“Carlin and I normally go for the Bohemian way of preparing it,” said LaMontagne.
Carlin reached into Suzannah’s pouch, snatched a sugar cube, and popped it in his mouth.
“The cubes are soaked in alcohol for Bohemian, then set on fire. It’s stronger that way.”
“But you don’t need it stronger for this first venture,” said LaMontagne.
Charlie raised his glass to them, wondering why he was toasting the man who had betrayed him. “May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead,” he said.
It was all stumbles and swirls after that.
Singing and dancing. Something about abbots and friars, about the men in the stained glass being apostles.
Slices of succulent pork slid onto plates.
Much wine.
More singing.
More young women. Inebriated, willing.
A moment to himself. Thoughts about MacLachlan. Guilt about MacLachlan. Confusion about “under Jennifer.”
Then someone shook him out of it. Back to the revelry. You’re the top / You’re the breasts on Venus / You’re the top / You’re King Kong’s penis.
Dulles and Dulles and Sam the Banana Man and Cohn and Strongfellow and LaMontagne, and that redheaded waitress, Suzannah, on his lap, and…a whirlpool of images, blurry, hard to understand, as if he were underwater.
Stumbling onto the street.
Falling.
Laughing.
Getting up.
Then blackness.
Charlie awoke hours later, his head pounding, his face in the mud. Next to him lay a shiny black 1953 Studebaker Commander Starliner partly submerged in Rock Creek.
Chapter Fifteen
Friday, March 5, 1954
Georgetown, Washington, DC
Margaret slept restlessly that night, tossing fitfully until the sound of a car door slamming brought her fully awake. She turned on the lamp on her night table, reached for the clock by her bed, and drew it to her heavy-lidded eyes: 5:33 a.m.
In a state of sorrow, she’d gone to bed as soon as Charlie left last night. She couldn’t imagine what the night was like for Henrietta MacLachlan and her four children, the oldest only fourteen years old. And she was sorely disappointed in Charlie; how could he just head back into the night on the heels of such awful news? She realized that things got done in DC only because of who you knew and whose back you scratched, and she’d tried to be understanding about Charlie’s frequent nights out, but if this was going to be their new way of life, she wasn’t sure how long she would last. These troubled thoughts kept deep sleep at bay, and she had hovered unsatisfyingly between awareness and oblivion. It had been almost worse than if she had stayed up all night.
Echoes of the turning tumblers of the lock on the front door bounced up two flights of stairs to the bedroom, the deliberate movements of someone trying to be quiet and the sudden sharp sounds of that same someone having difficulty doing it.
She heard the creaks from the floorboards as Charlie crept carefully upstairs and then slowly opened the door to their bedroom. Margaret lay on her side, facing the door, her eyes narrow slits. In his left hand, Charlie held his shoes, and Margaret felt a surge of exasperation at his faux consideration at five thirty in the morning.
He tiptoed into their bathroom and reemerged in pajamas, then eased himself into bed as quickly as he could. One didn’t need Charlie’s superhuman sense of smell to detect the excess alcohol oozing from every pore, a sudden punch of stink that was not unlike approaching the Socony-Mobil oil refinery on the brand-new New Jersey Turnpike.
He sighed dramatically, an expression of weariness or worry, Margaret couldn’t tell. Then he cleared his throat, seemingly testing to see if she was awake. She stayed still.
“Margaret?” he whispered.
She didn’t know how to react. She was angry and he reeked and she didn’t want to deal with him and whatever piffle was troubling him. She lay there silently, wondering what was happening to him and to them.
Beyond how let down she felt about Charlie’s behavior last night and the mess he was this morning, Margaret had something to tell him, and she knew it wasn’t going to help matters. For whatever reason, perhaps the folly of holding on to a shred of power by maintaining control of this information, she had decided not to tell him the night before. Louis Gwinnett had telephoned the previous afternoon, before Charlie came home from work. He and his team were out at Nanticoke and Susquehannock Islands again, and a researcher had dropped out at the last minute because of a death in the family.
“We really could use you. If you’re willing,” he had said.
Margaret hadn’t responded.
“Think of the ponies, Margaret. This is the time when they swim from Nanticoke to Susquehannock. Now. Any minute now!”
“It’s tempting.”
“You are actually going to make me beg,” Gwinnett said, and Margaret could practically hear his smile.
She was surprised that her heart had begun beating a little faster at the sound of his voice. They had not spoken in two months, since January. He had written her a glowing letter about her work on the previous expedition—one that walked right up to the line of inappropriate but did not cross it. They had communicated in letters about how to write up the research from their days in the field, but she kept everything professional.
But all the while she and Charlie were drifting, with forces pushing Charlie out to sea while she remained alone on the beach, each watching the other recede into the distance and neither doing much about it. And then: Dr. Louis Gwinnett had reared his head once again.
Margaret was secure enough in her emotional stability and her self-control, particularly in her current pregnant state, to trust that she would not say yes just because of her attraction to him. What pulled her most was the memory of how alive she felt in the field. It wasn’t that she was unhappy in her Georgetown home or even more generally in stuffy Washington, DC—though that surely played a part. But the sudden transition from their old life in New York to one here in which Charlie pursued a new career while she waited for their baby to arrive had made her feel as though she’d gone from being a scientist to being a laboratory.
She’d let a moment pass before she’d answered Gwinnett.
“I’d love to be there,” Margaret had finally told him. “I just need to check on a few things.”
Those few things were all contained in one drunken husband who was now lightly snoring beside her. It wasn’t a hard decision. Margaret got up and prepared to phone the research assistant who Gwinnett had said would give her a ride. As soon as the clock struck seven, she would call him and arrange to leave for the Maryland islands as soon as possible.
The phone woke Charlie at ten a.m. He was used to Margaret answering when someone called, but by the seventh ring he realized she wasn’t going to do so. His head was throbbing and the inside of his mouth tasted even worse than when he’d woken up with it full of mud just hours before. His tongue felt as if it were coated with a paste made of absinthe and bile and cheap perfume. The phone ringing exacerbated the pounding in his skull, so he mustered the strength to roll over and reach for the phone on the night table on Margaret’s side of the bed.
“Hello?” he croaked.
“Congressman, it’s Catherine Leopold. Where are you? You have a very busy day today.”
Gripping his forehead as if pressure would make the pain go away, Charlie apologized and promised he’d be in as soon as possible. He hung up and then everything from the night before hit him like a wave: MacLachlan’s death, the drunken party at the club, Rock Creek, the dead girl.
Good Lord. The dead girl.
That gorgeous young redhead. What was her name?