Loveknot. Marisa Carroll

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.”

      “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