Oh Christ, what have I done?
He sat frozen for one minute, then five. The phone rang again and he ignored all eight rings. Finally, as if on autopilot, he stood unsteadily and began to fumble his way to the bathroom. He tripped over the box containing the baby monitor, the gift from LaMontagne a lifetime ago. Charlie shaved and brushed his teeth. In a fog of sleep deprivation, booze, and trauma, he stepped into the steam of the shower.
The memories of the night before came back to him in glimpses, puzzle pieces he was in no condition to assemble. He didn’t remember leaving the Mayflower; all was black until he awoke facedown in the muck of Rock Creek. LaMontagne had arrived and attempted to whisk him away until he’d found the dead girl. Charlie had scurried to her side to try and find any signs of life. LaMontagne had then barked at him to help him carry her to the crashed Studebaker.
“No,” Charlie said.
“What?”
“I said no. I’m not going to carry her to the car.”
LaMontagne had bent down and grabbed Charlie by the shoulders. “Listen to me, you little shit. If you don’t do exactly as I say, your child will never see you anywhere other than inside a cell. Margaret will leave you and marry another man. You are throwing everything away for what? For fucking what?”
“It’s wrong,” Charlie had said.
Off in the distance they could hear another car. LaMontagne let go of Charlie, bent down, scooped up the young woman, and carried her to the Studebaker on his own. He wedged her into the driver’s seat.
“Come over here and help me set the Studebaker on fire, Charlie.”
“No,” Charlie said.
“Help me set the fucking Studebaker on fire!”
“Go to hell, Davis.”
“You fucking idiot,” LaMontagne said. He unscrewed the gas cap, took some papers from his pocket, and ignited the ends with a lighter. Then he delicately inserted the roll into the gas-tank opening and ran up the bank to Charlie on the road. “Get in the car!” he ordered, and this time Charlie obeyed. LaMontagne turned the key of his Dodge Firearrow and floored the pedal and they sped off.
Charlie replayed this as he stood in the shower, groaning and rubbing his face. He slowly toweled himself off and dressed, every movement requiring extra effort. Adjusting his thin blue Brooks Brothers tie, Charlie made his way downstairs, preparing an answer for the questions Margaret would surely have about his late night.
The kitchen was empty.
“Margaret?” No response. He moved through the house, looping in his cuff links, and peered into the living room—also empty. Had she had something to do this morning that she’d told him about and he’d forgotten? He looked on the kitchen table for a note and found none. The seed of a new anxiety began to take root in his stomach.
Looking outside, wondering where his wife was, he saw dark clouds gathering, and as he made a mental note to bring an umbrella, he realized he wasn’t sure where his car was. The last place he remembered seeing it was with the valet at the Mayflower Hotel. One more loose end, but a trifle, comparatively.
Charlie called for a taxi, then sat down heavily at the kitchen table, head in hands. Outside, a growl of thunder sounded ominously close. Inside, the house felt unnaturally quiet without Margaret there. He still could not believe his memories of the night before.
Initially, he thought the flashes of heat he felt had something to do with the approaching thunderstorm. Beads of sweat began collecting on Charlie’s forehead, the nape of his neck, the small of his back. He shivered, then stood and raced to the sink, where his abdominal muscles and diaphragm contracted, emptying everything out of his stomach, splashing the coffee cup Margaret had used at breakfast. Hyperventilating, he steeled himself for a second spasm and retched again. He fell to his knees, continuing to hold the rim of the sink. He hung there for a minute, two minutes, three minutes, as he slowed his breathing.
Okay. Focus.
He stared at the yellow linoleum and tried to steady himself.
Sheets of rain began hitting the street outside, sounding like an enthusiastic round of applause. Individual drops plinked hard on the windowpanes like snipers’ bullets.
Charlie stood up slowly and reached for the kitchen telephone on the wall. He asked the operator to connect him to Winston Marder on Seventy-Second Street in Manhattan and gave her the number.
“Connecting.”
A minute or so later, Charlie heard Winston’s booming baritone, loud enough to make him wince a bit and pull the receiver away from his ear.
“Charles, how are you, my son?”
“Not…not well, Dad.”
“Is Margaret all right? The baby?”
“They’re both fine. It’s not that.”
“What is it?”
“Are you alone?” Charlie asked.
“I am—as far as I know,” Winston said drily. “One can never be certain.”
Charlie was tempted to tell his father this was no time for philosophical cutesiness but he stopped when he recalled that in a recent letter, his father had speculated that J. Edgar Hoover was tapping phones all over Manhattan and Washington without bothering with the nuisance of lawfully obtained warrants.
“I was just reading a fascinating story about J. Edgar Hoover and the magnificent job the FBI is doing these days to root out the Communist menace,” his father said, confirming Charlie’s suspicions. “I would love to talk to you about it, and your mother would love to see you and Margaret this weekend. And if not this weekend, then sometime soon. Congress is breaking for recess next week, isn’t it?”
“I’ll talk about it with her,” Charlie said. “It would be great to see you and catch up.”
“That sounds like a plan,” Winston replied.
Charlie hung up. With his father wary of speaking on the phone and Margaret AWOL, he had no one to talk to, no way to unburden himself. Not that he was sure he’d be able to divulge every detail about the previous night to his wife or father either.
Washing his face at the kitchen sink, he heard the honk of a car horn. The cab. He ran through the rain and had the driver take him to the Mayflower.
After Margaret left her town house that morning, she visited the Birder Emporium, a shop tucked into Waters Alley off the very busy Wisconsin Avenue. A large tabby cat curled up near a heating vent meowed, then returned to its nap. The store sold anything a bird-watcher would ever need: bookshelves of field guides organized by state, country, and continent; warm clothing and hiking shoes; insect repellent, chairs, blankets, thermoses, pocketknives, camping equipment, backpacks, and lanterns. The walls were lined with photographs of a couple on various excursions through the decades, interspersed with posters of John James Audubon’s paintings of rare birds: Attwater’s greater prairie chicken, Kirtland’s warbler, the San Clemente loggerhead shrike.