High beams momentarily blinded me as a car swung around a corner of the private road that led from Mosby’s Highway to Hawthorne Castle. The driver had been barreling down the middle of the gravel-and-dirt road like he or she owned it. I swerved hard and ended up on the rutted shoulder, slamming on my brakes to avoid plowing into a stand of hollies and white pines.
In my rearview mirror, I saw brake lights followed by taillights as the other car backed up until it was alongside the Jeep. A window powered down, so I lowered mine. Scotty Avery wore a stricken expression as he recognized me and apparently realized how near he had been to causing a head-on collision.
“Lucie, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t expecting anyone to be coming down from the big house and I’m late, so I was in a rush to get home. My head is somewhere else lately, but that’s no excuse.”
“It’s okay,” I said, though I was shaken by what had almost happened. “No harm done.”
Relief flooded his face. “Thank God. Need some help getting unstuck?”
“No, thanks. The Jeep drives like a tank. I’ll be fine.”
“That’s good.” He gave me a curious look. “What brings you here?”
“Your father asked me to drop by.”
“Ah.”
His profile was faintly illuminated by the lights from the console of his gold Lexus SUV. Just like his father, the strain of the last two days appeared to be getting to him and he looked exhausted. If I’d met him a few seconds earlier as he roared around that curve, he knew just as I did that one of us would probably be calling 911 now instead of having this conversation. If we were lucky.
“Everything okay with you and Pop?” he asked. I could hear the thrum of tension in his voice.
He wasn’t going to ask directly, but he wanted to know why Clayton had summoned me to Hawthorne Castle. There was no reason not to tell him at least part of the truth.
“He wanted to know what your grandfather and I talked about when he invited me down to his wine cellar the day of the party,” I said. “I told him that he asked if I’d sell him some wine. Unfortunately we no longer have it.”
“Oh.” He seemed relieved it was something as innocuous as buying wine. I wasn’t about to get into the rest of it.
“How are you doing, Scott? I know you and Bianca and the kids must be going through hell right now.”
His face cracked into an are-you-kidding-me ironic smile. “Nico went back to Brown yesterday, we figured it was best for him to try to get back to normal, but Kellie’s in tough shape. I probably don’t need to tell you that Alex, Dad, and I are in the crosshairs of the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office’s investigation. They think one of us killed my grandfather.” He shook his head as if he were trying to clear his mind or wake up from a bad dream. “Plus apparently someone overheard Alex and me arguing on Saturday. I said some things I didn’t really mean.”
I was glad he didn’t know it was Quinn who’d stumbled onto their argument. He had said it sounded vicious. On both sides.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Bobby will get to the bottom of it. He knows how to sort out the difference between the truth and someone blowing off steam.”
“Let’s hope so.” He didn’t sound optimistic.
“Do you have any idea who did it?” I asked. “I’m still stunned.”
“Me, too,” he said. “As for who did it? Nope, not a clue. I can tell you it wasn’t me. My grandfather and my father didn’t get along, but Pop isn’t capable of murdering anybody. I’m sure of that.”
I brought up the obvious omission. “What about Alex?”
He blew out a breath. “Alex. Jeez, I don’t know. She’s hot tempered and fickle, and you’d have to be living in a cave not to know she and I don’t get along. We only talk on an as-needed basis.”
Apparently Prescott’s murder didn’t qualify as an as-needed basis for a conversation. Plus he hadn’t answered my question nor said he didn’t think his sister was a murderer.
“That’s got to be tough, working together every day,” I said.
“It wasn’t my idea.” His voice hardened. “I didn’t get a say in that decision. Grandpop figured it would be easier to keep her in line if she was back here rather than up in New York. After her third marriage fell apart, she decided to start shopping around a tell-all memoir. She said she nearly had an agent lined up, plus she was sweet-talking some publisher.” He shook his head in disgust. “With Alex that’s code for she’s sleeping with him.”
“I heard about the memoir,” I said.
