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.
“That’s not it.” He regretted yet again bringing up the matter. The words conflict of interest echoed through his brain. He wasn’t ready, or able, to discuss alternatives for management of Ingalls Farm and Machinery with Alyssa now or any time in the immediate future. He was also convinced she wasn’t going to thank him for it when he did.
“You must think I’m a fool,” she said, moving a little faster, just quickly enough to dislodge his hold on her elbow. “A small-town housewife, trying to run a million-dollar business that’s in trouble up to its neck, asking you for a huge loan she hasn’t even got the collateral to secure.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is, Edward. You’ve hidden your contempt for Tyler and the rest of us well these past months, but it’s still there, isn’t it?”
“I don’t have contempt or hatred for anyone in Tyler, Lyssa.”
“Not even my father?” she asked, her blue eyes looking past him, back into time.
“Especially not your father.”
“No,” she said, focusing on his face once again, searching for something in his carefully neutral expression. “I apologize for saying that. If you still hated my father, you wouldn’t have taken Timberlake off his hands. You paid cash. And far more than it’s worth.”
“You’re wrong. This place is a gold mine. It just needs the right management to take off.”
“It needs you,” Alyssa said softly. “You have changed a great deal. You don’t resent coming back here.” There was just enough doubt in her voice to prompt his answer.
“If I still hated everyone who ever put down Eddie Wocheck, the Polack from the wrong side of the tracks, I wouldn’t have done what I did with this place. Tyler is my hometown, just like it is yours.”
“I apologize again,” she said with a self-mocking smile. “You’re lucky you lost your Midwest naiveté years ago. It’s a lot harder to do when you spend your whole life in the same small town, you know. You can put your money to much better use than pumping it into a failing concern like Ingalls F and M.”
“Alyssa, stop putting yourself down. There are thousands of small companies all over the country in the same kind of financial bind. I can’t save them all.”
“Somehow that’s not very comforting to me, or the people who work for me. Goodbye, Edward. I won’t embarrass you or myself by asking for help again.” She got into the car. She hadn’t locked it, he noticed. No one in Tyler locked their cars.
He watched her drive away, wishing he could still trust his fellow man enough to leave his own car unlocked. Wishing he was still the boy Alyssa had loved and trusted with all her heart; knowing he was not and never could be again. And knowing, also, that sooner or later she would find that out.