A frigid gust of wind blew in off the river as she spoke. I pulled up the hood of my jacket and jammed my hands into my pockets. Quinn tugged on his knitted cap so it covered more of his ears and Josie zipped up her down jacket. No one else had joined the three of us the entire time we’d been here. The fort, which already seemed a grim, desolate place, looked increasingly bleak as dark clouds across the river scudded toward us.

“How did they survive in weather like this?” I said. “It must have been brutal.”

“It was,” Josie said. “The summer wasn’t much better.”

We left the delicate-looking barracks and walked over to an area that had been marked off by unfinished walls that appeared to be made of packed earth and came up to about the height of my waist. Wooden benches faced an area separated by a railing. Four crosses commemorating graves stood inside what must have been where the minister preached his sermons and led his congregation in prayer. This had to be the original church.

Fifty feet away—outside the walls of the fort—was a brick church that had been here on my last visit. In fact it had been here for more than a century and I knew it had been built on the site of several churches, including one that Nathaniel Bacon the Rebel burned down when he torched Jamestown in 1676. The only part of that church to survive the fire was the bell tower, the remains of which I was looking at right now.

According to what I’d read over the last few days, Nathaniel Bacon the Elder, a distant cousin of his rebel namesake and kin to Sir Francis Bacon, had buried the documents he brought over from England under that very bell tower. Later they had been moved to a vault at Bruton Parish in Williamsburg. The answer to Prescott Avery’s search for a lost treasure could have had its origins a few feet from where I stood.

“… you’re standing on the site of the earliest church erected in Jamestown,” Josie was saying to Quinn. “This was the church where Pocahontas married John Rolfe.”

“Are you serious? Pocahontas?” Quinn sounded awed.

Josie nodded. “Please tell me you’re not thinking of the cartoon version of a willowy girl with doe eyes and a feather in her long, dark hair. The real Pocahontas moved to England where her name was changed to Rebecca Rolfe. She died there and was buried there. In Kent, actually.”

Quinn gave her a guilty smile and she said in exasperation, “I should have guessed, Mr. California. The land of Mickey Mouse. Of course you’re imagining a Disney character.”