The White Feather Murders
Page 21
“What do you want?” Merinda asked at the same time.
Montague assessed them, one triangular eyebrow raised.
“Mrs. DeLuca, might I presume that your husband is enjoying his… erm… unexpected advancement?”
Jem’s smile cut through Montague’s condescension. “He certainly is.”
“Hmm. Miss Herringford…” His watery gray eyes appraised her. “Have you found your way back to earth after your not inconsiderable efforts in bringing Skip McCoy, our sensational white feather murderer, to justice?”
“Sir, we would love to know why it was so important for us to meet you here.”
“You think that McCoy was your Moriarty.” Merinda shifted ever so slightly, though Montague noticed all the same. “Ah, yes. My son is quite a fan of Mr. Doyle. I am familiar with the great detective whom you emulate in your little adventures.”†
“I think Skip McCoy was the white feather murderer,” Merinda said evasively.
“And he was, wasn’t he? So the city is safe, isn’t it? With you at the helm?”
“I didn’t say anything of the kind, Your Honor.” Merinda tried on her own italics for size.
“But I know that’s what you feel in that womanly heart of yours. Oh, don’t give me that look, Miss Herringford. McCoy wasn’t your Moriarty. But I am.”
Though her pulse skipped, Merinda guffawed. “What are you talking about?”
“I play your game, but I loathe you. I play your game because my approval ratings go up. But you are against every modicum of order I intend to eke out in our city during this most inconvenient conflict.”
“Inconvenient!” Merinda spat. “You are probably receiving a cut of the munitions’ profit. You have probably won another turn. Skip did you a favor by eliminating any potential conflict.”
“I will always win.”
“What is it you want so badly?” Jem intervened.
“Control, Mrs. DeLuca. I want control. The world is in upheaval. Toronto is in upheaval. I need some safe, sane certainty—”
“That you will provide,” Merinda said, cutting in.
“You are not God.” Jem’s voice was low. “You cannot control, and you cannot decide. There is a higher power than you even in this country, and reporters will stomp out your corruption, and people like us will fight it.”
Montague watched Jem with interest. “And I thought you were the silent, subservient one.”
“What is the point of our meeting, Mr. Montague?” Merinda asked again.
“You have solved the white feather murders. You have seen a young man sent to his grave for crimes he committed. Those were the only crimes committed. A man driven by power he knew he would never have.”
“We all know that is only one layer of your treacherous cake!” Merinda cried.
“I am warning you, Miss Herringford. Play by my rules, and I will keep my Morality Squad off your backs. But don’t think I am not inspired by McCoy’s ingenuity.”
“Ingenuity?” Jem repeated.
While Montague addressed Jem, his eyes coldly sought Merinda’s. “Picking off those Miss Herringford holds dear one by one.”
Canadian men, in smart berets with crisp khaki uniforms and shimmering bronze buttons, shipped out daily as they had since the first regiment proudly marched from Exhibition Place through the downtown core, Jem and Merinda joining the witnessing throng.
The collective fervor stirred a proud community, but all too soon the streets emptied, and the men left on trains to Halifax before crossing the Atlantic, and the world chugged on behind them.
Merinda and Jem canvassed for Lady Adelaide’s hospital ship, capitalizing on their minor celebrity, posing with bowler hats while change jangled in their labeled tins.
“You are not God.” Merinda remembered Jem saying that to Montague. She chewed on this. She didn’t share her friends’ faith, but she saw the way it coursed through them, saw the way that it glistened in the eyes of the women sending their men away, saw the way it rippled through the national consciousness. This something higher than any understanding she would hammer away at. Merinda didn’t pretend to know much about God, but she knew that Montague was wrong. So she would saunter forth and arm herself against her own war. Her contribution beyond strips of bandages and canvassing for coins to contribute to a hospital ship.
“I am my own special brand of different,” Merinda decided, tilting her bowler at a jaunty angle. “And that’s all right with me.”
