My tea had gone cold, but I drank it anyway and cradled the mug in both hands. “He also said he had a proposition for me. He told me that my family owned a cache of very old Madeira—bottles that were over two hundred years old—and he wanted to buy them. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about and that was sort of the end of it.”

“Sort of?”

I looked into the bottom of my mug as if the answer might lie in the tea leaves of Frankie’s fragrant Christmas spiced tea. “The end of the discussion about buying the Madeira. Inviting me downstairs to try the Malmsey was his way of enticing me—in private—to sell him the wine. He offered to pay any price for it, whatever I wanted.”

“Could have been worth a lot of money to you.”

“Bobby, Leland probably drank the damn wine. Or sold it to pay gambling debts, as I told Prescott. I never knew anything about it.” I glared at him as a log caved in and the fire hissed next to us.

“Okay, sorry. But there was something else besides the Madeira.” A statement, not a question.

I placed my mug on the coffee table. “Did you know Prescott was a Mason?” I asked.

“I did.”

It was Bobby’s business to know everything about everyone, so his answer probably shouldn’t have surprised me.

“I didn’t know,” I said and got up to put another log on the fire. “After we talked about the Madeira he brought me into another room. The door was behind the bookcase in his tasting room. When it opened and we went inside, it looked like some kind of Masonic shrine. There were engraved swords, a Bible with a compass and a carpenter’s square lying on it, the flags of the Knights Templar, a painting of George Washington in his Masonic apron in front of the Capitol … things like that.”

I brushed grit off my hands and sat down across from him again. “I had a feeling it was a privilege to be invited to see that room.”

“Why did he show it to you?”

I told him about Prescott’s copy of the Declaration of Independence.

“It was handwritten by Thomas Jefferson and it’s priceless,” I said. “I have no idea what Prescott paid for it. It’s only the third documented copy of the Declaration handwritten on parchment in existence.”

Bobby set his pen down on top of his notebook. He hadn’t written down anything I’d said about what Prescott had told me about the Declaration of Independence. To me that meant Bobby was looking for something else.

“Does this have anything to do with why he invited you to his wine cellar?” he asked.