At the precise moment Lance was vaguely threatening Margaret, the rain, brutal and unrelenting, was beating down onto the tarp of Margaret’s tent, and she was wondering how long the canvas would be able to withstand the assault. When she’d driven to the tip of the Maryland isthmus, parked, and then crossed the bridge to Susquehannock Island by foot, she’d wondered if the weather would render the trip pointless. But she had no way of reaching Gwinnett, and she didn’t want to disappoint him yet again; almost five months into her pregnancy, this would be her last outing.
Margaret had jogged across the bridge as quickly as she could with her slightly protruding abdomen, which meant she was soaking wet before she reached the halfway point, raincoat notwithstanding. She had guessed that by now Gwinett, Kessler, and Cornelius would have moved to this new island, and she was right. They’d even moved her tent here.
She felt thoroughly alone, unconnected to the researchers in the other three tents who didn’t know yet that she had rejoined them, hundreds of miles away from her husband, with no way to reach him, isolated from the world. She could vanish right now, on this spot, and no one would realize it for hours, if not days. A few months ago she might have reveled in that independence, but now, newly aware of menacing forces, she felt vulnerable. Her internal voice told her not to be so melodramatic, but then she reminded herself that these men in the Hellfire Club had tried to frame Charlie by killing a young woman and were, at the very least, indifferent to the poisoning of Americans in the name of some greater struggle against the Communists. They might even have killed Congressman Van Waganan, for all she knew.
She felt like Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible, which Charlie had taken her to see shortly after it opened on Broadway. It was as if the whole world had gone mad. People who were normal, even friends, could be revealed as enemies, even evil. What was that line she had so liked from the play? Remember, until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.
She looked at her few belongings in the tent, transported over and tossed inside: a small suitcase, a sleeping bag, a journal, her night-vision binoculars. She was surprised to see the specialty binoculars in her tent, and she picked them up and held them. It felt like years since she’d left the Birder Emporium with them. Before this knowledge of everything Charlie was caught up in; a lifetime ago. Under the hiss of rain hitting the pines and the deeper-pitched sizzle of the spray pounding the ground, a faint murmur of conversation made its way to her ears. One of the voices—Gwinnett’s—was considerably louder than the others. She tried to focus, ignore the other noises, so she could make out what was being said, but to no avail.
Without knowing exactly why she was being secretive, she walked stealthily, heel to toe, toward the sounds coming from Gwinnett’s tent. The soil, a combination of hard-packed sand and dirt, had largely absorbed the water for hours, but saturation was now setting in, and small streams began swirling and trickling throughout the campsite. Twice a sustained gust of wind was strong enough to require Margaret to push her body against it to proceed on her path.
“No sign of her yet,” she heard Gwinnett say. “We’re frankly not sure if she’s coming back. Maybe not with this weather.”
She heard a gravelly but fainter voice now, sounding as if it was coming over a telephone—the shortwave radio Margaret had heard Gwinnett mention he had in case of emergency. “That’s fine, just know that the mission has now changed. Get us that dossier.”
“Understood. And where is he?”
“Last seen in Manhattan.”
“What about her?”
“We were tailing him, not her, so we lost visibility after she dropped him at the train station.”
The sharp crack of a bolt of lightning hitting somewhere on the island startled Margaret, though she was careful not to make a sound. Thunder growled deeply.
“I can’t even believe I can hear you with this storm,” Gwinnett marveled. “Weather must be helping.”
“Just get the girl…folder,” Margaret made out. The transmitter crackled with static and the next words she could make out were “now top priority.”
“Of course,” Gwinnett said. The noise of the transmitter ended abruptly. Margaret strained to hear Gwinnett’s lowered voice. “Go to the bridge and keep an eye out for her.”
“Got it,” said Cornelius.
At the realization that Cornelius, too, was in the tent and any second would be coming to find her, Margaret turned and fled.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Wednesday, April 21, 1954—Evening
Susquehannock Island, Maryland
Margaret had trusted that Cornelius would follow orders and head right for the bridge, so she ran in the opposite direction. She knew it was a short-term solution; Cornelius would get to the bridge, cross it, and see her car parked nearby. As she’d anticipated, within three minutes of his leaving the tent, Cornelius returned from the bridge to the mainland and briskly walked right to Gwinnett and someone else—was it Kessler beneath that raincoat?—presumably to tell them that she might be on the island. The three began looking around; she guessed they were searching for her.
That was four hours ago.
Margaret lay on her side in a field of brush, sopping wet, watching the campsite, waiting for an idea or an opportunity. Gwinnett had returned to the campsite and now stood there with binoculars searching for Margaret in the distance. She heard him instruct Cornelius and Kessler to run in opposite directions around the island, which they did, though so loudly that it wasn’t difficult for Margaret to avoid them both. She was grateful the other two researchers, Quadrani and Hinman, were no longer there.
At first Gwinnett and his assistants attempted to appeal to her as if nothing was wrong.
“Margaret, where are you?” they shouted, as if she’d gotten lost.
As hours passed, however, and their frustration grew and the raging winds turned raindrops into pinpricks, they abandoned the pretense.
“Margaret, come out!” Cornelius yelled. “There’s nowhere for you to go! Kessler is at your car!”
And then: “You’re going to die in this storm, Margaret! What worse could we do to you?”
She had slowly and silently negotiated the marsh and the wetlands. Fierce winds pushed ashen, billowing thunderclouds across the sky without a break in sight. Night was coming, which complicated matters for both hunter and prey—they would not be able to see her, and she would not be able to see much beyond the lights of their camp.
Every inch of her was wet, and she was knee-deep in the bog. She had never been so cold; her jaw started to tremble, her teeth hitting each other. But it was too risky to move. Thank God she had been absentmindedly holding her night-vision binoculars when she walked to Gwinnett’s tent, she thought. They might save her life.
Charlie and Street just made the train—the five-fifteen Evening Congressional from New York to DC—climbing aboard as it was starting to chug out of the station. Traffic had been especially bad in the rain, the line for tickets was long, and the salesclerk expressed skepticism that they’d make it. But they ran to and then alongside the slow-moving train until they found an open door and jumped on. Sweating, panting, they slowed their pace and found seats in the club car. After a waitress took their drink orders, Charlie finally asked the question.
“So those were photographs of me? Of that night?”
“Correct,” said Street.
“What did they show?”
“Lance driving you to Rock Creek. Some other guy had already purposely crashed the car and placed the dead body by the side. He and Lance carried you to the spot and left. You woke up and LaMontagne showed up—he was cued to do so, I’m sure. The photos make it clear you weren’t driving the car. That it was a setup.”
The waitress returned with their drinks, and Street bought a pack of cigarettes. Charlie stared out the window at industrial sites and trash-filled vacant lots, trying to take in all that he’d just learned.
Street lit a cigarette and exhaled loudly. New Jersey swampland rushed past the window, and Charlie could see his reflection; he felt as if he’d aged ten years in the past week, and he looked it too.