by Mari Carr
Caden’s attention was piqued by that information. “Twenty-nine? I didn’t realize they recruited new members that late. How old are you now?”
“Thirty-four. And you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
He and Caden looked at Tess, who added, “I’m twenty-nine. Facing the big 3-0 birthday in just a couple of months. I must admit I assumed you were a legacy, given your pen name, Isaiah,” Tess confided.
“A nod to my ancestry. You see before you the product of an affair our third president had with his slave, Sally Hemings.”
“I saw the interview you did on The Today Show about discovering your lineage,” Tess said. “Absolutely fascinating. I have a famous ancestor as well.”
“The world will never be the same,” Isaiah quoted, adding the tune to the song as he finished it. “Alexander Hamilton?”
“One and the same. Needless to say, I’m constantly serenaded with Lin-Manuel Miranda songs these days anytime I introduce myself to people.”
Isaiah chuckled. “I can think of worse things to hear over and over. I had a cousin named Roxanne and believe me, I grew to hate that song as much as she did over the years whenever she met someone new.”
“What about your family, Caden?” Tess asked. “Any famous founding fathers in your closet?”
Caden’s face shut down, and Isaiah realized in an instant any strides they’d made in getting him to open up had just been lost. “No.”
Isaiah tried another tack. “Does your family live on the West Coast as well?”
“My parents are dead.”
Tess reached over and placed her hand on Caden’s. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be.”
Caden only spoke two words, but they fired up a million questions in Isaiah’s mind.
The rest of the meal passed with Tess and Isaiah locked in a continual tug of war with Caden. Every now and then, he’d ask them a question and it felt like he was lowering his guard. Then they’d ask him one in return and the walls flew back up.
Isaiah let the silence in the limo hover as they rode to the Boston Park Plaza, all of them lost in their thoughts. Tess was distractedly toying with her hair as she looked out the car window, and Caden’s scowl was back in place as he rubbed his chest.
Isaiah recalled the scar he’d seen there.
Yet another question, another part of the mystery of Caden. The man had more layers than an onion. Isaiah wondered how long it would take to peel all of them away.
Once they reached the penthouse, Isaiah headed straight for the wet bar. “According to the doorman, we’re the first people to stay in this room in six months. He said there was a fire that destroyed almost the entire floor. Said the hotel sank well over a million dollars into the repairs.”
“It’s beautiful,” Tess said, dragging her fingers over the back of the plush black leather couch. Caden had drifted along the short corridor, glancing into the other rooms before coming back to join them.
“It was a fire bomb,” Caden said, leaning against a wall.
“Really?” Tess asked.
Caden nodded and looked away, not bothering to add more.
Isaiah reached for a bottle of wine. “This is a good merlot. I can open it, if you’d like. Or there’s a bottle of Grey Goose as well if you’d prefer to switch over to vodka tonics?”
“I better stick to the wine or I’ll be singing later,” Tess teased. “And believe me, you don’t want to hear that.”
Isaiah opened the wine and poured them all a glass. “Why don’t we sit on the couch and get to know each other a bit more?”
Caden refused the wine Isaiah offered, reaching into his pocket for the folded piece of paper they’d been given by the Grand Master’s adviser. “I think we should take a look at the poem. Try to come up with a plan of attack.”
“Plan of attack? You make this sound like a war council,” Tess joked.
Caden didn’t share her humor. “You said your family has a copy of this poem. Can you call your dad and ask him about it?”
Tess nodded, then sat up when she realized Caden was waiting for her to move. “You mean right now?”
“The sooner we finish this task, the sooner…” Caden didn’t finish the sentence, and Isaiah had a sinking feeling that was because their partner wasn’t in a hurry to get to the wedding, but anxious to do his duty and disappear. Which made no sense. That wasn’t how the Trinity Masters worked.
“Why don’t you call, Tess? Maybe your father will offer some information that will give us an idea of where to start.” Isaiah hung back by the bar, watching Caden’s face as Tess placed the call and spoke to her dad.
From her initial blush and short answers, it was apparent her parents knew she’d been called to the altar and were grilling her for details. “I’ll call you tomorrow when we can talk more, Dad. For now, I’m sort of in a hurry and I wanted to ask about the framed poem in the attic. Do you know where it came from?”
After a pause, she said, “I see, did Granddaddy tell you anything about it?”
“Put him on speaker,” Caden murmured.
Tess lowered the phone and hit the button, allowing them to all hear her father’s response. “No. I don’t recall him saying much about it. Just that it was a copy of an original poem penned by John Adams, and that it was very valuable and old. Mentioned it was the only printed copy in existence and it had been drafted by John Adams himself. I told my dad it should probably be donated to a museum, but he made me swear that would never happen. He insisted it had to remain with the family. We should probably be ashamed of ourselves for not taking better care of it. I mean, the ink is faded and sort of hard to read. You can hardly make out the tiny fan Adams drew in the lower right corner anymore.”
“Fan?” Tess asked. “I don’t remember seeing a fan.”
“See what I mean?” her dad joked.
