A Midsummer Inheritance

When Ridgeway Springs' beloved retired postmistress is found at the base of the covered bridge steps, the official verdict is a tragic accident. Eloise Stevens notices the scuff mark on the step is angled entirely the wrong way.

As innkeeper of the Ridgeway Springs Inn, Eloise has spent a year learning this Vermont community's rhythms. She knows who walks where, who keeps which secrets, and who has reason to keep them buried. Midsummer should be the season of smooth routines and full guest books. Instead, a certified letter has arrived challenging her legal right to the inn itself, a long-sealed east wing has been opened for the first time in decades, and the woman who knew everyone's business has died before she could share what she'd quietly been investigating.

Winifred Albright kept this town's threads for nearly forty years. Someone made sure she'd never pull the most dangerous one. Now Eloise is inheriting both the mystery and the risk, because the harder she looks into Winifred's death, the more her own family's past rises to meet her. There are will drafts no one was supposed to surface, a cousin with a legitimate legal claim, and a quiet community presence who has been watching every development with unsettling calm.

When secrets are buried this carefully, the truth doesn't stay hidden, it waits.

This is the fourth installment of the Ridgeway Springs Inn Mysteries series.