afford to wait another twenty minutes for the next streetcar. She gathered up her camera case and tripod, ready to board.
The streetcar door opened, and Luke was standing in the entrance. “Hello, Marianne.”
She smiled in relief, kicking herself for doubting him. “Good afternoon, Luke,” she said as she boarded.
She liked saying his name. She liked the gentlemanly way he carried her tripod and found them both a seat near the rear of the streetcar. She especially liked the smile he sent her the moment they were seated. The streetcar set off toward the next stop while she gazed into his eyes. He looked vibrant and lively even though he was three days into the poison experiment.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
He didn’t need any clarification as to what she was driving at. “Okay,” he said without much conviction. “I still don’t know if I’m in the control group or not.”
“Good,” she said, because it seemed the polite thing to say. Both groups would surely be fine, but she didn’t want to argue about chemical preservatives. “Thank you for taking time away from your work to accompany me today.”
“The good thing about my job is that I get to set my own hours,” he said, and she realized she had no idea what he did for a living. “I’m a journalist,” he explained in response to her question. “I’m in the process of creating a Washington bureau for Modern Century magazine.”
She wrinkled her nose. “My father hates that magazine.” She immediately bit her tongue, regretting bringing Clyde into the conversation, but Luke merely laughed.
“That does not surprise me,” he said good-naturedly.
“What kind of magazine is it? Modern Century is forbidden reading in our house.”
He described the magazine, and she could understand why her father disapproved. It sounded like the kind of rabble-rousing Clyde hated, but she liked the way Luke spoke about Cornelius Newman, the magazine’s editor. It almost sounded like he had a hero-worship for the elderly man who had been tackling unpopular causes for decades.
“Cornelius and I both think we need someone in Washington to keep an eye on legislation. That’s why I’m opening a Washington bureau.” Luke paused, then turned a hesitant glance to her. “Maybe you could take some photographs of the office. We could publish them in the magazine to announce the new bureau.”
She shouldn’t. Only thirty minutes ago she had vowed that today would be their last meeting, and already she was losing her resolve.
“My father would be annoyed if he found out,” she said. “There isn’t a lot of forgiveness in the Magruder household. When we were growing up, if my brother or I ran amok, my mother warned us about what happened to poor Aunt Stella.”
“And what happened to poor Aunt Stella?”
“She fell in love with the wrong sort of man. It happened before I was born, so I never met her, but she was my father’s sister. After she eloped, her name was stricken from the family Bible and she was disinherited.”
She told Luke what little she knew from family lore, which claimed Stella moved out west with her unsuitable husband. However, Stella’s mother had kept up a secret correspondence with her banished daughter. Marianne only learned of it when she was visiting her grandparents for a week and saw a letter from Stella arrive before her grandmother panicked and hid it away. It had been an ordinary envelope, but it was addressed with purple ink. That purple ink made Marianne’s secret admiration for her daring aunt shoot even higher.
“After my grandmother died, no one kept in touch with Stella. I always wondered what happened to her. I know I shouldn’t, but a part of me admires her. Leaving everything behind couldn’t have been easy, but she was brave. A risk-taker.”
The streetcar rounded the bend into a blighted neighborhood and finally to the grounds of the District of Columbia Jail, built in 1872 and suffering from a bad reputation ever since.
A large, bleak building of red brick sat isolated in a muddy field. During epidemics the field was filled with temporary wooden shanties to house the sick who were too destitute to afford a hospital, but for now it was empty. The entire area seemed like a vast wasteland of despair.
“Here we are,” she said in an artificially bright voice.
“So we are,” Luke said, holding her hand to help her descend from the streetcar. He carried the tripod as they walked through the slushy field still covered with patches of melting snow.