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‘if’?” retorted Marie. “If someone finds us, then it would mean we took too damned long to get inside the mound, find the amulet, and head back to Cricket Field while no one around here was the wiser. But the if becoming a when is entirely up to us.”
    “You mean Ishi,” I said, motioning for him to get started, while I took out a pair of binoculars to keep an eye on the distant highway.
    “No, I mean him and you!” she said, snatching the binoculars from me and thrusting the other shovel into my gut for me to take.
    If only she hadn’t looked so damned perturbed it might not have stung as bad. But rather than give her any more shit, I began testing the ground for the breach we sought, while Marie scanned the countryside like General Rommel looking for the first sign of an allied attack.
    To be honest, I thought we’d find the breach quickly, but didn’t. In fact, we didn’t find a suitable spot to focus our efforts on during the first pass along the mound’s entire length. But before we took our chances on the other side, Ishi wanted to give the middle of the ridge one last shot.
    “T hank God!” Marie whispered, reverently, as the earthen wall near the base of the structure gave way. “Let me see!”
    Ishi stepped aside to allow her enough room to peer inside the two-foot hole. A musty, earthen smell carrying the rank stench of old fungi drifted up through the gap, and I noticed crumbling brick fragments along the hole’s rim. So far, this was anything but a typical burial mound. Hard not to feel a mixture of dread and excitement.
    “It looks really dark in there,” she said, suddenly less enthusiastic to explore the most likely home for her coveted relic.
    “Yep. What did you expect? A tour guide with a lamp coming out to greet us?”
    “God, Nick, you don’t need to be such a jerk!”
    Apparently I do need to be one, darlin’. If you don’t want to get down and dirty, then my previous suggestion to wait and come back ain’t such a bad idea. Hell, we can come back next spring or summer, when it’s warmer and the daisies and thistles are in full bloom. Whaddya say?
    “We can come back, you know,” I told her, bending down and adding my penlight to Ishi’s flashlight. “We can secure it and maybe purchase some better lights from the camera shop in downtown Salisbury.”
    I couldn’t get a clear view, but it looked a little like the catacombs we visited in Rome the past summer. Albeit, the bones there were not sitting on shelves caked with debris from centuries of lying in darkness—darkness fed by the mixture of earth, roots, and moisture from the adjacent river. Having better lighting could certainly come in handy.
    “No… I’ll go in there,” she said, summoning her courage with a deep breath.
    “No, I’ll go in there,” said Ishi, before I could offer doing the same. He deftly slipped into the hole, his feet landing with a thud upon the mound’s muddy floor. “Holy shit, Boss—you won’t believe what’s down here!”
    “Dead people?”
    “No… I mean yes. But dead people who must’ve all been rich. I see lots of jewels shining with the skeletons…. Looks like what Marie said would be here: a catacomb from Roman times.”
    Ishi’s flashlight beam flickered past the hole, confirming his excitement as he alternated his view of each side. No doubt, he already began referencing what he saw within the mound against the results of the many hours of online research he had devoted himself to, when Marie announced our destination the morning we fled from Paris.
    “We’re coming, Ishi.”
    I helped Marie step into the hole and followed behind her. I soon had a better view of what was there. A much better view.
    “Holy shit!”
     
     
     

 
     
    Chapter Seven
 
     
    To say what we found inside the cramped confines of the mound was completely unexpected would be untrue. However, what had been lying largely undisturbed for centuries, including human remains entombed since