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“It might be best to let the past rest in peace, like Margaret now rests in hallowed ground.”
“I can’t let it rest, Phil.” Alyssa fought back tears. “For my father’s sake, if not my own peace of mind.”
“For Judson Ingalls’s sake,” he said softly, under his breath. “The whole town wonders if I acted at his bidding. What does your father think of me for keeping my secrets all these years?”
“I don’t know,” Alyssa said truthfully. “He won’t discuss the trial—or the night my mother died.”
“Do you blame me for what I did, malushka—hiding her body away, telling no one what I knew for all these years?”
“The past can’t be altered,” she said, too confused by her own unsettled emotions to give the old man the answer he wanted.
“That is true,” he said sadly. “What is done is done.”
“At least now I know why she never came back for me. If only I could remember exactly what happened that night.”
“Don’t force your memories.” He crossed his gnarled hands on the head of his cane and leaned forward heavily to stare at the floor, his shoulders bent with age and years of hard work.
Once more the shadowy nightmare images played themselves out in her mind’s eye—her mother struggling with a faceless stranger, her own small hands holding a gun, the sound of a shot and her mother falling to the floor, away, out of her sight.
“Did I kill my mother, Phil?” she asked, unable to bear not knowing a moment longer. All through the long days of her father’s trial the question had haunted her almost to the point of madness.
The old man’s head jerked up, his white hair backlit by the afternoon sun shining through the windows, gleaming like snow on the hillside. “Why do you think that?”
“I…remember.” Alyssa looked down at her trembling hands. She couldn’t stop herself. “I remember firing the gun that killed her.”
Phil shook his head so vehemently a lock of hair fell across his forehead. “No! It was not proved Margaret died of a gunshot wound. I saw her body. I still see it over and over again in my thoughts. I carried her to her grave. The table beside her bed was made of iron. So was her bed. Very heavy, with sharp edges. Did she fall and hit her head? Was she strangled? Or maybe it was her heart? There was arguing, maybe a struggle or a push and she fell.”
“But the bullet Joe Santori found in the woodwork?” Alyssa couldn’t allow herself to feel any comfort from the old man’s words.
Phil shrugged. “That proves only that the gun went off when you picked it up. I did not look at her body any more than I had to. I covered her with a shawl from her bed. I didn’t want to look at her dead face and I couldn’t put her in the ground without some covering from the cold. It would not have been proper. But I did not look at her again. It was enough to know that she was dead.”
“Then why did you bury her secretly? Did you do it to save my father? Or to protect me?” It was almost as important to her sanity to learn the identity of the man in her dreams as it was to know for certain whether she might have shot Margaret herself. Alyssa’s thoughts continued to circle around those two points like vultures above a dead deer.
“I did nothing to protect Judson Ingalls,” Phil repeated stubbornly. “I was not his lackey. I owed him loyalty, yes, as my employer, but nothing more. The lawyer, Ethan Trask, was wrong. I did what I did…”
“To protect me,” Alyssa whispered.
“But not for why you think. Not because of the gunshot. I did it because I could not let your father be sent to prison for murder, leaving you alone, malushka.”
“You still think the man you saw could have been my father?” Alyssa looked inward, remembering all the years Judson had raised and protected her on his own. He had a formidable temper, it was true—most of the Ingalls men did—but she could never recall his raising his hand to a living soul.
“Who else?”
“A lover? One of my mother’s lovers? She was running away that night, wasn’t she? Leaving my father… and me.”
Phil shrugged again, looking fierce. “I was only the gardener. I knew nothing of your mother’s love affairs. It is true she was going away. But you don’t know that she meant to leave you behind.” His tone held doubt, however. Phil did believe Margaret had meant to abandon her daughter that terrible night.
“No one knows the truth,” Alyssa said sadly. “In my dreams, in my memory, there is still only a faceless man who might be my father…and me.”
“I do not think you shot your mother,” he repeated obstinately. Silence settled between them.
“And I don’t believe my father killed her,” Alyssa said very quietly.
“Because I hid her body all those years ago, we will never know.”
