The White Feather Murders

by Rachel McMillan

  “No,” Merinda said. “I didn’t even get to see if one of the automobiles here was responsible for the demolition of my roadster.”

  “My, Jemima, how like your friend you are sounding these days,” Ray said sardonically.

  “The food was delicious,” murmured Jem in an attempt to soften Ray’s animosity toward that particular friend.

  “And the company more so,” Jasper said, smiling at Merinda.

  Merinda, unsettled by his nearness, turned her attention to the galaxy. “Oh, look!” she said, her eyes focusing on a bright, flashing dot piercing the navy stretch above. “There’s Pyxis.”

  “Pyxis is best seen in March, Merinda,” Jasper said.‡

  “And Merinda made a new friend!” Jem said brightly.

  “Stupid bird!” seethed Merinda, though Jasper and Jem could see her smile in the waning light. She turned to Ray. “DeLuca, a moment.”

  “Jem,” Jasper said, reading a flicker between them, “let’s go wait for the car.” He took her arm and led her across the yard.

  “DeLuca,” Merinda entreated.

  “I have nothing to say to you, Merinda. Come, the others will be waiting.”

  “DeLuca, you are being childish!”

  “Coming from an expert…” Ray walked several paces ahead of her.

  “Argh!” she emitted, sprinting to catch up with him. “I’m sorry!” she exclaimed. “I don’t know how to make things right with you.”

  “Why do you care about making things right with me?” Ray asked innocently, his eyes sweeping over the throng getting into their cars and then the bright lights of the estate sheening over automobiles. Landing on anything but her.

  “Because… I just…”

  “I lost my job and my typewriter, and I almost lost my wife because you’re a lousy driver in pursuit of a mystery you are incapable of solving.”

  Merinda hid her hurt, though she remained silent on the way home. When Ray told them Martha was interested in loaning him her byline to report on some of the more horrid conditions afforded immigrants like himself, Jem was delighted, Jasper congratulatory, and Merinda lost in the speckle of streetlights like stars lining the road outside the passenger window.

  * Skip McCoy had photographed several of these workers in a recent Hogtown Herald article.

  † Not too painfully. Just a slight nip.

  ‡ He had begun to learn the constellations a careful reader will remember she always labelled erroneously.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In our last exchange, you asked if I would enlist. Because the law needs to be upheld on the homeland, members of the RNWMP are forbidden to do so. In a way I am glad. Not because I am unpatriotic, but because war changes a person, Merinda. It changed my grandfather and my father. There are so many things in life people like us like to control. You follow your guidebooks and your deductive manuals, and I align myself with the rigid rules of the force. But wars change people. They change the rhetoric of a place and the feel of it. If you get caught in the whirlwind, if you find yourself off-kilter in a place and time you cannot quite understand, I want to let you know you are not alone. That from my secondhand experience it is nothing short of normal.

  An excerpt from a letter to Merinda Herringford from Benny Citrone

  He’s safe as houses now.”

  Merinda overheard Jem talking with Mrs. Malone as she ascended the stairs the next morning. “It was mortifying to have the taxi park at the curb, only to find that the front window in our townhouse had been shattered.” Jem shuddered and reached for her tea. “But I am appreciative of your hospitality here, and Ray will stay with Jasper’s parents for the time being.”

  “God save the King!” Merinda pumped her fist in the air. She wouldn’t admit, even to Jem, that the grudge Ray was holding against her was nipping at her. That she had spent half of a sleepless night deciding how she could possibly make it right with him. Midway through the pulsing dark, she decided to refocus on the prospect of finally beginning women’s rifle practice.

  “We are shifting from detective mode to patriotism for the morning,” she informed Jem as Mrs. Malone disappeared to retrieve her Turkish coffee.

  “Can I perform this task with a bruised rib?” Jem wondered.

  Merinda shrugged. “We’ll give it the old college try, eh?”

  A half hour later, Merinda whistled the “Maple Leaf Rag” as they set in the direction of University from Queen.

