The buyer would know such things. Or think he knew them. The flint was far too delicate ever to have a practical use, but Ben's "clients" lied to themselves just as easily as any other human. That explained why many of his schemes worked at all. That explained why a single weird chunk of stone could bring a price well into six figures, US dollars, without certification or import license or even a bill of sale.
Blind obsession.
Ben had sold the flint three times, waited a decent interval, and stolen it back three times. He doubted if he'd risk a fourth. He chose his marks well, but the supply of rich and obsessive had its limits. Once in the U.S., once in Japan, once in Europe — anything more could cross that invisible boundary where greed led to a fatal error. Someone might talk to someone else.
And it was a lovely thing.
He'd keep it. He could even build a paper trail for it, trace its lineage to a sea-captain's house and trade routes for Maine shipping a century and a half ago. Write letters on ancient paper with ancient ink and pen, provide scratched glass-plate negatives of stiff Sunday-portrait Yankees in their Victorian parlor. He'd take that paper trail back to the point where owning an old piece of stone was legal.
Not that he'd ever make the paper public. Word might reach certain ears. But hold the documents in reserve, aged in the wood . . . .
Damn, it was a lovely thing. Ben shook himself, and the vision faded. Beauty could be as addictive as all hell. If he wasn't careful, he could end up committing the classic drug-dealer's mistake, getting hooked on his own product.
And that was usually fatal.
He shook himself again, bent down and gathered the iridescent plastic sawdust of dead larceny from the bin of the shredder, and bagged it for feeding to a woodstove up in the main house. He buttoned up the radio case, just another piece of equipment from the cluttered ham "shack" that Dan had shared with Gary, both holders of "Extra" class licenses and fully qualified in the FCC's own files for amateur satellite communications. The computers had finished their routine, so he started defragging their hard drives as a further guard.
He'd used Gary's login and password. No fingerprints left behind, either physical or electronic. After all, Ben Morgan was dead. Dead for twenty years, now, because having a dozen names and no legal existence gave you certain advantages when you lived outside the law. And now Dan was also "dead," leaving Gary and Ellen and Peggy in Alice Haskell's somewhat dubious care. Only in Stonefort could a lesbian witch be appointed guardian to three orphaned minors . . . .
He stepped through a doorway into the musty smell of old, old books long unread, the Morgan archives. A dark woman looked up at him from a table and a bound parchment manuscript, raven hair and dark eyes and the oiled-teak skin of First People genes exposed to fierce Arizona sun. A beautiful young woman, the echo of one summer twenty years ago.
His daughter, a child he'd never seen, never even suspected, until a few months back.
"How's it going?"
"Slow. This dumb schmuck's grasp of Latin is even worse than mine. I'd hate to see what kind of grades Mr. Dean would give him."
"Mr. Dean? He's still teaching? I had him for Latin."
"God. I didn't realize he was that old!" She grinned to take the sting out of her jab, and his heart lurched. The twinkling eyes and quick twitch of her lips came straight out of memories of her mother — Lainie Haskell at that age, not the Haskell Witch but she might as well have been, the way she had bewitched him.
And then he had to go and die. And go away to college under another name, and find another woman to fill the empty spot in his heart, and father Gary. And since he was dead, Maria ended up married to his brother Dan to gain a name and family and fortune for the baby.
The Dragon's Eye was the other reason he was "dead." The damned thing demanded a selkie for the head of the Morgan clan. Ben couldn't change. Dan could. And the head of the clan had to be the eldest living son. Medieval primogeniture bullshit. End of story.
The glowing red football-shaped something had dominated Morgan life for over a thousand years. It talked. It thought. It gave pieces of itself to selected Morgans in each generation, ruby-colored Tears that talked to each other and helped Morgans to hide, to detect lies and see through illusions, to sneak in and steal or sail in with guns blazing and steal. Gave them the glib tongue to convince idiots to part with money for the goods thus stolen.
Between the Dragon's Eye and Morgan family business and the Haskell blood running here and there, life in Stonefort got too damned tangled. Small town, everyone lived in everyone else's back pocket. Take Alice Haskell's current girlfriend for example, the town cop, damned awkward connection by way of Caroline.
Latin made for safer ground. "Who's your current problem?"
Her grin twisted into a grimace. "Some guy calls himself Columbanus. What kind of Welsh name is that? He seems to operate on the Humpty Dumpty principle — 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.' And I think he's applying Welsh grammar rules to Latin vocabulary. But then, I've never studied Welsh. Maybe he's just winging it."
"Hey, some of our priests weren't all that bright. If they had any brains, we gave them something better to do. Columbanus? That'd have to be way back,
