Loveknot

EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_133f0a96-8044-5c0b-9cda-c3be6e97ebec)

TIMBERLAKE.

Alyssa Ingalls Baron caught her breath at the sight of the imposing main lodge with its gabled dormer windows and twin fieldstone chimneys as the drive curved around to front the wide veranda.

Unconsciously her hands tightened on the steering wheel. “This is what it was like when my mother was alive.” She spoke the words aloud, the sound of her voice a talisman against the nervous beat of blood in her ears. “This is the way I remember it in my dreams.”

No one was sitting in the passenger seat of the car to hear her words. She was alone. She wanted it that way. No one knew she was coming to Timberlake to question Phil Wocheck face-to-face, for the first time, about Margaret Ingalls’s death. What she had to say to the old man was for his ears alone.

She parked the car in the graveled lot, hidden from the newly renovated lodge by an artful tangle of evergreens and barberry bushes, and started across the lawn. Adirondack chairs, painted a dark fir-green, were still grouped in inviting clusters under the massive maples and oaks, although many of the trees had already dropped their leaves and the late-fall weather was warm enough to sit outside comfortably for only a short time in the middle of the day.

But it was the windows Alyssa remembered best, dozens of them, it seemed, gleaming warmly in the sunlight, reflecting the blue of the sky and the lake, welcoming her—home.

Alyssa shivered. The feeling of comfort and momentary sense of belonging was so at odds with her mood. For forty years, most of her life, the lodge had been locked and shuttered and ignored, a grim testament to Margaret Ingalls’s desertion of her husband and daughter.

For all those years, no one but Phil had known what had happened to Margaret. Now they did. She hadn’t run away with a lover that long-ago night, but had died right here at Timberlake. It was public knowledge now, how she had died, when and where. The only question that still remained was who had killed her. Only two days before, Alyssa’s father, Judson Ingalls, had been acquitted of his wife’s murder. Acquitted of responsibility, but not proved innocent of the crime.

In the back of her mind Alyssa almost wished Judson had been found guilty. Then he would have continued to fight with all his considerable strength of will and formidable intellect to clear his name and lay to rest the rumors still swirling around Tyler. Instead, he had shut himself away in the big old house on Elm Street and refused to see anyone, friend or foe alike. Alyssa was worried for his health, and his mental well-being. That concern and her own nightmare memories of her mother’s death had driven her to seek Phil Wocheck’s company.

The double doors leading into the lobby opened smoothly and quietly. Inside, a fire blazed on the hearth. Light gleamed softly on the paneled walls from the impressive deer-antler chandelier hanging overhead. The Oriental rug that her younger daughter, Liza, had placed in the huge main room—now the lobby and reception area of the lodge—was gone; after it was discovered that it was stained with Margaret Ingalls’s blood, it had been replaced by another, even more magnificent in shades of green and copper and blue.

Alyssa knew she had Edward Wocheck to thank for that small courtesy. No matter how far apart they had grown in the last thirty years, he would never have put her, and her family, through the trauma of looking at the rug every time they entered this building. Before Liza set in motion the chain of events leading to the discovery of her mother’s body, Alyssa had simply avoided coming here. That was no longer possible. In the few months Timberlake had been open to the public, it had become a hub of activity in Tyler, Wisconsin.

There were about a dozen people sitting in comfortable, casual groupings of overstuffed furniture before the fire and the windows overlooking the lake, while they sipped drinks, exchanged hunting stories and big-city gossip or merely sat and stared at the fire. Even though it was the middle of the week, the lodge seemed to be well booked. Once more the prestige and drawing power of the Addison Hotel Corporation name was brought home to her. It could work magic, even on a small out-of-the-way resort like Timberlake.

A smiling young woman greeted Alyssa as she approached the front desk. “May I help you, Mrs. Baron?” she asked politely.

“Hello, Sheila. I’m here to see Phil Wocheck,” Alyssa responded with a smile of her own. Edward Wocheck, Phil’s son, and head of Addison Hotel Corporation, had promised when he bought Timberlake that he would hire and train as many local people as possible. He’d kept his promise. The young woman behind the counter was a Tyler resident, a high-school classmate of Liza’s. The bartender lived in Tyler, too, and so did most of the service staff. And Alyssa knew for a fact that Edward was paying for the education of two promising young Tyler High grads at a prestigious Chicago cooking school.

“Phil’s waiting for you in Mr. Wocheck’s suite. Second door on your left, in the west wing. Right through the French doors. Only I don’t have to tell you that, do I,” Sheila said with another smile. “You must know this building like the back of your hand.”

Alyssa kept her own smile in place with an effort of will. “It’s changed a great deal in the past year,” she said in a carefully neutral tone of voice. “A very great deal.”

“That’s right,” the young woman continued, seeming unaware of Alyssa’s reluctance to speak about Timberlake. “And Liza did a great job redecorating this part of the building. Have you taken a tour of the new additions?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Mr. Wocheck—Mr. Edward Wocheck, I mean—will have to show you around. Phil can’t manage the stairs as yet and there won’t be any elevators, you know. While the new facilities will be accessible to the handicapped, elevators are out of keeping with the unspoiled, turn-of-the-century rustic atmosphere of Timberlake Lodge.” She sounded as if she were reciting from a brochure lauding the resort’s amenities, or perhaps from a Timberlake Lodge employees’ pep talk.