Tess appeared to have gotten her wry sense of humor from her father. “Was there something drawn on the fan?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. More like a tiny doodle of a fan shape. No bigger than a pea and positioned next to his initials at the bottom. I assume it’s nothing more than a flourish.”
“And you said John Adams only made one copy of this poem?”
“Yeah. Apparently, he fancied himself a poet, kept a journal full of his verses. He gifted this one to the Hamiltons for some reason. Probably because he mentioned us in the poem.”
“Do you know what the poem means?” Tess asked.
“No. To tell you the truth, I never thought about it. If it doesn’t involve differential equations, it may as well be written in Greek as far as your aunt and I are concerned. Your mother is the writer.”
“Nonfiction, Dad. She made it pretty clear to me years ago that poem was something she viewed as unnecessary clutter.”
Her dad chuckled. “Yeah. She’s sitting here right now listening to me. Wants me to tell you that you are more than welcome to come get the thing and keep it in your apartment if you want.”
“Tell her I’ll stop by as soon as I get back to D.C. and take her up on the offer.”
“You’ve made her very happy.”
“One more question, Dad. Do you know where John Adams’ journal might be? The one with all his poems?”
“Couldn’t say for sure. Aren’t most of his books in the Boston Public Library? The rare books room? You could always look there.”
Tess looked up at Caden and then Isaiah, as if to see if they had any more questions. They both shook their heads.
“Thanks for all the info, Dad.”
“You have to give us something here, Tess. We’re all dying to know. Are you pleased with the Grand Master’s choices for you?”
Tess turned off the speaker phone and ventured a short way down the corridor. The scant distance and her lowered voice still carried, and Isaiah listened as she offered her father a rushed reassurance that all was well, followed by a hasty goodbye.
Once the call was disconnecte
d, she returned to the room and sat on the couch. “Sounds like we should go back to the library tomorrow to see if we can find the journal.”
Isaiah joined her on the couch. “I like that idea. I think our best bet is to follow the poem as we would a map. Take it in order, step by step. The first verse is about the Trinity Masters in Boston and apparently this ancient foe—”
“The British Empire?” Tess interjected.
Isaiah nodded and continued. “That seems to make sense, given the time period. They did something to George Washington, stole something.”
“And Adams is calling on the future sons and daughters,” Tess added.
“Us.” Isaiah couldn’t deny his excitement over this task. He’d been struggling to come up with a plot for his new mystery, suffering from a slight case of writer’s block, and suddenly a real-life adventure had been dumped right in his lap. If this didn’t get the blood pumping again, he didn’t think anything would. “So we need to discover if Adams left any other clues. I don’t think that fan drawing was a frivolous doodle.”
“It could be a clue. Something that might be explained in his journal.” Tess’ eyes were bright and wide, gleaming with the same enthusiasm Isaiah felt.
Caden still stood across the room, silent.
“What do you think, Caden?”
Caden walked toward them. “Sounds like as good a place as any to start. Someone brought our stuff here from headquarters and put it in the bedrooms. I’m going to fire up my laptop and try to do a little research in my room.”
“Caden,” Tess began, but he didn’t let her say anything more.
“It’s been a long day, I’m afraid. I didn’t receive my letter until very early this morning, then I had a long drive to Boston. I need some rest. Some time,” he added.
Tess nodded slowly, and Isaiah could see she was reluctant to see him go. He felt the same way. However, given Caden’s behavior all day, he didn’t see anything improving if it was like the man said and he was tired. Perhaps a good night’s sleep and time to process the day’s events was exactly what they all needed.
Isaiah decided to let him escape. For now. “Sounds like a good idea. Shall we reconvene here in the living room around nine tomorrow? We can grab some breakfast and then head over to the library to do a little snooping around.”
Caden sighed, the sound full of relief. Clearly, he hadn’t expected his getaway to be so easy. “I’ll see you both in the morning.”
Tess watched him leave, then turned to Isaiah. “Guess I’ll go to bed too.”
He leaned toward her, giving her a soft kiss on the cheek. “It’s only the first day,” he murmured, trying to reassure her. “I have high hopes for this trinity.”
She grinned, though there wasn’t as much happiness in the look as Isaiah would have liked. “So do I.”
Tess left as well, closing the door to the bedroom opposite the one Caden had disappeared into.
Isaiah picked up the glass of wine on the coffee table and downed it in one long swig.
The instant he was alone, he knew he’d made a mistake. He should never have let them leave the room.
Chapter Seven
Tess peered through the glass bookcases in the rare book room of the Boston Public Library and tried to concentrate on what she was looking at. The library housed thousands of volumes from John Adams’ personal library.
Caden had apparently made a call last night and managed to convince the Grand Master to get them access to the securely locked-down collection. Tess was curious about his connection to the Grand Master and her advisors. It was clear from their brief meeting after the binding ceremony that Caden was no stranger to the ruling force behind the secret society.
Unfortunately, her ability to focus on the task at hand was low. She was completely preoccupied by the previous night. Rubbing her eyes, she tried to recall if she’d ever had a worse night’s sleep. She had tossed and turned until two a.m., at which point she’d turned on the light and started rereading her favorite Isaiah Jefferson novel.
