When Sauniere returned to his parish, he resumed restoration of the church and discovered an underground crypt, supposedly containing skeletons. At this point, his taste in interior design seems to have taken a turn for the, well, peculiar; among the eccentric fixtures he installed were a holy water basin surmounted by a statue of a sneering red demon and an equally garish wall relief depicting Jesus atop a hill at the base of which is an object resembling a sack of money. The stations of the cross had their oddities too: One, set at night, depicted Jesus being carried into the tomb--or smuggled out of it? Sauniere also installed a series of cipher messages in the fixtures of the church. He spent a fortune refurbishing the town and developed extravagant tastes for rare china, antiques, and other pricey artifacts. Yet how Sauniere acquired this apparent windfall remained a mystery--he stubbornly refused to explain the secret of his success to the church authorities. When he died in 1917, he was supposedly penniless, yet his former housekeeper later spoke of a "secret" that would make its owner not only rich but also "powerful." Unfortunately, she never spilled the beans.

Lincoln and his co-authors found no treasure, though they speculated that Sauniere might have exhumed somebody's loot: Maybe it was the legendary Cathar hoard, or the nest egg of the Visigoths, or perhaps the treasure of the Merovingian kings who ruled the region between the fifth and eighth centuries--the Dagobert II mentioned in the coded parchment was one of them. Maybe it was a combination of all three treasures. Or, if not treasure in the conventional sense, then perhaps Sauniere had discovered some form of forbidden knowledge and had used it to blackmail someone, say, for instance, the church.

At any rate, during their investigation into the legend of Sauniere, what Lincoln and company did discover was less cashable, yet just as mysterious: an unseen hand "discreetly, tantalizingly" directing a low-key publicity effort on behalf of the legend.