CHAPTER 1

Today is the day of my father’s funeral. He was murdered. 

That was the first thought twenty-eight-year-old Mariah Lyons had as she awoke from a fitful sleep in the home where she had been raised in Mahwah, a town bordering the Ramapo Mountains in northern New Jersey.

Brushing back the tears that were welling in her eyes, she sat up slowly, slid her feet onto the floor, and looked around her room.