees. Over the years, Dylan could have stolen
a lot
.

And maybe Caroline had found out about that, or about Butler’s death, probably because she’d gotten close to Dylan. Why not tell Scott? It had to be
because
she’d been involved with Dylan, perhaps so deeply that she hadn’t been able to believe his treachery at first.

Later … Griffin didn’t know. Something had frightened Caroline, either Dylan or what he was doing, and she had decided she needed help. Maybe she’d been able to obtain some kind of evidence, hidden now in that little box no one had seen—and maybe Dylan knew or suspected she had evidence that would put him away for a long time.

It wasn’t such a big leap to imagine that Dylan might have come back from Portland earlier than expected that day and discovered Caroline’s car at the old barn. Not a big leap to imagine him confronting her, angry and suspicious, and her running away from him in a panic. Not a big leap to imagine one car racing after another down a winding highway until she lost control and went over the cliffs.

And from there, hardly any leap at all to imagine that as Joanna began asking questions about Caroline and putting the pieces together, she would become a threat to Dylan as well. A very dangerous threat.

She was right. She had been right about everything.

“Jesus,” Griffin muttered. He looked at his watch and suddenly felt cold. Ten minutes after two. He was late.

He reached for the phone with one hand and with the other opened the bottom drawer of his desk and closed his fingers around the gun he hadn’t worn since he’d left Chicago.

T
HE COOL BREEZE
had become gusty, and the dampness had become droplets of rain by the time Joanna was halfway to the gazebo. She hurried on, automatically staying back from the cliffs, and wished the storm clouds clashing overhead hadn’t turned the afternoon dark and eerie, because it seemed to have an odd effect on her mind.

Bits and pieces of information and conversation kept flitting through her mind just as the images in her dream had, and she couldn’t seem to shut them out. It was as if her subconscious were searching for something, flipping over the pages of memory. Then, when Joanna was nearly at the gazebo, the correct page was found, the relevant memory surfaced, and she came to a dead stop.

How had he known what she was wearing?

Jeans and a sweater, he’d said. She hadn’t been dressed for a trip to town
that morning
, because she’d been wearing jeans and a sweater. But he hadn’t been there that morning, Joanna remembered that from the statements in
Griffin’s files. He had gone to Portland the day before and had stayed there overnight, returning only in the late afternoon after Caroline’s accident. And he couldn’t have seen her after the accident, because only Griffin, the rescue people, and Cliffside’s doctor had seen her. Identification hadn’t been in question, so even Scott had not seen his wife’s body that day.

And there had been no mention in the newspapers of how Caroline had been dressed the day she had died.

So how could Dylan have known what she was wearing when she was killed—unless he had seen her earlier that day, perhaps at the old barn… ?

Joanna had an almost overpowering impulse to look back over her shoulder, but instead hurried on. She had no way of knowing if he even meant to come after her again, far less that he would make an attempt in the middle of the afternoon, she reminded herself. But if he intended that, then he was probably somewhere between her and the hotel, and she had no desire to try to get past him. No, the best thing to do, she thought, was to keep going, to go past the gazebo and head for Scott’s house, where there were people, where she would be safe until she could call Griffin.

But when she burst into the clearing, she saw Regan. The little girl was in the gazebo, huddled on the floor beside the carousel horse, and every line of her small body spoke of pain and grief.

Joanna didn’t hesitate; the instinct to go to the child was so strong Regan might have been her own flesh and blood. Just as she stepped up into the gazebo, the skies opened up, rain drumming fiercely on the roof and sheeting downward so hard that visibility was limited to only a few feet.

She knelt beside the child, putting a hand out to touch her gently, thinking only that the little girl had at last given in to her sorrow for the loss of her mother. “Regan? Honey—”

Regan looked up, her small, pale face tearstained, and with a sob threw herself into Joanna’s arms. “Not mine,”
she wailed miserably, her voice choked. “He’s not
mine
, Joanna!”

“Not yours? Regan—”

Still sobbing, her voice hardly audible above the sounds of the rain and wind, Regan said, “I heard him talking to Lyssa just now, and he
told
her. He said Mama put a stake in him, and that I wasn’t his child. He’s not my daddy, Joanna. I don’t have a daddy!”

Joanna couldn’t know for certain what Regan had overheard, but she had to believe that Scott had been explaining the situation to Lyssa for whatever reason, and that Regan had heard only snatches of it. “Listen to me, honey,” she said, making the little girl look at her. “You just heard part of something again, that’s all. You didn’t hear everything, and so you misunderstood. He is your daddy, I promise you—and he knows he is.”

“He said—”

“Never mind what he said. Regan, he’s your father. And he loves you, I know he does.”

Regan shook her head stubbornly. “No, he’s not. Not anymore. I was bad, Joanna, and God took them both away from me.”

“Honey—”

“You don’t
know!
I thought it was a game, another game, like Mama and me played all the time. I thought she hid the box for me to find. So I got it when she left, but it was locked and I didn’t know what was inside. I looked for the key, but I couldn’t find it. Then I saw Mama come out here, and I knew she was scared when she didn’t find the box, I
knew
it, because her face was all white and she looked like she wanted to cry. And when she left in her car, she was driving awful fast—and she never came back, Joanna! She never came back, and it’s all my fault! I brought the box back here after, and put it back in the little hidey-hole where I found it, but Mama never came back ….”

Joanna held the sobbing child, thinking how damnably easy it was to miss the most vital clue of all.
I was bad
,
Joanna
. A child’s guilt, and she should have paid far more attention to it.