After Caroline (47 page)

Scott nodded, then touched her cheek lightly and said, “Thank you,” again. And went upstairs to sit with his sleeping daughter.

“There shouldn’t be much of a fuss,” Griffin said. “The state police will want to have a look at my files, since I shot the suspect, but since he confessed in the presence of three witnesses and then subsequently aimed a cocked pistol at me, I doubt I’ll hear anything except congratulations for getting him.”

Joanna, sharing with him a thick quilt and a pile of cushions in front of his fireplace, looked at him gravely. “It doesn’t bother you, does it? You know you had no choice, that what you did was right.”

He nodded. “I won’t shed any tears for him, Joanna. He caused the deaths of three people, and he was fully prepared to kill you and Regan. As for how he ended, he aimed that gun at me and forced me to shoot him because he didn’t have the guts to commit suicide and we both knew it.”

“That’s what I thought.” Joanna set her wineglass aside with a sigh. “Will all that stuff about Caroline have to come out? I mean, that she and Dylan were lovers?”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.” He brooded a moment. “I can’t see that her relationship with him has to come into it. She found the disk—no need to say how, since we don’t actually know. Hid it. He found out it was gone and threatened her, frightened her so that she lost
control of her car. He had no idea where the disk was. Then you showed up here, and he got nervous because you were asking questions about Caroline and he was afraid you’d somehow stumble across the disk. So he tried to kill you—twice.”

Joanna smiled slightly. “Cheated death again. Guess I’d better be careful crossing streets from now on, huh?”

Griffin put his glass aside and leaned over her, his expression very sober. “Don’t joke about it. God knows I hope you do have as many lives as a cat, but please be careful with them, will you? I don’t want to lose you. I don’t ever want to lose you.”

She slid her arms up around his neck, her fingers sliding into his dark hair. His eyes, she decided, were blue. A very, very dark blue. Darker than sapphires. “You won’t,” she murmured, lifting her face in a silent plea.

Her mouth opened under the hungry pressure of his, and Joanna felt her senses heating, her thoughts spinning away because they weren’t needed. All she needed to do was feel, not think, and she gave herself up to the glory of that.

It was dawn when he woke, and Griffin sat up quickly when he realized she wasn’t in the bed beside him. He threw back the covers and got up, pausing only to pull on sweatpants and a sweatshirt. He felt a draft of chilly air when he stepped into the still-dark living room, and relaxed when he saw the atrium door slightly ajar and Joanna outside on the deck.

She had the quilt from their bed by the fire wrapped around her, and he could see the collar of his shirt, which was probably all she was wearing under the quilt.

He went outside and joined her, one hand rubbing up and down her back lightly as he leaned against the railing beside her. “Hey, you’ll freeze out here,” he told her.

She looked at him, clear-eyed and pink-cheeked in the chill of dawn. “I’ve been thinking about it all,” she murmred.
“But especially about Dylan. What makes a man like him, Griffin? When does greed become so absolute that killing is easy?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart.”

She sighed, her breath misting a bit. “It was such a miserable, unimportant crime to cost three lives. Covering up embezzlement. It was just
money
, Griffin.”

He shook his head. “No, not to Dylan. It was power. It was … a balancing of the scales, giving him what he thought was his due. Of course he was willing to kill to have what he wanted. It was his own image of himself he was protecting, Joanna. Caught, he would have been just another stupid criminal; success meant he was smarter than everybody else.”

Joanna nodded slightly and was silent for a moment. Then she sighed again. “So now it’s really over. I didn’t dream last night. It’s finally gone, Griffin. The fear. The urgency. The feeling of not being entirely alone in my own mind. Caroline is gone. I thought so last night—but now I’m sure of it.” She looked at him, her expression grave.

Griffin touched her cheek. “I’m glad, sweetheart.”

“I couldn’t … face anything else until she was gone.”

“I know.”

Still grave, she asked, “Do you know that I love you?”

He smiled slowly. “I was sort of hoping you did. You made me wait long enough to hear it, though.”

“I had to get Caroline out of my head,” she explained.

“And make sure she wasn’t in mine?”

“Something like that.”

He bent his head and kissed her slowly. “She was never in my head,” he said huskily against her lips. “But you are. God, you are. In my head and my heart and under my skin … inside me so deeply you feel like a part of me. Like you’ve always belonged there. I love you, Joanna.”

She made a little sound of contentment. “I love you too.”

He lifted his head so that he could look at her, and
stroked her cheek gently with the tips of his fingers. “We should go in. You’re cold.”

Her smile was so lovely it nearly stopped his heart. “I wanted to see the dawn. It looks so different when you don’t wake up scared to death. Just look at it, Griffin—isn’t it beautiful?”

It was difficult for him to look at anything but her, but he turned his gaze obediently to the horizon, where black was shading to deep purple, only to become dark blue overhead and then lighten gradually toward the east behind them where the sun would soon rise. It was high tide, so the ocean was roaring and booming as it battered against the cliffs, the morning air laden with salty dampness.

He drew a deep breath. “I fell in love with this place the first time I saw it,” he said.

