Thirty-Three

Luke couldn’t find Marianne, and it was driving him crazy. She had quit her job at the Department of the Interior, and three consecutive days spying on the Magruder town house revealed nothing.

That meant he had to pay a call on Dickie Shuster, the man who had his fingers on the pulse of everything that went on in Washington. It took him an entire day to track down the wily reporter at the horse races, where Dickie sat in the stands with a pair of binoculars—presumably to watch the horses but actually to observe people. Luke intended to rip Dickie’s head off his shoulders for leaking that claptrap about Marianne’s parentage, except Dickie didn’t do it.

“Her brother spilled the beans,” Dickie said. “Rumor claims old man Magruder always liked Marianne better than Andrew, and the young princeling thought he could throw a little mud on his sister without his parents ever figuring out who squealed. I only know about it because I have a weekly lunch with the reporter who let the cat out of the bag.”

“Does Clyde know?”

Dickie nodded. “He knows, and Vera finally figured it out too, but she’s blaming Andrew’s wife for it. Vera and Delia have always despised each other. According to the servants in the house, Vera and Delia had a huge shouting match. Vera accused Delia of forcing Andrew to expose Clyde’s affair because Delia was jealous of Marianne—something about how Marianne is naturally charming while Delia had to buy approval with a fortune in cosmetics and artificial hair extensions. All nonsense, if you ask me, but Vera refuses to see reason where Andrew is concerned. Anything he does wrong will always be blamed on Delia.”

Luke mulled over the appalling tale. In exposing Marianne, Andrew had taken a hatchet to his parents as well. But was Luke any better? He had systematically gotten men booted out of Congress, heedless of the collateral damage, in order to advance his private objective.

“Why don’t you ask what you really want to know?” Dickie prompted.

“And what’s that?”

Dickie didn’t even bother to hide his gloat. “Let’s see if I can remember. I recently read a charming bit of commentary. It suggested that in the last thousand years, a handful of women have achieved immortality in the world’s collective imagination. Guinevere. Juliet. Dulcinea. And dare I add . . . Marianne?”

Luke fidgeted in embarrassment. Maybe he’d gone a little overboard in that public declaration, but he wouldn’t take back a word of it. “Do you know where she is?”

“I have no idea,” Dickie said, raising his binoculars to stare at something in the crowd. “Good heavens, have you ever seen a frumpier ensemble than that beige coatdress Congressman Dern’s wife is wearing? She’s far too young to be dressing like a matron in a convent, but I guess some women have conservative tastes.”

Congressman Dern was the chairman of Clyde’s only congressional appointment. That Dickie chose to mention his wife could not have been a coincidence.

“And why do you suspect Mrs. Dern is dressing like a grim Mother Superior?”

“Probably because she doesn’t like being associated with scandal.” Dickie turned the binoculars toward other sections of the bleachers. “Neither does her husband. I heard Mrs. Dern paid a call on Mrs. Magruder for tea. That was quite a reversal in the social pecking order. My hunch is that she is putting on a public show of support for the embattled Mrs. Magruder, but she isn’t happy about it. And Marianne, the catalyst of the entire scandal, is nowhere to be seen. I’d guess she was sent back to Baltimore.”

Luke doubted it. Ever since the incident with Bandit, Marianne despised her brother. That made him worry something else had happened to her, and he’d already squandered the past three days looking for her. He wouldn’t waste any more.

He needed to go confront the lion in his den.

Luke waited across the street from the Magruder town house until Clyde returned well after dark. He watched Clyde pay the cabbie, then head up the stairs into his house.

Clyde wasn’t going to welcome this visit, and Luke prayed for wisdom and patience as he mounted the steps. The first floor was fully illuminated, and masculine voices came from inside. Luke adjusted his collar, dragged his fingers through his hair, and braced himself before knocking on the door.

Footsteps sounded, and Clyde soon opened the door. His eyes narrowed. “What do you want?” Hostility crackled in his voice.

Luke held up his hands, palms forward in a placating gesture. “I’ve come to inquire after Marianne. I’m worried about her.”

“You can’t see her,” Clyde said. “Go home.” He tried to slam the door, but Luke stuck his foot out to block it.

