Chapter 1
It was August and Kara Wolfe was preparing for her first trip to Montana. Her flight would leave the following morning and her carry-on and work bags were packed. It was to be a quick trip, three days at the most, the man on the phone said … to appraise an anonymous donation made to his cowboy museum. Kara had never been to Montana, but the state had deep Native American roots and she was eager for the visit, hoping she might get a chance to see some of the local history.
From her studies, she understood that the state was known more for its open air, jagged peaks, and rolling plains than for its bustling cities, and with her home of New York City experiencing its eighth straight day of a devastating heatwave, the man’s promise of ‘cool, mountain air’ sealed the deal.
The break from the heat, however, was only the second thing Kara was looking forward to. She was excited about the quick work trip and seeing a place she had never been to, but it was the object the man on the phone wanted her to appraise that completely stole her attention.
“You’re sure you’re not mistaken?” Kara asked when he first described the item over the phone. She was sitting in her small Brooklyn office, staring into the three circular fans propped up on her desk.
“No, ma’am, I’ve got it right here in front of me. Jewels in the handle and all.”
“I’ve only ever read about artifacts like that. I’ve never actually seen one. If it’s authentic, it could be a very valuable piece.”
The man on the phone paused for a few moments, and in the silence, Kara heard the faintest whisper of a triumphant hoot, as if he had covered his receiver in an effort to disguise his excited outburst.
“How valuable, ma’am? And you’re sure you’ll be able to tell if it’s real or not?”
“I’ll be able to give you a good idea about its authenticity,” Kara said with a smile. “But I won’t be able to give you an exact figure of its worth. If the object looks authentic, then the next step would be to take it to an expert in this area of history and archaeology.”
“Well, bless your heart, Ms. Wolfe. If this object is real, I’ll be bringing it to auction. You don’t know what this money could do for me.”
“I’m not making any promises, I still need to see the dagger, but from what you’ve been able to tell me, there’s a real possibility. It takes time to properly determine an object’s age and history. After my visit, it will be necessary to bring it to a university for further examination. But it does sound like the jade alone might be worth something. And please, call me Kara.”
“Yes, ma’am … um, of course, Kara. Got it. But you need to know. We, the museum, I mean … we can’t exactly pay you. Not yet, anyway. Business has been pretty bad around here, but if this thing sells at auction, I’ll be able to get a check in the mail to you for your time and expertise.”
“Don’t worry about that. We can deal with all of that once the cards are on the table. Lucy, my business partner, the woman you spoke with earlier, will get me on the next flight out of New York. It will be nice to meet you, Hank.”
“Well, my name is Hank, but everyone’s called me Sur for as long as I can remember. And, thank you. You don’t know what this means for the museum.”
“I’ll see you soon, Sur.”
* * *
The next flight, as it turned out, took off two days after Kara ended the phone call and put her flying into Missoula, Montana. When she landed, Kara would need to rent a car and drive the remaining two hours to Four Falls, a town just south of Glacier National Park. It was going to be a long day of travel there and a long day of travel home for such a quick trip, but she was used to tough days on the road. They were how Kara had cut her teeth in the archeological world over the last several years, and a tough day of travel usually meant they were headed somewhere worthwhile.
After graduating at the top of her class from Princeton, Kara had spent her first five years out of school freelancing around the world, chasing ancient stories and unearthing archaic mysteries. From the Mediterranean to the deserts of Africa, she worked tirelessly, unable to satiate her incredible drive for adventure and exploration. Much to the pleasure of her advisors at the university and her parents, Kara managed to make a name for herself internationally in the area of archeological and anthropological research and discovery.
School had always come easy to Kara. Whatever the subject, she breezed through all of her studies, but her passion had always been history, or, rather, the stories of history. There was something so personal about the biographical legends that Kara couldn’t stop herself from falling in love with them. The stories were born from fact. The people she read about had really lived, and their lives shone through in the books she devoured.
It was her parents who, whenever the question was raised at dig sites or university gatherings, Kara credited with instilling a love for history, but that wasn’t the full truth. In fact, it wasn’t the truth at all, but just like her mother recited to her over and over again growing up, “white lies make the world shine,” the world certainly didn’t need to know about Kara’s secret ability when she had only ever shared it with one other person.
The Wolfe family always had a way with words. Growing up with a father who anchored the five o’clock news and a mother who was a financial advisor, but was also involved with charities and the Homeowners’ Association, it made sense that Kara’s charisma gene was well-tuned. The charm her parents radiated was just about the only thread that could trace Kara back to them.