  Though she had passed the Armories some hundreds of times, Merinda had never been through its turreted doorways. Its grandeur put her in mind of the Coliseum in Chicago, wherein she and Benny Citrone had helped thwart an assassination attempt on Theodore Roosevelt.* The architecture of the previous century molded brick and stone and wheeling arches scoped above the windows and doorways.

  Now, it was abuzz with all manner of activity. Men were spilling out from the canvassing tents and along the avenue awaiting their chance to enlist. Soldiers stood guard at each doorway, at attention and with rifles spit-shone and held at the perfect angle.

  Jem adjusted her jacket, and Merinda swept her bowler from her head.

  Inside, they were nearly overwhelmed with the sleek command of the place: a dizzying whirr of men’s voices, heels clacking on the linoleum, stern commands, and messenger boys running to and fro. The ring of numerous telephones clanged from outside administration areas. Men snaked along the walls impatiently waiting for their medicals or to finalize the last bureaucratic steps to see them overseas and into the heart of the war.

  Jem and Merinda followed arrows that saw them through broad, regal doors and out into the sunny green space of the women’s rifle range. Patches of soft grass were interrupted by all manner of callisthenic equipment. To the right, targets erupted from the ground like white statues, their faces circles and numbers around a bull’s-eye. Opposite them, men were extended over varied obstacles, positioning their rifles on their shoulders or jabbing at the air with speared bayonets.

  Merinda’s and Jem’s loose-fitting attire was appraised. A sour-faced woman and an overbearing man with a drooping moustache were less than enamored with Merinda’s trousers.

  Jem watched Merinda’s eyes widen as women lay splayed on the ground in a most unladylike fashion—squiggling like worms, adjusting their elbows, and centering their shots before pressing their guns’ levers and expelling bullets that whizzed through the air.

  “Cracker jacks!” Merinda breathed to Jem as the women reloaded. “A step above Jasper showing us how to fire a pistol in an abandoned warehouse.”†

  Jem felt at her rib and decided she was well enough to join Merinda as long as she was careful. “If the enemy comes,” Jem said, accepting the gun held out to her by the sour-faced woman, “I won’t have a moment to stall on account of a slight injury.”

  Merinda loved the heavy feel of the gun as its stock pressed into her shoulder, the barrel pointing toward the target. She blew a tendril of hair from her forehead and squinted so that her right eye over the gun was directly in line with her target.

  Bang! The force of the shot shuddered through her. She took a shaky moment to see if she had hit the intended target before squinting up at the sour-faced woman, who was visibly impressed by Merinda’s first effort.

  “You’re a natural,” the overseer begrudgingly admitted as Merinda wiped the dirt from her trousers and turned proudly to Jemima.

  Jem, though careful, had also assumed the correct position, and while her aim was not as precise as her friend’s, the sour-faced overseer hesitantly agreed that with more practice Jem’s shots would be as sure.

  An hour later, Merinda’s arm steadied Jem, who finally admitted her stiff rib was smarting.

  “Threaten and point! That’s what I always told you. Threaten and point!”

  They stood, brushing the dust from their trousers when they heard a familiar voice from the evening before.

  “The war on the home front in action,” Philip Carr said proudly, removing the fol
der tucked underneath his elbow to point at them emphatically. “I am impressed.” He looked Jem over, appraisingly. “You’re more than just a pretty face.”

  Merinda repurposed her gun as a cane and leaned on it slightly as it stabbed the soft ground. “Mr. Carr.”

  “Miss Herringford, I trust you have recovered from your encounter with your feathered friend last evening.”

  “Clearly.” Merinda’s voice was sardonic.

  Jem scraped at civility. “I read in the paper that the ladies’ rifle range is one of your particular contributions, Mr. Carr.”

  “Indeed.”

  Merinda blinked at him before saying, “As you know, my friend and I are lady detectives, and I was interrupted from my inquiries last evening on account of the peacock.”

  “Oh? Am I being investigated?”