“So did I.” She smiled at him again. “I didn’t realize it because I seemed to see shadows and tension everywhere I looked, but despite all that, I felt deep inside that this was a beautiful place.”

“Then stay here—with me. Marry me.” He hadn’t intended to ask her, not so soon, but it felt right to him to say it now. “I know you’d be giving up a lot, Joanna, but—”

Her fingers touched his lips lightly to stop him. “What would I be giving up? The city? I don’t need it. Family? Aunt Sarah was the last. Friends? I’ll make new ones.”

“Sweetheart…”

“I love you, Griffin,” she said softly. “There’s nothing in the world I want more than to stay here with you.”

He drew a deep breath that did nothing to ease the sweet ache in his chest, and pulled her into his arms. “You won’t regret it, Joanna, I promise.”

“I know that.” Her fingers threaded into his hair, and her smile glowed with more promise than the morning. “I knew that the first time I saw you, even if I couldn’t admit it to myself. I looked at you, at the suspicion on your face, and I knew I wouldn’t be going back to Atlanta—except to pack.”

“I think you’re three parts witch,” he said huskily.

“And I think I’m just very, very lucky.”

Griffin thought he’d been the lucky one, but he didn’t argue with her as he lifted her and carried her back to their warm bed.

I
T WAS EXACTLY TWO WEEKS
to the day after Joanna had arrived in Cliffside, and a sunny Tuesday in mid-October, when Griffin walked beside Joanna to the peaceful old church at the northern end of town. He walked with her as far as the lovely wrought-iron gate at the side of the church and opened it for her. “You’re sure you don’t want me to go along?”

Joanna smiled up at him. “I’m sure. This is something I need to do alone.”

“Okay.” He bent his head and kissed her lightly, understanding without the need for explanations. “I’ll wait here for you. Just remember our appointment. Fifteen minutes.”

“It shouldn’t take me that long.”

She walked into the town’s oldest cemetery, following one of the neat graveled paths toward a spot she needed no directions to find. Like most everything in Cliffside, the grounds here were well kept, mostly sunny but shaded in several places by huge old oak trees. The ocean could
barely be heard from here, yet it could be felt, almost like a pulse in the ground. It was an oddly alive place where the dead had been laid to rest.

It was a place Joanna had avoided until now. She had avoided even thinking about it, because she’d been afraid that the fragile tie between her and Caroline would be severed by the stark reality of a grave and a headstone.

But the connection Joanna had known for so long was gone now, the feeling of it no more than a wisp of memory, and it was time for her to say good-bye to Caroline.

Her grave was as meticulously neat as all the others here, the grass clipped short and still green in October, the marble headstone gleaming. Her name was carved deeply into the stone.
Caroline Douglas McKenna
. The dates of her birth and her death were carved deeply as well. She had not lived thirty years, and she had made his life hell for more than ten of them, yet Scott had had carved
Beloved Wife and Mother
as well—and Joanna doubted he had done it because of convention.

Poor Caroline. She had lived and died with no idea of what she had missed.

On either side of her headstone were affixed permanent flowerpots, and in each one a bunch of her own roses glowed with beautiful color. They wouldn’t last long this time of the year, Joanna knew, but there were more grown and tended in the greenhouse to replace these when needed. For Caroline, indeed. Somehow, Joanna didn’t doubt that Caroline’s roses would bloom at her grave for a long, long time.

“You’ll probably hate these,” Joanna said conversationally as she bent to lay a bouquet of mixed flowers on the neat grave, speaking aloud because it felt right to. “But I’ll let the men in your life bring you roses, Caroline.”

She looked at the headstone, her gaze tracing the letters spelling out the name of a complex woman who had, Joanna believed, reached out from death to save her daughter. “You knew Regan was in danger, didn’t you? Maybe it was just something you realized in that final moment,
that she must have found the box with the disk in it. Or maybe … maybe there’s a time beyond death when we know what happens to those we left behind.

“Either way, I believe you knew. You knew she’d need help, knew she’d be in danger if Dylan discovered she’d found the disk. And maybe you wanted something else fixed as well. Did you, Caroline? Did you, finally, regret what you’d done to Scott? Did you realize that Regan needed her father back?”

There was no answer, of course, but it didn’t stop Joanna from musing aloud, from trying to find a kind of closure in this, the most elusive and intangible part of the whole thing.

“I’d like to think you did regret a few things, Caroline. That you sent me here not only to protect Regan but to at least attempt to heal a few of the wounds you caused. Scott knows the truth about Regan now. Adam had a chance to … oh, confess, I guess. And even Griffin doesn’t feel so guilty about your death now.

“Even the town is sort of healed, with the truth known. I think your death and Butler’s shook up everybody more than they wanted to admit, and then when I came along, looking so much like you and asking questions, it just added tension. Griffin felt it, too, the uneasiness of the town. Maybe a lot of people sensed there was something wrong, I don’t know. In any case, things are much better now. Why I came here will probably always be a mystery to some people, but even the ones who seemed so wary of me are smiling and friendly now. This is a nice little town, Caroline. I think I’m going to love it here.”