With part of his mind, Harry listened carefully to every word Jennifer Dutton said, but with most of it, he raced through calculations and crunched numbers. Buying her coin collection would mean changing his entire financial strategy from reservoir to river⏤trading his considerable cache of savings for a steady stream of income. Royalties on 900 acres of fertile land was nothing to walk away from, but would he have time to earn back his investment? He knew the land well, and he knew that the Duttons were wealthy, but he also knew it took generations to build that wealth and that if what Jennifer Dutton said was true, it could all end with a snap of the fingers, a literal toss of the coin.

Harry had heard of coins like these but had never seen any. He admired the type of man who would cast his last wishes in pure gold rather than scratch them out on paper. As he turned the first coin over in his hand, he thought about the garnet deposits he used to pick through before Mother’s Day every year and the look on his mother’s face when he would present to her a red stone worth a full week of food. She would take it to the local coin-and-gem shop and sell it, and they would eat meat that week. The Duttons never shooed kids away from their land, only adults, and there was more than one household in West Vernal warmed by Dutton wood gathered by young hands. Garnet was the kind of red Harry liked, dark and subdued, easy to overlook.

The text encircling the outer edge of the coin’s reverse was easy enough to read: DUTTON LANDS BY DUTTON HANDS, but the words in the center were much smaller. Harry pulled out his magnifying glass, focused on the small, script-like font, and read old Wedderburn’s wishes out loud: 

To the Bearer of this Coin

Shall flow the Bounty of

Parcel 1, West Vernal

Wood ~ Stone ~ Water

W.W.D. III

He placed the coin back in the tray, carefully rewrapped everything in the beautiful linen cloth, and opened his checkbook. “Your full name is Jennifer Wedderburn Dutton, right?” he asked.

Copyright 2023 Kesel Wilson (entirely, 100% human-created)

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