“Are you kidding me? Everybody heard about it. And I’m not just talking about the Romeos and their morning kaffeeklatsch at the General Store. There was a piece about her in the goddamn Post. Of course they were only too happy to run a story about a scandal involving the Averys. You probably saw the piece. After Alex finished dragging her husbands through the mud, she was going to start on our family and all of our supposed hidden secrets about how we acquired our money and the newspapers.”
I had read the gossipy story in the Post, but Scotty wasn’t finished venting his anger. “She made us sound like a bunch of thugs. Mafiosi. It sent Grandpop into orbit. Hence the order to come home. He said there was nothing dishonest about the way the Averys had earned their money and there was no story to tell.”
He stopped talking and shook his head as if he was remembering an ugly family scene.
“I’m sorry.”
His laughter held no mirth. “You and me both. You know what’s ironic? No one—none of us, Pop, Alex, my kids—is an Avery by blood. Grandpop adopted my father after Grandma Rose married him and Pop changed his last name to Avery,” he said. “So this whole thing is just insane.”
“Was Alex angry with your grandfather because he made her come back to Virginia?”
Scotty raised an eyebrow. In the washed-out light, he suddenly looked disdainful as if he were pulling up the figurative drawbridge to Hawthorne Castle and the Avery family. “Are you asking if she was angry enough to kill him? Come on, Lucie, you probably know more than I do. You were the last one to see my grandfather alive.”
I wasn’t sure if he was trying to provoke me or make a not-so-subtle accusation.
“Second to last.” I kept my voice even. Hadn’t I just said the same thing to Clay?
Scotty stiffened. “There may be no love lost between Alex and me, but I’m not going to trash my sister. Frankly, we’d be more likely to kill each other, especially when we get going about something.” He paused. “You know what? Forget I said that. I’m just running my mouth. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Of course.”
He revved his car’s engine, the noise menacing in the tomblike night silence. I jumped.
“Sorry, accidentally hit the gas pedal,” he said. “And I’d better get home. I’ll wait until you’re back on the road and make sure you’re on your way.”
“Thanks, but I’ll be fine,” I said. “Good luck, Scott.”
He nodded without replying and powered up his window. He was upset and I’d hit a nerve, pressing him about his sister. I reversed the Jeep until I was off the shoulder, stuck my hand out the window, waved, and tooted my horn. He honked back and a moment later his taillights disappeared in a spray of gravel.
By the time I got to the turnoff for Mosby’s Highway, I wasn’t sure what to make of that disquieting whipsaw conversation. I had just spoken to two of the three people Bobby Noland most suspected in the murder of Prescott Avery. Both claimed they didn’t do it, but if they had, neither one of them would have confessed their crime to me.
Then there was Alex. Scotty had defended her in a muted way, but he never said outright he was certain she wasn’t guilty of murder.
Which still left the question: did Alexandra Avery kill her grandfather on Saturday afternoon under the noses of one hundred people who were upstairs eating and drinking at her family’s annual post-Thanksgiving party? Scotty had said she was hot tempered and mercurial and that she and Prescott had argued over her returning to Virginia.
Adding up all of those things, it seemed to me they would move her straight to the top of the list of suspects.
I wondered if Bobby Noland had already reached the same conclusion.
I WAS IN THE middle of putting Persia’s turkey casserole in the oven to warm it up when Quinn got home.
He kissed me and said, “Sounds like you had a hell of a day. How did it go with Seth … and Clayton? Red or white?”
My meeting at the bank with Seth Hannah seemed as if it happened weeks ago instead of just this morning. “White. Chardonnay, please.”
He walked over to the wine refrigerator, opened it, and started pulling out bottles and scanning labels. “Virginia Chard okay?”
“Great.”
He came back with a bottle from Slater Run Vineyards, our down-the-street neighbor. I fixed a salad and made a lemon and olive oil dressing while he warmed up Persia’s homemade biscuits.
