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 shecould. 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 forModern Centuryall 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.
Twenty-Nine
Luke listened in amazement as Gray recounted what had been going on in the outside world over the past week. Gray and Mr. Alphonse told him the good news as they sat in the tiny meeting room.
“The Poison Squad are the most popular men in town,” Gray said. “They’re giving daily interviews to the newspapers, and Dr. Wiley isn’t reining them in anymore. There’s an annoying Italian who is always touting the extent of his suffering and hamming it up for the press. He announced he would be signing autographs at the base of the Washington Monument tonight.”
Luke grinned. “Nicolo will do anything for attention, especially if it involves attention from the ladies. Keep talking.”
