Bobby was finishing a call on his mobile as Quinn and I walked back into the tasting room. He had his back to us but I heard him say, “Yeah, I’m talking to him next. Right. Bye.”

He turned around, looking grim, eyeing the three of us but focusing on Quinn and me. “I’d better get going. If you two think of anything else…”

“We’ll let you know,” Quinn said.

“I hope it’s someone none of us knew,” I said.

“Whoever it is knew the Masonic code on the keypad to get into the wine cellar,” Bobby said.

I blinked and said, “What Masonic code?”

He flipped open his notebook and read to us. “HTWSSTKS. It stands for ‘Hiram, Tyrian, Widow’s Son, Sent to King Solomon.’ It’s in every Masonic temple in the world and on a lot of Masonic gravestones.”

So HTWSSTKS wasn’t Hot Wish Sticks. Quinn and I exchanged glances.

“Who is Hiram?” Quinn asked. “And why was he sent to King Solomon?”

I got out my phone and searched. “Hiram Abiff was the Grand Architect of the Temple of Solomon, which was built as the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. He was murdered by three men in the temple one night for refusing to divulge secrets about how the temple was built that only he knew as a master stonemason.”

“That’s right,” Bobby said. “For the Masons, Hiram’s kind of their hero. He represents honor and loyalty because he died rather than giving up their secrets.”

“The Ark of the Covenant,” Quinn said. “The gold box where the Ten Commandments were kept? The stone tablets God supposedly gave Moses?”

“That’s right,” Bobby said.

“Probably the most sought-after treasure in the world,” Frankie spoke up. “Solomon’s Temple was destroyed when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, in the fifth century B.C., if I remember my Catholic school Biblical history correctly. The Ark disappeared and was never seen again. To this day people are still looking for it.”

“It’s been a while since the fifth century B.C.,” Bobby said. “But it makes a good movie or a good story, that someone might have found another clue about where it is.”

“So those letters, which every Mason in the world knows, were the code to Prescott’s wine cellar?” I asked. “I wonder why he bothered with a secret code if it was that easy to figure out.”

“For the same reason millions of people still use one-two-three-four as their home security code,” Bobby said. “Or, if they’re really creative, their birth month and date. Because it’s easy to remember and they feel better about having an extra layer of security.” He shoved his phone in his pocket. “I’d better get going. I’ll see you guys later.”

After he left, the three of us looked at each other. Frankie said it first.

“I wonder who did it.”