“The newsroom. The Trib comes first with him. He sent me to cover the story.” She leaned in closer. “You didn’t hear this from me but Alex is leaving. She wants to move to London and Clay’s fine with that. Scotty’s going take over as publisher and run the place solo. The staff is so pumped we’re ready to light up Trib tower like the Eiffel Tower at night.”

“I’m glad.”

The Inn had been closed for the morning for “a special event” and the Tap Room was once again going to be used as a triage site as it had been during the Civil War to examine anything the two archeologists dressed in hazmat suits found. Opening the heavy metal lid turned out to be a chore that required yet another crowbar, the strength of both men, and about twenty minutes of pulling and tugging before it finally came loose.

One of them shone a flashlight into the opening. “It’s not that deep,” he said, “and there’s something down there.”

I squeezed Quinn’s hand so hard he winced as the archeologist lowered himself into the opening. A moment later he emerged holding a dirty, shapeless lump in both hands as if it were the Holy Grail.

“There’s something inside this sack,” he said. “It feels like papers.”

A few people gasped.

“Congratulations, sweetheart,” Quinn said in my ear, “you were right.”

But was I?

The sack hadn’t been waterproof and Hobson Banks had probably expected to return for it not long after he hid it underneath the Red Fox Inn. Instead it had remained in that small vault for more than two hundred years.

What had I been expecting? A swashbuckling Indiana Jones–like ending to a centuries-old mystery? Proof that Shakespeare was not really the genius the world believed he was? And that Francis Bacon had masterminded the plans for the government of the United States, plans Thomas Jefferson hid in the White House after borrowing Bacon’s ideas to write the Declaration of Independence?

Life is never that simple, nor is it black-and-white. The papers had suffered water damage and were mildewed. The ink had run, smearing words and seeping through to other pages, staining them like Rorschach blots. It would take time to dry them out, analyze the handwriting, and test for DNA. Today there would be no answers.

Almost none.

“Wait a minute,” one of the archeologists said, “take a look at this. It was still inside the sack, not with the other documents.”

We crowded around the table. It was a letter, heavily mildewed except for the signature of the correspondent at the bottom of the page. In script as large as the signature on James Madison’s copy of the Declaration Independence, Thomas Jefferson had signed his name with a flourish in his distinctive handwriting.