Twenty-Eight

Sweltering heat from the laundry dragged on Luke’s energy. The rotary drums of the drying machines emitted constant waves of warm air, and the vent didn’t do a good job siphoning off the heat. It had been hot in Cuba, but it was a natural heat. There was nothing natural about the man-made heat pouring out of the laundry. It was over a hundred degrees in here, and the air barely moved. His hands were inflamed by the bleach and sweat that cracked his skin and made them sting.

To make it worse, Marianne hadn’t visited him today. So far, she’d always come in the mornings, but it was almost dinnertime and she still hadn’t appeared at the dryer vent. He’d left the laundry for thirty minutes at lunch and had asked Stillman if there’d been any sign of a visitor while he’d been gone.

“No sign of that girl, if that’s what you’re asking,” his fellow inmate said with a wink. At first Luke tried to hide Marianne’s visits, but Stillman quickly caught on. Luke had slipped him a few sticks of candy Gray brought him, and that was more than enough to keep Stillman quiet about Marianne’s visits.

Luke lifted another armful of wet sheets into the drying drum, trying to use only his forearms to spare the cracked skin on his hands. He closed the door on the drum and pulled the metal lever to start the machine into motion.

A guard entered the laundry room. “Delacroix! You’ve got a visitor in the meeting room. Hands out for the cuffs.”

Luke swiped an arm across the sweat on his face. He hated meeting Gray looking like this. His prison uniform was soaked with wash water and perspiration, but maybe the unexpected visit signaled something good. His lawyer planned to file an emergency appeal to a higher court, and maybe there was already some movement on that front.

The guard locked the handcuffs and leg-irons onto him, then led him out of the room. Luke followed, but the leg-irons made it impossible to move more than a few inches with each step. Damp strands of hair were plastered to his face, and he felt as limp as a wet rag as the guard opened the door of the meeting room. Luke shuffled forward.

Clyde Magruder stood inside. Luke immediately went on the alert. A hint of a sneer tugged at Clyde’s mouth when he saw the handcuffs and leg-irons.

“Charming,” Clyde said.

Luke recovered quickly. “It’s always a pleasure to see you, Clyde.”

Clyde glanced at the guard still standing in the doorway. “Close the door and leave us,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir,” the guard said.

Luke tried not to cringe as the locking mechanism slid into place, trapping him in this enclosed environment with his bitterest enemy.

Clyde kicked a chair a few inches and ordered him to sit.

Luke refused. “You can order the guards around, but not me.”

“Suit yourself.” Clyde sat, folded his arms across his chest, and glared. “It has come to my attention that you have been carrying on with my daughter.” He tossed a stack of photographs on the table, damning proof of the relationship.

A crushing weight settled on Luke’s chest. This was why Marianne hadn’t come today. She was in trouble and probably suffering at this very moment because of him. He wouldn’t volunteer any information, but he had to stop aggravating Clyde. This needed to be handled as carefully as a time bomb. Clyde held all the cards, and Luke could only gather information.

He pulled out the chair and sat opposite Clyde, setting his hands on the table, letting Clyde see the cuffs and his completely defenseless position.

“I know she was the source for that incendiary article you wrote,” Clyde said.

At this point Luke would normally start taunting Clyde about the article, but not today. If he aggravated Clyde, Marianne would be the one to pay. All he did was raise a brow, an invitation for Clyde to keep talking. He braced himself to endure a round of insults or slurs against his family, but when Clyde finally spoke, he said the last thing Luke had been expecting.

“I am prepared to drop all the charges against you, provided you leave the city and never see my daughter again.”

Luke drew a quick breath of air but tried not to get his hopes up. It was probably just a cruel taunt, like a cat playing with a mouse.

“I don’t believe it,” he finally managed to say. “Why would you open the prison door when you’ve got the opportunity to twist the knife even deeper?”

Clyde’s eyes narrowed. “As much as I would love to twist that knife, it would cost too much. My objective is to expunge you from my daughter’s life. I can’t do that if she harbors misplaced guilt over you.”

