“Getting involved in what?”

She shook her head and gave me the look of disappointment my mother used to give me that always made me feel guilty as hell.

“Don’t tangle with the Freemasons, child. They don’t take kindly to folks butting in and exposing things that are private and sacred to them.”

“Yes, ma’am. I know that.”

She picked up one of her snow globes and shook it. Snow cascaded furiously over a sweet little white church with a steeple, lighted windows, and a manger scene in front of its open doors.

When the snow had finally settled, she looked up. “You’ve got your mother’s beauty, but you’re even more stubborn and ornery than your father was. Sometimes it’s just best to leave things lay where Jesus flang ’em, child. I think this is one of those times. If you’re getting yourself mixed up in something Prescott was involved in, you could be asking for trouble.” She shook her finger at me. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I said, “Yes, ma’am” one more time and got out of there.

Seventeen

I found Tana Rossi’s reply to the email I’d written to her earlier this morning in my in-box when I checked my phone for messages in Thelma’s parking lot. She wrote that she would be willing to talk to me about the Sea Venture and its relationship to The Tempest, plus she said she’d be interested in any information I had challenging the authenticity of Shakespeare as the author of his plays.

I decided not to tell her that I didn’t actually have anything concrete, no documents in my possession to show her that would make a case that Shakespeare might not have written Shakespeare. Then I figured she heard from people like me all the time that were convinced they’d made the discovery of a millennium—just as Frankie said—if only they had the evidence to prove they were right.

I wrote back and asked if it would be possible to meet with her in Washington later this week if she had time, possibly Thursday or Friday. She answered a few minutes later suggesting Thursday afternoon at one o’clock at the Folger. Sign in at the front desk when you arrive and they’ll find me, she wrote. I replied that it was a date and that I was looking forward to it.

On the drive home from Thelma’s I wondered whether tomorrow’s meeting with Josie Wilde would yield any new information on the documents Hobson Banks had mentioned in his letter. If I were lucky, then maybe I’d have another arrow or two in my quiver when I met Tana Rossi on Thursday.