The Hellfire Club(75)

Margaret recognized Polly from her last visit to the island in January, when she’d borrowed the motel phone, but the woman gave no sign of remembering her. She informed Charlie that they had plenty of rooms and offered them what she referred to without a trace of sarcasm as the honeymoon suite at no extra charge if they indeed would be staying only one night. He looked at Margaret, who squeezed his hand. With his briefcase and her leather satchel between them, they walked to room 20 and Charlie locked the door behind them. The clock by their bedside said 1:05.

“Well,” said Margaret, sitting on the bed and exhaling loudly, “that was something.”

Charlie pulled up a chair and tried to think of what to say.

“I’ve really missed you,” he finally blurted out.

“I’m right here.”

“Are you?”

She sniffed, still cold from the ocean, and reached for a tissue. “Yes,” she said.

“We haven’t talked in forever.”

Margaret pulled an elastic band from around her wrist and put her blond hair up in a ponytail. “Truth Train?”

Charlie smiled. His parents’ wedding present to them had been a round-trip train ride on “the most famous train in the world,” the 20th Century Limited, from New York’s Grand Central Terminal to Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station, a trip they took in the summer of 1947. It was not the easiest time in their marriage, as Charlie was struggling with war memories and what seemed to him a shallow and silly civilian world. After a couple of cocktails one evening, Margaret came up with the idea that while they were on the train, they could speak only the 100 percent truth to each other. The result was shockingly effective—the truths one revealed and explored were usually about one’s own bad behavior—and for the next year or so they would use the term Truth Train to temporarily reinstate those rules. It had been at least five years since either had invoked it.

“Truth Train,” Charlie agreed.

“We haven’t talked in forever because I’ve made it clear I didn’t like what you had to say.”

Charlie grimaced; she was so much better at Truth Train than he was.

“I know,” he acknowledged.

She sat waiting for him to offer a contribution.

Finally he told her: “I’ve been doing the best I can. This hasn’t been easy. You and the baby. Everything is so new, and Washington is such a messed-up place.” He heard weakness in his voice and cursed himself for it; he wanted to be honest, but he didn’t want her to think he couldn’t handle the pressures of their new life.

Margaret’s face was stony, unreadable. She leaned back on the bed. “I’m assuming there’s much more going on here than those insipid comic-book hearings. And part of me doesn’t want to know more. But that’s selfish.” Her face softened. “I think I’ve been afraid to find out more.”

“You don’t want to hear that I’m not the man you thought you’d married.” Charlie took her hands in his. “I didn’t think you did.” He looked down at the floor and shook his head. It was hard to meet her gaze knowing everything he had to tell her.

Margaret squeezed his hands sympathetically. “You sound just a bit self-pitying there, honey.”

He winced, then smiled. “I forgot how turbulent the Truth Train can be.”

“I want to help. But I have to know what’s going on.”

“That’s why I came here. I can get through this, but not…not without you.”

He was surprised to see her eyes glistening with tears. She patted the bed next to her. He obligingly crawled onto it and sank against the pillows. Margaret propped herself up on an elbow and turned to him, all trace of emotion replaced by her usual inquisitive and methodical manner. “All right, darling. I want to hear everything.”

So he told her.

Hands clasped behind his head, Charlie found it easier to look at the motel ceiling than at Margaret as he unburdened himself. He began at the beginning: Why he had the congressional seat. Congressman Van Waganan’s death might not have been as neat and tidy as it seemed. At least, not according to Congressman Christian MacLachlan, who was now also dead, shot by Puerto Rican terrorists.

“What was Mac suggesting happened to Van Waganan?” she asked.

“Nothing specific. Just vague allusions to how nothing was what it seemed, how Van Waganan had kept up the fight against companies cutting corners.”

“I thought Van Waganan committed suicide.”

“Me too, but Street says he was found in a hotel with a prostitute. They were both dead.”

Margaret’s face settled into an expression of confused disbelief as Charlie told her about the odd note he found in the desk that was once Van Waganan’s: U Chicago, 2,4-D 2,4,5-T cereal grains broadleaf crops.

“You remember my perky intern, Sheryl Ann Bernstein, she came to the house that time?” Margaret nodded with a slight roll of her eyes. “Her brother’s at Northwestern so she asked him to go see what that meant, but he hit a dead end. A woman at the University of Chicago said the study was subject to wartime secrecy laws.”

“War’s been over for a decade,” Margaret observed.

“Yes, so I’ve read,” Charlie said. “Strongfellow’s on House Armed Services so he explored it at the Pentagon but also didn’t get anywhere.”