I told him everything while we ate, starting with my talk with Seth and the documents he’d given me and ending with Clay summoning me to Hawthorne and my unsettling talk with Scotty. Quinn didn’t say a word while I spoke. When I was finished the only sounds in the room were the steady tick-tock of the antique pendulum wall clock and the occasional hiss of the gas heat coming through the floor vents.
The under-cabinet rope lights lit the perimeter of the kitchen, giving it a dreamy look against the black void of the windows. My mother’s antique silver candelabra and her Waterford candleholders from our Thanksgiving table were still on the table from last night, though the green-, gold-, and rust-colored candles had now nearly burned down to nubs. Their flickering, dwindling light made the room feel as comforting as if we were protected in a cocoon. Added to that was the effect of a couple of glasses of Chardonnay and the lingering warmth and smells from the oven, and I had the disconnected feeling that I had been telling Quinn a story that happened to someone else.
He covered my hands with his. “I hope Bobby finds out who killed Prescott soon and this ends,” he said. “Clay seemed nervous about what you might know and it sounds like Scotty wouldn’t let Alex off the hook as a possible suspect for the murder of her grandfather.”
“Un-hunh.”
He squeezed my hands. “Hey. You’re not listening to me. I know that ‘un-hunh.’ Your mind is a million miles away.”
“I am listening. But I’m also thinking about what Prescott said about the mystery he planned to reveal at the Masons meeting before the Miranda Foundation gala. And that it might have something to do with the documents Leland kept in his safe-deposit box.”
Quinn withdrew his hands and folded them together, leaning in from across the table. “I think you might want to give Clay a little credit, sweetheart. That he’s right about Prescott chasing unicorns or pirate treasure or rainbows. And your father—with all due respect—was notorious for doing the same thing.”
“I know,” I said, “but this feels different.”
“Because?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
He sat back, lips pursed together, an expression I knew well. If he opened his mouth, he’d regret whatever flew out, especially if he hadn’t thought it through first.
“I’d like to find out what they were looking for, what was so important,” I said. “I thought we could start with doing some research to find out more about the documents in Leland’s safe-deposit box.”
“We?”
“Yes, we. Will you help me? Please?”
“Lucie, Seth and Clay told you to forget about this, and Prescott said whatever he was looking for was dangerous. Even if there is a there there.”
“How will we know if there’s a there there if we don’t look?” I said. “And it can’t be dangerous because no one knows that Prescott told me anything. Nor does anyone know about Leland’s documents. Seth said he never opened that envelope and looked at what was inside.”
Quinn worried on his lower lip with his teeth and shook his head as if he wanted to say no. Instead he said, “I don’t know about this, sweetheart.”
“What harm would there be in doing some internet research? If it’s a dead end, we’ll stop.”
He stared at me for a long time. Finally he said, “What kind of internet research?”
I smiled. He was in.
“First I want to find out what ‘Francis Bacon’s Vault’ is. In four years at William & Mary, I never heard anything about it. Plus Josie Wilde was at the second excavation in the Bruton Parish Church graveyard where people from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and someone from the church said the vault never existed. I was going to call her anyway. Now I can ask her about it.”
He grunted in agreement and said, “Do you think your father thought this vault existed?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Prescott and Jock must have thought there was something to it for both of them to be present at excavations that were more than fifty years apart. Each looking for the same thing.”
Quinn got up and started clearing away our dishes. “This is beginning to sound like looking for pirate treasure.”
“Maybe. People do find pirate treasure, you know.”
He turned around from the sink and faced me. “You’re excited about this. Aren’t you?”
“Intrigued. Curious.” I stood up and blew out the guttering candles.
“Plus I know how much you love all the Indiana Jones movies.”
I made a face at him and said in my haughtiest tone, “Indy was looking for real things.”
“Yeah, the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. Which he, of course, found. Both of them.”
“You can be such a wet blanket sometimes, you know?”
