The White Feather Murders

by Rachel McMillan

  All the streets leading to Yonge were awash with people by early that evening. Cars were abandoned on the sides of the road as traffic cops turned their efforts to crowd control. The pent-up energy that swallowed Toronto through the pervasive heat of the unending summer fizzled and popped over the settling quiet.

  After depositing Hamish with Mrs. Malone, Ray gathered Jem and Merinda, and they joined the crowd at City Hall. They almost immediately collided with Skip McCoy, who was finagling with his tripod.

  “Need to be a little steadier on your feet there, McCoy,” Ray teased, clutching Jem’s hand as they ascended the slight hill toward the grand redbrick building that housed City Hall.

  Skip’s eyes flashed with annoyance. He rejigged the tripod, balancing his levers as the accordion-stretch of the camera distanced him from the throng.

  Jem and Ray walked on, only to turn at the sound of Skip’s loud curse following a loud crash.

  Skip emitted a string of curses directed at an unsteady young man who had doubtlessly jostled his camera. Jem, Ray, and Merinda watched him pick up the apparatus, which had crashed to the ground in the brief kerfuffle.

  Merinda was the first to swerve. Ray clicked his tongue. “All right there, Skip?”

  Skip’s brow furrowed in consternation. “Loose plate,” he deduced after a moment.

  “Still work?” Ray asked, concerned.

  Skip pressed his eye to the lens and shifted the stand. They heard the familiar click, tang, and pop of the camera. “Seems to,” he said with relief.

  Ray gave him a fleeting smile, and they turned again toward the slight hill. “I’ll watch from up there and most likely see you at the Hog later if we need to print an emergency edition.”

  Toronto’s russet-bricked Big Ben pierced the cloudless sky, its face ticking the moments onward while Jem, Ray, and Merinda found a slight opening in the throng. Reporters from the Globe, Star, and Tely wandered through the crowd, notepads at ready, stealing snatches of statements from those who had gathered to hear the news.

  Ray simply watched. He could string together the general fervor into a story later.

  Jasper arrived, clad in civilian clothes and wearing a tired expression. “Finally found you!” He gave them a wan smile. “Awful day. The Muellers are devastated.”

  “A truly horrible thing,” Jem said, looking away.

  “Wish we’d get this turnout at one of our ball games.” Jasper tried to lighten the mood. “Or at one of the Cartier meetings.” He winked at Merinda. “Speaking of, I saw Horace Milbrook a few moments ago. Just a split second near his automobile. He mentioned your piece in the Hog, Ray. He said he meant to talk to you about helping with his campaign speech.”

  “Really?” said Ray with interest. “When’s the next meeting?”

  “Tomorrow. But I move that we wait to hear what happens now before deciding when and how the Cartiers will transition with the war effort.”

  “The entire city is out tonight,” Merinda observed, taking it all in.

  “Would you enlist, Jasper?” Jem wondered.

  “Uh… I…” Jasper scratched his neck and looked to Merinda.

  “Half these lads need a paycheck,” Ray interrupted, indicating the hopeful faces of young men staring up at the clock. “It’s a free uniform and guaranteed means to send home to their family. Better than finishing school here just to beat the pavement for a job.”

  “Especially with the economy as it is,” added Jasper.

  Ray nodded. “They’ll either go to war or find themselves in Spenser and Montague’s web.”

  “Ha!” said Merinda. “What web?”

  “This new British agent. This Carr. I’ve been interested in him since he arrived. Remember in Chicago how easy it was for the anarchists to get bombs through Spenser’s warehouse? What better way to supplement our city’s income in a time of war than profiteering?”

  “Munitions?” Jasper chewed on that for a moment.

  Ray shrugged. “It is early speculation, but it would be a corker of a story!”

  Silence spread over the hundreds gathered—some clutching their hands, some their prayer books or Bibles or rosaries. They watched as telegraph operators stood ready at their posts and newspaper offices awaited word flurrying under the waves of the Atlantic Ocean at a frequency exemplary of their progressive age. Later, the quartet learned that it was a newsboy who screeched, “Let out the war cry!” before it rippled and spilled and heaved over the crowds crammed into every crevice of the downtown core, finally reaching City Hall as Big Ben marked 7:15.

