Being a 'treasure hunter' isn't a terribly easy job, but it suits her well enough. The people you meet tend to be more interesting, the pay is great, and there are a lot more skeletons involved in it than in most professions.

Stephanie Edgley has just turned thirty-five. She has an excellent grasp of history, tends to be a bit over-imaginative and is very much a necrophiliac, but all this means very little in the circles through which she cuts her way, where oddities are the norm and normality is pitied.

She has been searching for several months now-eleven, in fact-and she has finally found it. The Murder Skull.

It's an item that has become, to this particular community, something of a legend. It rose to fame when it was discovered to be the weapon in three separate murder cases - and, since that got around, witness to hundreds more. It has a History, and it's every collectors dream to possess it.

Stephanie has fought off the likes of China Sorrows and Thomas Chabon to get her hands on it, and now it's hers.

It's got a place in her study - the study in that giant mansion her Uncle had left to her before he died. That had been an age ago, decades into her past, and she had to say, she missed him. He had been an avid collector too, and his books of historical fantasy had been based on the objects he hoarded in his study, or 'treasure room'. Any of the items held within could, if sold, give Stephanie enough money to live out the rest of her life in comfort.

The moment she reaches her home and the study, she puts it in the gap on her shelves. Tilting her head critically, she inspects it. It looks no smaller than she expected, and that's a surprise. Men so often are to her.

Thoughtfully, she grasps the brim of her hat and places it on the Murder Skull. It tilts to a rakish angle, and gives it something of a macabre edge - if that's even possible, considering how dark it already is, especially to one such as her, who knows the history.

Handsome, she thinks cheerfully. The husband her mother has long given up on her getting. She leans close to it, and her lips nearly contact teeth. The air around the skull suddenly seems hard, and she could swear that her mouth had just touched another.

The skull becomes an obsession. She can hardly go an hour without looking at it. She begins to sketch, to paint, to color, as she did so many years ago, back in high school, before she gave everything else up to become a treasure-hunter. She has a new life, and, at the same time, she's lost her old one.

She grows paranoid. Everyone is out to steal the skull. Steal her life.

It doesn't get better, especially because the paranoia isn't unfounded. Literally everyone of importance in that world wants the skull more than anything, now they know it to be so very attainable. She worries.

Her skin grows gaunt, and her eyes hollow, and the skull looks more alive than she, at times.

When she finally commits suicide, she's buried with the skull, clutching it with dead arms. Rigor mortis had apparently set in unexpectedly fast. That was the only explanation. The only possible explanation, because they couldn't force the corpse to relinquish the skull.

She is buried in an unmarked grave and becomes a legend of her own. The man who finds her will have, not one, but two treasures - the Murder Skull and the cadaver of the woman who was in love with it.

A/N: I think I'm probably the first one to write this particular scenario.

I feel so proud.

~Mademise Morte, November 2