The Hellfire Club(6)
He leaned over as if confiding some great wisdom. “Watch out for the poker faces in this town,” Kefauver whispered.
Margaret intertwined her fingers with Charlie’s as the lights went out and the opening number of the musical began.
Charlie hated it.
Chapter Three
Friday, January 15, 1954—Morning
Georgetown, Washington, DC
Margaret paused to roll her eyes and suppress a smile while her husband, on his knees, gently kissed her stomach. She was standing at the bathroom mirror in her camisole, carefully applying her eyeliner, just recovered from another bout of morning sickness. So she wasn’t strictly in the mood to be touched, but she also didn’t want to push Charlie away.
“Bye-bye, little Alger,” Charlie sang to the baby in her womb. He made it a daily habit to come up with the worst possible names to bestow upon their impending arrival. “Good-bye, sweet little Hirohito Marder.”
Margaret laughed, then spat into the sink, wiped her mouth, and reached for her favorite pair of khakis. “I can’t believe these pants still fit,” she said, stepping into them. “I feel so bloated, like the boa digesting the elephant in The Little Prince.”
“And yet you still look très belle,” Charlie said in the grunty French accent he and his troops would use mockingly to lighten the mood. He eyed her valise while he knotted his tie. “Excited about the trip?” he asked, trying his best to hide his concern and, yes, disapproval of Margaret’s participation in the zoological study of the mysterious ponies out on Nanticoke and Susquehannock Islands in Maryland. Prior to their move to Washington, DC, she had discussed writing a book about the ponies for a university publishing house, but the editors there—in addition to being dismissive of a woman zoologist—felt the book would need firsthand accounts from a full team in the field. Margaret had planned to spend her first year in Washington, DC, trying to secure funding and partnerships for such an excursion. Then, almost like magic, an older zoologist she knew—one who shared her minor obsession with the ponies—had called her in December and offered her a job as a researcher on his own trip to the very same islands. She could join his study and they could co-author a paper.
Charlie had supported her desire to keep working in her field. In theory. In fact, the opportunity for her to join the Maryland study was partly how he’d convinced her to abandon their lives in New York City and move to the nation’s capital for his new job. But ever since the baby news the week before, he’d deeply regretted their agreement. He kept imagining Margaret in a field getting kicked in the abdomen by a wild pony.
“So someone from the research team is picking you up?” he asked. “How long is the drive?”
“Two and a half hours, I think,” she said. “Wait, let me show you.”
She retrieved a map from her purse and showed him the route they’d be taking. They would drive from the city through rural Maryland and to the tip of an isthmus, then proceed by boat to the far island, Nanticoke. He followed her finger absently, picturing her out there in the middle of nowhere surrounded by wild animals and sleeping on the ground in a tent. He fretted but out loud said only, “Just don’t work too hard.”
Margaret chuckled to herself; Charlie was as easy to read as the top line of an eye chart. Did he think she couldn’t take care of herself? “I’ll be back a week from tomorrow at the very latest,” she said, yielding at the sight of his worried face. “We’ll be fine, I promise.” She patted her belly and gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile.
The ponies had been a fascination of Margaret’s since she was a child, when her mother had taken her and her sister on a long camping vacation after their father had been killed in an airship disaster. A few hundred wild ponies roamed the beaches and marshes of Susquehannock Island every spring and summer, then inexplicably crossed the bay every autumn to return to Nanticoke Island a few hundred yards south. No one knew where the ponies had originally come from or why they behaved the way they did or even how they made the trek. Margaret would be part of a small group of similarly fascinated zoologists, a loosely affiliated research team headed by Dr. Louis Gwinnett, whom she had met at an annual conference; they were going to try to figure out how and why the animals made the seasonal crossings.
Charlie raised his hands in surrender. “Just find a way to call me if you can. Miss Leopold can always track me down. She’s like a bloodhound.”
Catherine Leopold, a Southern former beauty queen in her forties with a helmet of thick brown hair and penetrating pale blue eyes, served as Charlie’s office manager. He’d inherited her from his predecessor, Congressman Martin Van Waganan, and in their three weeks together, he’d come to rely on her. Her ruthless efficiency was candy-coated, charming, and deft; Charlie depended on her wholly.
Margaret buttoned her blouse. “I’m not sure how many phone booths we’ll find out there in the fields, but if I need to reach you, I promise I will. And I’ll try to find a way to call you at work on Monday. Just try to be in your office as much as possible so I don’t miss you; I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get away.”
Charlie reached his arms around her and gently pulled her close. “I’ll miss you two,” he said.
“Us too, darling,” she said. “While we’re gone, you stay focused. You enlist some fellow veterans and kill that Goodstone funding. And don’t drink too much! You were comatose last night after just a few martinis. I couldn’t wake you at all when you started your three a.m. snore-a-bration.”