Her childhood home, a bright two-story house in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York, had been about as cookie-cutter as they came, but she had two parents who loved her dearly and the house was filled with fun, dinners with friends, and kayaking on the lakes and rivers. Although Kara had never had an uncomfortable day in the eighteen years she’d lived in Buffalo, she had always been a little different.
To Kara, their life was happy and enjoyable with block parties, sports, afternoon tea, manicured lawns, and white picket fences, but it lacked the adventure she desperately longed for, the adventures she had spent her early life reading about. She wanted to experience something exciting, something meaningful. Like the warriors, queens, and history makers, Kara wanted to encounter something special and noteworthy. She wanted to travel and explore, which meant leaving the gated community the first chance she got.
Kara wasn’t a tall woman, just a few inches above average, but her long, wavy black hair and athletic frame drastically contrasted with that of her plump, blond-haired and blue-eyed parents. By the age of thirteen, she stood a full head taller than her mother, a fact that always seemed to be brought up by the neighborhood housewives.
She had enjoyed sports in school, and Kara was built like a pole vaulter, with long, thin limbs and lean muscles, a trait that she was thankful for every time she explored a new dig site or hiked to a forgotten burial ground.
Kara had settled in Brooklyn, working as a professor at a nearby university and using her freelancing talents to create a consulting company with her best friend from Princeton, Lucy Morefield.
Lucy had followed Kara around the world on her archaeological missions, and when the two decided they’d had enough traveling and wanted to head back stateside, it was only fitting that they went into business together.
Lucy’s academic pursuits were quite a bit less elegant than Kara’s, but she still managed to graduate the same spring with a business degree. To Lucy, Princeton had always been more about the experience than about the framed receipt they gave out with your name on it. She was there to discover who she was, and that could not be found in books or study sessions. She was there to find herself, not the person her family had decided she would be.
The Morefields were one of the oldest families in New Jersey, a family not only born with silver spoons, but with silver knives, forks, toothpicks, and lobster mallets. The Morefields could trace their roots all the way back to the second class to ever graduate from Princeton, and from as early as she could remember, it had been Lucy’s job to walk the same halls as her ancestors. A fact that really irked her, and one that Kara figured was the main fuel behind Lucy’s streak of rebellious behavior.
Lucy was a carefree spirit, as Kara so delicately referred to her, and her spirit had the tendency to land herself in the hot seat, which was exactly how the two women first met. Lucy walked into the first day of their freshman orientation class ten minutes late, sunglasses on, hungover beyond belief, and plopped herself into the first open seat she saw, which happened to be right next to Kara.
It wasn’t an early class by any means, but within minutes, Lucy had fallen asleep with her head on Kara’s shoulder. Not knowing how to react, Kara did nothing, letting Lucy sleep through the entire class period, only waking once the class had been dismissed. The two were inseparable from that moment on.
* * *
“You know there’s nothing in Montana, right?” Lucy asked as she unzipped Kara’s carry-on and checked the clothing that had already been packed. “Just a whole bunch of wind and sagebrush. I went to my grandad’s hunting cabin in Bozeman once when I was little. It was cold. There are a lot of bears. And it gets dark, like, ‘see-the-entirety-of-the-cosmos-swirling-above-your-head’ kind of dark. Tibet reminded me a lot of Montana, and we liked Tibet, remember? But we also promised we’d never go back. This is borderline pinky-promise-breaking behavior, Kara.”
It was the morning of Kara’s flight and Lucy had shown up early to share a cup of coffee before her friend went to the airport.
“I’m not going hunting, I’ll make sure to watch out for any bears, and you’re just jealous you can’t come with me,” Kara said as she tried to stop Lucy from upending her luggage. “I’m just going there to let Sur know if the dagger is real. I’ll be in and out. Plus, someone needs to make sure we stay open for business.”
“I know, I know. Leave the girl without the special archaeological hands behind,” Lucy said, emphasizing the last word as she maneuvered her body between Kara and the luggage, effectively butting her out of the way. “He sounded really old on the phone. Polite, but old. What will you do if it’s just a knockoff?”
Kara shrugged. “Let him know he has a beautiful paperweight.”
Lucy laughed as she emptied the small suitcase onto the bed. She fished through the clothes, then moved to the closet where she pulled different dresses and blouses off of their hangers. “Does Four Falls have any nightlife?”
