Loveknot

“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.