  Silence stirred heavily thereafter as the citizens of Toronto processed the news that had been on the tip of their tongues and buzzing through their worried brains for months. Then a celebration erupted, and Jem, Merinda, Jasper, and Ray were whirled into jingoistic, patriotic chanting amid the humming din.

  It was difficult, to be sure, to imagine men in khaki wading in bloody mud in faraway Europe while the Union Jack was proudly bannered, and Yonge Street, like an overturned vessel, spilled people every which way. A brass band played “The Maple Leaf Forever,” and children with flags and drums appeared like apparitions from across the lawn, waving and stirring a palpable hope.

  “A free trip to the motherland!” cried one young man before raising his harried voice in an off-key belt of “Rule, Britannia!”

  Jasper was stunned silent. Merinda was taking in the scene at large with intent interest. Ray intertwined his fingers with Jem’s.

  “Will it come here?” Jem asked, her voice a decibel higher to compensate for the noise around them.

  “It’s already here, Jem,” Ray said, tightening his grip and settling a kiss on her cheek, while Jasper sidestepped a flurry of teenagers rallying all men to the Armories to wait for the sign-up sheets.

  “We’re not officially in the war yet,” Jasper informed one of the teens.

  “But we will be!” a boy said triumphantly. “We will be very soon!”

  A police whistle shrilled, and the rambunctious crowd surprisingly stilled awaiting another announcement.

  “Forth!”

  Jasper recognized the voice as belonging to St. Clair, who was frantically searching the crowd.

  “St. Clair!” Jasper called, finally finding him in the throng.

  “Looked everywhere for you,” St. Clair panted, parting their quartet. “You’d better come with me.” He crooked his finger. Jasper nodded and bid his goodbyes, but Merinda kept at his heels. “You too, DeLuca,” St. Clair added.

  “Pardon?”

  “Just come.”

  Ray exchanged a helpless look with Jem before matching Jasper’s faster stride. Jem and Merinda fell into step together not far behind.

  They shoved through the crowd in the direction of Bay Street, stopping when St. Clair did in front of a black automobile.

  “I don’t want to disturb your feminine sensibilities,” St. Clair snarled to Merinda, who was inching closer.

  “Piffle,” Merinda said dismissively, leaning in.

  In the front seat of the convertible, Horace Milbrook was slumped in an unnatural position, his white shirt stained with blood.

  Jem, at Merinda’s shoulder, gripped her friend’s arm.

  “When did you find him?” Jasper asked, his eyes surveying the automobile. A few other constables arrived to keep the general population at bay.

  “Not five minutes ago.” St. Clair turned to Ray. “I wasn’t alone in finding him. Your photographer, Skip McCoy, was also here. You’d figure he’d want to snap some of the real action, not a lone man in an automobile,” St. Clair mused.

  “Why was he just sitting here when all of this was going on?” Merinda asked. She’d removed her torch from her trousers and was moving the light back and forth over Milbrook’s body.

  “Maybe he never had the opportunity to get out of his car,” Jasper said.

  Merinda passed the torch to Jem, instructing her to keep the light on the corpse. Then she took her magnifying glass from he
r pocket and held it over the stain on Milbrook’s chest before pausing above something slightly peeping out from his lapel. “Jasper! Do you have tweezers?”

  Jasper shook his head.

  “St. Clair? No? Fine. Jemima, a handkerchief.” Jem extracted one and passed it over. Merinda wrapped her fingers in its lavender-scented folds and gingerly extracted a small white thing from Milbrook’s lapel. She held it up.

  A white feather—perfectly shaped, fanning out, and only slightly blemished with Milbrook’s blood.

  Not long afterward, Ray left for the Hog offices after finding a cab for Jemima to ride in to King Street so she could properly see Hamish to bed. Jem’s first instinct was to follow Merinda, but watching Ray’s eyes glower darkly let her know this wasn’t the time for an argument. She promised to pick up Hamish and keep the taxi until they were both safe home in Cabbagetown.

