The Bachelor Girl's Guide to Murder

by Rachel McMillan

  “Or mass?”

  “I go to a different mass.”

  “You don’t go to St. Paul’s at all anymore, do you?” Viola’s brow furrowed and she crossed herself. Their deceased mother would turn over in her grave.

  Ray started at the thought of the gorgeous cathedral in the heart of Corktown. “I haven’t been going to mass for a long time.”

  The door creaked open on its rusty hinges, and they both turned at the sound. Tony appeared, drenched and stumbling. Viola ran to get a towel while Ray concentrated on swallowing his temper. His fists were so tightly pressed that he felt the crescents of his fingernails digging into his palms.

  Tony’s eyes widened at Ray. “What are you doing here?”

  Ray narrowed his eyes. “What were you doing at the Elgin Theatre today where that girl was murdered?”

  Viola gasped loudly. “Stop!”

  “Shhh!” Tony hissed. “You’ll wake the boy and I’ll get no sleep! And take off my sweater.”

  “You’re drunk, Tony.” Viola’s voice was soft.

  Ray clenched his teeth. “You’re surprised?”

  “Get your useless brother out of my house.” Tony edged by Viola and crashed around in the kitchen until he found a half-full bottle of whiskey. He popped the cap and took a swig.

  “Stop!” Viola pleaded. “Stop. This drinking is why Ray is here. This is why you go off and end up where a girl has been killed. Stop.” She reached out, tugging at the bottle. Tony held fast to it while shoving her back with his free hand. Viola toppled against the counter.

  Ray looked up at Tony. His jaw hurt from clenching, and every sinew in his body ached from being suppressed. He looped back his arm and let loose a swing.

  Merinda and Jem thawed themselves in front of the fire. Jem could tell that Merinda was puzzling out the connection between the two murdered women. But Jem’s mind was on herself and her embarrassing performance, which had culminated in losing her trousers in front of that DeLuca fellow. Who, most likely, would skewer it across the morning headlines. She played the scene over and over again, and each time it was more humiliating. This was the first man who had ever seen her without layers of a carefully constructed feminine cage, and she flushed and sank lower into her chair at the thought. How had she looked? Were her thighs too thick? Her waist too thin?

  She still had the reporter’s coat folded over her arm. She lifted it to her nose and inhaled. It was a piney hybrid of outdoors, sweat, and rain. She allowed her truant fingers to find their way into the pockets.

  A notebook. She impulsively removed it.

  “You’ve got the right idea, Jem!” Merinda snatched one end of the coat. “Let’s go exploring.” Merinda found a pocket watch in the tawny folds of the other pocket.

  “Clues?” Jem said. “But the reporter was just there for the speech. He can’t have been involved in the murders.” She sniffed again, deeply. “It smells like the city. The lapping harbor, the steam and grime of the wharfs, the overcrowded stench of the Ward. A soft fall breeze.”

  “You can smell all that? Oh, look!” Merinda excavated a pencil nub and snatched the coat to her side of the hearth. “I wonder what he was doing there. Did your trousers fall off in front of a murderer?”

  Jem was absently inspecting her fingers. “Mmm?”

  “What’s that black stuff on your hand?”

  “It’s ink. His fingernails were black with it. He shook my hand and left some on me. I told you, he’s not the murderer. He’s a reporter.”

  “The coat is very old. Threadbare, almost. And I don’t think he was the original owner. I only saw him for a moment, but he’s a medium-sized man, and this coat is barely large enough for you. I don’t think it’s his.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Well, if he killed someone, maybe he left his coat and took this one instead.”

  “Poor Ray DeLuca,” Jem said with a laugh, “unaware he is the subject of your irrational presumptions.”

  “Ray DeLuca? That was Ray DeLuca?”

  Jem’s eyes widened. “You know him?”

  “He’s that fellow from the Hog.”

  “You read the Hog?”

  “Yes, I read the Hog,” said Merinda. “He wrote a long muckraking piece on the Don Jail. I like him. He hates the Morality Squad. Too bad he might be a murderer.”

  “I told you, he’s not.”

