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.”
She wrinkled her brow. “This is all just so bizarre.”
“It gets stranger. Because now Mac is dead,” Charlie said, “and on his deathbed, the last thing he said to me was ‘under Jennifer.’”
She scrunched up her face in confusion, and Charlie nodded. “We had no idea who Jennifer was, but then Sheryl Ann came up with a smart theory.” He started telling her about Maryland delegate Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, but Margaret held up her hand to stop him.
“I need to write all this down,” she said. She opened the drawer of the nightstand and withdrew a pad of paper and a sharpened pencil. Mac, she wrote at the top of the pad, followed by other reminders of related threads. This was how they had worked together while he was writing Sons of Liberty; he would research and share his discoveries, and then she would take notes and categorize every item until they could come up with coherent narratives.
“Congressman Street and this girl, Sheryl Ann—how much do they know about your predicament?” Margaret asked.
“Sheryl Ann knows a little, about the broadleaf-crops note and about Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, obviously,” Charlie said. “Isaiah knows everything.”
“Okay, what else?” she asked. “What ever happened with your main mission? To stop funding for Goodstone?”
Charlie shook his head. “I thought I’d achieved it. Carlin told me it was out of the bill, we voted, everyone was patting me on the back—”
“Did you read the bill?” she interrupted.
“I did,” he said. “There were no references to Goodstone. That section had been deleted. But then…well, Conrad Hilton was throwing a party—a celebration of the migrant bill passing. So we were all at the penthouse of the Mayflower and Carlin was there. The night got away from me a bit. Strongfellow and Bob Kennedy were there. Roy Cohn too. We got into it about Ike and patriotism, and I got hit with the Cohn crazy spray. But more to the point, eventually I ended up drinking absinthe with Carlin, Strongfellow, and some others. LaMontagne.”
“Oh…” Margaret tapped the pencil against her cheek thoughtfully. “This must have been the morning you came home reeking like a distillery rag.”
“Correct.”
“Boy, I hated you that morning.”
Charlie remained silent, knowing she had every right to resent him. And he hadn’t even gotten to the worst of it yet: the car accident. He told her about Carlin cackling when he said, “I screwed you on Goodstone,” and, to be fair, because he was nothing if not diligently so, about Carlin’s argument that businesses such as Goodstone and General Kinetics needed to thrive as much for national security as for national economic advancement.
“It’s so odd that he told you about it,” Margaret said. “Why not just do it and go on about his life?”
“Clearly he doesn’t like me,” said Charlie, who had given the matter some serious thought. “He didn’t appreciate my original protest of the funding. And, look, he’s a hardscrabble, pull-himself-up-by-his-own-bootstraps kind of guy from Snake Skull, Oklahoma, and to him I must seem like an entitled establishment New Yorker who breezed into Congress without any right to be there.”