“I guess we’ve come to a dead end. Thank you for telling me what you know about that night.”
“It is over and done with, Alyssa. You yourself said it. Let the past be the past.”
She rose from her chair, preventing Phil from doing the same with a gentle hand on his shoulder. She couldn’t believe her father had killed Margaret, run away and left her behind to deal with the horror alone. There had to be another man. A stranger who knew exactly what had happened that night. A man whose guilt would prove Judson’s innocence—as well as her own. “I can’t let it rest. For my father’s sake, and for my own. Goodbye, Phil.” She picked up her coat and purse and started for the door.
“Alyssa. Malushka, come back. We will find this other man together.”
She barely heard the old man’s words; their meaning didn’t register at all. She walked out of the building in a daze, only to come face-to-face with Edward Wocheck, the very real, flesh-and-blood man who also haunted her dreams.
* * *
“ALYSSA. I didn’t expect to find you here.” Edward Wocheck felt like kicking himself for the banality of his greeting. Alyssa looked as if she’d seen a ghost. The urge to take her in his arms and kiss away her fears and sorrows struck him like a blow between the shoulders. She’d always had the power to move him that way. It hadn’t been any different when he returned to Tyler a year ago than it had been thirty years before. He was just better at convincing himself he could live without her now, at nearly fifty years of age, than he had been at seventeen.
“Hello, Edward.” Others of their old friends and acquaintances still called him Eddie, but not Alyssa—another way she chose to keep her distance from him, perhaps. “I—I came to visit your father.” She looked nearly as flustered as he was, and sad.
“Why, Lyssa?”
“Just to see him,” she explained hurriedly, too hurriedly. “I miss visiting him at Worthington House.”
“You’re not telling the truth.” He wondered if she knew how easy it was for him to read the emotions flitting across her expressive features. She had been a very pretty girl. She was still a beautiful woman, her blond hair shining and nearly free of gray, her body soft and rounded in all the right places. Her figure was still slim and appealing, even though she was now a grandmother. “Are you angry with him for what he did that night forty years ago?”
“No,” Alyssa said, suddenly able to put her thoughts into words. “Maybe he saved my father’s life. Surely, then, so soon after it happened, a jury would have convicted him. He would have spent the rest of his life in prison…or—”
“My father did what he thought was best.”
“I know that.”
“I’m not saying he was right.”
“I don’t blame him. I don’t think my father does, either. Phil has suffered, too. Keeping such a terrible secret all these years.”
“We all have secrets.”
“Yes,” she said, almost to herself. “We all have secrets.”
“Tell me yours.”
“Edward, please. I have to go. We’ll talk about this later.” She seemed to realize she wasn’t wearing her coat and began to struggle into it.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” he decided abruptly, holding the fawn-colored trench coat so that she could slip her arms into the sleeves. His father would tell him what their conversation had been about. But he could guess already. Judson Ingalls’s acquittal on murder charges had done nothing to lessen Alyssa’s fears of her own involvement in Margaret’s death. He wished she would confide in him, but she had not.
“Thank you,” she said politely, distantly. She seemed poised to run, like one of the deer that came out of the woods at dusk to drink at the edge of the lake, wary of humans, but drawn to the life-giving water.
He ignored her dismissal. They started walking. “Have you been busy at the plant since the trial ended?” He rested his hand lightly beneath her elbow and she didn’t protest the small intimacy.
“Swamped,” she said, managing a smile. He realized the subject of her family’s financially strapped business was nearly as distressing as his curiosity about her visit to his father. “It seems like everything was put on hold during the trial. And now Dad—” Abruptly she stopped talking, pretending instead that she had to watch her footing on the straight, well-paved path to the parking lot.
“Any new contacts on the horizon?” He shouldn’t have asked that question, and wished he hadn’t the moment it was out of his mouth.
“One or two. But small ones. Replacement parts for a couple of the big farm-machinery companies that we subcontract with. They’ll only keep us running till the first of the year. And then I’m afraid we’re looking at substantial layoffs.”
“And then?” he prompted, ignoring another jab of his conscience. Business was business. He shouldn’t feel as if he was betraying her.