  But Merinda was no longer listening. Turning the pocket watch over in her hands, she brought the coat out to the kitchen. “Something for the laundry, Mrs. Malone,” Jem heard her say.

  “Sherlock Holmes discovers a lot from a pocket watch in The Sign of the Four,” Merinda said as she returned to the sitting room. “Silver. A bit tarnished. And look—something written on the back. Can’t read it.” She tossed the watch to Jem, who caught it handily.

  “Italian,” said Jem, looking at the inscription. She flipped the watch open and heard its beguiling tick. A picture of a pretty woman and a little boy was pasted just inside.

  Jem looked at it and blinked a few times. “His wi—Well, his family.”

  “You’re acting very strange this evening, Jemima.” Merinda took the watch back and closed it. “The journal seems more interesting than this old thing.” She motioned for Jem to pass it over. Pasted on the front flap was another sentimental memento, a grainy picture of two children, the sun stretched behind them. Merinda didn’t give it more than a moment’s thought before turning the first pages.

  Jem felt more than a little guilty as Merinda began reading Ray DeLuca’s thoughts aloud.

  Merinda opened to a page full of flowery thoughts about a girl named Angelica. Half in Italian. She snorted and moved on. There was nothing in the book about Ray’s wife and child, but there were pages and pages about a sister and nephew—most likely, Merinda decided, the people in the watch photograph.

  Finally, there was the material about the Don Jail. He had detailed events and descriptions that Merinda remembered reading about in Ray’s Hogtown Herald pieces. Other aspects he’d recorded about the jail were even more disturbing, and Jem felt as if she were exhuming a sordid new underworld she had never imagined.

  DAY ONE. Incarcerated. McCormick wants me to go muckraking on account of there being little news other than the rumored and abhorrent conditions here. Blasted newspaper editors! I offered to help. But carrying through with that offer means mold, lice, dirt and a horrible mixture of watery oats that constitutes dinner.

  DAY THREE. Hungry as I was on the passage, and I remember that gnawing ghost pain.

  Merinda stopped and moved to the chalkboard beside their hearth. It was used for everything from grocery lists to Jemima’s work schedule and a few chemistry problems she and Jasper were trying to crack on weekends. She wiped it clean with her sleeve and began a list of suspects:

  Ray DeLuca

  Tertius Montague

  Fred O’Hare

  “Fred O’Hare?” Jem asked, reading the unfamiliar name.

  “Fiona’s fiancé. He was at the rally tonight.”

  Jem took up the journal and continued reading aloud:

  My bunkmate is a fellow named Forbes. He is known to me through my brother-in-law, Tony. The flat tick we sleep on is little more than a hard slat. And his bulk spills over the sides.

  DAY SEVEN. I want to hear the St. James church bells.

  DAY EIGHT. My first visitor arrived today. Constable Forth.

  Jem and Merinda locked eyes. Merinda took the journal and read it aloud.

  He pulled a favor so he could come and sit on the opposite side of the bars. I have met him a few times. That amiable face of his was the brightest thing I’ve seen in the Don since I arrived.

  He could give me only crumbs of news. He checked on Viola and Luca for me, like the solid man he is. His mother offered to watch Luca while Viola looked for work. He brought them cookies and bread. This man—a stranger—takes better care of them than Tony does.

  DAY NINE. Viola sent a tear-spattered note. She
’s sure I’m on the peg for something I was driven to do out of poverty from supporting her. I wonder if Tony receives the same heartbreak every time he’s tossed in jail after a drunken rage somewhere.

  DAY TEN. The fellow on the other side of the cell is rambling. I can make out his face just barely in the slight shaft of sunlight. He might be drunk. He lights up a cigar. He’s talking about flowers from his garden. Flowers he cut for a girl. She’s not good for him, he tells me. He’s stuttering a little. Probably a nervous habit. He asks me, half-mad, if I knew of a path under Yonge that connects the old bank to the Massey Hall. I thought that tunnel was a legend. He’s rambling about the Count of Monte Cristo and how he could escape. He knows about tunnels. They were built in the 1812 war in case of a siege.