Merinda was told to go to the last bed, near the grated window. She tugged at her shirtwaist, straightened her back, and entered the large room.
The patient practically blended in with the starched ivory sheets. She seemed smaller than she ever had before. It would still be several weeks before she was released, the orderly had informed her.
“Hello, Mouse!” she said brightly. The girl’s wide brown eyes watched with interest as she lowered herself into a chair.
“Hello, Miss Herringford.”
“Mouse, you’re awake and alert!” Merinda inspected the bandage under Mouse’s hairline. Her right arm was in a cast. “You right scared me.”
“I knew I’d be all right. I’m more worried for Kat. She was in a state.”
“Where is she now?” Merinda looked about, as if Kat might pop out from behind a screen or curtain.
“She went to rustle up something to eat.”
“Well, you must be bored out of your socks. So I am here to keep you company. I brought a deck of cards.” Merinda reached into her trouser pocket and splayed the hand over the bedcover. “I can teach you something. Go Fish! Or—” Merinda reached into her other pocket and pulled out a folded Strand magazine. She unrolled its pages and opened it up. “I can read you a story.”
“What kind of story?”
“A ghost story. A horror story. You might get scared.”
“I won’t get scared.”
“Scared as a mouse!”
Mouse shook her head with a slight smile at the pun.
“Very well.” Merinda thumbed to the beginning of the greatest ghost story she had ever read and knew nearly by heart (with dramatic looks up from the well-worn pages now and then alongside a rather terrible attempt at dramatic recitation). “ ‘Mr. Sherlock Holmes,’” she read, “ ‘who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before.’ ”
Beginning with The House of the Baskervilles, she read Sherlock Holmes serials well into the night.
The invitation arrived on the peeling paint of the porch beyond the overgrown shrubs. A hand unfamiliar to Jemima scrawled on pearl-colored stationery, which clashed with their dusty furniture. Sure, they had moved to a new place with windows intact and a few extra rooms,‡ but some things, such as Jem’s attention to domestic detail, had not been transferred with their boxes and furniture on moving day.
“Ray?” she called. “I think we’ve been invited to a wedding…”
Ray bit his lip and rubbed at a smudge of ink on his ear. He shifted in his arm chair, watching Jemima as she traded one frock for the next, adjusted the pearls or brooch affixed to her collar, and kicked off one pair of heels before stepping into another. He had offered to buy her a new outfit with his increased salary, but she maintained that she had plenty of lovely things she could wear to Viola’s wedding. She wanted to make a good impression. She didn’t want to stand out too much.
Canada will experience pockets of prejudice my family never anticipated when we scraped together our fare for passage to our promised land. We will never learn who throws rocks through windows or smashes a printing press. The battle for our home front…
Ray chewed on the end of his pen. Those last words would make a corker of a headline.
“We can’t be late,” Jem chided, having apparently decided on a lemon-hued organdy.
“I rec
ognize the color of that dress, but it is… it is different somehow.”
“I had Mrs. Malone take off the sleeves and move the waist line.” She spun in front of the mirror. “You like it? It’s the more modern style and yet quite frugal!”
Ray smiled, struggling into his pin-striped jacket and two-toned shoes.
His Globe salary afforded him a sudden splurge on a rather sharp made-to-wear suit from the Spenser’s discount rack. He did up the top button of his collar. But not a moment later, his finger hooked, tugging at it, and he undid the button again. Then he wrestled out of the jacket.
Jem giggled at the transformation. A bit of something new fringing some irrepressible part of him that could never change. She edged toward him, and he felt the rustle of lace on his collar bone, the light scent of lavender tickling his nostrils. She ran her fingers over the back of his hair line. “It’s too short.”
“It looks smart. Professional.” He smoothed his hair down at the part line.
“Still too short.”
He combed it away from his face. “It’s not falling over my eyes.”