  After a rendezvous with other station officers, Russell St. Clair apprehended some suspects. Jasper stayed mostly silent as to his personal opinions on level of probable guilt, instead simply watching and, every few seconds, reining Merinda in with a steady hand every time she lunged toward St. Clair.

  Jasper’s approach to the law was to assume every party innocent until proven guilty. St. Clair, however, seemed to be working in the reverse of that. Nonetheless, Jasper stood stoically, minding Merinda and glancing carefully over the crime scene. If he was going to spend the night questioning suspects, he needed to have a lay of the land. Indeed, the only time Jasper intervened in St. Clair’s preliminary roundup of suspects was when his colleague reached out to grab the collar of a bystander who, not yet seventeen, had little comprehension as to what the large officer was saying.

  Afterward, officers led the suspects toward police vehicles, leaving St. Clair to turn to his partner with an angry spew as to the state of violence in the city.

  Seeing that Merinda was still very much present, St. Clair scowled.

  “Come, Jasper. We’ve a long night ahead of us,” he said, his eyes still boring into Merinda.

  “Head home, Merinda,” Jasper said with a slight smile. “It might get dangerous later. If there are riots and so on.”

  Merinda shook her head. Sighing heavily, St. Clair pulled Jasper in the direction of the station house on foot. It was only a few blocks away, and the vehicles were full with possible suspects: some legitimate, and others, Jasper was sure, apprehended on St. Clair’s whim. Throughout their walk, they did a poor job of shaking Merinda from their trail.* If St. Clair turned on his heel even slightly, he nearly collided with her. That continued until they reached the front door of the station house.

  “Go home, Merinda,” Jasper said again.

  “No thanks,” she countered.

  “Merinda!” Jasper entreated.

  “I’ll just stay right here.” She gestured toward the broad station steps.

  “Merinda.”

  St. Clair scowled once more before dragging Jasper inside. Jasper, resignedly, shrugged once more in Merinda’s direction before disappearing after him.

  Alone, she worked the scene over and over in her mind, sitting on the steps and ignoring odd looks from passersby. She tented her fingers as she imagined the Great Detective had done at Baker Street.

  Her first guess was that Milbrook’s death had something to do with Montague. There was opportunity and motive. But Sherlock Holmes said guessing was “a shocking habit—destructive to logical faculty,” so she tried to expand her deductive horizons.

  She remained thus, formulating a half dozen scenarios, many of which came back to someone wanting Milbrook’s car, and then she yawned and turned at the sound of footsteps on the stairs directly above her.

  “You’re idle,” Jasper joshed, lowering himself to sit beside her. “I thought you would be prowling Toronto.”

  “Are you making any progress with the suspects inside?”

  He shook his head. “I needed some air. One poor fellow obviously has nothing to do with it and can’t even trip through English. We released Skip. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “It stands to reason a murderer could easily slide off into the night. Anyone else?”

  “Not of consequence, though St. Clair is still questioning hard. He believes everyone is guilty until proven innocent.”

  Merinda chortled. “And you?”

  “I can’t think of anyone who would want to dispose of poor Milbrook. Most of what he rallied for has been well received. Most Torontonians would say he had a sure shot at the next election.”

  “Then it was clearly one of Montague’s cronies,” Merinda seethed. “Get him out of the way.”

  Jasper nodded. “That seems a common theory.”

  “Or perfect. It’s so easy to leave undetected.” Merinda chewed her lip.

  “Tipton brought in a foreigner. Someone he has had his eye on in the Ward.” Jasper ran his hand over his face. “I have a feeling some of these men are facing a tribunal of officers like Tipton and St. Clair who need them to be guilty.” Jasper sighed. “I’ve said too much.”

  “Surely Tipton had some reason to investigate.” Merinda ironed out the fight in her voice. Jasper was looking disconsolate enough as it was.

  “Tipton’s man was seen earlier with a bird, of all things. Just at the edge of the Ward near City Hall and Milbrook’s parked automobile.”

  “There’s certainly a dozen good reasons a fellow would have a bird. But that feather… it was so… perfectly shaped. I highly doubt some fellow just plucked it from a bird!”

