I decided there would be only two variables, condition and supply. According to the listings, all these coins got the same very-fine ranking, so that eliminated condition as the reason for the difference in price. That left supply as the explanation; that is to say, a few more of them had been put on the market in the intervening time. So, had I been holding on to a couple of these, I wouldn't want large numbers of them to appear overnight.
I wondered under what circumstances a bunch of these would suddenly turn up. A hoard was one possibility. Historically, people buried objects they valued, including coins, particularly in bad times. From time to time someone found one of these hoards that the owner never got back to, for whatever reason. Maybe he died, or just forgot where he buried them. If they ended up in a museum, fine, but if they got onto the open market, and there were a lot of them, some people might lose.
I sprawled on the bed and tried to sort through in my head all that I'd learned. The material about coins was interesting. Emile was in coins, and given what I'd read, a new supply of coins would certainly have a major impact on his business. If I was looking for a reason someone wouldn't want either expedition to be successful, then this just might be it. But how would he know Star Salvage and Briars were looking for an ancient shipwreck to start with? And even if he did, it didn't necessarily follow there'd be lots of coins to be found. Coins, particularly silver and bronze, wouldn't hold up very well underwater for any significant period of time. Still it did bear some thinking about. Everything did: Star Salvage, which might or might not be in financial hot water. Curtis: Who knew what other mistakes he had made? Somewhere in the group lay the anguis in herba, as Ben would no doubt say: the snake in the grass. The anguis could even be Ben. Heaven knows he was the only one who'd been in the neighborhood when every single one of the victims had turned up dead.
I found myself getting very sleepy, too sleepy in fact to get myself up to undress and crawl into bed. The pages were blurring before my eyes and I struggled to stay awake. I was afraid if I dozed off I'd be back in the tophet with that horrible snake, with Jimmy making his snide remarks, Ben spouting Latin, and Susie going on and on about jogging, and how much weight you could lose. Forty-five pounds in a year. I'd heard her say it often enough.
I sat up, gasping. I grabbed the telephone, but remembered that there wasn't one in the cabin. I pulled on my shoes and dashed out the door, stumbling on the steps leading down to the path from the pool.
I knocked. There was no response. I tried the door, which was unlocked, and went straight in.
"Come in," Nora said. "You're just in time to witness an execution. Close the door and move away from it." I did as I was told. Briars sat in a chair, his hands on his thighs, a knife held under his chin, a rope wound round and round him, pinning his arms to his sides and his body to the chair. A trickle of blood streamed from a cut on his left cheek. "If you run for help, he's dead."
"What is this about?" Briars gasped.
"You don't even know who I am, do you?" Nora demanded. "You sat in that courtroom day after day, and you didn't even look the mother of the boy you murdered, full in the face. Not once. You and Peter Groves."
"You're Mark's mother," Briars gasped. "You're so thin. Your hair . . ."
"So you admit you killed him," she said.
"No," he whispered. "I just didn't recognize you. You've changed."
"He was my only child," she said.
"I know. I'm sorry."
"Shut up," she said. "Do you have any idea what it is to lose a child? Do you?"
"No," he whispered.
"I lost everything. My son, my husband. You would think losing your only child would bring you closer together. It doesn't. He told me we had to move on, when he left me. Said I was lost in the past. Maybe so. I like the past. My boy is alive in it, handsome, intelligent, and so charming.
"And it was all over in a minute, wasn't it? The life gone from him. And for what? A shipwreck? Some ridiculous story about a graveyard of some kind guarded by the golden god of the sea. There's no such shipwreck, just the obsession of two middle-aged men. Are you surprised I know about this? He wrote me every week, long letters, about everything he was doing. He liked you. He trusted you. Does that bother you at all? Does it?" she said. The knife looked perilously close to slicing into his neck.
"Yes," he whispered. "It has bothered me ever since."
"He got a university scholarship, did you know that?"
"Yes," Briars said. "Mark was a gifted young man."
"Are you going to say that I was lucky to have him for as long as I did? That's what the priest told me. I hated him for it. But you and Peter Groves, that went way beyond hatred. I knew I'd track you down one day. How I laughed when I got the brochure for the tour. Briars Hatley, professor of archaeology and noted expert on the Phoenician period, will show us Carthage as tourists rarely see it: Byrsa Hill, the place of its legendary founding in 814 B.C., Roman Carthage in all its grandeur, and the tophet, where it is said thousands of little children were sacrificed to save the city from its greatest threat. I love ad copy, don't you? Did you write that?" she said to me.
"No. My business partner did."
"Your partner was right. Particularly about the sacrificed children. We know all about that, don't we? A child sacrificed for someone's lust for gold. I couldn't even bury him, you know. I dream of his body being eaten by fish, or washed up on shore and devoured by birds." She stopped for a moment and choked back tears.
I found my voice at last. "You think killing Briars will make up for it," I said, barely recognizing the sound coming out of my mouth. There was no fear in it, just fury. "And I suppose some might say you're right. But what about the other people you killed? Ron was someone's son, too, you know. He was handsome and charming and intelligent. Did you think about his mother? And what about that beautiful young woman who was terribly disfigured by the fire on Peter's boat? Her name is Maggie. I met her, and she was cheerful and friendly, and she loved the work she was doing, just the way Mark did. She has a mother, too."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Nora hissed. "I didn't do anything to her. I wanted to kill the other girl, Peter Groves' daughter. Then Groves, too, would know what it was like to lose a child. Just shut up," she barked again. But she hesitated for a moment. I pressed on.
"And Rick Reynolds? Was he just another casualty, too? Boring, I know. But he had a mother. And Kristi. Oh, I know she'd have liked us all to think she'd arrived fully formed as the internationally renowned travel writer, but I'll bet even she had a mother."