He threw the dish towel at me. I caught it before it hit its intended target. “I like to think I’m the voice of reason,” he said. “It’s a good thing we’re not telling anyone about this. They’d think we were nuts.”
It was a good thing he didn’t know what I’d learned from Clayton earlier today: that Prescott had fancied himself a real-life Prospero, the magician from The Tempest, believing he had special powers to persuade people to do what he wanted.
I ignored what Quinn had just said about us being nuts and plowed ahead. “Okay, you can look into the letter Hobson Banks wrote Dolley Madison. I think we ought to go on the assumption that the letter in Leland’s safe deposit box was the missing puzzle piece that convinced Prescott there was more to find. He said a letter Leland showed him helped him put the whole thing together.”
“What whole thing?”
“A lost treasure that has to do with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Declaration of Independence. And apparently the Jamestown Settlement and Williamsburg are involved in some way. And maybe Shakespeare.”
“Must be a hell of a treasure.”
He stacked our plates in the dishwasher while I covered what was left of the casserole and put it in the refrigerator.
“Maybe it is,” I said.
“I hope you’re not going to get too wrapped up in this. It could just be a pig in a poke.”
“You still don’t believe me.”
“It’s not you, sweetheart. I’m not sure I believe them. Prescott and Leland.”
“Well, I do.”
He threw up his hands. “Why?”
“Because Leland went to a lot of trouble to hide those documents,” I said. “And he got Seth Hannah to go along with him. Plus I don’t believe Clay that Prescott was as off his rocker as Clay implied. He was pretty sharp, if you ask me.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Clay needs to be able to convince his lawyers that Prescott was starting to lose it,” I said. “That he wasn’t competent enough mentally to make financial commitments. And he was spending money recklessly. So he’s got to make anything Prescott said or did sound loony or off the wall. He’s looking at trying to get out of the Caritas Commitment and he doesn’t want to sell the Trib.”
“Okay,” Quinn said. “Let’s suppose Prescott’s right and so was Leland. Now what?”
“I’ll see what I can find on Francis Bacon’s Vault and you look into the Banks letter. Also someone named Paul Jennings. Banks mentioned Jennings in his letter and Prescott owned a copy of Jennings’s memoirs. He was a slave who worked at the White House.”
“I suppose you want to do this tonight,” he said.
I smiled. “You suppose right.”
QUINN GOT HIS LAPTOP from his backpack and poured the last of the dinner wine into our glasses, which we carried into the library. He threw himself onto the sofa, stuffed a throw pillow behind his head, and opened the laptop. I sat across the room at my father’s antique partner desk and powered up the desktop computer.
For a while there was no sound but the quiet clicking of computer keys as we searched for answers. Half an hour later, Quinn found what he was looking for, but I felt like Alice who had fallen down the rabbit hole, getting deeper and deeper into secrets, lies, conspiracies, and plots to control the government. At the heart of it, or at least where everything seemed to begin, was Sir Francis Bacon, the English polymath who was a philosopher, scientist, statesman, and author living from the late 1500s to the mid 1600s. He was also a prominent Freemason and a prolific writer.
When I told Quinn, it was going to vindicate his conviction that we were chasing unicorns or looking for the Holy Grail, just like Indiana Jones. I sat back from the computer and my chair creaked. He looked up over the top of his reading glasses.
“What’d you find?” he asked.
“You go first. My story is a bit convoluted.”
“Mine isn’t much better,” he said. “I didn’t find anything about Hobson Banks, unfortunately. But, as you said, Paul Jennings was a White House slave who worked for James and Dolley Madison. He wrote his memoir in—wait a minute.” He scrolled on his laptop and began reading. “He wrote his memoir, A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, which was published in 1865. By then he’d bought his freedom from Daniel Webster. His real fame came when he was fifteen because he helped Dolley get the eight-foot-tall Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington out of the White House before the British burned the place during the War of 1812.”
Earlier I had shown Quinn the contents of Leland’s envelope, which now lay spread out all over the desk. I picked up the sheet protector containing the letter from Hobson Banks.
