The Curator of Provenance

Sue Haranfot’s eyes widened at the SEIZED notice shouting out in fluorescent red on the door of the old homestead. Her jaw dropped and she threw hands on hips before ripping the sign off the door. Staring at it, Sue discovered the property was slated for auction over a past due tax issue. She slapped her forehead—how did I miss this? Sue thought she handled right during the two years she took care of her ailing grandmother before inheriting the centuries old New England homestead. Now Sue has a problem, a devastating one since as the last of the Haranfot line she’d spent the past year painstakingly restoring the property, making it ready to be her home and to re-open the Comfort Haranfot Memorial Library & Museum, an ode to family and community history run out of the adjacent barn.

Almost fifty thousand dollars? Sue’s mother Stella shook her head when she learned this after Sue discovered just how long her grandmother went without paying the property taxes on the five hundred plus acres of land. Sue was hoping her step-father George, the man who helped raise her since her father died when she was a child, might help, but he was having his own financial problems with a failing business. He advised Sue to consider selling some of the land, but she refused to part with the Haranfot’s four hundred year old legacy. Besides, she reminded him that due to a later conservation restriction nobody could develop the land, the grandfathered exception being Haranfot blood, and she was the last. Stella urged Sue to then consider partnering with a developer—it would still be yours, in a way, she pointed out. Maybe a compromise you can live with? But even a suggestion of tampering with the family legacy left Sue fuming.

Thirty days. That’s all Sue has and the ideas and proposals she and her friends came up with weren’t panning out until one day Sue received a visit from a woman looking for something that was once on display at the Haranfot Memorial Library and Museum. A rock, an unusual mineral specimen that inspired her dying father and something he wanted to glimpse one more time before passing. The woman offered Sue a large sum of money for it, enough to save the homestead, but there was a problem: Sue had never seen the rock, never heard if it, and newspaper clippings the woman provided were from over fifty years ago.

Digging deeper into family history, Sue finds a mention of the rock, called The Serendipity Queen because of the circumstances surrounding its discovery. But where is it now? A search thru every bit of Haranfot memorabilia is useless, so Sue reaches out to those in the community connected to the Haranfot’s and comes up with a possible clue. With the clock ticking, no help from family and only the slightest hint of an answer, Sue discovers one person who might be able to help—Glen Sutter, a man said to have a specific skill necessary for the task. A man she learns has questionable associations and a less than stellar past who she locates squatting in a condemned house with no life-purpose other than trying to drink himself to death. With Sue having inklings others might also be eyeing her property, she is forced to put her reservations aside and try to convince Glen to help. Will they team up and beat the odds and the clock in a race to find the long-missing Serendipity Queen in time to save the Haranfot property?

The Curator of Provenance is a psychological thriller wrapped inside the tale of a quest—a journey that ultimately veers into an exploration of our private realities, the treachery inside a wounded heart and the cost for the privilege of owning our own lives in this world as Sue Haranfot learns everyone must have their war to taste the blood and chaos of the world. This story is about her’s.