“Probably just an old country bar … and, for what it’s worth, Sur seemed to know what he was talking about over the phone. I think it’s worth the trip.”
Lucy asked, “Who runs a cowboy museum anyway? I thought all the cowboys lived in Texas?”
“All that open land means a lot of cows, and I think they like their steaks big out there,” Kara said. “I think Montana has more cowboys per capita than Texas.”
“How can you possibly know that?” Lucy was holding a green cardigan in one hand and a navy suit jacket in the other, mentally weighing their merits and potential uses on the trip.
Kara watched her friend and shook her head. “I’m not going to need a cardigan in August. I think jeans and t-shirts are going to be more their style anyway.”
“Well, what kind of first impression is that going to make? What if you find a hunk of a cowboy down at the local saloon?”
“The only hunk I’m looking for is that hunk of Ming Dynasty jade. Can you believe someone donated that? Either they really want that cowboy museum to stay in business for the next three hundred years, or they’re looking to get rid of a tax sinkhole,” Kara said. “I wonder how many hands have held that dagger?”
Lucy wore a grave expression. “You’re going to be careful out there, right? I’m not going to be able to run interference like I usually do when you start inspecting the goods. You can’t go getting all glossy-eyed without any backup.”
Kara started repacking her carry-on with the same jeans and t-shirts she’d originally chosen.
“Kara?”
“Yes, yes. I’ll be careful. Didn’t I get on just fine before I met you?” Kara smiled.
“Yeah, but according to my calculations, your life has improved about ten million times for the better since I walked into it.”
“Well, that’s a blatant lie,” Kara chuckled. “I’d only say about eight million times.”
“Take the cardigan. The plane will be cold, and Montana gets freak snowstorms. You’ll thank me later.”
“Fine, but that’s going to take away baggage space for your souvenir. I’ll only be able to get you a keychain at this rate. It’s just a few days, remember?”
“I’d rather you bring home a jade paycheck. We need to keep our lights on,” Lucy said, zipping the carry-on closed.
“It’s New York City,” Kara replied. “The lights are always on.”
Chapter 2
Kara’s flight was uneventful. With a quick layover in Chicago, she slept for most of the trip, waking up just in time to see their descent into Missoula. She’d seen images online, but in person, the mountain town carried an air that she’d never experienced before. Kara had traveled around the world. She’d climbed snowy peaks and bushwhacked through jungles, but the way the shadows of these mountains spread across the land felt special, like a city untouched, a secret tucked away from the rest of the world.
Missoula was home to over seventy thousand people, so it wasn’t small by any means, but it somehow managed to hold onto its small-town atmosphere. Every street Kara’s rental car turned down felt like it could have been the city’s only road. It was starkly different from Brooklyn, something Kara noticed the moment she entered the open road.
Montana was quiet. Not silent, as there were sounds all around her, from the rushing water of the rivers she crossed to birds calling to one another across the sky, but quiet in the sense that only those things with something to say bothered to speak—as if this state had something to tell her, and Kara was willing to listen.
She drove with her windows down the whole way to Four Falls, enjoying the cool breezes that danced off the mountain’s still snow-covered peaks. With every mile, summer jumped out at her with a refreshing air. Each town, each tree, each deer hidden in the bushes, the lakes she drove around, the families walking their dogs, the mailboxes made of old license plates, the looming Rocky Mountains, the winding roads, the pure blue sky. Kara could see why people chose to call Montana home.
Its peacefulness was tangible, and each crisp breath seemed to raise her a little higher in her seat. If every day is like this, she thought, I might need to stretch this trip into a week to see what else this state has to offer. Who knows what secrets these old mountains hold?
She was three miles outside of Four Falls when Kara spotted the biggest cowboy she had ever seen. Sun-bleached and with a few bullet holes, the sixty-foot-tall billboard depicted a smiling, middle-aged cowboy with a thick gray mustache, blue eyes, and a white cowboy hat. Stretching out of his mouth like a lit cigarette, a comic-book-style bubble cut across the sky with the words: Montana’s Biggest Cowboy Museum.
“Well,” Kara said. “At least I know I’m in the right place.”
