She prepared her camera. This recipe made an immense amount of apple compote, and a few cups of chemical enhancers were probably harmless, but only Dr. Wiley would know for sure. She took a photograph of the recipe and returned it to the file.
An entire filing cabinet was devoted to their canned meat products, and she pulled the files for Deviled Ham, Corned Beef Hash, Chicken Spread, and Creamed Chipped Beef.
The recipe for Creamed Chipped Beef was much lengthier than the apple compote. Three hundred pounds of thinly sliced cured beef, forty gallons of condensed milk, eight gallons of soybean oil, and six pounds of cornstarch. Then came the list of chemicals. Calcium chloride, sodium metabisulfite, maltodextrin, and salicylic acid. Was four cups of salicylic acid a lot for a recipe this size? She couldn’t begin to guess. She laid the recipe flat on a table to take a photograph.
In ten minutes she’d made photographs of all the meat recipes. Pangs of guilt plagued her the entire time, but Dr. Wiley was a good man. He wasn’t going to steal these recipes. All he would do was determine if they were safe.
Throughout it all, she thought about The Sparrow. The incident had happened before she was born, and maybe her grandfather had become a different man. It wasn’t for her to judge. This archive brimmed with proof of her family’s industry and success. She should be proud of her family. She was proud of her family.
After she’d photographed the recipes she came for, curiosity drove her to the last filing cabinet. Her father had commissioned numerous studies into the safety of their preservatives over the years, and she’d bet her bottom dollar they were stored in this last cabinet. According to Dr. Wiley, her father’s congressional committee sponsored five additional studies just this year. Only two of the five studies had been released to the public. Where were the other three?
It didn’t take her long to find them. The new studies were in a file clearly labeled the Congressional Committee on Manufactures. Copies of all five studies were here. The results of the experiments were filled with chemical equations and terminology she didn’t understand. She didn’t know how to interpret them, but Dr. Wiley would.
She photographed the entire file of test results. As soon as she developed the film, she would turn the studies over to Dr. Wiley, who would know what to do with them.
Twenty
On Saturday morning Marianne went to the Gunderson Photography Studio and paid to have use of the darkroom for the entire morning. It took hours to develop all the film she had taken in Baltimore, but by noon she had it processed and the photographs enlarged. The problem was that she had no idea where Dr. Wiley could be found.
Luke would know. From the studio she went to the boardinghouse to turn the pictures over to him, but he wasn’t there.
“He’s visiting his family,” Princeton said when he answered the door. “Dr. Wiley is giving us all a week off the test, and Luke said he had business back home.”
Marianne thanked him and headed for the streetcar stop. The photographs felt like an albatross around her neck, and she wanted them out of her hands today. The quicker she could turn them over to Luke, the quicker she could shake this feeling of disloyalty.
Except when she stood on the stoop outside his town house and knocked, there was no answer. She knocked again and still had no response, but the sound of laughter carried on the breeze from behind the house. She skirted around the side of the house to a backyard surrounded by a brick wall.
The wall was too high to see over, but Luke’s voice could clearly be heard on the other side, engaged in some sort of good-natured argument with several others. She ran her fingers across the mortar of the old brick wall, quickly finding a crevice that provided a toehold. Slinging her satchel securely across her body, she reached for the top of the wall and hoisted herself up, the grit rough beneath her palms.
She peeked over the rim and saw a group of people lounging on a blanket on the grassy lawn, a picnic spread out before them. Luke had his back to her.
“Hello?” she asked.
Five people swiveled toward her in surprise, and Luke leapt to his feet.
“There’s the prettiest sight I’ve seen all day,” he said as he crossed toward her as if this happened all the time.
“I don’t want to disturb you,” she said to the others still sitting on the lawn. “I simply came to give Luke something.” That something being a photographic stack of reports that should have been submitted to the government instead of being buried in her family’s archive.
“Come join us,” Luke said. “My family is trying to evict me, and I could use someone on my side.” Her eyes widened in surprise, but he was laughing, as were the others, so the threat couldn’t be too serious. “Come to the front, and I’ll let you in.”
She scurried through the overgrown grass on the side of the house and met him at the front door. Before she could say anything, he swept her into his arms to steal a lingering kiss. Her tension from the past twenty-four hours drained away in the comfort of his embrace.
“Let’s go join the others,” he said after he finally released her.
He led her down the center hallway and out to the back garden, where he introduced her to Nathaniel Trask, his future brother-in-law, who didn’t look too stuffy, since he wore an open-collared shirt and rolled-up sleeves. She had already met Gray and Caroline, but Gray’s wife was the only one not sitting on the grass. Annabelle wore a loose white gown and sat on a bench beneath a pear tree, gently fanning herself.
“We’re not evicting Luke,” Annabelle said. “We just don’t know if we’re going to turn his bedroom into a nursery, or if it will be in the addition we’re planning to build onto the back of the house.”
A glance at Annabelle’s waistline explained why she was sitting on the bench instead of sprawling on the picnic blanket like the others.
“I’m sorry for intruding,” Marianne said. “I merely came to deliver some photographs to Luke.”
“Photographs?” Caroline said. “Show us! Luke has been bragging about your wonderfully artistic pictures.”
Her fingers curled around the satchel. Photographs of old recipes and scientific studies were surely the least artistic pictures she’d ever taken.
“They’re just dull, government pictures,” Luke said, neatly saving her from an explanation. “Let’s not change the topic of how I am to be banished from the family home to make way for the coming infant.”
Gray rolled back on the grass and covered his eyes. “Such melodrama!” he moaned. “Miss Magruder, please join us. Perhaps you can reel Luke back from the cliff of despair he is determined to enjoy.”
“Only if you call me Marianne,” she said, sinking to her knees on one of the blankets.
Caroline filled a plate with some sliced pears and a wedge of cheese. Everyone ate with their hands instead of silverware. How refreshing this was! Picnics in the Magruder household involved tables set beneath a tent with maids serving meals and a musician playing an instrument from a tactful distance. Here the only music was a couple of sparrows chirping overhead.
The next hour was perfectly delightful, but throughout it all, the cache of photographs tugged at her conscience. She needed to pass them over to Luke in private. Her fingers curled around the rim of the case that was hidden inside her satchel.