Coralena

WHEN TWO GUN-TOTING CHARACTERS wearing ski masks step into the Hong Kong Café at closing time and tell the girl at the register to empty the till, she answers with a roll of quarters clenched in her fist and a double kick to the chins. "That one's for Adam," she says. "And that one's for Eve." This is Coralena, a young unwed mother who has a mind of her own. Watching this spectacle is Chase who doesn't know he's in love with her. While Chase obsesses over lost treasure at the old Horn Silver Mine, Coralena obsesses over childhood stories of the Garden of Eden and the Prophet they meet. How does the rib of Adam in Eve lead to a treasure of gold on which lay the bones of a boy? What ghosts from yesteryear haunt the landscape today?

THE STORY takes place in the high desert valley of a small southern Utah town seventeen miles east of the San Francisco Mountains and the remains of the Horn Silver Mine. Beneath the caved-in mine lies the ghost town of Frisco where, in 1881, with six thousand residents, there were over 23 brothels and gambling halls-and nightly gunfights. Now, a hundred years later, the blessing of opposition and the curse of gunfights remains, thanks to the love and choice of Adam and Eve.