“Are you kidding? I already told him when he questioned me the other day about Prescott telling me he was on the verge of solving a puzzle that’s baffled people for centuries.” I twirled my finger next to my temple. “Bobby thinks that’s nuts. He thinks I’m nuts. Don’t forget, Clay’s trying to make a case that Prescott wasn’t mentally competent when he died. That he wasn’t capable of making sound financial decisions because he was living in his own imaginary little world.”

Quinn groaned. “What a mess.” He reached for his to-go coffee mug and took a sip. “This has gone cold. Want to stop for another coffee?”

“Not just now,” I said, an edge of excitement creeping into my voice. I pointed to the exit sign next to the highway. “This is where we turn off to take the back road to Jamestown. We’re almost there.”

IT HAD BEEN A dozen years since I visited Jamestown—both sites—the living history exhibition where visitors could explore a replica of the colonial fort, see a Powhatan Indian village, and tour replicas of the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery—the three ships the settlers had sailed on in 1607—and the actual site of the original fort where archaeologists were still making new discoveries.

In the 1950s a scenic twenty-three-mile road known as Colonial Parkway had been completed that connected the Jamestown Settlement, the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, and Colonial Williamsburg in what was known as the Historic Triangle.

America started here.

The site of the Jamestown fort, known as Historic Jamestowne to distinguish it from the Jamestown Settlement, was located off a spur of Colonial Parkway. We drove across a bridge that led to what had once been a peninsula but, thanks to rising water levels and changes in the topography of the James River, was now Jamestown Island.

“I didn’t expect it to be so remote,” Quinn said as we drove along a desolate stretch of road surrounded by nothing but forests of pine trees and bare deciduous trees. We hadn’t seen a car for a couple of miles.

“The fort is located on the banks of the James River,” I said. “Not so far inland that the settlers couldn’t easily sail back out to the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Plus, the land belonged to the Powhatan Indians. The English were encroaching on their territory, so they stayed near the water on purpose.”

Quinn pulled into a parking lot where fewer than half a dozen cars were parked. A red-and-white Mini Cooper that reminded me of a car I used to own had a Virginia license plate from the Jamestown quadricentennial—a picture of the Susan Constant, along with 1607—JAMESTOWN—2007 written across the bottom. The tag read VAYNDOC.