If it had been up to Adrian, this would not have been a surreptitious visit. If it had been up to him, he would have made a simple phone call to the museum trustees—something he’d suggested while Nick was hot-wiring the skiff before their soggy journey around the harbor. But both Nick and Hailey had refused the offer—and in a way, Adrian had seen their logic. He would not have been able to give many details to the trustees, and they would have been less than enthusiastic to allow him to rifle through one of their rotating collections. No matter that Adrian himself had curated that particular collection, two years earlier, when the trustees had finally deigned to acknowledge Paul Revere’s participation in the Tea Party, that historic act of hooliganism.

And to be fair, even if Adrian had been able to give them some story about a special project that needed immediate attention—he suspected they might have refused him anyway. He knew that many of the trustees simply didn’t like Adrian, because he’d often told them what he thought of their institution. It reeked of whimsy. And Adrian felt almost as strongly about whimsy as he did about flights of fancy.

On the other side of the doorway, Adrian found himself in the main section of the museum, a wide gallery filled with exhibits. There were framed documents on the walls documenting the onerous Stamp Act of 1765, which levied taxes on just about every piece of paper, from letters to playing cards, and the Townshend Act of 1767, which taxed pretty much everything else. Then a print of Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre, which followed in short order. And after that, the declaration of the Tea Act of 1773, which most historians taught was the parliamentary outrage that led, in short course, to the Tea Party, the British overreaction, Paul Revere’s ride, and the start of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord.