The dead end isolation and solitude Kari loved most about her home was now the thing that would consume and cripple her.  Her new normal was to be trapped inside of her house with two dogs about to blow and her mind filled with so much fear that it was as if a swarm of killer wasps had replaced her brain.

She threw herself on her couch, pulled the hood of her XL man’s hoodie over her head, grabbed a safety pin, opened it up and began picking at her cuticles until they bled. The mutilation helped put her into a calming meditative trance as it had for most of her life.

Accident or murder, pre-meditated or spontaneous; either way, Kari was just informed, as the only-child-daughter of one whack job of a mother whose fate she held in her hands.  She gagged up bile.  She didn’t want to be there.  She had her own problems and would need a therapist to process what she’d just been told, but she couldn’t afford one.

Being broke and homeless was actually better, Kari thought, than being there with her deranged mother.  She wanted to leave, but how could she leave now?  And where would she go?  The person who most likely killed her father was now freaking tethered to her for as long as Bev lived….and they say the crazy ones live the longest.

“Rarer than rare,” Avent responded.  “It’s called the Lydian Lion – a coin of a wealthy Turkish dynasty going back to about 600 B.C.  Thing is, these photos aren’t of just any Lydian coin, I’m told.  Don’t ask me how or why or any other obvious questions about what it has to do with Raintree, but a couple months ago, he posted these photos on a sketchy men-looking-for-foreign bride’s website with the caption, ‘Looking for love and treasure.’  This coin has never been seen before.  Collectors have been talking about it for centuries. Until Raintree’s photos, it’s been something of a myth.  And not only that, but with this photo, he resurrected centuries of rumors about the lost buried gold on Raintree lands.