Then the door opened, and the two men who came into the room could have stepped out of an adventure novel. The husky man with the piercing blue-green eyes and strange pale hair came over and introduced himself and his darkly handsome friend. She was practically speechless.

They sat at the table and Paul handed them copies of the computer-generated ship of Tarshish. “We think this is the type of vessel that would have sailed to North America. We didn’t get far on the transatlantic route, so we tried another avenue. We noticed a series of connections to the Philosophical Society and followed it up. That’s when we met Angela.”

“Congratulations on finding the Jefferson file,” Austin said with a friendly grin that put her at ease.

“Thank you,” Angela said. “It was dumb luck, really.”

“Angela has had more dumb luck,” Gamay said. “Please tell Kurt and Joe what else you’ve found.”

“We think that Meriwether Lewis was murdered to stop him from bringing some vital information to Thomas Jefferson.”

“I’d be interested in how you reached that conclusion,” Austin said.

Angela pulled a file folder out of a battered leather briefcase.

“I dug into the files looking for information on Lewis’s slave, a young man named Zeb. The records show that he arrived at Monticello several weeks after Lewis died. It’s possible he had gone along with a man called Neelly, who traveled to Monticello with news of Lewis’s death. Neelly would have needed help with Lewis’s belongings and brought along the slave. I wondered what became of Zeb after that.”

“In those days the slave would have been considered part of Lewis’s estate,” Austin said.

“That’s what I thought. He would have been delivered with other property to Lewis’s family. On a hunch, I went through Monticello’s slave population. I found something quite fascinating.”

She handed Austin a sheet of paper with the names of slaves, their sex, age, and job. Austin perused the roster and passed it along to the table without comment.

Gamay said, “Zeb is listed as a freeman. He was assigned to the house.”

“How did he become free at age eighteen?” Austin said.

“I think it was a reward,” Angela suggested.

“That makes sense,” Austin said. “It was Jefferson’s way of thanking the young man for a service he had performed.”

“The Lewis material,” Gamay said. “I’ll bet he delivered the goods to Jefferson.”

“Do you know what happened to him?” Austin asked Angela.

“He stayed at Monticello, working in a prize position inside the house. He vanished from the roster years later, but that’s not the end of the story.”

She produced a copy of an old newspaper clipping.

Gamay read the clipping. “Our freeman?”

“It says he worked for President Jefferson,” Angela said.