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R EBECCA

And the stars never rise, though I feel the bright eyes...

Annabel Lee

ANNABEL’S LIGHTHOUSE SPRING, 1874

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, you don’t remember?” Hilliard asked.

His hard stare brought back the memories Rebecca didn’t want to recall. More and more flooded her consciousness. The moments she’d hidden under her bed as a child when her father had stormed around the house in a drunken rage. The times she had planted a pretty smile on her face at dinner functions, where he paraded her around to potential investors. They had traveled to places like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., St. Louis and Detroit. Hilliard was always mingling with investors, politicians, men driven by the pursuit of power. Rebecca had lived in her father’s shadow, managed each day under his thumb, and had known from a young age that she was no more to him than a tool.

“I asked you a question!” Hilliard’s sharp demand brought Rebecca back to the present.

Her heartbeat was erratic, her breaths coming in short gasps. Panic wrapped itself around her.

“I don’t remember,” she whimpered, desperately wishing she could remember where she had stashed the papers. Wishing she could remember as well why she had taken them in the first place.

Hilliard marched to the door of his office and jerked it open. “Mercer!” he shouted.

“Yes, sir?” Mercer’s voice sent shivers through Rebecca’s body.

“Take my daughter to the shack and keep her there until she complies and tells you where the papers are.”

“Yes, sir,” Mercer said.

Rebecca’s breaths came faster now. Mercer strode in and hauled Rebecca by her arm from the chair.

“No!” She cried out against the pain of his brutal grip. “Father, please!” Rebecca pleaded, tears staining her face. He had to have some mercy in him, some element of concern or of conscience. But she saw none of that on his face or in his eyes. Instead, selfish ambition and greed shadowed her father’s countenance despite the well-trimmed beard and dark sideburns, his overall debonair appearance. He was a man who was used to having his way.

Hilliard put out a hand to stop Mercer as he tugged Rebecca toward the door, her feet stumbling over themselves.

“This is your last chance, Rebecca,” Hilliard warned. “Once you are out of my sight, your welfare is out of my control.”

Rebecca sucked in a gulp of air. “You’re a monster,” she whispered.

Hilliard’s face hardened, and he pointed to the door. “Take her. Get those papers and map from her. Do whatever you need to. I will not lose this town because of the impulse of that woman’s illegitimate offspring!”

Mercer shoved her out a back door, away from the small town’s main street. The air was still thick with smoke. Miners and a few women scurried on missions likely related to the stamp mill—their livelihood—which now, according to Hilliard, lay in ashes. Mining would be slow and worthless without the mill. To move the quantity of ore necessary to maintain strong economic growth, the mill had to be in working order.

Mercer half threw Rebecca into the back of a waiting wagon. Bear was there, and he hauled her up and in, her legs scraping on the wood floor. He held her down with a boot to her midsection, and Rebecca froze. Any struggle from her would only result in pressure from his foot, and that in turn might harm Abel’s baby.

Abel’s baby .

It was how she thought of the child now. Her loyalty to the babe was due to her loyalty to the man who had shown her kindness. He had withheld the knowledge of their marriage—of his fatherhood—she could only assume because he didn’t wish her to flee again. The world around them had begun to spiral out of control, not the least of which being Kjersti’s death. Grief and fear had a way of making souls make hard choices—and not always the best ones. She should know.

The wagon hit a rut that jolted Bear’s balance. His foot came off Rebecca, and she rolled to the far side of the wagon, away from him. As fast as she could, she gripped the side and pulled herself into a sitting position.

“Please, someone! Help—!” Her screams were cut off as Bear’s arm came across her mouth, dragging her back against him.

But in that moment, Rebecca’s eyes latched onto another’s that emerged from the hazy, smoke-filled street. Niina’s horrified expression summarized every ounce of Rebecca’s terror.

She was alone in the shack that Mercer had brought her to before. The place she had escaped from, an act he’d obviously recalled because her hands and feet were bound tighter now, and Bear stood sentinel outside the rickety door made of wood planks. She could see daylight through the top and bottom of the door. She could also see the heels of Bear’s boots. She was not going anywhere, even if she could wriggle free from her bindings.

Rebecca allowed the tears to come, though they had been falling longer than she’d realized. She wasn’t strong; she wasn’t a fighter. No, she had always been compliant, easily manipulated, well aware that things would go better for her if she didn’t go against Walter Hilliard. The man who claimed he was not her father. The man who had raised her because of her dead mother, Annabel. Was it true? Was he truly not her father? Or perhaps that was the thin thread of reason that had made Hilliard keep her close to him. To raise her anyway. Maybe he questioned it too. Maybe Annabel had never told him whether Rebecca was or wasn’t his, and Hilliard had drawn his own conclusions.

Annabel. Rebecca closed her eyes, and Edgar’s story returned to her. Had he loved her? He claimed to have. The unrequited love in his words, in the old man’s tone, haunted Rebecca now.

Annabel had been a miner’s daughter, Edgar had said. Hilliard had told Rebecca that she was not his child. Edgar had loved Annabel. Hilliard had married her.

Rebecca’s heart began to race. Two men, one woman, a child—Rebecca—and Annabel’s death. This was a legacy. A legacy of one woman torn between two men.

She strained to remember the date of death on Annabel’s gravestone—1852, it had a said. She would have just been born. Was she ... was she Edgar’s daughter? Rebecca’s watery gasp echoed in the shack, and Bear’s boot slammed against the door.

“Shut up!” he demanded.

Rebecca bit down on her tongue, willing away the sob that stuck in her throat.

Edgar was an old man, at least twenty years Hilliard’s senior. He would have been in his fifties when Rebecca was born, and yet Rebecca knew in a wild land like the Porcupine Mountains, age meant little when love blossomed.

She squeezed her eyes shut against the burning tears. If God had mercy, then He would come down from His heaven and clear everything up until all of it made sense. He would fill in the blanks and give answers to the questions of this tragic story.

Love wasn’t supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be giving, a wellspring of joy, with a willingness to serve and sacrifice for those one held dear. Instead, in Rebecca’s story—no, in her mother Annabel’s story—what passed for love had taken on the grotesque shape of selfishness, of a motivation not for the well-being of the other, but for oneself.

At least for Hilliard it was that way.

Rebecca didn’t know Edgar’s story. She didn’t know her mother’s story either. She just knew Annabel’s, the woman who had given her life, then drowned while she had been married to Hilliard. Not to Edgar. Which meant that if Hilliard was right, an affair of the heart, if not more, had occurred while she was wed to him. Edgar would have been an interloper in a marriage perhaps based on greed or selfish desire on Hilliard’s part, or desperate need on Annabel’s. Or perhaps they had both at one time imagined love.

Whatever its beginning, it soured, became divisive, and then Edgar entered ... and then Rebecca was conceived and later born.

And Annabel had drowned.

A horrible supposition entered Rebecca’s mind then.

Annabel had drowned—a woman alone in a skiff? On Lake Superior, with waves that could easily topple such a boat, unless of course the one at the helm had the benefit of expertise? Why had Annabel left the shore to row onto the lake anyway? What had driven her to face the violence of the lake’s mouth?

Rebecca stilled at the imagery entering her mind. Blue eyes as cold as the lake but filled with a protective warmth that countered the chill. Abel.

Not long ago she herself had entered the mouth of the lake—to escape a worse evil, yes. Yet the wildness of the lake was preferable to the violence that had loomed behind Rebecca. But Abel...

He had been there.

He had risked his life to envelop her in his embrace.

He had claimed her and their babe.

And suddenly, in the force of what love was supposed to be, Rebecca remembered everything.