Read Online A Fortune to Die For (White Oak - Mafia Series Book 1) by Liza O'Connor - Free Book Online

a heavy copper brown.
    After a healthy breakfast of oatmeal with walnuts and fruits, the three women returned to their rooms to ready for their hike. Since the Feds insisted Meg could take only one small suitcase on the plane, setting her priorities over what to pack had been paramount. Proper hiking gear was number one on her list.
    Thus, she had sacrificed clothes space to carry her hip-pack, three RTE meals, a mosquito net, fishing string and hooks, a thermal blanket, an ace bandage, and her hiking boots. Which meant after she packed her hiking clothes, she only had room for one “wrinkle proof suit”, five pairs of undergarments and socks, and her favorite PJs.
    Fortunately, yesterday, when she’d stopped for gas at the Indian Casino, she’d been able to replace many items she couldn’t carry on the plane. The “no fly” items included a Swiss army knife, matches in a waterproof tube, a compass, a small shovel, a hatchet, and two stainless steel water containers now filled with water. If something were to happen and she couldn’t make it out of the woods, she wanted to have everything she needed to survive.
    Meg quickly donned her hiking clothes, then filled the hip-pack with her survival gear. Soon, she had everything fitted inside except for the shovel and ax, which she attached to external loops, one on each hip.
    Satisfied with her gear, she sat down and laced up her water-resistant, toe-reinforced, mid-ankle hiking boots. After tucking in the legs of her bug-resistant pants into the top of the boots and zipping up the knee-high gaiters to protect her lower legs from whatever came her way, she was ready.
    Excited to be hiking again, she grabbed her floppy hat and headed to the living room where both Tess and Helen waited, dressed much the same.
    They both smiled and Helen softly whispered to Tess, “Told you.”
    “Nice gear!” Tess said. “We can take on anything now.”
    There was an exit from the lower part of the house that didn’t require going through the closet. A good thing, given Tess wore a full-size backpack. Helen had a hip-pack similar to hers.
    The trail literally began at the door.
    Meg breathed in with great pleasure as she followed the two women into the woods. It had been a long time—four years to be precise—since she’d been hiking without the stress of fearing some deranged person might take her out any second.
    The forest seemed ancient compared to the woods she normally hiked. Almost all the trees had light gray bark, standing nearly one hundred and fifty feet with massive branches, creating a shaded canopy. “How old are these trees?”
    “Most are a hundred and fifty to two hundred years old,” Helen replied. “Though a few may be hitting four hundred.” She pointed to a thick, straight trunk five or six feet in diameter. “This beauty’s pushing four.”
    “The white oak’s heartwood is denser and thus less susceptible to fungal diseases,” Tess explained, “thus it’s a long-lived tree if it can avoid being cut down. It’s highly valued as lumber because it's closed cellular structure makes it rot-resistant. This tree would sell for three or four thousand dollars at final market.”
    Helen huffed at Tess’s last comment.
    Meg quickly did the math and frowned. Even if the average tree brought a price of $1000, assuming 200 trees per acre, they were sitting on four billion dollars’ worth of trees. No wonder Helen’s relatives wanted her to sell. They weren’t after her land; they wanted to harvest the trees.
    Which explained why Helen searched for a person who loved hiking and had more money than she ever wanted. Anyone else would sacrifice the forest for wealth beyond their imagination.
    After trekking for two hours through the forest, Meg was in love. The well-marked and maintained trails took them up and down hills, along ridges and into swamps where white oak timber was used to make long-lasting boardwalks.
    Helen thumped her heel on the boardwalk. “When