At the winery we had clients who worked in the intelligence world at the alphabet agencies in Washington and Virginia—though they never said anything overtly—so that over the years I’d heard an expression used in the spy business that always intrigued me: walking back the cat. It meant you retreated all the way to the origin or source to find out how a story or theory got started—tracing precisely where it came from. And that’s what I wanted to do with Hobson Banks’s documents: walk back the cat.

Because it seemed to me that walking back this particular cat led to Jamestown, where I hoped the documents Banks was referring to had first been hidden, and subsequently to Williamsburg, where, if I guessed correctly, they disappeared and had been brought to the White House by Thomas Jefferson. Josie Wilde had been one of the privileged few who had been present at the final excavation at Bruton Parish. Josie said they’d turned up nothing—but wasn’t it possible, as some people claimed, they were digging in the wrong place?

There were also the theories I’d read about on the more controversial internet websites describing a conspiracy and a cover-up to make the story disappear once and for all by claiming Bruton Vault never existed. That there were never documents smuggled into Jamestown proving that a group of powerful Freemasons led by Sir Francis Bacon had laid out plans for the foundation of a government in the New World based on Masonic ideas and principles. And that later these plans and ideas had been incorporated into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution written by Founding Fathers, who weren’t Masons themselves, but were influenced by those Masonic ideas and principles. And finally, among the vault’s most controversial contents was irrefutable proof that Bacon had had a hand in writing Shakespeare’s plays, almost certainly The Tempest.

Far-fetched and crazy? Maybe. But wasn’t it also true that where there was smoke there was fire? It seemed that Jock and Prescott Avery had thought so; and so had my father.

It was too tempting not to pursue what they had been searching for, especially after Prescott said he’d finally found the last clue to this treasure hunt. And now I thought I’d figured out what it was, too.

Or almost figured it out. But that was predicated on a very big if.

SEELY’S GARDEN CENTER WAS perhaps the only place in Middleburg and Atoka that could give Frankie’s gorgeous Christmas decorations at the winery a run for their money. At this time of year Seely’s was magical, every child’s fantasy of what Santa’s North Pole workshop looked like, except with a lot of plants.