Witch’s Stone: The Sister’s Claim: A Petra Woods Mystery: 5

Petra Woods has spent twenty years trusting her hands over anything else. This time, she trusted a friend, and it cost her more than money. When her cousin commissions an impossible piece, a genuine witch's stone in raw fluorite, naturally holed and rarer than almost anything in the trade, Petra hires the one contact who's never once let her down. Weeks later, he's gone. No stone, no refund, no answer to a single message. Just an empty line in her checkbook and a trail of emails that read very differently in hindsight. Following his last known steps to a small mountain town in New Mexico, Petra finds a box of forgotten belongings, a claim owner who's never heard her contact's name, and a family secret that was never about the stone at all. Someone has been selling what was never hers to sell, chasing a kind of recognition money can't actually buy. But recognition isn't the only thing this mountain has taken. And some answers, Petra learns, don't arrive with confrontation or confession. Sometimes they just show up, months later, in three quiet columns of a small-town newspaper, folded in beside an ad for a hardware store.