“I’ll have to deal with the Japanese consortium that wants to buy the plant. Unless,” she said, looking up at him with a smile that was half teasing, half in earnest, “you could lend me a million dollars to get us through the winter.”
“I can’t do that, Lyssa.” Not because he couldn’t put his hands on that much money. He could float a loan that size from his own personal investments, without bringing Addison Corporation, or DEVCHECK, his own investment company, into the deal.
“Too small-potatoes for Addison Hotels, I suppose,” she said, a blush of red stealing over her cheeks.
“That’s not it.” He regretted yet again bringing up the matter. The words conflict of interest echoed through his brain. He wasn’t ready, or able, to discuss alternatives for management of Ingalls Farm and Machinery with Alyssa now or any time in the immediate future. He was also convinced she wasn’t going to thank him for it when he did.
“You must think I’m a fool,” she said, moving a little faster, just quickly enough to dislodge his hold on her elbow. “A small-town housewife, trying to run a million-dollar business that’s in trouble up to its neck, asking you for a huge loan she hasn’t even got the collateral to secure.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is, Edward. You’ve hidden your contempt for Tyler and the rest of us well these past months, but it’s still there, isn’t it?”
“I don’t have contempt or hatred for anyone in Tyler, Lyssa.”
“Not even my father?” she asked, her blue eyes looking past him, back into time.
“Especially not your father.”
“No,” she said, focusing on his face once again, searching for something in his carefully neutral expression. “I apologize for saying that. If you still hated my father, you wouldn’t have taken Timberlake off his hands. You paid cash. And far more than it’s worth.”
“You’re wrong. This place is a gold mine. It just needs the right management to take off.”
“It needs you,” Alyssa said softly. “You have changed a great deal. You don’t resent coming back here.” There was just enough doubt in her voice to prompt his answer.
“If I still hated everyone who ever put down Eddie Wocheck, the Polack from the wrong side of the tracks, I wouldn’t have done what I did with this place. Tyler is my hometown, just like it is yours.”
“I apologize again,” she said with a self-mocking smile. “You’re lucky you lost your Midwest naiveté years ago. It’s a lot harder to do when you spend your whole life in the same small town, you know. You can put your money to much better use than pumping it into a failing concern like Ingalls F and M.”
“Alyssa, stop putting yourself down. There are thousands of small companies all over the country in the same kind of financial bind. I can’t save them all.”
“Somehow that’s not very comforting to me, or the people who work for me. Goodbye, Edward. I won’t embarrass you or myself by asking for help again.” She got into the car. She hadn’t locked it, he noticed. No one in Tyler locked their cars.
He watched her drive away, wishing he could still trust his fellow man enough to leave his own car unlocked. Wishing he was still the boy Alyssa had loved and trusted with all her heart; knowing he was not and never could be again. And knowing, also, that sooner or later she would find that out.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_1dd58bf4-9941-5ec1-952c-1e6d5fc2df65)
ALYSSA STOPPED the car at the top of the hill above the boathouse where her daughter and son-in-law, Liza and Cliff Forrester, made their home. Smoke curled lazily from the chimney of the rustic building, built to complement the lodge, nearly hidden from sight by the trees. When Judson had decided not to sell the boathouse along with the rest of Timberlake Lodge, Alyssa hadn’t been sure she approved. But now she was glad the property had stayed in the family, even though the private drive lay inside the lodge gates and one of the hiking paths ran past where she was parked, increasing, however slightly, her chances of running into Edward Wocheck every time she visited her daughter and her grandchild.
She rested her head on the steering wheel for a moment, trying to restore her composure so that Liza wouldn’t ask too many awkward questions about her state of mind. Her relationship with her volatile offspring had improved a great deal since Liza’s marriage to Cliff, but it still wasn’t the easy mother-daughter camaraderie she shared with Amanda, or with her son Jeff’s new wife, Cece.
Cliff’s pickup was gone, but Liza’s white classic Thunderbird convertible was parked at the top of the path leading down to the lake. Alyssa sat quietly a moment or two longer. Her confrontation with Edward, coming so close on the heels of her unsettling conversation with his father, had upset her more than she wanted to admit.
