She eventually pulled away. “How are you feeling?”
“Better, now that you’re here. What did Caroline say?”
“She invited me to tea and couldn’t have been nicer. Your brother was scary.”
He stilled. If Gray had said a single hostile thing to Marianne, Luke would have his head.
She must have noticed, for she laughed and touched the side of his face. “By scary I mean he was thoughtful and considerate and had a raft of good reasons why we shouldn’t see each other anymore. Like I said: scary.”
He clasped her hand and began walking down the street with her. “When do your parents get back in town?”
“Not until Sunday.”
That meant they could have four sun-kissed summer days without fear of intrusion from her family. He could take her sailing on the Potomac. They could explore the city and take photographs together. Lay on a blanket and watch the stars rotate all night long.
She cut his daydreams short. “I need to return to Baltimore.” He frowned, and she rushed to explain that Dr. Wiley wanted the recipes for Magruder’s canned meals. “If getting those recipes will help, or if it means men like you won’t have to subject yourself to this sort of treatment, how can I refuse?”
Luke was stunned. He hadn’t even asked for her help, and already she was offering it. The base part of him immediately started scheming up ways to take advantage of her access to the Magruder archives. He could probably get in and out without her ever knowing. Even if she caught him red-handed, he knew in his bones she wouldn’t turn him in. He could get away with it. . . .
But he was trying to be a better man. He wanted to defeat Clyde Magruder and win the princess too.
He leaned forward to kiss her forehead. “You’re far too good for me.”
She tugged his chin down and pressed a kiss to his lips. “Maybe. I love you anyway.”
He smiled and withdrew a step. “Do the recipes contain the preservatives?”
Marianne didn’t know, but there was only one way to find out. He thought carefully for how to take advantage of the situation.
“Bring plenty of film with you,” he advised her. “Photograph everything you can find. Then we can turn the pictures over to Dr. Wiley and see once and for all if those recipes are safe.”
Marianne set off for Baltimore on Friday morning, feeling anxious throughout the entire train ride. Maybe she shouldn’t feel so wretchedly, horribly guilty. All she would do was pass on a few recipes so Dr. Wiley could assess the safety of the preservatives used in their food. Andrew and her father always claimed the miniscule amounts of chemical additives they used were safe, but that was what they thought about coffee they’d sold in Philadelphia. If the amount of salicylic acid they used as a meat preservative in their creamed chipped beef was safe, they should have no qualms in letting Dr. Wiley analyze it.
Once in Baltimore, she hired a private carriage to take her straight to the Magruder factory. With luck, she would be able to take photographs of the recipes and catch the four o’clock train back to Washington.
It was the day of Andrew’s big party, and knowing her sister-in-law, Marianne doubted Delia had let Andrew go to the office today. She still was cautious as she approached the office building. The blinds in Andrew’s office were open, and a peek inside revealed the room was empty.
Good. Had Andrew been in the office, she would have been forced to swallow her disgust over Bandit and beg his permission to look through the company archives. Now all she had to do was get the office secretary to unlock the door to the archive.
Mrs. Carlyle was a matronly woman who had been Clyde’s secretary and now worked for Andrew. Vera had once told Marianne that if any woman was going to be waiting hand and foot on her husband eight hours a day, she had better have a face like a bulldog. That fit Mrs. Carlyle to a T. It wouldn’t surprise Marianne if Delia encouraged Andrew to keep Mrs. Carlyle on for the same reason.
Mrs. Carlyle looked surprised as Marianne entered the small foyer area. “I would have thought you’d be at the birthday festivities,” the old secretary said.
“Who would have guessed that a thirtieth birthday party could cause such a ruckus,” Marianne said with a laugh. “The party won’t start until five o’clock, but everything is chaos at home. I thought I’d take the opportunity to look through the family archives. Can you unlock the door?”
Mrs. Carlyle didn’t hesitate as she reached for an enormous ring of keys and led the way to a locked door at the rear of the building. To call this room an archive was a bit of a stretch. It was a windowless room filled with filing cabinets and old advertising posters. Marianne pulled the lever on the switch plate, and a bare lightbulb illuminated the room. Dust prickled her nose, and the musty odor surrounded her as she stepped inside.
“Is there something I can help you find?” Mrs. Carlyle asked. “I probably know the contents of this cave better than anyone.”
Marianne shook her head. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “I don’t want to keep you from your work.”
Mrs. Carlyle nodded and left, but the door remained open. Marianne counted out the space of a dozen heartbeats, then closed the door. She intended to take plenty of photographs, and that was best done in private.
Magruder’s Creamed Chipped Beef had been their best-selling product for decades. It was an adaptation of an old family recipe from when Grandma Magruder cooked it up by the vat in her home kitchen and sold it in mason jars to workingmen in the neighborhood. They didn’t start adding chemical preservatives until decades later after mass production began.
Marianne started in the first filing drawer, but it contained nothing but old billing records. Other drawers held machinery repair manuals and personnel files.
Then she found an entire drawer of files about the Delacroix family.
Delacroix? Her eyes widened. This wasn’t what she came for, but it was impossible to resist temptation. She yanked out the first file and opened it.
It contained the bill of sale for The Sparrow, the ship Jedidiah bought to irk the Delacroixs, whose ships had been seized during the Civil War. Magruder family legend celebrated how the man born in a cabin with a dirt floor became so rich that he bought and burned the Delacroix ship simply to prove how far he had climbed. As a child, the story made Marianne proud. Now that she held the bill of sale for the long-ago ship, she wasn’t sure. It had been a petty act of spite, not the action of a wise or kind man.
She turned to the next page in the file, and her heart plummeted.
Jedidiah had filed an insurance claim on the ship. The Sparrow had been fully insured through Lloyd’s of London, a company so far away that they probably never learned the details of how that ship caught fire. She ought to have known her thrifty grandfather would figure out a way to be fully compensated. This crime took place almost forty years ago, long past any legal consequences, but her respect for old Jedidiah had been dealt a blow.
She shook her head. It didn’t matter. She came here to get the recipe for Creamed Chipped Beef and any other products using salicylic acid as a preservative.
The third cabinet held the recipes. A whole drawer contained canning and preservation procedures for their fruit pie fillings. These were no simple recipes. They required ingredients by the barrel and complex steps for feeding the ingredients into machinery and tank-sized vats. The recipe for apple compote required four hundred pounds of diced apples, thirty pounds of butter, and sixty pounds of brown sugar. Then came a list of unfamiliar terms. Three pounds of powdered fruit pectin, a cup of erythorbic acid, and two cups of sodium bisulfite.