Luke wouldn’t trust Clyde to make him a ham sandwich. “You don’t have the power to drop the charges. The complaint against me was filed by the chairman of the Committee on Manufactures. That’s Roland Dern. Get him in here to make the promise, and I’ll consider it.”

“Absolutely not,” Clyde said. “You have already endangered my daughter’s reputation by involving her in this scandal.”

Luke leaned back in his chair. “Did I? Or am I languishing in jail because I’m protecting her? I will never do anything to hurt Marianne, and that should say something about my regard for her.”

“Take your regard and get out of town with it. My daughter is on the verge of becoming engaged to Colonel Henry Phelps, a man of valor whose good name will honor and protect her.”

It was a slap in the face, but Luke tried not to show how badly this hurt. The worst thing was that it was true. Colonel Phelps did have a sterling reputation. He was a decent, battle-tested man with no demons inside. Marianne probably would be better off with Colonel Phelps, and it sickened him.

But he would never take a payoff to turn his back on her. Marianne was the one pure thing in his life. She made him want to be a better man. She inspired him to reach higher, try harder, and seek out the better angels of his nature. He would protect Marianne, no matter what the cost to himself.

He stood, the leg-irons making a loud clank in the barren room. “No deal.”

The guard led him back to the laundry, where the heat and confinement threatened to suffocate him.

Marianne didn’t have much experience with boredom, and the hours stretched painfully in her bedroom prison. It had been two days, and Clyde made good on his threat to send all her meals upstairs and had forbidden her from mingling with the rest of the family.

Her bedroom door had no lock, but the force of Clyde’s anger was more effective than any dead bolt. She stayed in her room, but the isolation terrified her. Some people might be able to be alone, but she wasn’t one of them. She already knew what Andrew and Delia thought of her, but what did Vera think? Surely her mother had been told, but Vera made no attempt to see her, and that snub spoke with the power of a trumpet blast.

It had been two days. It was hard to guess how long Clyde intended to enforce this banishment, because she’d never seen him this angry before. She sat on her bed and stared at the four walls, counting the ways she could have lived the past six months differently. She could have been more honest with her parents about Luke or been more forthcoming about negotiating a truce with the Delacroixs. It probably wouldn’t have worked, but she owed her parents more than she’d given them.

But was it all her fault? If she could design a perfect family, no one would ever fear being kicked out or shunned. Over the last few months she’d learned terrible things about her family, but none of it could stop her from loving them. She had been planted in this family, put down her roots with them, and clung to them as naturally as a vine clung to a trellis. She didn’t want to be ripped out and torn away. No matter how badly they treated her, she still wanted to belong.

A gentle tapping on her bedroom door made her sit bolt upright. It wasn’t time for dinner yet, so perhaps Vera was coming to see her at last.

“Yes?” she asked, racing to the door and tugging it open, but it was only Bridget, the downstairs maid. Marianne tried not to let her disappointment show.

“This came for you in the mail today,” Bridget said, holding a package. It had been opened because Clyde was inspecting everything going in or out of her room to prevent communication with Luke.

Marianne took the package without looking inside. “Thank you,” she said. “How is everyone downstairs? Has my mother’s migraine lifted?”

“Oh yes, ma’am. She’s been right as rain for more than a day now. She went out shopping for a new tea set this morning.”

“Good.” Although it wasn’t good at all. If Vera was feeling better, she could have come to comfort Marianne. Or yell at her. Or intervene for her. Instead, Vera chose to ignore her, which was the most painful of all.

“What about Andrew and Delia? Are they still here, or have they gone back to Baltimore?”

Bridget glanced down the hall in unease. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m really not supposed to be speaking to you.”

Marianne nodded and watched the maid go. It wouldn’t be fair to risk someone’s job just because she was lonely and afraid. She closed the door and pulled the wrapping away from the package, and her heart nearly stopped.

Don Quixote!