“I know!” She pouted. “Too short.”
“But dashing, right?” Ray tilted his head to the side.
“I suppose.”
Ray couldn’t keep his stomach from fluttering at the prospect of seeing his sister again. And Luca too. Ten minutes later, they stepped into the September sun tinged with the warmth of leftover August, yet pinged with a portentous hint of a chill to settle in. Jem looped her arm in his. After they deposited Hamish with Mrs. Malone, Jem smiled into the waning sunshine.
“Now admit to me, Ray DeLuca, that it is nice to have a night out. Just the two of us. We must allow ourselves one night now and then. Our son will be safe under the watch of Mrs. Malone.”
A smile tickled Ray’s cheek. “For one night. Now and then.”
She fell into him, and he took her hand in his, marred with ink, in momentary reprieve of any tremor.
It was a short jaunt of a trolley ride before they alighted at the mouth of the Ward. Evening was just flirting with the sunlight still staining the sky like a swath of butter from an uneven knife.
Jem had rarely experienced St. John’s Ward in broad daylight or on happy terms. So many of the clients she and Merinda received, especially during the first years of their practice, were residents of some of the ramshackle cottages. Ray tugged her hand gently into a side alleyway and through a shortcut to the Community Center. He explained that the hall was a prime example of the mosaic they were trying to achieve. Differences were left at the door, and despite barriers of language and tradition, a community was burgeoning.
Jem and Ray heard merry voices, a fiddle, and the tinny chords of an out-of-tune piano even before they entered the door.
Once inside, Viola was in Ray’s arms in a moment.
“It’s bad luck to cry on your wedding day, Vi,” he said, his voice cracking.
“Ray! I could hardly wait for you to get here.”
Viola then turned to Jem with a smile that lit up her entire face. “Welcome.” She pulled Jem close and kissed her on both cheeks.
A moment later Lars appeared with Luca at his side.
Ray shook Lars’s hand and was nearly bowled over by Luca’s quick embrace. His nephew remembered him. And fondly.
While they found their seats, Ray examined Lars, who looked at Viola as if she were a piece of fine china. Luca remained nearby, inquisitively looking up at the bear of a man with wide black eyes and expectant smile.
The ceremony was brief. Incense permeated the cedar pews and week-old communion wafers. Viola’s dress was secondhand: a yellowed ivory that smelt of mothballs when one was up close. Yet she was radiant underneath her makepiece veil and too-long skirt.
Lars’s voice was brusque as they tripped through their vows in a hybrid of Italian and Swedish and the English they were determined to master.
Then their new life officially began, and they led the procession to the basement, where the ladies of the neighborhood had laid out a feast days in the making.
Rickety boards in the unstable floor were whitewashed clean, though they were subject to the scrape of scuffed shoes.
A violinist played a tune in the corner, a pint of ale beside him.
Ray recognized a number of people, many from his intimate acquaintance with Toronto, who smiled and raised their glasses. And all the while Jem held tightly to his hand.
Food was piled high, and the sparse orchestra was in full swing.
On each side of the room, plaques and banners and poorly framed photographs displayed the Ward Boys, a mélange of dialects and nationalities strewn together by common cause all proving themselves to Canada. We will be home by Christmas. We will be home.
Lars towered over Viola. The DeLucas were never known for their prominence or stature. Viola smiled happily as Luca grabbed at her skirt and Lars tugged at her hand.
Ray, satisfied, let his eyes roam over the scene.
This was his Toronto. This hodgepodge, potluck crew of overlong hair and rehemmed dresses. Every person possessing a tapestry of stories, carrying his or her past like a rucksack on sunken shoulders. Not crushed by the weight, but instead hopeful for eventual rest.
Now they proudly gave their sons and fathers to the European conflict, aligning themselves to the Union Jack, embracing the tenuous jingoism of their appropriated home. A few tears were shed in remembrance of the fields and plains across the Atlantic, but Canada was branded on their hearts now.
