As the only heir of Brad and Kathy Hughes, she’d known she would be inheriting a sizable estate. Not that she needed it. Straight out of college, she and a friend had opened a boutique that had taken off.

After establishing more than a dozen such shops across the country, she and Renada had sold the businesses six months ago and made enough that she would never have to work again if she invested the money wisely, which of course she had.

She’d been trying to decide what to do next when her seventy-two-year-old father had taken ill. Her mother had never been strong, suffering from a weak heart. But to lose both of them within a few weeks had been crushing.

Now, months later, she felt even more at loose ends.

As she left the lawyer’s office, her cell phone rang.

“So it’s over?” asked her friend and former business partner tentatively. Renada had wanted to come along with her to see the lawyer, knowing how hard this was for her. But Dulcie had needed to do this on her own. She needed to get used to doing a lot of things on her own.

“All done,” she said, patting the papers she’d stuffed into her shoulder bag.

“Up for lunch?” Renada asked.

“Absolutely. I’m starved.” And she was, she realized.

It wasn’t until after they’d eaten and she was feeling better for the first time in months that she told her friend about the Montana property.

“It’s very odd,” she said, digging out the papers the lawyer had given her. “I’ve been left property in Montana from someone named Laura Beaumont.”

“Seriously? How much?”

“Apparently a hundred and sixty acres just outside of Whitehorse, Montana.”

“Where is that?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“Aren’t you curious about this Laura Beaumont?”

“Yes, but it’s so strange that my parents never mentioned this woman or anything about the property, even though Laura Beaumont left it to me years ago.”

“Your parents never even went to Montana to see what you’d been left?”

“Apparently not. We went to Yellowstone Park one summer. Wouldn’t you think they’d have mentioned the property?”

“Or taken you there. Unless it’s in the middle of nowhere and they had no interest in it. You are going to check it out, aren’t you?”

Dulcie knew her friend had been worried about her, urging her to come up with another business venture to help get her through her loss. “Do you want to go with me?”

Renada shook her head ruefully. “I’d love to, but I can’t leave right now. I just agreed to teach some clothing design classes at the community university.”