  He doesn’t sound like the others here. He’s a bit of a dandy. Muttering something about the Ward. Got a girl in trouble. It’s a story I’ve heard countless times before. Then he starts on again about his knowledge of the Dominion Bank. There’s a tunnel there that stretches from under it to the Massey Hall on Shuter Street. I’ve sketched it in my mind. It was the most amusing thing I’ve heard in days…

  DAY TWENTY-ONE. It’s fortunate Constable Forth’s mother has been kind to Viola. For, currently, Tony is in the Don as well. Seems to know my bunkmate, Forbes, quite well. He broke into Spenser’s. Heaven knows what he wanted from a department store. Well, I know that whatever the reason for his crime, it was farmed for a pretty penny. Sad how the same story plays over and over. It seems those of darkest hearts and cleanest hands know exactly who to prey upon for a fast dollar.

  I watch Tony and think of the little boy who once played jacks with me by the river. He’s still pleasant enough when he laughs. But he rarely laughs. Life in America was supposed to be better for us, but it has taken all the lightness from him.

  Merinda closed the journal. “This gives a little more depth to those Don Jail articles, eh?”

  They said good night, and Jem ascended the steps, performed her evening toilette, and went to bed. And there, tucked beneath her floral eiderdown, she explored Ray DeLuca’s journal more carefully.

  From her brief encounter with him, she had not imagined he would have such delicate handwriting. She brightened the lamp on her side table and flipped through the thin pages. She read his notes, dated and detailing the scenarios of the day as well as appointments and ideas for articles. Some entries were difficult to understand, and some involved a shorthand code of names and places.

  This Ray DeLuca was a reformer, as was evident through his observations on the horrid conditions of St. John’s Ward. Some pages bore nothing but quotations and overheard statements of a judicial, legal, or municipal tone. And there were even a few poems—terrible ones, she was forced to admit—in the style of Wordsworth. They were ill-fitting, like his coat, Jem observed.

  Reading his notebook was like reading a cadence of the city. It was a strange little book, this collection of thoughts and poems and scribblings. Jem’s favorite aspect of it was the running lexicon he kept in the back pages, proof that English still presented a challenge: Beguiled. Ornery. Significant. Precipice. Cumulonimbus.

  She bit back her smile, and with a jumble of vocabulary words lolling around in her head, she fell fast asleep.

  * A year earlier, Ray DeLuca had feigned arrest to be tossed in a cell at the Don Jail with a poor excuse for a trial. From its depths, he investigated the unfair treatment of the prisoners there. Along the way, he learned how easy it was to bribe guards—and to get a sentence cut short by being affiliated with Mayor Tertius Montague.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A lady must choose her company wisely for a man who turns his earnest eye in her direction will want to survey where and with whom she chooses to spend her idle hours. If she is assumed to be aligned with those who do not meet with his careful discretion, it might deter him from pressing suit and a bachelor girlhood, through no fault of her own save clumsiness, may have been cost a potential husband.

  Dorothea Fairfax’s Handbook to Bachelor Girlhood

  Who is the Corktown Murderer?” Jem read Gavin Crawley’s byline from the breakfast table.

  Merinda swallowed a large bite of toast and marmalade. “The Corktown Murderer?”

  “Both the murdered girls were from Corktown—most of the Irish immigrants live there,” said Jem. “Fiona Byrne and Grace Kennedy. Sound decidedly Irish to me.”

  “And you look decidedly dreadful. Did you sleep at all last night?”

  Jem’s mouth dropped open, but she was spared from having to form a reply by Mrs. Malone’s voice coming from the doorway. “Constable Forth is here.”

  Jasper stepped into the kitchen wearing civilian clothes. His blue eyes were highlighted by purple rings of fatigue.

  “Speaking of decidedly dreadful,” Merinda mumbled from the side of her mouth. “Coffee, Jasper?”

  Jasper smiled weakly and took the chair she offered him. She poured and plopped in two lumps of sugar and a dribble of cream. Just the way she liked it.

  “Now, Jasper,” Merinda said, “we are going to need you to arrest Ray DeLuca.”

  Jem suppressed surprise.

