"Are you sure it had nothing to do with you?" Marshal pressed instinctively. He couldn't be blamed for his suspicion; the timing was simply too coincidental. They had just held a symposium there, and the very next day, details from it were plastered across newspapers and television. The reports were filled with words like "counterfeits," "high-quality forgeries," and "incompetent appraisers," pushing Serenity Antiques directly into the eye of the storm.
Sanford is a city with a thousand years of history, and it teemed with antique shops that had a zero-tolerance policy for fakes. Now, Serenity Antiques was facing a joint attack from the entire industry! Customers were showing up to demand re-appraisals, and the police were coming by to investigate. With the nation's largest jade counterfeiting case having just concluded, the police were taking these customer reports extremely seriously. Serenity Antiques had been pushed to the brink of closure!