  “I don’t like your tone, Mr. Carr.”

  He ignored Merinda, choosing to extend his arm to Jem. “Come. You seem slightly uneasy on your feet, and the sun is quite bright here. Perhaps we would all be more comfortable at a table under the shade.” He indicated a tree nearby.

  They had just been seated when Merinda began asking questions. “What sort of operation do you have going on, Mr. Carr?”

  “I confess to being at a complete loss as to your meaning, Miss Herringford.”

  “Oh, really? There you are, knowing about ceremonial doves. Flitting into the city just as men are murdered.”

  “And why would I murder these men?” he asked while stealing a wink at Jem.

  “Because they are covering up something you are trying to hide. Where were you the night of Milbrook’s murder?”

  “At Mayor Montague’s house awaiting the news of the ultimatum on the telephone.”

  “And not at Spenser’s earlier that day, silencing a boy who might have been on to your dastardly war-mongering plans?”

  “I enjoy your brand of hyperbole, Miss Herringford. It enlivens you.”

  “Why, of all the—”

  “My friend means well, Mr. Carr,” Jem intervened with a silencing look at Merinda.

  “Of course. My job is to ensure that, even though factories and munitions operatives of a grander scale are not yet properly outfitted, Canada has yet a way to ensure the munitions needed reach the boys on the frontlines. At least until we have a transparent course of action.” He shrugged easily. “Spenser’s has an impressive cargo bay, a fleet of its own boats, and a world-class shipping system at its fingertips. With such a shipping system and warehouse, Thad Spenser is a patriot who will see some form of fine recognition once the mess is over. The sacrifice he is making—”

  “Sacrifice?”

  “The carte blanche usage of his facilities. His dedication to the equipment and shipping needed and available at a moment’s notice.”

  “But we just entered the war,” Jem puzzled. “How much equipment and munitions are here?”

  “Have you started this industry?” Merinda asked.

  “A young man was murdered, as you say,” Carr said evasively. “And while I welcome your questions, I fail to see how I could possibly be of assistance.”

  Merinda wondered if Jem noticed how Carr’s eyes flicked to the folder he was carrying now and again.

  “Because you are our war agent, and we feel that Milbrook and Waverley were killed because they were looking into illegal means of buying cheap munitions from across the border.”

  Carr shrugged. “I work for Mayor Montague and I work for Sir Henry. I obey orders.”

  “Is Sir Henry standing to make the same profit you are?” Merinda barreled on.

  “Darling, you’re barking up the wrong tree. You’re looking for the killer of a Kraut boy from the Ward. An enemy. Some ruffian or bully did us all a favor.” He cleared his throat. “That fellow from the Hogtown Herald has been shadowing me lately for an article.”

  “You say this proudly,” Merinda intoned, wondering if Carr knew that the Hog’s reputation suffered even more with the loss of Ray DeLuca.

  “I am a person of interest, but not in a murder inquiry. Rather, as a message to the city that we are willing to work with you. That you… all of you…” his eyes looked toward the men still undertaking their exercises around the range, “… are invaluable to our effort.”

  “You couldn’t sound more patronizing if you tried,” Merinda grunted.

  “I don’t know what light you think I might shed.” He tipped his chin. “As you say, we have only just entered the war, and to date my role has been…” he paused and worked his teeth over his bottom lip, “… more of a type of surveillance.”

  “And yet,” Jem said, “you have made such close connections that you are a hair’s breadth away from Montague and Spenser, two men with a history of trade with anarchist bombs and even aligned with a ring that saw girls sold into the States.”

  “These things have been proven?”

  “As good as,” Merinda said.

  “Almost,” Jem said simultaneously. Chagrined, she murmured, “We haven’t ever been able to find quite enough evidence.”

  “But we know. We just know.” Merinda’s voice was adamant.

  Carr rose and tipped his hat to them. “Ladies, I admire you. As does Mr. Montague. You are emblems of the resilience and fortitude we will need of our women as we step forward into the fray.” His accompanying smile held condescension. “But don’t steer yourselves off course.”

