The Bachelor Girl's Guide to Murder

by Rachel McMillan

  “Back to Fiona, please.”

  “Well, he paid Forbes and Tony to move the body to the theatre. Nothing would embarrass Montague more than a dead woman found in his gorgeous new theatre. And the more Gavin got in debt the more he wanted to deflect the blame. Maybe cause some confusion. Maybe paint a different villain. Fingers of accusation pointed away from Gavin, and the publicity of a dead body on that new red carpet did not please Montague. Especially as Horace Milbrook was inching ahead in the election race.”

  “And what about Grace?” Jasper asked, sipping from a refilled coffee cup. “Gavin again?”

  “Obviously. When Fiona was killed, Grace, Fiona’s friend and confidante, surmised that Gavin had done it. She confronted him and told him she knew everything. She also knew from her connections that he had bought the silence of other people in town, and she believed he would buy hers, as well. Unfortunately for her, he did want her silence, but the solution he had in mind was more permanent.”

  Jasper nodded approvingly. “And he has his goons drop her body at another high-profile Montague event. I must say, Merinda, you really do have a knack for this.”

  She stamped her foot. “Don’t patronize me, Jasper. You’d figured all of this out already, hadn’t you?”

  “Not all of it. Your connections are ingenious. I actually didn’t start piecing it together until our day at the Danforth racetrack.”

  Merinda nodded. “More gambling. He used Tippy for this. Another susceptible girl easily bought.” She flopped on her chair near the fireplace and threw back a glug of Turkish coffee.

  “You’re forgetting another woman he used,” Jasper said soberly.

  “Who, Jem?” Merinda shook her head. “No. Jem was never taken in by him. She knew exactly what he was. I think he was interested in her because he saw our exploits turning up in the Hog and he knew she worked with Tippy. But we turned the tables on him!”

  There was a knock at the door, and presently Mrs. Malone came into the sitting room bearing an unsigned telegram.

  Merinda’s face went pale as she read.

  Jasper straightened. “What?”

  She crumpled the telegram and threw it at him. “Take it. Solve it. I am not solving anything anymore.” She stood and faced the chalkboard. “How could I have been so stupid?”

  Jasper read the telegram and sighed. “So Gavin has Jem. And Tippy. We’ll find them, Merinda. We’ll give him whatever he wants.”

  “Cracker jacks, Jasper! He was smarter than I thought. Poor Jem!” Merinda wrung her hands. “I wanted to wrap up this case, clean off the chalkboard, and move onto the next thing! Instead, the mystery I have to solve is the most important of my life. He wants to leave town and has spent the past weeks wiping Toronto clean of anything that could implicate him.”

  “And the last two girls who know his secrets.” Jasper stared ruefully at his cup of coffee. “Where would he take two innocent females?”

  “They could be anywhere in the city.” She flipped through her mind’s catalogue.

  Jasper went to the kitchen and telephoned the station to tell them of the missing girls. He returned to the sitting room and opened his hand toward Merinda. “Time to let the police take over, Merinda. I’ve been happy to let you do some sleuthing on your own, but this is getting too serious. I won’t let you take the risk.”

  “You don’t let me do anything, Jasper Forth!” Merinda growled. “I am a free woman. Now, help me think where he might have taken them.” She inhaled sharply. “The theatre! The Winter Garden! It has to be there!”

  Jasper shook his head. “There’s likely to be a show there on Saturday, Merinda.”

  “He’s not remarkably intelligent,” she said.

  “I don’t think it’s the Winter Garden. Not today. That would be sloppy. Every criminal has an inherent need to put their thumbprint on whatever they do. Your M.C. Wheaton says that. Crawley won’t be careless about this.”

  Merinda flopped backward on the settee and closed her eyes tight, torn between her desire to race about the city looking for Jem and her need to think this through logically, to understand the mind of a killer. Sherlock Holmes compared his brain to an attic, with different compartments storing necessary information. He didn’t keep any information in there that would obscure the most essential facts. Merinda imagined herself in an attic looking through boxes. She went back to the box from the very beginning of their association with Gavin.

  The Elgin Theatre.

  The Election Gala.

  The Ward.

  The hidden Winter Garden Theatre.

  Spenser’s.

  Jem falling for DeLuca, ever so slowly. Ever so obviously.

  Jem looking through DeLuca’s journal—

  She sat up. DeLuca’s Journal. She followed that thought for a moment, pressing the heels of her palms into her closed eyes. The man in one of the entries had had impeccable manners and a clipped voice. He’d talked about a garden and girl. A garden, a girl, and a tunnel Ray had thought existed only in fables.

  Then she thought about the tunnel: the dampness of Fiona’s clothes when they found her, the sediment under her fingernails.

  She grabbed Jasper’s arm so tightly she cut off its circulation. “I know where they are.”

  Jem thought it rather unfortunate that Gavin Crawley was holding a gun to her head. After all, she had only recently had a life-affirming moment at St. James. Tippy was there too, held tightly by Forbes. It was further unfortunate that Merinda wasn’t there to fill her with confidence—or to strike these men across the head with her blasted crowbar.

  She didn’t know which cold, uninhabited building Gavin had brought them to, thanks to the blindfolds they’d used on her and Tippy. They’d taken Jem’s off now that they were here, wherever ‘here’ was, and they were taking Tippy’s off too. But the girl stumbled, forcing both Forbes and Gavin to reach to steady her, and it was then that Jem saw her chance.

  She kicked Gavin’s shin and darted off. It was only a moment before she realized that her too-high heels were slowing her down, and they made a horrid noise that was too easy to follow. She kicked them off and ran silently into the darkness.

