“Okay,” I said, “maybe it was somewhere else. It’s not impossible, is it?”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nor does anybody else.”

“But if there were documents, is it so impossible to imagine that Thomas Jefferson might have decided they were safer with him than in a vault in the ground?”

She let out a noisy sigh. “Okay, Jefferson was a huge fan of Sir Francis Bacon, I’ll give you that. I’m over at Monticello a lot, talking to them all the time about Jefferson’s vineyards. And in his study I can tell you there are portraits of the three men Jefferson called ‘his trinity of the three greatest men in the world.’ John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, and—” She paused for effect. “Sir Francis Bacon.”

“Okay,” I said. “There you go. Don’t you think that if Thomas Jefferson came across papers that were actually written by Sir Francis Bacon himself, one of Jefferson’s three greatest heroes, and they were papers no one had ever seen or knew existed, that a man of Thomas Jefferson’s intellectual curiosity would want to take them and keep them someplace safe? Why risk leaving them for someone else to find?”

“If there were papers,” she said, “maybe.”

“Plus Bacon was one of the investors and founders of the Virginia Company in London. He’d certainly be really interested in everything that went on in the new colony he was helping to finance, right? How far-fetched would it be to imagine that one of his relatives might bring some of his papers—a book that laid out his ideas for how the new government should be set up—to Jamestown itself?” I said. “I’m talking about a completed version of New Atlantis—his Utopian novel—as well as proof that some of Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by Sir Francis Bacon and not Shakespeare. Say, maybe The Tempest, which is probably based on the wreck of the Sea Venture, something Bacon would have known about firsthand.”

“Lucie,” Josie said, “I’ve heard all this before and you make a convincing case. But no one has found anything—any evidence, any vault, any anything—in three hundred years.”

I folded my arms across my chest and gave her a stony stare.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Prescott … found … something? Is that what this is all about?”

“Possibly. I’m not entirely sure.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Does this have anything to do with his murder?”

“The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office believes he was murdered because he threatened to sell off the family business—specifically the Washington Tribune—against the wishes of everyone in his family and his employees.”

She tilted her head and stared as if she were seeing me for the first time. “What do you think?”

The snow had begun falling more heavily, dusting the three of us so we looked as if we were coated in powdered sugar. Three snow angels.