Twelve

It was time for Andrew and Sam to return to Baltimore, and Marianne accompanied them to the train station. She’d been trying all week to have a private conversation with her brother, but it seemed her mother or Sam was always hovering nearby. There was no privacy in the bustling Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station, but it would have to do. They still had twenty minutes before their train boarded, and she steered Andrew toward a bench on the far side of the waiting area.

“Why don’t you take Bandit for a walk?” she suggested to Sam. The last thing she wanted was a nine-year-old to overhear this conversation. “You’ll be cooped up on the train for a while, so let him walk off some energy now.”

“Don’t go too far,” Andrew warned as Sam headed toward the row of newsstands and vendors selling treats to the passengers.

Marianne pinched the tips of her fingers to wiggle off the tight gloves as she searched for the most delicate way to phrase her question, but there was no dignified way to ask if their father was still being unfaithful with Lottie O’Grady.

“Do you think Papa’s visits to see Tommy are entirely innocent?”

Andrew’s expression grew stormy. “They’d better be.”

“Do you have any reason to suspect otherwise?”

Andrew shifted on the bench and folded his arms. “I don’t go with him on the visits. I have no desire to see that woman or the child.”

His bitterness was blatant. Lottie O’Grady had been Sam’s nanny. It was impossible to know when her affair with Clyde began, but Sam was six when it became obvious the nanny was carrying a child. Clyde did some fancy footwork to move Lottie into her own town house before the baby was born. Vera found out anyway and left Clyde for six months. She lived with Andrew and Delia before Clyde succeeded in winning her back with lavish apologies and vows of eternal fidelity.

But Clyde’s visits to Lottie still rankled both Andrew and her mother. Marianne could understand Andrew’s disdain for Lottie, but the child was innocent.

“Aren’t you at least curious about Tommy?” she asked.

“No. I witnessed six months of Mother’s agony when she lived with us after it happened. I wish Dad would wash his hands of both Lottie and the child. It’s the least he could do for Mother. There’s no reason a lawyer can’t simply write the woman a monthly check and be done with it.”

It was impossible to share his sentiments. Marianne was grateful down to the marrow of her bones that Clyde hadn’t abandoned her. She had been given the gift of two loving parents and a stable household. That wouldn’t have happened had she been raised by the opera singer who was paid to turn her over to Clyde, then made no attempt to contact her again.

“I wouldn’t mind meeting him,” she said quietly.

It was the wrong thing to say. Andrew whirled on the bench and shook his finger in her face. “Don’t you dare,” he said vehemently. “It would kill Mother. She’s been through enough, and you can’t repay her generosity by extending an olive branch to the O’Gradys. Mother did more than enough when she took you in twenty-six years ago.”

“Shh!” she warned. “Sam might overhear.”

The boy was loping toward them with Bandit at his heels. “Can I have a nickel for a pretzel?” he asked Andrew. “Bandit wants one too, so that means two nickels.”

Andrew scrounged in his vest pocket and produced the coins, then waved Sam away. His voice was calmer when he turned back to her. “I’m sorry for speaking bluntly of things better left in the past, but my loyalty will always be to Mother. I’ve told Dad that if I catch him being unfaithful again, I’ll quit working for the company.”

“You would really do that?” she asked in surprise.

“I would.” His face was somber as he watched Sam buy two enormous pretzels. “Managing the company is harder than I expected. It seems like every day new problems crop up.”

“But you enjoy the work, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “It’s not like I get to spend my days taking pretty pictures. It’s one headache after another.”

She ignored the swipe. Andrew had never approved of her job, and surely his work was more stressful than hers.

“Do you remember that article in the newspaper a few days ago?” she asked. “The one that Papa got so angry about?”

“I remember.”

“Is there any truth to the notion that the chemicals we use are unsafe?”

“It would be worse if we didn’t use them,” he replied. “We put a tiny bit of preservatives into canned foods that could sit on store shelves for months. Just this year I spent a fortune commissioning tests that prove our preservatives are safe.”

“You did?” she asked hopefully. “I thought you said tests like that were too expensive.”

Andrew gave an embarrassed laugh. “Let me clarify. The committee Dad works on paid for the tests. They hired a bunch of college laboratories to buy hundreds of rabbits and run the experiments.”

“And what did the tests show?”

He shrugged. “They won’t be finished for a few months. Look, our food is perfectly safe, and you need to keep away from that Poison Squad nonsense that uses human test subjects. I’ve never seen Dad so annoyed as when he spotted that article in the newspaper.”

Andrew consulted his watch and called for Sam to return. Their train had just pulled into the station, but before boarding, Andrew turned to her.

“Don’t make Dad angry,” he said. “I may be in charge of the company, but he’s still in charge of the family. You don’t want to end up like Aunt Stella.”

Andrew snapped his fingers to summon Sam, then boarded the train without even saying good-bye.

The strangest thing happened when Luke went shopping for a new typewriter. He went to a department store to try out all three models on display. He fed a piece of paper beneath the roller of the first typewriter and twisted the knob to position it, then began banging out text until he heard the satisfying ding at the end of the line. He pushed the carriage return lever and commenced another line.

He tried all three machines. Price was no object. A typewriter was going to be the single most important tool he’d use to start changing the world. All three machines were perfectly fine, and he could buy one, walk out of the shop, and be back in business within an hour.

Except he couldn’t do it.

It was irrational to mourn a broken piece of equipment, but he did. He’d had that machine for more than a decade. He took it to college with him and wrote his first published article on it. He wrote his translation of Don Quixote on it. That old, mangled typewriter was an inanimate object beyond repair, and he shouldn’t feel disloyal for buying a replacement.

The salesman came over to check on him. “Well, sir? Will one of these suffice?”

