“It’s a controlled experiment with a dozen men living in a boardinghouse, eating food heavily laced with chemicals, and having their health monitored. You couldn’t pay me enough to be a part of it, but it looks like the folks over at Ag found a dozen fellows willing to do it. They need to be photographed this morning because they start eating the poisoned stuff at lunch.”
She pocketed the list. It seemed like a fool’s errand, but she would do it.
Marianne arrived at the boardinghouse on Grove Street promptly at eleven o’clock, which would give her plenty of time to take photographs of the men participating in the research study before they were served lunch. She’d been told to take individual portraits of each man staring straight at the camera. This sort of documentation was important for the scientific aspects of the study, but she’d also take some group poses of the men who had volunteered to be human test subjects.
She knocked on the door of the boardinghouse, but no one answered, and she doubted anyone heard. It sounded like quitea rumpus was going on inside. There was stomping feet, banging, and shouting. She knocked a second time and waited, but it was obvious she couldn’t be heard over the commotion. When no one answered, she gave up and stepped inside.
Then ducked to avoid the tennis ball flying straight at her.
A man with a racket threw himself after the ball, bumping into her but managing to return the ball into a room on the other side of the entryway. Good heavens! She clutched the satchel containing her camera against her chest, aghast at the tumult. It looked like there were three simultaneous games of tennis happening, as the entire ground floor swarmed with men, all armed with rackets and batting tennis balls between the parlor on her left and the dining room on the other side. A curly-headed man stood on the second-floor balcony, volleying a ball with the man in the entryway who had just slammed into her.
These weren’t men, they were a pack of animals! She gaped at the free-for-all as men scrambled after the balls flying every direction, smacking into walls and furniture. One man ran straight toward a sofa, then launched into the air in an amazing leap to vault right over it. She darted a few steps up the staircase, possibly the only place where she could avoid the men’s bodies hurtling through space.
A loud whistle split the air, and the men began to settle down, but a few stray tennis balls continued to bounce.
“Pardon us, ma’am,” a tall blond man said, still panting. “You must be the photographer?”
“I am.”
“You’ll want to get a picture of me first, because I’m much better looking than my brother.”
“Yeah, but I’m the better tennis player,” the man beside him challenged.
A tennis ball came flying out of nowhere and smacked the self-proclaimed better-looking brother on the back of the shoulder.He chased after it and hurled it back, almost clipping her with it.
There were a few ways she could handle this. She could simply leave. She could scold them all and warn them to behave. Or she could go along with them and get some truly amazing photographs. They were rumpled, laughing, and out of breath. The choice was obvious.
“Line up exactly as you are,” she said. “Keep your rackets. No, no—don’t straighten your hair. Don’t tuck in your shirts. I want to catch you exactly as you are. Disheveled and irreverent.”And dazzling, she silently added.
She pointed to where she wanted them to stand so the backlighting from the window wouldn’t interfere with the photograph. “Taller men in the back, shorter men on one knee in the front.”
It was the wrong thing to say, as a couple of men started arguing over who was taller, but they did as she asked, nudging and bickering as they sorted themselves into two rows. They were a handsome lot, all of them vibrant and lively as they joked. She scanned the group, mentally forming the composition, but one man stood a little off to the side, watching her.
Luke!
A smile broke across her face at the sight of him, for he was beaming at her in a wonderfully irreverent way that lit his whole face.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I’m on the Poison Squad.”
Poison Squad? It seemed a suitable nickname, but this was quite possibly the last place she ever expected to see a Delacroix. They seemed so wealthy and refined, not the sort to delve into an experiment like this. And yet here he was, his darkly handsome face flushed with excitement as he watched her.
“Go ahead and hunker down in front of Mr. Princeton,” she said.
“How did you know I went to Princeton?” a gangly man with a trim mustache asked.
“Who else would wear a black jacket with orange piping?” she asked.
Her guess caused another round of ribbing. She handed Princeton a tennis racket, then tossed a ball to Luke. He snatched it out of the air with one hand and flashed a wink at her. She wished that wink didn’t send a thrill through her, but oh, he was handsome. He radiated charisma, even amidst this loud, boisterous crew.
She moved quickly to prepare her camera, desperate to capture this image before the men settled down. Already a few were straightening their collars, and she didn’t want that. She grabbed another tennis ball and tossed it toward the center of the group.
“Catch!” she said, and it injected an immediate spark of energy back into the men. She held the camera against her waist, cranked the roll of new film into place, and looked down through the viewfinder. “Don’t move or say anything, but I want each of you to think about which of you is the best tennis player in the group.”
The challenge worked like a charm, inserting a jolt of competitive spirit even as they held still, and she got two good photographs. Then she had the rows trade places, moved the tennis rackets among the men, and took four more.
These would surely be her best pictures of the day, but she needed to take the boring individual pictures that would be used to document each man’s appearance before they began eating tainted food.