Jem politely nodded and smiled at a man whose broken English was tinged with a Yiddish dialect, promising to save him a dance.
Ray tightened his grip on her hand and tugged her toward the center of the whirling crowd. Then he pulled her tightly to him. “I don’t know…” he paused, his breath momentarily stolen by her nearness, “… if I have ever properly asked you to dance.”
“You haven’t.” Her smile was giddy. “I didn’t know you knew how to dance! Yet you have your arms around me. You are holding me close…”
Very close. The lace at her neck tickled the space at his open collar again. “But I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, his eyes shifting down to her rib.
“I’ll take the risk. It’s just a little stiff. Almost as right as rain.”
The band struck up a familiar ditty known to both from Merinda’s gramophone. It spilled out in three-quarter time and Ray, to Jem’s surprise, turned her to the floor.
“I didn’t know you could waltz!” Jem sounded joyfully surprised.
“My little sister and I learned from our mother. I always anticipated a situation wherein I would want to spin the most beautiful woman in the city around a crowded room.”
Jem smiled, and they continued through several dances more.
“May I cut in?”
Jem turned her flushed face and met Viola’s kind gaze directly. “Of course,” she said, making her way to the side of the room.
Jem watched brother and sister dance, and her heart rose and then rested. Viola was a missing puzzle piece. Ray would never have quite been the same without her near. She was his connection to his life before Canada. She was his homeland.
Once the dance ended, Jem saw Ray looking for her in the crowd. She wondered if she would ever stop blushing when his gaze sought hers and then decided she didn’t care if she didn’t.
He strolled over, took her hand, and led her back to the dance floor.
His breath tickled a stray strand of hair from her chignon, his long fingers stayed at the small of her back, and she couldn’t tell right from left or her hat from her glove, and she didn’t care.
“We deserve a little magic,” she whispered into his right ear, his good ear, when she could manage enough of a voice to speak.
“A little?” he said with a sly grin, spinning her again.
Jasper peered out the lace curtains of his childhood bedroom over a neighborhood of picket fences and redbrick houses in row upon congenial row.
It had been years since Jasper had occupied the now-made bed. It didn’t really fit him anymore. His feet draped over its edge. But he wanted to make sure he spent the last night with his mother and father. After supper his mother had taken the clock off the parlor wall so her eyes wouldn’t be drawn to the time, so the rhythm of its tick wouldn’t toll the hours till morning.
Hearing his mother’s stern-sweet beckoning coming from downstairs, Jasper donned his robe over his pajamas and tied the belt.
He held on to the bannister, following the scent of breakfast with a slow stride. Might this be the last time I will descend from my bedroom to the wafting smell of syrup and pancakes?
His mother’s smile wavered, but the pancakes were hot, the syrup a sticky river through tasty fluff.
Everything was as it was when Jasper was a boy, his greatest worry losing a round of marbles to the school bully.
“I want to make this morning last!” he said.
His mother nodded, piling another stack of pancakes on stoneware whose design he used to make out with his fork on meatloaf night.§
“Why has every morning of my life dragged, while the one morning I want to keep forever rushes by?” his mother wondered in an uneven voice.
Lemon light pierced through the homemade gingham curtains.
“You’ll come back, though,” his father said gruffly, following Jasper’s gaze to the window. “And we’re proud of you.”
“Have you seen your friends, then?” Jasper’s mother’s hand trembled around her teacup, and Jasper was pained to see her trying so hard to keep herself in check.
“I have.”
“Well, we’ll see you off.”
Jasper swallowed a bite of pancake, shaking his head. “No. I don’t want to remember you there, me looking back and you unable to keep your heart from breaking in front of me.” He took his mother’s hand and squeezed gently. “I won’t look back at all. Like Lot’s wife from the Sunday school story.” He cracked a smile. “I want to remember you here, waving from the front door like you did when I would head off to school.”