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.”
“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.
