With Christmas and her wedding just weeks away, Sheriff McCall Winchester knew she couldn’t put it off any longer.
The whole family would be attending the wedding. She had to find out if someone in the family had been involved in her father’s death. She knew her grandmother had been doing some investigating of her own. As far as McCall could tell, though, Pepper hadn’t discovered who might have betrayed not only McCall’s father, but also Pepper herself.
“She’s never going to let it lie,” McCall told her fiancé, Luke Crawford, as they lay in the small double bed in his travel trailer.
Through the window, she could see the beautiful house he’d built for them. Luke said it would be finished by the time they returned from their honeymoon and had made her promise she wouldn’t peek inside until then.
She couldn’t have been more excited—and anxious about marrying this man lying next to her.
“Are we talking about your grandmother again?” he asked, sounding half-asleep.
“I’m worried about the wedding.” She knew they’d had this discussion many times before. When her grandmother had insisted she and Luke get married at the Winchester ranch, McCall had been touched. After all, except for a few months of her life, she’d been the black sheep, an outcast, not even accepted as a Winchester, her paternity in question.
All that had changed when she’d discovered that her father, Trace Winchester, had never left town on the lam, leaving behind a pregnant wife and a devastated mother. His murder had brought his daughter and mother together.
The second shock to both of them was how much McCall resembled her grandmother.
“The problem is that Pepper is still convinced someone in the family was involved in Trace’s murder,” she told her fiancé now.
Luke opened one eye and focused it on her. “I wondered how long it would take before you admitted you agree with her.”
“Who said I agree?”
Luke laughed and closed his eye again. “Your grandmother is right. You make a damned good sheriff. You’re a born investigator. So investigate. Better to find out before the wedding, don’t you think?”
She lay back on her pillow, staring up at the ceiling. “There isn’t much time,” she said, more to herself than Luke. “But the whole family is coming home a few days before the wedding.”
McCall sighed. Why had she been putting it off?
Because her father was dead and nothing could bring him back. And investigating her own family, the family she’d just been accepted into, wasn’t something she’d wanted to do. A sure sign she shouldn’t be sheriff.
As she studied the trailer ceiling, she had to admit the truth to herself. She believed that the killer hadn’t acted alone, had suspected it from the moment she’d found her father’s remains within sight of the Winchester ranch. There had only been one reason to kill her father on that high ridge with the ranch in the distance.
And while she was being truthful, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know who in the Winchester family had been involved. She feared her grandmother would regret knowing, as well.
But the wedding day was looming. It was time to find out who in the wedding party was an accomplice to murder.