Loveknot. Marisa Carroll

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      “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.

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