“I don’t want to cause trouble. I just need to be sure she’s all right.”

“Of course she’s all right. I know how to take care of my own daughter.” Clyde came out onto the porch, driving Luke back a few steps on the narrow landing. “I would never let my daughter be lured into a distasteful alliance with a scoundrel who only wants to use her to score a point against me.”

Luke straightened, refusing to let Clyde push him back any farther. “I love Marianne. I would never do anything to hurt her.”

“You’ve already hurt her,” Clyde shouted. He grabbed Luke by the lapels of his jacket and slammed him against a pillar, but Luke wasn’t going to retaliate. He needed to keep a cool head to learn what had happened to Marianne. He shrugged out of Clyde’s grasp and moved a few feet away.

Old Jedidiah Magruder soon came plodding onto the porch as well, his face a mask of distrust. “Throw him out,” the old man growled.

“I’m not here to cause trouble,” Luke said, his hands again raised in supplication. “I just need to know where Marianne is.”

“She’s somewhere you can’t hurt her,” Jedidiah said. “Take your fancy airs and your blue blood and get out.” The old man’s voice was caustic and his face hard, but Luke had a smidgeon of respect for the man who clawed his way out of poverty and into a house like this. Maybe he could be reasoned with.

“I can’t just leave,” he said. “I love her and need to know she’s safe. Her disappearing like this isn’t natural. Something is wrong.”

“Something has been wrong since the moment you got a decent girl to spy on her own family,” Jedidiah spat.

“Yeah, about that,” Clyde said, his voice low with menace, closing the space between them.

Luke itched to defend himself and fight, but he couldn’t. Not against Marianne’s father. He retreated to the far end of the porch until his back was to the railing and there was no room left.

Clyde punched him in the jaw. Luke’s head snapped to the side, and he grabbed for the wall. The salty tang of blood leaked into his mouth, but he swallowed it back. He waited until his vision steadied before straightening to face Clyde again.

“I’m turning the other cheek, Clyde. Go ahead and take another swing if you want.”

Clyde’s eyes narrowed in anger. “Don’t flaunt that holier-than-thou drivel at me. You colluded with my daughter to spy on her own family. What does your fancy Bible have to say about that?”

Luke sagged a little but managed to keep looking Clyde in the face. “It says I should never have let the situation get this bad. I won’t abandon Marianne. I have connections all over the city and in half the states as well. I’ll call down the moon if I have to, but I will find her.”

“Be careful,” Clyde said, his voice lethally calm. “You’ve just managed to worm your way out of a spying charge, but don’t think I can’t bring the hammer down on you again. I’ll honor my word to Marianne, but if you so much as touch a blade of grass belonging to me, I’ll have you thrown in jail until you’re old and gray.”

Clyde and Jedidiah retreated into the house without a backward glance. Luke flinched at the slam of the door, and a sick feeling took root in his gut.

Something Clyde had just said put the situation into terrible clarity. He’d vowed to honor his word to Marianne. Honor his word about what? A promise like that would not have been made lightly. It came at a cost to someone, and Luke suspected his sudden release from jail had a lot more behind it than pressure from the Poison Squad.

Marianne had struck a deal with Clyde. He closed his eyes in anguish as the pieces fell into place. They’d sent Marianne away, and it was all his fault.

He carefully navigated down the porch steps, pain in his head throbbing with each step.

No matter what it took, he was going to find Marianne.

Luke moved back into the boardinghouse even though he wasn’t a member of the Poison Squad anymore. He couldn’t live with Gray or, even worse, with Caroline and her husband at their new home on Twelfth Street. It was hard to be around happy people when his own heart had been stomped flat. At least Gray and Annabelle behaved themselves with decorum, but Caroline made no effort to mask her enthusiastic physical appreciation of her husband, showering affection on Nathaniel, laughing with him, tugging on a lock of his hair and begging for a kiss. It was nauseating. Luke was fully aware of how irrational he was being but didn’t care.

Misery loved company, so he made himself at home in the Poison Squad’s parlor. He slept at the boardinghouse in the evenings, but during the days he prowled around town, looking for a clue as to what happened to Marianne.