“Banks apparently got something out of the White House as well,” I said. “He writes about his ‘preschus package.’ I wonder what it was. Maybe he was the one who took the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and brought them to Leesburg. They were moved, too, you know, the summer the British burned Washington.”
“Nope.” Quinn shook his head. “It wasn’t him. Hang on.”
He clicked a few more times. “The entry about the War of 1812 on the U.S. history website I found says those two documents were stored at the State Department. Clerks bundled them up, shoved them in a book bag, and one of them brought them to Leesburg for safekeeping.”
Today the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were enshrined at the National Archives in specially built glass cases to provide maximum security and guards who would come running, guns pointed at you, if anyone so much as breathed too heavily on the glass. The light in the Rotunda, where they were kept along with the Bill of Rights was so dim you could barely read what was written, but necessary to preserve the pale, faded ink and keep it from vanishing forever from the paper. I tried to imagine both documents being shoved in someone’s satchel, slung over a shoulder, and brought to Leesburg, probably on horseback.
I frowned at Quinn. “If it wasn’t the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, what did Hobson Banks carry with him that was so precious?”
“Besides the Gilbert Stuart painting that she gave to two men from New York to take with them after Jennings and the others cut it out of the frame, Dolley also managed to get some of the White House silver out. It also says she removed ‘some documents’ but not what they were. Maybe Banks took those things—the silver and the documents,” he said. “If he did, none of it ever found its way back to the White House.”
I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice. “That’s it. That’s got to be what Prescott found. Where Banks hid his precious package.”
“Do you think Prescott left notes or maybe something on a computer about where it is?”
I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or serious.
“If he did, I’ll never have a chance to look around his sanctum sanctorum to find out. Definitely not now with the three Averys under suspicion of murder.”
“You could tell Clay about it. He might try to have a look.”
“Sure, and I could tell him the Tooth Fairy visited me last night. He’d believe that, too. Clay made certain today that I knew he wouldn’t buy Leland’s Madeira—presuming we ever found it—and he’s not about to get involved in whatever Prescott was looking for. He’d probably think it was just another wild goose chase.”
“Point taken.” Quinn shoved his reading glasses up so they were on top of his head. “Your turn. What did you find?”
Here it was. Wait ’til he heard what I’d turned up.
“Francis Bacon’s Vault—if it really existed—is actually more commonly known as Bruton Vault because it is supposedly located in the graveyard of Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg. It’s the oldest church in Virginia and it’s still an actual functioning church, not part of Colonial Williamsburg. My college roommate used to go to services there.”
He nodded, impatient. “What’s in the vault?”
“Not so fast. There’s more to the story before what’s in it ended up in Williamsburg.” Before I get to the things you’re going to think are completely off the wall.
He let out a noisy sigh, making sure I knew he wasn’t happy.
“I’m telling this my way,” I said. “In the proper order.”
“All right, do it your way. Knock yourself out.”
I made a face at him. “Supposedly,” I said emphasizing the word, “a man named Henry Blount, who was a relative of Sir Francis Bacon, brought certain documents from England to the Jamestown Settlement in 1653. Or it could have been 1635. Either way, the cache of documents was kept secret and when Blount got to Virginia he buried them under the Jamestown church. He also changed his name to Nathaniel Bacon. Later he became known as Nathaniel Bacon the Elder.”
“Because his son was Nathaniel Bacon the Younger?”
“Not exactly. The younger Nathaniel Bacon was his nephew, not his son, and he was called Nathaniel Bacon the Rebel. The rebellious Bacon burned Jamestown to the ground in 1676.”
“Not a nice guy. Do I need to write this down?”
“No, and don’t be snippy.”
“I’m never snippy. Want a cognac?”
“I’d love a cognac.”
He got up and went into the dining room where we kept a collection of liquors and spirits. When he returned, he handed me my snifter and I held it in my hands to warm the alcohol.