  “I don’t know much about plumage myself,” Jasper said resignedly. He sighed. “I’d best be back in. Are you going to act reasonably and head home or keep watch on our steps in the middle of the night? I must admit that having you here is slightly safer than your wandering about unaccompanied.”

  Merinda ignored that. “Any mention of the murder of that poor fellow at Spenser’s this afternoon?”

  Jasper shook his head. “I doubt anyone will keep that incident at the forefront of other duties. A poor German immigrant and possibly an enemy now that we’ve thrown our lot in with the Brits. But most likely just another innocent in a scuffle that Tipton will decide a shame but not worth police resources.”

  “I’m not the police.” Merinda stood.

  “Be careful,” Jasper said, stretching his arms out.

  For a silent moment they used their vantage on the station steps to take in the last dregs of the evening’s commotion.

  “Maybe their deaths are connected,” Merinda mused, distracted by an impromptu posse of revelers with loud, raucous voices rising in a lubricated ballad to the home country.

  Jasper shrugged. “Maybe.” He smiled and squeezed her shoulder. “Safe home, Merinda.”

  She looked about her, a slight smile tickling her cheek. Safe home. Her home, the city stretched in a kaleidoscopic flurry of Union Jack flags and leftover snatches of music from a revel that would either signal the dawning of an incredible new era or the final droning toll of a world about to end.

  During her tenure on the steps, Merinda had turned an idea over and over in her brain. M.C. Wheaton would advise that one must never prematurely anticipate a connection. Yet, Merinda most decidedly subscribed to the Ray DeLuca school of “Montague, Spenser, and Tipton Are Responsible for Nearly Everything.” And, if this were the case, who was to say that the two corpses from completely different rungs of the social ladder couldn’t indeed be tied with an invisible knot?

  Merinda skipped down the station steps and set off in the direction of Queen Street.

  She suspected that the night crew at Spenser’s, its location at an intersection still bustling with the now just-waning action, would likely be late to their shift, caught up in the revelry. Along Yonge Street, under the winking of the electric billboards and marquees, great banners unfurled, announcing: GREAT BRITAIN DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY!

  Merinda was swung into a group of men kissing their girls. “We should all be married before we
ship out!” one said, grabbing at her arm. Merinda shoved him off with a scowl.

  She kept her head high and her shoulders back. Love and energy flittered around her, preventing her from reaching her destination at the speed she desired. She employed her walking stick a few times to either rap on the pavement to the surprise of an embracing couple or threaten a kid tripping into her path.

  Turning onto Queen, she elbowed her way through the rollicking crowd leaving City Hall and retraced her steps to the back loading bay. She reached into her pocket and extracted her torch, flicking its light over the pavement and around the dark vans.

  A surprised gasp from the boot of one vehicle drove her buttery light northward and exposed two young people in a tight embrace.

  “Cracker jacks! Scurry along, you vagrants! Want me to whistle for the Morality Squad?”

  The kids set off. Of course, they’d had no idea it was a crime scene, but Merinda winced nonetheless at the hapless state of the place a likely innocent young man took his final breaths.

  As she flashed her light over a large grated door and the ground nearest her vicinity, she reminded herself that Russell St. Clair, though undoubtedly a fiend, was most likely perfunctory in his tasks. Jasper seemed to respect him, but Merinda had once referred to Jasper as a human golden retriever, liking and befriending everyone, so his instincts were admittedly drawn toward blind affection.

  She crouched down and took a swift look around over the tarmac and near the hubcap of one of the van’s tires. Not finding what she had hoped for, she expanded her perimeter in a semicircle, to no avail. Frustrated, she thought of turning toward home, but some inkling kept her brogans on the ground. At the sound of a sudden shuffle and thud, Merinda’s catlike eyes blazed, and she stiffened. Was that a footfall? She froze, waiting several moments before calling up the courage to move on.

  Merinda looked up, scanning the broad, gated door with careful eyes. And thus she saw it, a little flicker of white under the dusky starlight. Wishing she had Jasper’s height, she looked around for something to elevate her enough to pull at the protruding item, which was a whisper of ivory against the dank, black grate of the warehouse.