If she hadn’t been desperate to put the unanswered questions about Margaret’s death out of her mind she would never have been so tactless as to ask Edward for a loan for Ingalls F and M. And to add to everything else, the man still had the power, in his mere physical presence, to totally unnerve her. What must he think of her? That her business skills were woefully inadequate? Most likely that her common sense was lacking as well.
It was hard to concentrate on business concerns, no matter how important, when your thoughts were tangled in nightmare images of the past. What was in store for her family, for herself, if she remembered completely what had happened that night? What if she recalled the shadowy figure leaving her mother’s room to be her father, after all? What should she do? And worst of all, what if she remembered beyond all doubt that she herself was responsible for her mother’s death?
Alyssa got out of the car and hurried down the path, anxious to hold her new granddaughter in her arms. Margaret Alyssa’s warmth and sweet baby softness were just what she needed to dissolve the terror and uncertainty in her heart. Unconsciously she began to smile, picturing little Maggie’s already vivid blue eyes, and imagined herself coaxing a still-uncertain smile from the wee one.
“Excuse me.” A man was standing at the top of the ridge, at the intersection where the hiking path joined Liza and Cliff’s approach to the boathouse. He was older, balding, carrying a fishing pole and tackle box, and was dressed in Land’s End outdoor wear. He was also about fifty pounds overweight and breathing heavily from the climb. “Can you tell me the shortest route to Timberlake Lodge? I seem to have taken a wrong turn somewhere.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to go back the way you came,” Alyssa said, unfailingly polite. “Or you can walk along the driveway. It’s longer, but you won’t have to climb the hill from the lake again.”
“Yes,” he said, looking over her shoulder at the steep climb. “I think I’ll take the road. Are you a guest at Timberlake, too? Or are you native to these parts?” He smiled, showing teeth too straight and white to be real.
“I live in Tyler,” Alyssa said, shoving her hands deep into her pockets. The low November sun had gone behind the trees, and the damp, late-afternoon chill quickly penetrated her unlined coat.
The man nodded and smiled again. “I thought so. I’ve been at Timberlake the past five days. Figured I would have seen you somewhere around the building in that amount of time. My name’s Robert Grover. I spend most of my time in Florida these days but I still call Chicago home. Thought I’d come up here and try my hand at bagging a few pheasants and some pan fish before the lake ices over.” He transferred the fishing pole to his left hand, holding out the right one for Alyssa to shake. “And your name is?” he asked, waiting expectantly.
“Alyssa Baron.”
“Baron? That name rings a bell.”
“My husband’s family has lived in Tyler for many years,” Alyssa said, unable to be rude enough to walk away from the man but reluctant to continue talking to him.
“No, that’s not it.” He was still smiling. “It’s something else. It’ll come to me in a moment.” He snapped the fingers of his free hand. “Now I’ve got it. It’s the trial. I read your name in the Tyler Citizen. You’re…” He stopped abruptly and a red flush, almost the same color as the down vest he was wearing, crept up over the collar of his khaki shirt. “You’re Judson Ingalls’s daughter. Sorry,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “I have a bad habit of doing that. Running off at the mouth.”
“Don’t apologize,” Alyssa said, taking a step past him.
He shifted position slightly, unintentionally blocking her way. “I read about the trial in the Chicago papers, too.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Maybe that’s partly what made me come up here when my doctor told me to take it easy for a few days.”
“Maybe it was. If you’ll excuse me.” Alyssa smiled a polite dismissal.
“Or maybe it’s because I wanted to see what Timberlake looked like all spruced up. I remember being here in its heyday.”
“You knew my parents?” Alyssa asked, intrigued despite her reluctance to keep talking to the man.
“Never met your father,” Robert Grover admitted. “I knew your mother, Margaret, though. Lovely woman.”
“You were her friend?”
He shook his head. “Just an acquaintance. We had mutual friends. I came here once or twice for parties. Your mother certainly knew how to entertain.”
“Yes, so I’ve been told.”