“That would be nice,” Alyssa said politely, as she stepped away from the desk to allow a newly arrived couple to check in. “But I’m sure Edward Wocheck is far too busy to have time to give guided tours to everyone who wants one.”

“I’m sure he could find time for you, Mrs. Baron.” Sheila’s smile was still friendly but her eyes were speculative as she nodded a goodbye and returned to her duties.

Alyssa felt a faint heat touch her cheeks as she turned away. She ought to be used to the speculation about her past relationship with Edward Wocheck by now, but she wasn’t. In a town as small as Tyler, old love affairs were public property. Especially when one of the lovers was now the richest man in town, and the other was at the center of a forty-year-old murder investigation. Everyone watched every move they made when they were together. It was that lack of privacy, that feeling of living in a glass bowl, that made their public meetings so awkward and their private ones so charged with tension. Nothing more.

And today she didn’t want to see Edward at all.

Her thoughts had carried her down the west wing corridor to the door of Phil and Edward’s suite. The rooms they occupied held no special meaning for Alyssa. Her mother’s room was in the other wing, her old bedroom and her father’s on the floor above it.

She knocked firmly and waited for a response from Phil. The older man had moved to Timberlake from Worthington House, Tyler’s retirement center and nursing home, because he could no longer climb the stairs to his room at Kelsey Boardinghouse.

“Come in,” Phil called. “The door is not locked.”

Alyssa turned the knob and went inside. Phil was rising slowly from a floral upholstered couch in front of windows that looked out over the lake.

“Forgive me. I move too slowly these days to meet you at the door,” he said, coming toward her with only a cane and a limp to remind her that he’d broken his hip not many months before. “I can go pretty good once I’m up off the couch.” He shook his head in obvious frustration. “It is getting to my feet that doesn’t go so well. How are you, Alyssa?”

“I’m well, thank you, Phil,” she said, linking her arm through his as they walked back toward the couch.

“Let me take your coat and purse,” Phil insisted. “There is no one else here to do it now. I sent Edward’s butler away. Imagine, my son with a snooty English butler to do for him.”

“Edward has a butler?” Alyssa laid her coat and purse over the arm of a wing chair, upholstered in the same soft corals and greens as the couch. She knew he was a very different man from the boy she’d known and loved all those years ago, but somehow she couldn’t picture him with a butler, English or otherwise.

“Well,” Phil said, motioning her to take a seat as he lowered himself slowly onto the couch, “the butler is his wife’s. His ex-wife, Nikki Addison. She sent him here to make us comfortable,” he said with a sneer that twisted his lips. “If you ask me, she sent him here to spy on us. What need have three men for another man to take care of them? You mark my words. She will show up herself, soon enough. She will say it is because she misses her son. But I know better.”

Alyssa didn’t want to hear about Edward’s ex-wife, the millionaire daughter of hotel magnate Arthur Addison, a woman light-years removed in wealth and prestige from Tyler, Wisconsin. “Devon is here?” she asked politely, shifting the subject slightly, but enough to steer it away from Nicole Addison Wocheck Donatelli Holmes. She’d heard the string of names from Liza and knew, from Tyler gossip as well, that Devon’s father wasn’t one of his mother’s ex-husbands, but a French skier whom Nikki had never married at all.

Alyssa had never met Edward’s stepson. The boy had never visited Tyler when he was growing up, during the years when Edward had been making his fortune and his visits to his father had been few and far between. She wondered what the young man was like, born to such wealth and power, already Edward’s right-hand man and still only thirty years old. “How does he like Tyler?”

“He likes it well enough,” Phil said, his voice overriding her thoughts. “Devon is a good boy. Edward raised him right, kept his mother and the old one, his grandfather Addison, from spoiling him rotten. Edward is a good father.” His voice was gruff, as though the praise of his son didn’t come easily. The relationship between Edward and Phil had always been strained. Now, after thirty years of only occasional visits, they were living under the same roof. It couldn’t be easy for either of them.

“I’m looking forward to meeting him,” she replied automatically, politely.

“He is in Chicago today on business. But I expect him very soon. Next time you come, you’ll meet him.”

“I—I don’t want to come here any more than I have to, Phil,” Alyssa said softly. “It’s too often in my dreams.”

“I, too, never expected to live under this roof again. Does your father know you’re here?” Alyssa shook her head. “No.”

“You didn’t come to inquire about my health.”

“No.”

“You want to know what happened that night your mother died.” He didn’t look out across the lawns to the tree by the lakeshore where he’d buried Margaret’s body so many years before; he didn’t have to. Alyssa knew he was looking back in time in his thoughts, just as she was.

“Yes.”

“I told my story to the judge and the jury. And that fire-breathing lawyer, Ethan Trask. Even he couldn’t make me say any more.”

“But you know more than what you’ve told.” Alyssa smoothed the lightweight wool material of her slacks across her knee. “You can answer my questions, fill in the gaps in my memory.”

“What do you remember, malushka?” Phil asked using the Polish endearment of her childhood.

“Not enough,” Alyssa said with a quick catch of her breath. “And too much.”