Deception

“Jewel deserves someone far better than me.” And if she had a wealthy family, she was more like Katelyn than he’d realized. That wealth had come between them more than once. Her wealthy family had questioned his investigation, blamed him for her murder as if he hadn’t already been weighed down by it.

“So what do you think? Who do you believe is a suspect?”

“Hard to say at this point. The fact she has a wealthy family could be motivation for murder.”

“But how if she’s been disinherited?” David asked. “There has to be more to the story.”

“There always is.”

* * *

Meral had gone down to the kitchen to get Jewel a cup of green tea. Jewel was glad to have a minute of relative privacy. She was glad that she had people who cared about her enough to want to help her, but the hovering was already starting to feel overwhelming.

She definitely didn’t like being confined to her room, even though her body was sore and she needed to recover from her injuries. Not to mention she had guests to attend to, but neither could she let any of them see her like this. She’d give it a day or two, leaving running the B and B to her staff, and hope it didn’t take a week for her bruised body to heal. Jewel would give anything to forget about the fall and her injuries and to go back to life as usual. She needed normalcy. To get that, she would have to stop taking the painkillers. They made her groggy, and she couldn’t think straight.

When she sat up, dizziness swept over her. She made the mistake of glancing in the mirror over the dresser, and her mouth dried up.

Chief Winters saw me like this?

She shoved thoughts of what he must think of her out of her mind. His opinion shouldn’t count. She couldn’t care about that. After Silas’s death, she almost hadn’t survived the heartache. She’d given up her life and family to be with him, and now all she had left of that life were memories and heartache. The price of loving someone was too high.

She couldn’t survive that pain again.

So for now she had to focus on other things until the unwelcome feelings in her heart went away.

One question nagged her. Why would someone want to kill her? Had it simply been random? Or had she been targeted? Jewel had no enemies that she knew about. No reason for someone to push her over.

Unless...

My secret.

Jewel pressed her hands over her heart. God, please no. She needed the secret to remain dead and buried. She wasn’t the same young woman who had made that mistake. Besides, no one knew about it, so no. That couldn’t be it.

She was back to her question. And she didn’t know why someone would try to kill her. When she was a child, her parents had taught her to be on her guard, not to trust easily, because there were too many people in the world who might try to hurt her or kidnap her because of their money. But it had been years since that had been an issue for her. No one in Alaska had even known she’d once been wealthy. Until Meral and Buck arrived a few days ago.

Now suddenly her life had been threatened.

Could the two incidents be related?

And what of Meral’s new husband, Buck? What did Meral really know about the man?

Jewel should be ecstatic that she had a second chance with the family she’d given up to come to Alaska. She thought she’d gotten over that hurt, too, until Meral. She wanted to be happy to see her sister, who had only been fifteen when Jewel had left. In fact, she had not known how much she’d missed her family.

But something was wrong. Very wrong. She should thank Buck Cambridge for bringing Meral—a wedding gift, he’d said. He’d found Meral’s long-lost sister. But Jewel wasn’t sure she really wanted to be found.

Something about Buck disturbed her. He didn’t look at Meral the way Jewel’s husband had looked at her when they’d fallen in love.

But who was Jewel to judge? How could she bring up her misgivings about Buck with Meral, a sister she barely knew? They were only just reconnecting. Getting to know each other again. It wasn’t her place. She wouldn’t do anything to destroy this chance at having her family again. If Jewel questioned her sister about Buck, then she would sound just like their parents had sounded when Jewel had fallen in love.

Those memories came rushing back, crushing the breath from her.

Jewel shoved from the bed. She wouldn’t do that to Meral. She’d give her sister—a grown woman in her thirties, an experienced woman who had already been married before—the benefit of a doubt.

Jewel would let Chief Winters investigate and see what came of it without mentioning her suspicions about Buck.

She could trust Colin Winters. He was a good man and a good chief of police and had served Mountain Cove well. Maybe there were some in town who blamed him for the rise in the crime rate in recent years, accusing him of not being hard enough on suspects and criminals. Then others blamed him and his officers for using too much force. So much pressure from the community pushing him in different directions had to be brutal on him.

Jewel had never blamed him. People wanted to remove God from the equation of life and expect law and order to reign in His place. Without God ruling people’s lives, there was only chaos.

The words snagged at her heart, bringing to mind her own shortcomings. Her own hidden secret. She needed to check on it—see if it was still safe. Jewel peeked out the door into the hallway. All clear.

Jewel’s bedroom was on the second floor. She tiptoed up another flight of stairs. Though unintelligible, Meral’s voice could be heard, along with Katy Warren’s, drifting up from the kitchen.

Katy was here? The grandmother and matriarch of the Warren clan was a dear friend, and Jewel wanted to go down and greet her, but now that she had a moment alone—something she might not get for a while—she needed to take a good long look at her past.

The one she’d buried, tucked away forever, safe and sound.

Creeping to the end of the hallway, she gently pulled down the stepladder to the attic. She climbed up into the hot and stuffy room. She flicked on a light to add to the sunlight spilling through a dirty dormer window at the far end.

A raccoon had tried to nest up here, and Jewel had come up to chase it away on more than one occasion, but other than that, she hadn’t been up here for months.

Dust motes and cobwebs had taken over the space. Jewel brushed away the webs as she moved. When Silas had bought the B and B, he had believed it would keep her occupied so she wouldn’t worry about him traveling to fight wildfires. They’d hoped to turn the attic into an office or another room for a guest. Instead, it ended up serving as storage for old furniture and collectibles that Jewel planned to use to refresh the B and B decor, switching things out for seasons or special occasions.

And when he’d been away, she’d stored her more valuable collectible—if you could call it that—not just in the house but with the house.

If the house burned to the ground, her valuable would survive.

Jewel headed for the far corner, dreading what she was about to do. Acid churned in her stomach.

She moved a trunk, feeling an ache through her back and across her legs and arms. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. She might accidentally tear the stitches and open up that nasty gash.

Plus, moving the trunk had made too much noise. She had to be quiet, or Katy and Meral would hear her movements.

Creak.

She froze. Her pulse jumped.

The sound had come from the attic. The rafters settling beneath the simple plywood flooring? Or something—someone—else?

At the falls she’d heard the snap of a twig right behind her. Shuddering, she slowly turned to look. See if someone was there, fearing what would happen if they were. She couldn’t see the steps down into the hallway for the boxes and furniture stacked in her way.

Ever since Tracy’s attacker had stayed in the B and B, Jewel had known she needed more protection than the rifles stored in a gun closet or a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol tucked away in her nightstand. She had needed to train in self-defense in case a day ever came when she would have to protect herself without the use of a firearm.

Granted, none of that had come in handy at the falls, except maybe to give her confidence to swim her way to freedom. Would she find herself using that training now? When she heard nothing more, she looked at the wall where the item was hidden behind a plank and reconsidered. Maybe she wasn’t in the right frame of mind to revisit the past.

But there was only one reason Jewel could imagine someone would want her dead. She hadn’t wanted to think about it, but as the walls of the attic closed in around her, she had to face the truth.

Another creak had her stiffening. Preparing for the worst.