She’d ordered a copy from the bookseller months ago, and now it was here. The front of the book was beautifully embossed with gold foil, showing the silhouette of a gangly man holding a lance, staring at a windmill in the distance. The top of the book had the title Don Quixote in a lavish font, and at the bottom was the author, Miguel de Cervantes. Marianne opened the front cover, where Luke’s name was listed as the translator in much smaller font. Whoever was screening her mail obviously hadn’t inspected the book carefully, or it would have been thrown into the fire.

He’d done it! Luke got this book across the finish line even though the process terrified him. She hugged the heavy tome to her chest, so proud of Luke but desperately wishing he could be here to share this moment.

Well! At least now she would have something to fill these long, dreary hours. She hopped onto her bed, cradling the book and savoring its weight and all that it represented. This was a monumental accomplishment, a labor of love that proved Luke Delacroix was no feckless dabbler. He was a man of immense talent and dedication, even if he hid it beneath a layer of breezy charm.

She gazed at his name on the title page, then turned it over to read a brief dedication.

Amazing women have inspired men from the dawn of literary history. Cleopatra, Helen, Guinevere, Juliet, and Dulcinea.

To these legendary heroines, I add my own,

and her name is Marianne.

She couldn’t even breathe. Oh, Luke, what a wonderful, magnificent dreamer. Thank heavens her parents hadn’t seen this, or she would have been banished to Siberia!

She shot off the bed, energy prickling through her veins and making it impossible to be still. For the past two days she had let herself be boxed up in this room. No more. She had to be worthy of that dedication. She had to be worthy of Luke and her own God-given intelligence to make a difference in the world.

Luke was locked up in jail because of her. She had to do something to help, but what? She couldn’t storm the jail to break him out or make a legal argument in a court of law. She wasn’t a person of influence who could call on connections.

She paced. It was time to stop counting the ways she couldn’t help and think about how she could. She’d give anything for even a fraction of Luke’s connections. He was a prince of the city and had a thousand friends. She was a newcomer and had no one.

That meant she had to be clever about this. She needed to rouse an army of Luke’s allies and supporters, and she instinctively knew who they were.

The Poison Squad.

If those bombastic, hyper-competitive men knew Luke had been locked up for publishing a story about noxious chemicals, they would climb over each other to be first in line to help. All she had to do was figure out a way to get to them without alerting her father.

She waited until four o’clock in the morning to make her escape because no one in this household was an early riser.

Men on the Poison Squad were. Luke told her that St. Louis got up at five o’clock every morning to train for the Olympics before breakfast, and the Rollins brothers rose early to study. Marianne expected at least a couple of the men to be awake to greet her.

Guilt ate at her as she snuck out of her bedroom. The house was dark, and she crept in stocking feet down the hall. Even the sound of her heart pumping blood in her ears felt loud as she tiptoed downstairs, clutching a pair of shoes to her chest. She waited until she was outside to tug them on.

Twenty minutes later she was on the sidewalk outside the Poison Squad’s boardinghouse. A light illuminated one of the upstairs rooms, and she scurried up the steps, knocking with vigor to get that unknown person’s attention.

It was St. Louis, already dressed for an early morning sprint through the deserted city streets. “Aren’t you the photographer lady?” he asked.

She stepped inside the house. “I am. The last time I was here was the infamous night of the mass poisoning. You ran to fetch Dr. Wiley.”

“I remember,” he said. “You were holed up with Delacroix over there on that window seat all night. Say, where is he these days? He disappeared on us.”

“That’s what I’m here about.”

St. Louis’s eyes widened in disbelief when she told him about Luke’s arrest and why he’d been taken into custody. He rounded up the Rollins brothers and Princeton, the only other men awake at that hour. All were aghast at what had happened to Luke.

“Was he the one writing articles for Modern Century all along?” St. Louis asked.

She nodded.

Princeton’s normally gregarious demeanor was unexpectedly grim. “Are you telling us that Congress knew those chemicals could make people sick and buried the test results?”

“It was only a single committee that knew,” she said. And one of the men on that committee was her own father, which made it hard to hold up her head, but that was the reason she was here.

“How can we help?” Princeton asked, and Marianne smiled, knowing she’d come to the right place.