This embarrassing surge of sentimentality for his old typewriter was ridiculous, and he needed to get over it.

But not quite yet. Gray had a typewriter he could borrow for a while.

He pulled the paper-release bar and lifted the practice page from the machine. “I’ll be back in a few days,” he told the salesman. Maybe then he’d have his head screwed on firmly enough to quit worrying about the feelings of a broken typewriter.

And a cheerful, high-spirited girl who took a picture of him with a dog.

He wallowed in the memories the entire journey to the Delacroix Global Spice factory. He might fall for another woman someday, but it would be impossible to forget Marianne. She crawled out onto the ice! Onto the Capitol dome! She was brave enough to walk into a jail but tenderly compassionate when he hightailed it out of there like a weakling. Normally he considered his overblown emotionalism an asset, but today it just made him ache.

A heady wall of aroma hit Luke the moment he stepped inside the noisy spice factory and looked for Joseph, the factory foreman since Luke was a child. The spice factory covered an entire city block, a large cavernous space filled with twelve-foot-tall tanks that used hammer mills to grind the spices.

Luke soon found Joseph, who was recalibrating a machine. “Is my brother here?” Luke called out over the din. The hammer mills made it loud.

Joseph nodded and pointed back to the office hallway.

Luke breathed a sigh of relief when he left the noisy factory floor. All he was looking for today was permission to use the typewriter Gray kept for correspondence. The top of his brother’s office door was glass, and Gray was hunched over a page full of columns. Luke would go stark raving mad if he had to sit at a desk all day analyzing numbers, but Gray appeared fascinated as he rubbed his jaw and turned another page.

Luke tapped on the glass, and Gray stood. Surprise was evident as he yanked the door open.

“Luke! How are you feeling?”

“Better,” he said as he wandered inside the office. “I’m getting decent food this week.”

“How can you tell?” Gray asked.

“Do you really need to ask that?”

“Well, now that you’ve sacrificed yourself on the altar of science, why don’t you get off that assignment?”

Luke dropped into the chair opposite Gray’s desk and propped his feet on a shipping crate from Indonesia. “There are several more rounds to go, and before you ask, yes, I will be staying on board for as long as I am physically capable. But I didn’t come here to argue about food. I need a favor.”

“Name it.”

Luke glanced at the typewriter sitting on a corner table. Gray couldn’t type, but his secretary could. With the exception of a few business letters, that thing gathered dust most of the time.

“Can I borrow your typewriter for a few days? Mine had a mishap.”

Gray’s brow furrowed. “What sort of mishap?”

There was no point in lying. Gray and Caroline planned to visit his office this weekend, and there was no way he could get everything repaired in time.

“Somebody ransacked my office. I’m pretty certain it was Clyde Magruder.”

Gray’s face hardened. Several seconds elapsed as he paced in the tight confines of his office. “Have you reported it to the police?”

“It won’t do any good.”

“Think,” Gray pointed out. “If a sitting US congressman is ransacking the offices of journalists, you don’t think that could hurt his chances for reelection?”

It was embarrassing Luke hadn’t thought of that himself. He’d been too busy getting mopey and sentimental about an old typewriter, but Gray was right. There might be some way to make political capital out of this.

“We all know the Magruders hate the idea of the Poison Squad,” Gray said. “By hitting at you, they can strike two birds with one stone. They would do anything to shut down that experiment.”

Except in his soul Luke knew this wasn’t about the experiment. Bringing his older brother into his confidence was a risk, but Luke would trust Gray with his life.

“I don’t think it’s about the Poison Squad,” he said, then affected a deliberately casual tone. “Did you know Clyde Magruder has a daughter? We met her that day on the ice. Aunt Marianne.”

Gray turned to face him from the far side of the office. He must have noticed something about the way Luke said Marianne. Or maybe it was the overly casual tone. Either way, Gray’s expression morphed from annoyance into caution. “The one you sent flowers to?”

“The very one. She’s amazing.”

Gray’s shoulders sagged. “Luke . . . no,” he finally said.

Luke hunkered down farther in his chair, steepling his hands to partially cover his face. Anything to shield himself from the thundercloud of disapproval coming from Gray. “I can’t help it. I care about her.”

“You care because she’s forbidden fruit,” Gray said, and Luke shook his head.

“It’s more than that.” He put his feet flat on the floor and scrambled for the right words. “There’s a feeling I get when I’m with her, a mix of peace and exhilaration at the same time. When I’m with her I want to slay a dragon or grab her hand and run away to the West Coast where we can live like gypsies.”

“And Clyde knows about this?”

Luke shrugged. “He knows we’ve seen each other a few times. He doesn’t like it.”

“I don’t either.”

“Oh, snap out of it, Gray. Don’t blame Marianne because her family is a swarming vat of pestilent lice. Can I use your typewriter or not?”

“Not here.”

Luke was dumbfounded. “You’re being stingy with a typewriter because I like a Magruder?”

“I’m being stingy because I have three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of equipment in this factory. I can’t afford to have it vandalized if Magruder’s henchmen decide to come after you here. Take the typewriter, but use it somewhere else.”

It was the best he was going to get. Luke packed up the typewriter to take to his boardinghouse, but thoughts of Marianne still tormented him. He had a sinking sensation that Marianne Magruder would forever be his huge, once-in-a-lifetime regret.

He would let her go, but not without sending her a token of remembrance. He visited a jeweler’s shop and found an enamel pendant shaped like a small spray of forget-me-nots. The pale blue petals were the exact shade of Marianne’s eyes. He paid for the jeweler to wrap the pin and have it delivered to the Department of the Interior with no note or return address.

His interlude with Marianne was over, but echoes of their brief, magical time together would live with him forever.