  Jasper tested the coffee. “That muckraker from the Hog?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “He saw Jem en déshabille and she has been up half the night worrying that she will be his next headline in that silly Hog newspaper.” Merinda didn’t mention they had been rifling through his journal.

  “Merinda,” cried Jem, “that is not true.”

  “Nonsense. I deduced. Look at you.”

  Jem slumped a little lower in her chair.

  “I can’t arrest anyone right now, unfortunately,” said Jasper, patting his street clothes. “We were found out, girls. Someone reported my letting you near the first body. And I am off the case. The Corktown case. Any case. Temporary demotion. I’m back on the traffic squad.”

  Merinda moaned. “That’s no use to me!”

  “And you both need to stop bounding about in pants. That band of moralizers is cracking the whip hard. I never should’ve taken you to the Elgin. Now look where it’s got me.” Jasper ruefully inspected his coffee cup.

  “What’s your new beat?” Jem asked gently.

  “King and Yonge. Worst intersection in the city. And there’s threat of a trolley strike.”

  Jem and Merinda exchanged an empathetic glance.

  “I am terribly sorry, Jasper.” Jem placed her hand over his. “It’s a rotten business, and we never should have been there in the first place.”

  “Thank you, Jemima.” He seemed to be waiting for Merinda to extend the same sympathies, but judging from her expression, she was miles away.

  They lingered a few moments longer, Jasper in no great hurry to return to the King and Yonge beat, until Jemima had to begin preparing for work. She tucked a pressed shirtwaist into her best black skirt and headed out for Spenser’s Department Store.

  Settled on the streetcar, Jem spent her short commute peeking into Ray’s journal again, looking up sheepishly now and then on the off-chance that its owner was nearby.

  DAY TWENTY-TWO. Tony won’t quit talking about Spenser. They tell me he deserved to be robbed. They have heard no end from their friends in the warehouse of how he mistreats his employees and will do anything to dock pay or keep from having to dole out the money his workers are owed. I tell them there are better ways to get something done, but they wonder how you can get the attention of someone who won’t hear you other than to take back what is rightfully yours.

  Jem snapped the book shut as the driver called her stop. She alighted and crossed Yonge to the stories-high red brick of Spenser’s, admiring the opulent window displays as she walked down Queen Street to the employee entrance.

  Her initial employment at Spenser’s Department Store had been as a mailroom girl. She’d spent eight hours a day opening letters from catalogue subscribers and sending them to the order room to be processed and filled
. Then there came a promotion, of sorts, to the packaging room, which was overseen by a surly foreman with a slick handlebar moustache. There with Tippy Carr, a slight blonde girl with doe eyes and a button nose, Jem giftwrapped packages and tied them with sateen ribbon. Jem was dedicated to her job—she needed the money, after all—but Tippy bordered on obsession.

  As the day progressed, Jem watched the clock. She watched it even more intently after three, aching to shrug into her coat and leave. Finally, five o’clock came and their shift ended. Jem sprang away from their table, but Tippy lingered.

  “You go on without me.”

  Jem knew that Tippy lived near Corktown and had little family to go home to. But she also knew that Tippy, more in need of the pay than Jem was, didn’t receive any overtime checks or goodwill from her long shifts. So why stay?

  Jem turned toward home, a little apprehensive as she saw newsies hawking the evening edition of the Hog. Would Ray DeLuca have found a way to work their humiliating meeting into a headline?

  She bought a copy of the Hog from a newsboy and flipped through it. Unless she missed it, there was nothing at all about a strange trouser-less girl.

  Jem breathed relief as she trudged up the stairs to their flat. She passed the paper to Merinda, who demanded it as soon as she spotted it tucked under her friend’s arm.

  “Well.” Merinda stretched her legs out on the Persian carpet as she read. “He didn’t get much more last night than any of the other reporters.” She waved a hand over several other newspapers strewn around the floor. Merinda had been examining them—quite closely, it would appear—since Jem had left for her shift that morning.

  “Is there anything of interest?”

  Merinda stretched. “I think the only thing of interest is the fact that Jasper is back on street patrol.”

  “Poor Jasper. That is awful. We ought to do something.”