Even without the billboard beacon, she wouldn’t have had a hard time finding the museum. Four Falls was not a large place. With a grocery store that doubled as the town’s only gas station, a beauty salon with 1980s-era hair posters in the window, an “authentic” pizza place, and, as she correctly guessed, an old Western bar, the next largest building she saw was an old, white chapel. Its paint was peeling in some areas, and you had to walk through a garden of ancient tombstones to get to the main doors, but it looked well-used. With a little TLC, Kara thought, it could shine like the churches you see in romantic comedies, the ones where the main characters run away to get married in the little white chapel on a hill. Lucy would love this place.
A few blocks past the church, Kara had her second run-in with the sixty-foot-tall cowboy, only this time, he was around twenty feet tall. He still wore the same cowboy hat and had the same steely blue eyes and gray mustache, but instead of a billboard, his face was plastered to the side of a large, boxy building. Its façade had changed, but if you looked hard enough, you could still make out the skeleton of the elementary school it had replaced.
The brick building was yellowing in some places, and it desperately needed a new paint job, but, like the church, she could see how it had the potential to return to its former glory with a few weekends of sweat equity. The museum parking lot was empty, void of life except for a single black horse sunbathing in the pasture next to it.
Kara didn’t know much about horses; the few she had ridden were small creatures strong enough to climb steep terrain while still being compact enough to pass under the bows of hundred-year-old trees, and this horse looked nothing like the ones she remembered fondly from her trip to Ecuador.
This horse was chubby.
Its well-groomed, black coat shimmered in the midday sun, but the horse looked like it hadn’t been on a decent journey in years, and, in her opinion, it seemed to be enjoying that fact.
Parking the car, Kara barely had time to stand up straight before the blue-eyed, gray-mustached cowboy greeted her for the third time.
“You must be Kara,” he said, extending his hand toward her. “I’m so happy you’re finally here.”
“You must be Sur. It’s a pleasure.” Kara met his hand with a firm grasp, and the two stood shaking for a few beats too many while Sur beamed down on her.
“That I am, that I am,” he said, still holding her hand in his. “I just can’t wait to hear what you’ve got to say.”
“Never mind what I have to say,” said Kara, finally pulling her hand away. She gestured up at the image of Sur on the building. “I’m interested in hearing what stories that guy has to tell.”
Judging by how faded the edges were, Kara guessed the picture had been taken over ten years ago, but the Sur she’d just met made her question that assessment. He looked like the photo could have been taken earlier that morning.
Standing in front of a twenty-foot photo of his face, looking like a strange, infant-sized clone of himself, Sur straightened his back and mimicked the same stoic cowboy facial expression of his larger counterpart, then he laughed.
“They say the best advertisements are the ones you remember, and I bet you won’t be forgetting this ugly mug anytime soon.”
“Probably not,” Kara laughed.
There was a certain warmth to Sur’s presence, like walking into a room heated by a fireplace that exclusively burned cherrywood. Kara couldn’t help herself from smiling when they spoke.
“How was your trip? No issues driving up, were there?” Sur asked.
“No, none at all. Montana is beautiful. The scenery, the animals, even the air. There’s not a whole lot of this in New York,” Kara said, motioning around her in a circle.
“What, trees?”
“No,” she laughed. “Space. It feels like I can move around out here.”
“Well, don’t go moving too far, not yet at least. We still have a lot of work to do.”
“Right, yes, we do,” Kara said, reaching into the car for her workbag. The two started walking toward the museum’s large double doors.
“What can you tell me about how the dagger wound up at your museum?”
“Not a lot, actually. I came down in the morning and found a box sitting right here at the entrance. I thought it was a delivery at first. Brought it inside, made a pot of coffee, opened the museum for business, cracked the box open, and nearly dropped my mug on the floor. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I don’t know a lot about history or Chinese culture, but that thing just takes your breath away. Like I told you over the phone, it looks real. Or it’s a really good fake. But I don’t know who would go to the trouble of dropping off a fake artifact—unless they didn’t know it was fake in the first place.”
Kara wrinkled her brow as she processed everything Sur had said. “Did you touch it?”
“I couldn’t risk holding it, the way my hands were shaking. And I know better than to touch something like that barehanded. I don’t need to go putting my fingerprints all over it.”
“Does that mean you called the police?”
“They told me it was mine to keep. I run a business that accepts donations, and whoever dropped it here had written For Donation on a slip of paper inside the box.”
“That’s it?” Kara asked. “There was no name or anything that suggested who might have donated the dagger? I’ll still be able to evaluate it, of course, but a little bit of context on why they decided to drop off an item like that might be nice.”
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