Today's Reading
CHAPTER ONE
Once a weapon is discovered, it will always be used by those who are in desperate straits.
—Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, September 25, 1945
Aboard the Royal Blue train
Union Station, Washington, DC
September 1951
When Kay Thompson landed a job as secretary for Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady, she never dreamed her work would include discovering a body.
The Royal Blue, the streamlined train that had glided in at 1:30 p.m., stood at the platform, completely stationary.
But Kay could have sworn it swayed under her feet as Mrs. Roosevelt opened the washroom door at the end of the lounge car, revealing a compact space of chrome and Formica...and a young woman's body lying in a ghastly pool of dark red blood.
Roaring filled Kay's ears. Putting her hand up to her face, she shielded herself from the sight. Spots of color exploded in the corners of her vision. Her legs wobbled, behaving like her aunt Tommy's picnic aspic jelly, which Kay had notoriously dropped on the lawn when she was eight years old.
Since she was perched on three-inch stiletto shoes, wobbling wasn't a good idea. That jelly had hit the ground with a formless splat.
Dizziness swept over her...until she saw that Mrs. Roosevelt, standing at her side, did not look ready to pass out.
The porter who had led them onto the train gave a gasp of horror as he peered into the tiny compartment, even though he had been the one to tell them a body had been found on the train.
Kay thought working with Mrs. Roosevelt would involve behind-the- scenes politics, fabulous social events, and the chance to meet the kind of single, attractive men who moved and shook Washington. Heads of state like movie-star handsome, bachelor Prince Rainier of Monaco.
Instead, just after she began her temporary post, she had helped Mrs. Roosevelt hunt for the missing daughter of a foreign atomic scientist. Now, at Mrs. Roosevelt's side, she was staring into a cramped washroom at that young woman—who had been stabbed horribly in the chest and stomach, ruining her lovely pearl-gray suit.
The poor woman had long platinum-blond hair that looked impossibly natural. That pure white blond wasn't the kind that came out of a bottle. Kay knew—she'd tried to match Veronica Lake's blond color once and after the awful yellow grew out, she never touched her red hair again.
But with the expression of terror transfixed on the victim's face, Kay couldn't be sure this was the woman they had been searching for.
"Is it her?" she managed to choke out. "She doesn't look like—like the photograph Mrs. Meyer sent."
"I think so, Kay," Mrs. Roosevelt said, her voice heavy with sorrow. "I believe this is Susan."
Susan Meyer. Daughter of Elsa Meyer, the famous atomic scientist who had escaped Nazi Germany for Sweden. The daughter who Mrs. Meyer feared had been recruited as a Soviet spy. In the black and white photograph Mrs. Meyer mailed by airmail from Sweden, her daughter had a heart-shaped face, high cheekbones, luminous eyes. Susan could have been a stand-in for Ingrid Bergman. This poor young woman's face, frozen in a mask of terror, barely resembled that picture.
Kay felt she had fallen into an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Like Notorious.
Except gorgeous Cary Grant was nowhere to be seen.
Mrs. Roosevelt gingerly stepped over the pool of blood in her sensible, low-heeled shoes. She wore a gray tweed jacket over a navy blouse and skirt, with a fox fur around her neck. Her gray hair was arranged in curls and parted down the middle, secured under a dark blue felt hat. Despite being sixty-six years old, she knelt beside the poor murdered woman.
"Mrs. Roosevelt! What are you doing?" Kay cried.
As a former First Lady, Mrs. Roosevelt lived in the kind of social stratosphere where Kay assumed she should never have to get her hands dirty. But Mrs. Roosevelt was gently touching the woman's wrist. There was barely room in the tiny space for Mrs. Roosevelt to move, yet she dealt with the situation without revulsion.
...
