It was going to be a tight fit. There were two bunk beds, a single desk, a single chest of drawers, and a slim window overlooking an alley. Luke was the first of the test subjects to arrive and chose the lower bunk closest to the window. Gray hoisted his trunk onto the mattress.
“Oh, Luke.” Annabelle sighed as she scanned the room with worried eyes. “Are you sure? No one will think badly of you if you back out.”
“I would,” he said instinctively.
Annabelle and Gray didn’t understand. He was elated by this chance to prove himself. Adventure and danger had always been carved onto his heart. In his younger years it ran wild, leading him into foolhardy exploits and trouble with the law, but he was learning to funnel it toward the good. He needed to test his physical strength against a challenge. He needed to match wits with a worthy opponent and win. Five days out of the week he sat at a desk and did paperwork, but his soul craved more. There was a wildness inside that needed a mission to both challenge and frighten him.
This need was so deeply embedded that he had no doubt God instilled it in him. Luke had never done his finest praying in a church pew. He did it out in the real world. He had proven himself in the sweltering battlefields of Cuba and in exposing corruption on the pages of Modern Century.
Now it was time to test his mettle with the Poison Squad.
Six
Marianne headed toward her supervisor’s office, her footsteps echoing in the marble hallway of the Interior building. Willard Schmidt oversaw the photographers, and each week he provided her with a list of the buildings and subjects he wanted photographed. He was a thickset middle-aged man with a shiny bald head.
“Here you go, Miss Magruder,” he said as he pushed her assignment toward her. Most of the subjects were familiar to her, but two were odd.
“The District of Columbia Jail?” she asked.
Mr. Schmidt nodded. “It falls under our purview. Lately there have been complaints that the facility is inadequate. It was built in 1872 but has never been photographed. We need to prove it is a safe and well-maintained facility. I trust you can make sure that happens,” he said with a critical look over the top of his spectacles.
One of the nice things about coming from a wealthy family was that the roof over Marianne’s head was not dependent upon Mr. Schmidt. If the prison was dreadful, her photographs would capture its true condition. She wouldn’t use her camera to lie and show it in a positive light.
“I’ll do a good job,” she said, still studying her list of assignments. “What are the hygienic table trials?”
“A new initiative at the Department of Agriculture. They’re taking volunteers who agree to be test subjects for food preservatives. The doctor wants every man photographed before the testing begins. Poor fools. Lord only knows what they’ll look like in a few months.”
“What do you mean by ‘food preservatives’?” she asked. Most of the food sold in markets today had preservatives in it. It was safer than eating meat that had been sweltering in hot railway cars without preservatives. Her father was an expert at ensuring that meat, milk, and canned food were safe, and chemical preservatives were a blessing of modern science.
“It’s a controlled experiment with a dozen men living in a boardinghouse, eating food heavily laced with chemicals, and having their health monitored. You couldn’t pay me enough to be a part of it, but it looks like the folks over at Ag found a dozen fellows willing to do it. They need to be photographed this morning because they start eating the poisoned stuff at lunch.”
She pocketed the list. It seemed like a fool’s errand, but she would do it.
Marianne arrived at the boardinghouse on Grove Street promptly at eleven o’clock, which would give her plenty of time to take photographs of the men participating in the research study before they were served lunch. She’d been told to take individual portraits of each man staring straight at the camera. This sort of documentation was important for the scientific aspects of the study, but she’d also take some group poses of the men who had volunteered to be human test subjects.
She knocked on the door of the boardinghouse, but no one answered, and she doubted anyone heard. It sounded like quite a rumpus was going on inside. There was stomping feet, banging, and shouting. She knocked a second time and waited, but it was obvious she couldn’t be heard over the commotion. When no one answered, she gave up and stepped inside.
Then ducked to avoid the tennis ball flying straight at her.
A man with a racket threw himself after the ball, bumping into her but managing to return the ball into a room on the other side of the entryway. Good heavens! She clutched the satchel containing her camera against her chest, aghast at the tumult. It looked like there were three simultaneous games of tennis happening, as the entire ground floor swarmed with men, all armed with rackets and batting tennis balls between the parlor on her left and the dining room on the other side. A curly-headed man stood on the second-floor balcony, volleying a ball with the man in the entryway who had just slammed into her.
These weren’t men, they were a pack of animals! She gaped at the free-for-all as men scrambled after the balls flying every direction, smacking into walls and furniture. One man ran straight toward a sofa, then launched into the air in an amazing leap to vault right over it. She darted a few steps up the staircase, possibly the only place where she could avoid the men’s bodies hurtling through space.
A loud whistle split the air, and the men began to settle down, but a few stray tennis balls continued to bounce.
“Pardon us, ma’am,” a tall blond man said, still panting. “You must be the photographer?”
“I am.”
“You’ll want to get a picture of me first, because I’m much better looking than my brother.”
“Yeah, but I’m the better tennis player,” the man beside him challenged.
A tennis ball came flying out of nowhere and smacked the self-proclaimed better-looking brother on the back of the shoulder. He chased after it and hurled it back, almost clipping her with it.
There were a few ways she could handle this. She could simply leave. She could scold them all and warn them to behave. Or she could go along with them and get some truly amazing photographs. They were rumpled, laughing, and out of breath. The choice was obvious.
“Line up exactly as you are,” she said. “Keep your rackets. No, no—don’t straighten your hair. Don’t tuck in your shirts. I want to catch you exactly as you are. Disheveled and irreverent.” And dazzling, she silently added.
She pointed to where she wanted them to stand so the backlighting from the window wouldn’t interfere with the photograph. “Taller men in the back, shorter men on one knee in the front.”
It was the wrong thing to say, as a couple of men started arguing over who was taller, but they did as she asked, nudging and bickering as they sorted themselves into two rows. They were a handsome lot, all of them vibrant and lively as they joked. She scanned the group, mentally forming the composition, but one man stood a little off to the side, watching her.
Luke!
A smile broke across her face at the sight of him, for he was beaming at her in a wonderfully irreverent way that lit his whole face.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.