Twenty-one

The Town Car pulled away and I started walking down First Street toward East Capitol, away from the Library of Congress. The Folger was the next block behind it on East Capitol and Second. Grant Lowry was a Freemason, just like Prescott. Had he known anything about Prescott’s search for the documents hidden in Bruton Vault, or supposedly hidden there? Did Grant believe Prescott, or, like Clay, did he consider Prescott’s search to be an expensive wild-goose chase?

It felt, all of a sudden, as if I were running out of time to find the Bruton Vault documents. If there was something to find. My heart was still pounding as I walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library a few minutes later.

“Can I help you, dear?” A middle-aged woman standing behind a counter in the small dark-paneled entryway gave me a concerned smile. “Are you all right?”

“Yes … I’m fine, thanks. I have a meeting with Tana Rossi at one o’clock,” I said. “I’m Lucie Montgomery.”

The woman made a call and Tana Rossi appeared before I’d finished signing in. She looked as if she were about Frankie’s age, in her early fifties, with short, curly, salt-and-pepper hair, a pair of knee-high suede boots worn with faded jeans, a turquoise-and-lavender knitted turtleneck, and an eye-popping fuchsia scarf around her neck. Elaborate turquoise earrings that looked Southwestern dangled from her ears and she wore scholarly-looking oversized tortoiseshell glasses.

We shook hands and she said, “Won’t you come with me? We need to leave your coat and purse in my office before we do anything.”

Her office was a small rectangular room off a hallway on the main floor that made me think of a repurposed coat closet. I shed my winter coat, scarf, and gloves and set them on a chair.

“Your purse will be perfectly safe here,” she said in a faint English accent. “I’ll lock the office. You may bring a notebook and your phone, if you want to take photos without a flash, but all notes must be taken in pencil. Help yourself to one from that pencil holder on the table over there.”

I did as I was told and followed her back down the corridor after she locked her door. The building, I knew, dated from the 1920s, but inside it seemed more like a place where Will himself would feel at home, with its subdued lighting, dark, heavy oak paneling, and carved wood.

“I’ll show you the Great Hall and the library later,” she said. “Plus if you’d like to visit the vault and see our manuscripts—I presume you’d like to see a First Folio—we can do that as well. For now, I thought we could talk in the Founders’ Room, where we’ll have some privacy.”