The White Feather Murders

by Rachel McMillan

  Kirk swerved over to the curb outside their townhouse, and they thanked him. Ray helped Jem get out of the car, and then he placed his arm around her back as he helped her up the walkway and toward the door.

  “Oh!” she said. “I forgot about the window.”

  Ray had done a crude job of patching it up with boards. The post was waiting on the verandah, and amid the usual bills and notices, Jem noticed one envelope addressed to Ray from City Hall.

  Once they were inside and Jem was comfortably settled on the sofa, he ripped it open and grimaced. “That didn’t take long,” he muttered.

  “What?”

  “A precautionary measure in accordance with Mayor Montague’s measures of impending war. ‘All enemy aliens must report to City Hall at the beginning of the month with papers in order and…’” He read the rest before capping “to ensure those late of a country opposing our allied forces are established as above reproach and dedicated to Canada. God save the King.”

  Jem’s eyes went the ceiling, then moved toward the window, and then back to the ceiling. “It’s preposterous. You have to write something about it.”

  “I have to choose my hills, Jem.”

  “You cannot pretend this isn’t happening. Maybe this is your moment, Ray. The reason you have had this platform all these years.”

  “You were almost killed, and someone vandalized our house.” He rubbed his hand over his face. “I have to choose my words carefully. I have to…”

  Jem waited for him to finish his thought, knowing he wanted to say something shattering and type until his hands cramped up. When he didn’t speak, she said quietly, “I’m not the only one caught between adventure and our life here.”

  “I’m sorry, Jem. I didn’t hear you.”

  “Just thinking aloud.” She exhaled. “I was thinking of sending round for Hamish this afternoon.”

  “I… I rang your mother,” he said after a moment.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your mother is taking care of Hamish while you recover.”

  “Ray DeLuca, you had no right to do that!” Jem wanted to rise and face him down, but her rib smarted. “You didn’t even consult me? You want me to recover, so you take my little boy away from me?”

  “You would have sent him to Mrs. Malone’s anyway,” Ray snapped.

  “Ray… you don’t have to speak this way.”

  “You almost died, Jem!” He found the words that had evaded him the evening before. “I felt as though I had cracked in half! You were so pale and your eyes… I never want to see you like that again. I was devastated and heartbroken and so angry at anyone who would hurt you.”

  “It wasn’t my fault. You said—”

  “You talk about family, about Hamish. If you cared more about our family, Jemima, you wouldn’t have risked your life.”

  Jem watched Ray’s eyes shine helplessly and his body deflate. “You think I don’t care about our family?” Her voice sounded like broken glass.

  “Jem, I didn’t…” He reached to touch her, but she flinched away.

  “Yes!” she said between gritted teeth. “You did mean it! As if I intentionally did this to myself!”

  Ray raked his fingers through his hair. Jem noticed the gray was more prominent at his temples than before. Was it just the light?

  “What do you want, Jem?”

  “You will not ask that question of me!” Now her voice was steel.

  “Jem, you are a mother. You are a wife. This is of your choosing.” His hand swept the circumference of the living room from boarded window to sunken sofa. His eyes flicked to the discarded letter demanding his reporting to City Hall. He swallowed and then said, “This is our home, and you need to decide what you want most. Didn’t it become as clear to you in that hospital bed as it did to me? Was the risk not too great this time? The consequences… Hamish could have grown up without a mother! And I had to imagine a life without you.”

  Jem tried to speak, but her throat was filled with a lump. When her voice finally came, it was little more than a whisper. “You said in the hospital that I had been in automobiles several times before. That…” She took a breath. “Do you realize what a contradiction you are being? I cannot be everything to you, Ray DeLuca. I cannot be the spirited woman you married and a mother and your wife and live in these rigid regulations just because you had a momentary scare. You cannot fit women into boxes. I am all of these things. And you want me at home, but you also want me at Merinda’s, and you want… you…” she trailed off.

  “That experience, Jemima. The one where…” He squeezed his eyes to block a million imagined scenarios where the outcome was not a safe and sound Jemima standing defiantly in front of him. “Jem, I can’t do it anymore.” His right hand, she noticed, was shaking. A rippled trace of the action that had sent his brother-in-law, Tony, to his death in Chicago. She wondered if he would ever be completely free of it.

  He drew a jagged breath “The world is shifting. I cannot say what darkness will happen upon us next. I need you to be safe. I need you to be my fixed point. For my sake but for also for Hamish’s. My little boy will not grow up without a mother.”

  Jem shook her head, at first a small movement that picked up speed. “I am not a fixed point. You cannot ask me to be something that I am not. I need to move. I might change. I have never once asked you to be anything but what you are.”

  “I know.”

  “I support what you do!”

  “I know that.”

  “And here you are saying you can’t do it anymore. What can’t you do, Ray?”

  “I think you need to leave, Jem.”

  “Why? Because of the window? Because of the accident? Because we’re fighting? You make little sense.”

  How had she failed to notice that while his right hand slowly shook, his left curled around the discarded missive he had received from City Hall.

