of the fallacies were started in the fifties by a Rennes innkeeper who wanted to generate business. One lie built on another. Lars never accepted that those parchments were real. Their supposed text was printed in countless books, but no one has ever seen them.'
'Then why did he write about them?'
'To sell books. I know it bothered him, but he did it anyway. He always said that whatever wealth Sauniere found could be traced to 1891 and whatever was inside that glass vial. But he was the only one who believed that.' She pointed off to another of the stone buildings. 'That's the presbytery where Sauniere lived. It's a museum about him now. The pillar with the small niche is in there for all to see.'
They passed the crowded kiosks and kept to the rough-paved street.
'The Church of Mary Magdalene,' she said, pointing at a Romanesque building. 'Once the chapel for the local counts. Now, for a few euros, you can see the great creation of Abbe Sauniere.'
'You don't approve?'
She shrugged. 'I never did. That was the problem.'
Off to their right he saw a tumbled-down chateau, its mud-colored outer walls baked by the sun. 'That's the Hautpouls estate,' she said. 'It was lost during the Revolution to the government and has been a mess ever since.'
They rounded the far end of the church and passed beneath a stone gateway that bore what looked like a skull and crossbones. He recalled from the book he'd read last night that the symbol appeared on many Templar gravestones.
The earth beyond the entrance was littered with pebbles. He knew what the French called the space. Enclos paroissiaux. Parish close. And the enclosure seemed typical-one side bounded by a low wall, the other nestled close to a church, its entrance a triumphal arch. The cemetery hosted a profusion of table tombs, headstones, and memorials. Floral tributes topped some of the graves, and many were adorned, in the French tradition, with photographs of the deceased.
Stephanie walked to one of the monuments that displayed neither flowers nor images, and Malone let her go alone. He knew that Lars Nelle had been so liked by the locals that they'd granted him the privilege of being buried in their cherished churchyard.
The headstone was simple and noted only the name, dates, and an epitaph of HUSBAND, FATHER, SCHOLAR.
He eased up beside her.
'They never once wavered in burying him here,' she muttered.
He knew what she meant. In sacred ground.
'The mayor at the time said there was no conclusive evidence he killed himself. He and Lars were close, and he wanted his friend buried here.'
'It's the perfect place,' he said.
She was hurting, he knew, but to recognize her pain would be viewed as an invasion of her privacy.
'I made a lot of mistakes with Lars,' she said. 'And most of them eventually cost me with Mark.'
'Marriage is tough.' His own failed through selfishness, too. 'So is parenthood.'
'I always thought Lars's passion silly. I was a government lawyer doing important things. He was searching for the impossible.'
'So why are you here?'
Her gaze stayed on the grave. 'I've come to realize that I owe him.'
'Or do you owe yourself.'
She turned away from the grave. 'Perhaps I do owe us both,' she said.
He let it drop.
Stephanie pointed to a far corner. 'Sauniere's mistress is buried there.'
Malone knew about the mistress from Lars's books. She was sixteen years Sauniere's junior, a mere eighteen when she quit her job as a hatmaker and became the abbe's housekeeper. She stayed by his side for thirty-one years, until his death in 1917. Everything Sauniere acquired was eventually placed in her name, including all of his land and bank accounts, which subsequently made it impossible for anyone, including the Church, to claim them. She continued to live in Rennes, dressing in somber clothes and behaving as strangely as when her lover was alive, until her death in 1953.
'She was an odd one,' Stephanie said. 'She made a statement, long after Sauniere died, about how with what he left behind you could feed all of Rennes for a hundred years, but she lived in poverty till the day she died.'
'Any one ever learn why?'
'Her only statement was, I cannot touch it. '
'Thought you didn't know much about all this.'
'I didn't, until last week. The books and journal were informative. Lars spent a lot of time interviewing locals.'
'Sounds like that would have been double or triple hearsay.'
'For Sauniere, that's true. He's been dead a long time. But his mistress lived till the fifties, so there were many still around in the seventies and eighties who knew her. She sold the Villa Bethanie in 1946 to a man named Noel Corbu. He was the one who converted it into a hotel-the innkeeper I mentioned who made up much of the false information about Rennes. The mistress promised to tell Sauniere's great secret to Corbu, but at the end of her life she suffered a stroke and was unable to communicate.'
They trudged across the hard ground, grit crunching with every step.
'Sauniere was once buried here, too, beside her, but the mayor said the grave was in danger from treasure hunters.' She shook her head. 'So a few years ago they dug the priest up and moved him into a mausoleum in the garden. Now it costs three euros to see his grave… the price of a corpse's safety, I assume.'
He caught her sarcasm.
She pointed at the grave. 'I remember coming here once years ago. When Lars first arrived in the late sixties, nothing but two tattered crosses marked the graves, overgrown with vines. No one tended to them. No one cared. Sauniere and his lover were totally forgotten.'
An iron chain encircled the plot and fresh flowers sprouted from concrete vases. Malone noticed the epitaph on one of the stones, barely legible.
HERE LIES BERENGER SAUNIERE
'I read somewhere that the marker was too fragile to move,' she said, 'so they left it. More for the tourists to see.'
He noticed the mistress's gravestone. 'She wasn't a target of opportunists, too?'
'Apparently not, since they left her here.'
'Wasn't it a scandal, their relationship?'
She shrugged. 'Whatever wealth Sauniere acquired, he spread around. The water tower back at the car park? He built it for the town. He also paved roads, repaired houses, made loans to people in trouble. So he was forgiven whatever weakness he may have possessed. And it was not uncommon for priests of that time to have female housekeepers. Or at least that's what Lars wrote in one of his books.'
A group of noisy visitors rounded the corner behind them and headed for the grave.
'Here they come to gawk,' Stephanie said, a touch of contempt in her voice. 'I wonder if they would act that way back home, in the cemetery where their loved ones are buried?'
The boisterous crowd drew close, and a tour guide started talking about the mistress. Stephanie retreated and