He doubted she’d gone to her brother. Marianne resented Andrew ever since he shot Bandit, and it only took Luke a few minutes to confirm she wasn’t there. He asked Princeton to place a telephone call to Andrew’s house, and the servant who answered the phone claimed Marianne wasn’t staying there. The same thing happened when Princeton called her parents’ house in Baltimore.

Late one night, Luke lounged in the window seat where he and Marianne spent that miserable night together when he was so sick. He gazed at the postcard she’d sent him of San Francisco during the few months when they’d been separated. She’d written only three words on the back of the card: The Promised Land.

Was she waiting for him in San Francisco? It was where they’d dreamed they might someday escape to live in a garret apartment and listen to the foghorns in the morning. San Francisco was a dream, a golden mirage, but he didn’t think she would go there without him. Marianne had felt like a redheaded stepchild all her life. If her parents ordered her out of the family home, he had a hunch she would go in search of her long-lost Aunt Stella, a woman who shared Marianne’s rebellious streak. If he could find Aunt Stella, he suspected Marianne would be nearby.

Finding Stella would be a challenging task, which was why Luke turned to Nathaniel for help. Instead of offering useful advice, his new brother-in-law was appalled.

“Are you insane?” Nathaniel asked, halfway rising from the desk chair in his cramped Treasury office. “You don’t know Stella’s last name, or her age, or even what state she lives in. You don’t even know if she’s alive, and yet you want me to find her?”

Luke didn’t let Nathaniel’s ire fluster him. “Caroline said you were a good detective.”

“I am, but I’m not a magician. Why don’t you go apologize to Clyde Magruder and try to patch things up? Maybe he’ll relent.”

Nathaniel was intelligent, but he was also a newcomer to the family, or he’d understand how ridiculous that suggestion sounded. Luke cut straight to the chase. “There has to be a record of this woman somewhere. Marriage certificates? School records? What about the census? Could we find her through the census?”

Nathaniel leaned back in his swivel chair and looked at him as though he were a simpleton. “You could try all those places and probably come up empty, or you can choose the path of least resistance.”

Luke sat up straight. “And that is?”

“Servants know everything,” Nathaniel said simply. “Start there.”

Luke was embarrassed not to have thought of it himself. Some of the servants in Clyde’s Baltimore mansion had been employed by the Magruder family for decades. The house would be empty, since Clyde, his wife, and his father were all currently in Washington.

The next morning Luke set off for Baltimore, and by lunchtime he was walking up the front path to the Magruders’ imposing three-story mansion set far back from the street. He straightened his tie, adjusted his collar, and knocked on the front door. Clyde would like nothing better than to make good on his threat to throw Luke into jail for eternity if he violated so much as a blade of grass, but timidity would get him nowhere.

“My name is Luke Delacroix, reporter for Modern Century,” he introduced himself to the cheerful maid who answered the door. “I’m doing some research on Magruder family history. Might I speak with the longest-serving member of the household staff?”

It was shockingly easy to gain access to the house. Within five minutes he’d been shown into the kitchen and introduced to Mrs. Nellie Rumsfeld, the housekeeper, who was eager to discuss her thirty years of service to the Magruder family. She insisted on preparing a pot of tea for Luke and filled his ears with all manner of insight into the family before he was able to steer her in the direction of Stella Magruder.

“I always liked Miss Stella,” Nellie said as she poured Luke a third cup of tea, her palsied hands shaking and sloshing a little over the rim. “That girl was as tough as nails, but I liked her. It was a shame she had to run off to get married. Stella and her mother corresponded for years behind old Jedidiah’s back. The man she married was a carpenter and a minister. Stella said he was like Johnny Appleseed, except instead of planting trees, he planted churches. Whenever a letter came from her, Mrs. Magruder told me to hide it from Jedidiah and put it straight into her hands.”

“And where were those letters from?” he asked, holding his breath and praying the housekeeper had a good memory.

She did. Luke straightened his spine, excitement beginning to surge as he pocketed the last-known location of Stella and Joseph Greenleaf.

He was on his way to Amarillo, Texas.