  “Because I refuse to humiliate you. I refuse to drag you down with me. Can’t you see?” He exhaled. “Jem, I am a proud man. I cannot have you tugged along with me while I register under Montague’s orders.”

  “We share a last name!”

  Ray shook his head. “No, we don’t. Not to Toronto we don’t. Not in the papers. Right now, I prefer it that way.”

  “I’m not ashamed of you. I went into this marriage with eyes wide open, Ray. Do not lessen my choice.”

  He scratched the back of his neck. “There is little for you here right now. A broken window. An empty larder. No Hamish.”

  “You are here right now.”

  Ray said something in Italian before shaking his head. “I am going to go to the office. And when I get back, I think I would feel better if you were at Merinda’s.”

  “Is… is that what you really want?”

  “It’s not safe for you here. It’s also not safe for you there running around with that woman, but at least I can count on you being sane enough to give yourself time to recover. And you’ll have Mrs. Malone.”

  “Why are we arguing, Ray?” Jem’s voice hovered just above a whisper. “I don’t even understand this argument. I think you’re trying to tell me what you want me to be, but it’s so many different things at once.” She reached out and grabbed his forearm. “I don’t understand you.”

  “Be careful with your case,” was all he said as he disappeared into the kitchen. “I’ll ring Jasper to send Kirk by to take you to King Street.”

  Jem sat stunned a moment. All she had thought about in that cold, sterile hospital room was the safe bower of home.

  She took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and opted to take the world straight on. She had reserves of strength. She had Hamish, and she had Ray to some extent, and she had a battle fresh for the taking in Toronto.

  Jem’s eyes went around the perimeters of the empty sitting room. The grandfather clock’s tick unsettled her. She rose and left through the narrow hallway, taking the stairs slowly, her rib still aching with a stinging stiffness. Once in her bedro
om, a ray of sun highlighted the dust shrouding the furniture, reminding her that, yes, the home she wanted was so often unattended, a transient stop between adventures.

  She swiveled to face Hamish’s crib. He had his favorite teddy bear and blanket, but a secondary quilt, recently laundered, was folded over the side. Jem pressed it to her nose. Hamish. If she were the woman Ray wanted her to be, she would be with him now at her childhood home, ensuring he had his favorite treats, singing him lullabies, and kissing the silky hair of his soft head.

  She took her case from its place beside the bureau and lined it with lavender-scented sheets. Then she began packing, carefully folding in lace and tweed, brogans and stockings, as she tried to resist the persistence of her brain in revisiting the baffling disagreement they had just had. He wasn’t himself, she decided as she folded a few perfumed handkerchiefs and tucked them into the lining of her case. In this occupation she recalled something Ray had said to her in a long-ago adventure.† Empathy is the greatest gift. She couldn’t begin to imagine some of the families being torn apart. The Muellers mourning young Hans, the mothers preparing to send off their sons with knitted socks and scarves into the unknown mire of the war. She was in the middle of her own loss. Not as desperate, but still keenly felt.

  She would just have to rely on Merinda and her brand of incessant hyper-energy to throw her into a case and out of self-pity.

  * One of the Morality Squad’s more notorious brutes.

  † Ray DeLuca’s profound statement on the human condition is documented in A Singular and Whimsical Problem.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Those labeled as suspicious can be held on apprehension of sedition. Their mail can be confiscated and read if from a country supposedly allied with the Central Powers. With very little provocation and with the best interests of Toronto at hand, arrest without warrant may be enforced.

  From Mayor Tertius Montague’s Plan of Enactment

  God uses broken vessels. Ray remembered something Ethan Talbot had once said. He’d remembered several things Ethan had said when he argued with Jemima. Funny that every sane, salient word that had ricocheted through his brain on his way to pick her up from the hospital disappeared when he faced her. Perhaps he was never more broken than at that moment, having just found momentary renewal with Ethan only to lash out at Jemima. What was it that made him think that he could exact things of her he wouldn’t of himself? The prospect of throwing himself into work was often a reprieve when his thoughts spun as rapidly as they did at the moment.

  Ray knew Skip would pester him about Jem’s accident, McCormick would berate him for not being at work at his appointed time, and he would scrape together words about the plight that had just been doled out to him even as the war loomed far away and the election was near.

  Nonetheless, he boarded the trolley at the edge of Yonge and transferred at King, a route he could navigate with his eyes closed. When he finally alighted at Trinity Street, he took the last leg to the Hogtown Herald office amid the cobblestones and industrial structures of Corktown at a slower pace, drawing out the feeling of sunshine on his face before retreating into the dank cave of the office.

  When he arrived, the door was open, ushering in the sunlight. Ray found that strange because even though keeping the door closed trapped the summer humidity inside the ramshackle building, it allowed Skip to work with his photographs.

  When he walked through the doorway, he nearly collided with Jasper Forth.

  “Jasper!” His voice held surprise.

  “Ray…” Jasper began to explain, but as soon as Ray looked over his friend’s broad shoulder, he focused only on the upturned furniture and discarded paper all over the floor.

  The first time Ray met McCormick, he was told the story of William Lyon Mackenzie, the rebel leader of a failed revolution whose presses used to rail against the elite before they were dunked into Lake Ontario.