  Merinda looked to Jem helplessly. There was something about Carr that set her off. Meeting her friend’s eyes, she noticed a slight, mischievous sparkle and waited for the inevitable plan that would follow.

  Jem stepped forward and feigned uneasiness, tottering slightly on her heels and falling forward before feeling Carr’s steadying arms around her. Merinda pounced on the folder he dropped. Jem flittered her eyes open to watch Merinda rifle through it for anything of importance, rounding her blue eyes to the size of saucers while thanking Carr profusely.

  The agent seemed hesitant to release her from his grip once he had assisted her to her feet. Jem looked around his shoulder to receive a slight nod from her friend.

  He took his leave the moment Merinda handed him the slightly lighter folder, straightening his shoulders and casting one last appreciative look at Jemima.

  “You have an admirer.” Merinda beamed as she patted her vest, which covered the tightly folded papers she had managed to pilfer from him.

  “Odious man,” Jem said, sneering.

  “Oh, I wasn’t talking about Philip Carr,” Merinda joshed, looping Jem’s arm with her own. “Come on. We’ll take a taxi home to save your rib from more exertion this morning.”

  “You’re more astute than I took you for.” Ray assessed Martha appreciatively as Mrs. Malone ushered her into the sitting room of Merinda’s townhouse.

  “I went to your home address,” Martha explained, smoothing her skirt under her on the settee. “And, well, assumed you had the good sense to avoid staying there and wondered where to find you. I know of your particular connection with Constable Forth and was happy when you suggested meeting here.” Martha looked around. “It must be nice to be able to appropriate Merinda Herringford’s parlor for your personal use.”

  “She owes me one,” Ray said quietly.

  “I think you are the person I need in order to be able to make good the faith that Waverley put in me before I came here.”

  Ray fingered through his notebook and extracted the letter Jasper had given him from the murder scene. “Alexander Waverley left these notes in his desk for a reason.”

  Martha looked over them. “The munitions smuggling theory.” She shrugged. “This will come out eventually.”

  Ray’s expression darkened. “You are a journalist. It is your job to expose the corruption in our higher politics.”

  She tugged the pencil tucked behind her ear and tapped him playfully on the shoulder. “If you are committed to using the splendor of my byline, I think I have some say in how you use it.”

  �
�This is a real story, Miss Kingston.”

  “So is the lineup at City Hall every Monday morning. Children and their parents clutching cards that label them.” She smiled and pointed the pencil at him. “That is the story I need.”

  “Then write it yourself. I am unsure how I can help you.”

  “Remember what I told you at the Pelhams’ last night?”

  “It was hard to hear much over the clang of expensive silverware.” Ray looked up as Mrs. Malone entered with the tea service and a plate of sandwiches.

  “Toronto is a grid of papers. Each daily has its share. The Globe is the most respectable. The others teeter off with their own Whig views or liberal nonsense down the rungs of the ladder to rags like the Hogtown Herald.” Her growing smile was matched by a glint in her eye. “Suppose one paper unified the readership and became the most read daily because it spoke specifically to current events from a perspective that broadly swept the entirety of the Toronto experience.” Her smile stretched “Toronto needs a unified voice. One that represents and straddles all worlds. Has a pulse on the political climate and knows the inner workings of the corrupt police force, but also has a decided talent for engaging the lower classes.” Martha inclined her chin. “A voice that champions all stations.” She poked his shoulder with the end of her pencil. “DeLuca, nothing in the world is as effective as a piece by someone who has lived through prejudice. You have a Canadian wife, and yet you’re expected to line up and present yourself every month, while your home country is seen as a stick of dynamite that could blow towards the war?” She slapped his notebook emphatically. “Write that.”

  Ray had opened his mouth to respond when he heard voices in the foyer.

  “Coffee, Mrs. Malone!” a voice unmistakably Merinda’s erupted from the foyer.

  Ray shot Martha a half smile as the girls removed their hats and stepped into the room.