The three of them had gone out for breakfast and, while the conversation had been perfectly pleasant, Tess couldn’t shake the feeling that Caden was holding back from them, rejecting the trinity.
Which was madness. The very first rule of the organization was that members gave up the right to choose their partners. What would happen to them if Caden failed to accept them? Tess had heard the horror stories about members who broke the rules. She wasn’t anxious to discover if any of them held any truth.
“I think I’ve found something.” Isaiah spoke softly in the painfully quiet room.
She and Caden turned to see him gesturing toward the table where he was sitting.
Caden joined him. “Is it the journal?”
Isaiah nodded. “I think so. I even found the poem.”
“Wow.” Tess was impressed. They hadn’t been in the rare books room for more than a couple hours, and given the size of John Adams’ collection, she feared they’d be there all day…and then some.
Isaiah winked at her. “It’s not my first rodeo. Spend as much time in libraries as I do in front of the computer writing.”
“I fully intend to exploit this skill of yours,” she threatened good-naturedly. “I do a lot of research when I design my exhibits. Might have to pick your brain on how to do fast research. My doctorate taught me to research, but not quickly.”
“I’m at your disposal,” Isaiah said.
“Is there anything different about the poem?” Caden asked, returning them to the subject at hand. “Or was this a waste of time?”
Isaiah sighed. “The poem is completely identical to the one that was shared with us. The only difference is the handwriting.”
“The Grand Master wouldn’t have given us one of the originals to work with,” Tess said. “Someone copied it onto that paper for us.”
Isaiah agreed. “I did notice this in the last line. Adams capitalized two letters in the middle of a word. He didn’t do that anywhere else in the poem.”
Tess read the last line, then the entire poem once more. Isaiah was right. That was the only word with two misplaced caps.
She read it aloud. “SeCRet spies, kept from sight, our leader to avenge. CR? That could mean so many different things. We start with the obvious and assume it’s initials.”
“For a man? Woman? Place?” Caden asked.
Isaiah shrugged. “No idea. Were they capped in the copy your family possesses?”
Tess tried to visualize the framed poem, but it had been years since she’d seen it, and she hadn’t studied it very closely. “I don’t know. I’ll call and ask my dad later.”
“Okay.” Isaiah continued to study the poem.
Tess tried to do the same, but the words were blurry. She rubbed her eyes wearily, the lack of sleep catching up with her. “Assume CR represents a person. Someone hidden? Waiting to avenge the leader like the line says. Problem is, I’m confused about which leader. George Washington or the Grand Master.”
“I think we have to assume it’s Washington. He’s named as the wronged party in an earlier stanza,” Caden said, flipping through the journal.
Isaiah pulled out his cell and quickly tapped something into the search screen. “Let me see if there were any founding fathers or signers of the Declaration of Independence with those initials.”
Tess continued to read the last line over and over, trying to figure out what they were missing.
“Caesar Rodney,” Isaiah said after a few minutes.
“Who is that?” Caden asked.
“The only person with the initials CR to sign the Declaration of Independence. He was from Delaware.” Isaiah spent the next few minutes reading Rodney’s list of accomplishments and efforts during the American Revolution. Nothing about the man seemed to fit or jump out.
Caden shook his head. “There’s nothing to say that CR is a person. It could be anything. A place, a group, a—”
“A group,” Tess interjected. “Spies
. Secret spies.” Tess pulled out her phone and did a quick search. She skimmed a few paragraphs, then smiled.
“You figured something out?”
“Maybe. Have you ever heard of the Culper Ring?”
Both Isaiah and Caden shook their heads.
“One of my first exhibits for the Smithsonian was about the secret intelligence employed by George Washington and his generals during the American Revolution. I did months of research on it. It was absolutely fascinating stuff, and I don’t doubt for a second they were instrumental in our success in winning the war. They used aliases, printed coded messages in newspapers, and even utilized sympathetic stain.”
“What the hell is that?” Caden asked.
Isaiah grinned as he answered, “Invisible ink.”
Caden leaned back. “I think I’m starting to understand why the Grand Master called you two to the altar for this trinity.”
Isaiah tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “Trying to decide if you mean that as a compliment or if Tess and I have just been labeled nerds.”
For a split second, the ends of Caden’s lips tipped up in something that could almost be mistaken for a smile. “You don’t expect me to clarify, do you?”
Isaiah barked out a quick laugh, then glanced back at the page. “I have to admit the Culper Ring does seem like the type of cloak-and-dagger operation that would be involved in concealing a mystery. The problem is—”
“This information doesn’t actually get us closer to the answer.” Caden ran his hand through his hair, his frustration palpable.
Isaiah was obviously made of sterner stuff. Rather than annoyed, he looked almost energized, excited as a kid with a new puppy. Tess wished she could work up that same level of enthusiasm, but she was too damn tired.
Isaiah tapped Culper Ring into his own phone, doing another search. “It’s just a piece of the puzzle. Once we find enough pieces, I’m sure it’ll all fall into place.”
Tess scrolled through a few more pages of information about the Culper Ring, but nothing else jumped out at her. While she and Isaiah read from their phones, Caden got up from the table and paced around the room.