  Here, amid the chaos of the ransacked Hog office, he could make out their skeletons.

  “You’re out, DeLuca!”

  Ray hardly heard his editor as he surveyed the office in tatters. Newsprint fluttered about like misshapen confetti. Inkwells had been spilled, chairs were knocked over, and desks were breached. Upon moving at a slow diagonal through the carnage, Ray noticed that his desk was the most assaulted, his beloved Underwood near unrecognizable. The keys popped up jaggedly, the springs and gears spurting at unnatural angles.

  “You’re out, DeLuca,” McCormick repeated. The little hair the editor had left was plastered to the globe of his forehead with perspiration. Ray looked to Jasper, who had followed him. “When did this happen?”

  “Skip rang this morning. I didn’t know whether you were preoccupied. How’s Jem?”

  “Safe enough at Merinda’s,” Ray said absently, running his finger over the edge of his destroyed workspace. The pad of his finger came away black with ink. He rubbed it on his wrist.

  “DeLuca!” McCormick stood on the other side of the desk, his watery gray eyes near popping out of their sockets. “You ran that Milbrook piece. This is on account of you! How many times—”

  “You won’t have any content without me!” Ray was adamant. “You will have nothing to print. You think Skip can get you your readership? Your exclusives?” Ray fingered his collar. “This piece will sell a storm. It hasn’t even gone to print yet! Print it, McCormick!”

  “Who cares if it sells a storm if we’re shut down in a fortnight?” McCormick cursed. “Look at this office!” He flung out his hand to the carnage. “If I want to salvage anything of a paper that I personally invested in long before you stepped onto the scene, I need to do so now. This is my livelihood. I always let you get away with things! I always let you—” He raised a hand, stopping himself. “There is no sense talking to you about any of this, is there? You don’t care.”

  “Perhaps,” Jasper intercepted with a level voice, “this is not the time. Ray, what is this piece?”

  “I am surprised anyone saw it. I came here last night, after…” he used his hands to draw out the rest of the sentence. “But I didn’t do anything.”

  “You intended to distribute them?” Jasper asked.

  “I hadn’t… I hadn’t decided. I just needed to finish it. How did you know about it?”

  “It was plastered on the front door when I arrived this morning.” McCormick was livid. “And you are out.”

  “Maybe it has nothing to do with the article. Maybe it has to do with me,” Ray surmised. “Someone threw a rock through my front window the other day. Attached was a rather nasty note.”

  “You never mentioned it,” Jasper said.

  McCormick was sourly muttering, unconcerned with the possible tie to the previous threat.

  “I was preoccupied.”

  “Pack up what is left of your things, DeLuca.”

  “Mr. McCormick, this may have nothing to do with Ray’s article. As he says, who had time to see it?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Constable. I can’t afford to have this place explode. I cannot conceive what the damage here is. What the cost—”

  “I need an outlet!” Ray slammed his fist on his broken desk, leaving it if possible in an even worse state. “No one else is brave enough to speak up for the corruption here!”

  McCormick pretended not to hear him. “So you create your Cartier Clubs and you rail against Montague, not caring a hang for anyone else? Do you ever think that maybe I toe the line and Skip toes the line because we are in a recession and we need the money as much as you do?”

  “You need me! I am this paper, McCormick. I have always been willing to do things no one else would!”

  “Until the moment you decided to do something that would see us run into the ground! I am playing ball, DeLuca. We have always disagreed on this, and I respect your passion for reform. But I have a wife and family to feed!” He shook his head. “You’re a bright writer. You’re a bright man. But your temper and your impetuous need to find corruption in every corner is a
hindrance! I should have done this years ago.”

  “I need this job. You know I do. We have a history, McCormick. You owe me one! I have a wife and family too!”

  “Mr. McCormick—” Jasper interceded, but McCormick was a train on an unending rail.

  “I owe you nothing! I never had any debt to you! I took you on because Ethan Talbot told me he had found a smart young man willing to do anything with words! I saved you from the rubbish heap. But no more. You’re out!”

  “This paper will not function without me!” Ray exclaimed, summoning a courage he did not feel.

  “Don’t have such a high opinion of yourself, DeLuca. If it wasn’t your raking Montague over the coals, it would be something else. Didn’t you just say your window was smashed a few days ago? They’d come knocking to run you out of town on a rail. This is better for both of us.”

  Ray looked over what was left of his makeshift desk. Papers were fanned out around it, ink stickily covering the scraped surface.

  He’s been in a fog. He was impulsive, certainly, but he always tried to toe the line as well, and when he didn’t he was perfunctorily apologetic.

  The hardest to bear of the wreckage surrounding him was his Underwood. His most prized possession.

  He had been so proud of it. It was sleek despite its secondhand status and broken H key. He knew the sound of it and the familiarity of its perimeters under his fingers. It was so much of who he was. Now, numbly, he saw the end of his tenure at the newspaper as through a film or dream.

  He collected the shards of almost a decade of his life and slowly, vacantly walked in the direction of the doorway, Jasper close behind.