Andrew gave an embarrassed laugh. “Let me clarify. The committee Dad works on paid for the tests. They hired a bunch of college laboratories to buy hundreds of rabbits and run the experiments.”
“And what did the tests show?”
He shrugged. “They won’t be finished for a few months. Look, our food is perfectly safe, and you need to keep away from that Poison Squad nonsense that uses human test subjects. I’ve never seen Dad so annoyed as when he spotted that article in the newspaper.”
Andrew consulted his watch and called for Sam to return. Their train had just pulled into the station, but before boarding, Andrew turned to her.
“Don’t make Dad angry,” he said. “I may be in charge of the company, but he’s still in charge of the family. You don’t want to end up like Aunt Stella.”
Andrew snapped his fingers to summon Sam, then boarded the train without even saying good-bye.
The strangest thing happened when Luke went shopping for a new typewriter. He went to a department store to try out all three models on display. He fed a piece of paper beneath the roller of the first typewriter and twisted the knob to position it, then began banging out text until he heard the satisfying ding at the end of the line. He pushed the carriage return lever and commenced another line.
He tried all three machines. Price was no object. A typewriter was going to be the single most important tool he’d use to start changing the world. All three machines were perfectly fine, and he could buy one, walk out of the shop, and be back in business within an hour.
Except he couldn’t do it.
It was irrational to mourn a broken piece of equipment, but he did. He’d had that machine for more than a decade. He took it to college with him and wrote his first published article on it. He wrote his translation of Don Quixote on it. That old, mangled typewriter was an inanimate object beyond repair, and he shouldn’t feel disloyal for buying a replacement.
The salesman came over to check on him. “Well, sir? Will one of these suffice?”
This embarrassing surge of sentimentality for his old typewriter was ridiculous, and he needed to get over it.
But not quite yet. Gray had a typewriter he could borrow for a while.
He pulled the paper-release bar and lifted the practice page from the machine. “I’ll be back in a few days,” he told the salesman. Maybe then he’d have his head screwed on firmly enough to quit worrying about the feelings of a broken typewriter.
And a cheerful, high-spirited girl who took a picture of him with a dog.
He wallowed in the memories the entire journey to the Delacroix Global Spice factory. He might fall for another woman someday, but it would be impossible to forget Marianne. She crawled out onto the ice! Onto the Capitol dome! She was brave enough to walk into a jail but tenderly compassionate when he hightailed it out of there like a weakling. Normally he considered his overblown emotionalism an asset, but today it just made him ache.
A heady wall of aroma hit Luke the moment he stepped inside the noisy spice factory and looked for Joseph, the factory foreman since Luke was a child. The spice factory covered an entire city block, a large cavernous space filled with twelve-foot-tall tanks that used hammer mills to grind the spices.
Luke soon found Joseph, who was recalibrating a machine. “Is my brother here?” Luke called out over the din. The hammer mills made it loud.
Joseph nodded and pointed back to the office hallway.
Luke breathed a sigh of relief when he left the noisy factory floor. All he was looking for today was permission to use the typewriter Gray kept for correspondence. The top of his brother’s office door was glass, and Gray was hunched over a page full of columns. Luke would go stark raving mad if he had to sit at a desk all day analyzing numbers, but Gray appeared fascinated as he rubbed his jaw and turned another page.
Luke tapped on the glass, and Gray stood. Surprise was evident as he yanked the door open.
“Luke! How are you feeling?”
“Better,” he said as he wandered inside the office. “I’m getting decent food this week.”
“How can you tell?” Gray asked.
“Do you really need to ask that?”
“Well, now that you’ve sacrificed yourself on the altar of science, why don’t you get off that assignment?”
Luke dropped into the chair opposite Gray’s desk and propped his feet on a shipping crate from Indonesia. “There are several more rounds to go, and before you ask, yes, I will be staying on board for as long as I am physically capable. But I didn’t come here to argue about food. I need a favor.”
“Name it.”
Luke glanced at the typewriter sitting on a corner table. Gray couldn’t type, but his secretary could. With the exception of a few business letters, that thing gathered dust most of the time.
“Can I borrow your typewriter for a few days? Mine had a mishap.”
Gray’s brow furrowed. “What sort of mishap?”
There was no point in lying. Gray and Caroline planned to visit his office this weekend, and there was no way he could get everything repaired in time.
“Somebody ransacked my office. I’m pretty certain it was Clyde Magruder.”
Gray’s face hardened. Several seconds elapsed as he paced in the tight confines of his office. “Have you reported it to the police?”
“It won’t do any good.”
“Think,” Gray pointed out. “If a sitting US congressman is ransacking the offices of journalists, you don’t think that could hurt his chances for reelection?”
It was embarrassing Luke hadn’t thought of that himself. He’d been too busy getting mopey and sentimental about an old typewriter, but Gray was right. There might be some way to make political capital out of this.
“We all know the Magruders hate the idea of the Poison Squad,” Gray said. “By hitting at you, they can strike two birds with one stone. They would do anything to shut down that experiment.”
Except in his soul Luke knew this wasn’t about the experiment. Bringing his older brother into his confidence was a risk, but Luke would trust Gray with his life.
“I don’t think it’s about the Poison Squad,” he said, then affected a deliberately casual tone. “Did you know Clyde Magruder has a daughter? We met her that day on the ice. Aunt Marianne.”
Gray turned to face him from the far side of the office. He must have noticed something about the way Luke said Marianne. Or maybe it was the overly casual tone. Either way, Gray’s expression morphed from annoyance into caution. “The one you sent flowers to?”
“The very one. She’s amazing.”
Gray’s shoulders sagged. “Luke . . . no,” he finally said.
Luke hunkered down farther in his chair, steepling his hands to partially cover his face. Anything to shield himself from the thundercloud of disapproval coming from Gray. “I can’t help it. I care about her.”
“You care because she’s forbidden fruit,” Gray said, and Luke shook his head.
“It’s more than that.” He put his feet flat on the floor and scrambled for the right words. “There’s a feeling I get when I’m with her, a mix of peace and exhilaration at the same time. When I’m with her I want to slay a dragon or grab her hand and run away to the West Coast where we can live like gypsies.”