“I’m sorry. I’m giving you a hard time,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “But the story gets even more complicated.”
“You mean the plot thickens?”
“More like turns to mud.”
He sat down on the couch and propped his sock feet up on the coffee table. “So what happened?”
“At some point the documents are moved to Williamsburg,” I said. “It could have been because the James River was going to flood and it probably had something to do with plans to move the capital of Virginia from Jamestown to Williamsburg. Other Vault-believers say Bacon’s Rebellion was a cover to move the documents out of Jamestown. Whatever the real reason was, no one disputes that they were moved to a large vault built under the tower of the first Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg.”
“There’s more than one church?”
“They rebuilt it, and when they did, they moved it. Not far—just a few yards away. It’s still on Duke of Gloucester Street, the main street in Williamsburg.”
Quinn sipped his cognac. “So what, exactly, are these secret documents?”
“This is the muddy part.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
I turned back to the computer screen for a moment. “No one is exactly sure, but supposedly there is a complete copy of a novel written by Sir Francis Bacon called New Atlantis. Also several manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays—except they’re in Bacon’s handwriting. In other words, they’re proof that Sir Francis Bacon—not Shakespeare—wrote Shakespeare.” I looked up at him. My heart was pounding in my chest. What if this were true?
“What else?” he said. “You have a funny look on your face.”
I hesitated. “I also came across some pretty wacky theories about what else might be in that vault.”
“I’m all ears.”
He was going to look at me as if I’d grown another head when I told him. “Supposedly there might be secret codes and documents, including a formula for alchemy—turning lead to gold—and that anyone who is able to decipher the documents will have superhuman vision that will allow them to enter the presence of the Superior Gods. Whoever they are.”
“If you say so.” He looked as if he was trying not to laugh.
“I know,” I said. “It sounds nuts, doesn’t it?”
He grinned. “Sounds like the kind of thing your father would be looking for. Or the plot of another Indiana Jones movie.”
It did.
“The most reasonable—and consistent—theories by people who believe the vault existed claim it definitely contained a copy of New Atlantis as well as manuscripts proving Bacon was the author of several of Shakespeare’s plays,” I said. “Bacon died before New Atlantis was published and the novel was never finished, or at least that’s what everyone thought. Supposedly, though, he did finish it and the vault contains the only copy in existence.”
“Why is that such a big deal?”
“Because Bacon describes a Utopia that’s actually a blueprint for America. It’s the organizational plans for our government, along with instructions for the type of democracy he thought the United States should become. It also happens to be taken directly from the beliefs and ideals of the Freemasons.”
“If that’s true, then the conspiracy theories about the Masons secretly plotting to control the American government when it was first established are correct, right? And that Francis Bacon was not only behind the plans for setting it up, but the plan for our government was masterminded in England?”
“I guess so,” I said. “If it is true, I can see why, as a Freemason, Prescott would be so interested in locating those documents. Leland, too—although his interest would be more for historical reasons.”
“And if Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare,” Quinn said, “that would be a bombshell. Those documents would be worth a fortune.”
“Wouldn’t they?” I nodded. “At least now I understand what Prescott told me.”
“What’s that?”
“That there are people who don’t want these documents ever to be discovered.”
“If they exist.” Quinn still wasn’t convinced. “Look at those newspaper articles you showed me proving the Bruton Vault didn’t exist.”
“Or maybe it did,” I said. “And someone moved the contents. Again. Just like they were moved from Jamestown to Williamsburg.”
“Move them where?”
“To the White House.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I know,” I said. “But it would explain what Prescott said about Leland’s letter—the Banks letter—giving him an important clue in solving the mystery of where the lost treasure might be.”
“True.” He still sounded dubious, but at least his interest had perked up. “So these documents—if they exist—aren’t in the White House anymore, either.”
“That’s right. They’re not because Hobson Banks removed them on Dolley Madison’s instructions. And Prescott had a pretty good idea where they went.” I paused and added, “Which he was going to reveal, until someone murdered him.”