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.”