  They shouted and at least one of them gave chase, but she had the advantage for the moment. She raced down a corridor and ducked into a narrow spot beside a tall cabinet, forcing herself to breathe quietly. Forbes went through several doorways looking for her, but always he returned to the corridor where she hid. Finally he drew even with her cabinet. She held her breath.

  In the end, it was a rat that ratted her out. As Forbes passed, he startled the rat from some hiding place. It dropped from a vent shaft above Jem and fell onto her head. Its horrible body and wormy tail snaked across her shoulder and its claws got tangled in her hair. And Jem could hardly be blamed for letting loose an involuntary shriek that echoed across the corridor.

  “Hello there.” Forbes grabbed her arm and tugged her into the half-light of the corridor. He brandished his pistol at her. “Let’s get you back to—”

  Jem lowered her head and bit his knuckles. It probably wasn’t the pain so much as the surprise that made him drop the gun. It clattered to the floor and Jem was afraid it would go off. But it didn’t, so she grabbed it and pointed it at his face. “I’m going to use it!” Jem’s voice quaked. She threatened and pointed, just as she had learned from Jasper.*

  “Stop that.” Forbes reached out and snatched it from her. He pointed it at her nose and forced her back toward Gavin.

  “Rats!” she squeaked.

  Where is Merinda? Jem squeezed her eyes shut. This was the second time in as many months she had been held at the whim of a man several times larger than herself while Merinda enjoyed the fresh air.† Tippy was tied up not far from her, and Gavin was rapping his pistol on his expensive trousers. What were they planning to do with them? Jem imagined a thousand scenarios, but they all ended in death. Or at least a good deal of discomfort.

  The gag cut the corners of her mouth, and her
feet and hands were bound. She tried to pull free, but all she managed to do was squirm. She cursed her poor, bound frame affixed to the upturned crate.

  She thought about Ray. She thought about Merinda and Jasper. Then she thought about her childhood and the letter she had just ripped up admonishing her imprudent behavior. It was imprudent, wasn’t it? What right did she have to color so far outside the lines of propriety?

  Then she thought about Tippy, and she gazed at the poor girl, tied up and as good as dead now. Jem and Merinda had put themselves in danger willingly. But Tippy had approached them to avoid danger. And now look at her.

  Gavin moved closer and traced her neckline with his finger. Jem’s eyes never left the revolver at his hip level, even as he lowered his mouth, removed the bind from her lips, and brushed her with a kiss. “I’ve no trouble disposing of disposable women, Jemima. What I’m deciding,” he said, raising the gun to her temple, “is exactly how to do it.”

  * After a lesson in which Merinda failed to empty the bullets out of the pistol they used for practice, Jasper declined to help any further.

  † Jem recorded that first adventure in the story “A Singular and Whimsical Problem.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The bank layers three levels. The lifts are to the right. Down the shaft there is a path to Victoria Street. A subterranean tunnel, built in case of siege in the City of York in the nineteenth century, begins under its foyer and snakes underneath, coming just outside Massey Hall. The tunnels are closely encased, narrow, and suffocating. So old, indeed, that no one can be sure that time and wear have not crumbled it into a dirt avalanche.

  From Toronto Architecture of the New Century, William Flanders, ed.

  Merinda had changed into tweed, cotton, and suspenders and was rapping her walking stick on her palm. “I’d really rather do this alone,” she said for the third time as she and Jasper sat in the cab heading toward Yonge.

  Gavin Crawley had bragged in a prison cell that he knew the inner workings of Dominion Bank, so they were headed there now.

  “Yes,” Jasper said, also for the third time, “but then you’d actually have to use that ridiculous tunnel. You’d perhaps suffocate from crumbling dirt, and even if you made your way to the bank, you’d have no sure way of getting inside.”

  The cab deposited them at the Dominion Bank, and Jasper’s identification got them past one of the two guards on duty on a Saturday. Inside, the other guard was holding a bloody cloth to his forehead. “There’s been a break in.”

  “I can see that,” Jasper said. “I’m with the police. Your friend outside will see you get medical attention. Then both of you please call the station for backup.”

  The man gazed at him dizzily. “They broke in.”

  Jasper led Merinda across the grand foyer, their steps echoing on the tile. A few desks, sequestered with iron grates, lined each side of the bank lobby.

  “The security here isn’t wonderful, is it?” Merinda sniffed. “If I had an account here, I would close it.”

  Boom.

  Jasper held Merinda back. “Hush. Someone’s breaking into the safe.”

  Given the cavernous acoustics of the place, it was impossible to deduce whether the sound had come from above or below. Merinda only hoped it wasn’t anywhere near Tippy and Jem. She still didn’t know for sure that Gavin had brought them here, but the break-in at this time seemed unlikely to be coincidental.

  Jasper turned to Merinda. “You go try to find Jem. I’ll follow the sound and try to stop the robbery.”

  Merinda nodded and went out again into the grand entrance of the bank. Maybe there would be some clue there as to where Gavin had taken Jem. She’d been there less than thirty seconds when a side door opened, and she scuttled behind a pillar as a figure emerged.

  Forbes.

  He didn’t scan the lobby at all, or he would’ve seen her. Instead, he concentrated on pulling the door shut behind him—it didn’t want to stay latched—while he held a pistol in the other hand.

  He tucked the pistol under his arm and yanked the door shut again and again, his anger growing. And Merinda seized her opportunity.

  She crossed the distance quickly, silently. And when she was upon him, she dropped her walking stick and leaped onto Forbes’s back. The gun fell to the floor and he struggled to fling Merinda off, but she tightened her grip around his neck. She was strong, but he was bigger—and unpredictable. She could never calculate which way he would turn next.

  He finally threw her from him. She sprawled across the floor of the lobby, very near her walking stick. She grabbed it and lunged at Forbes just as he retrieved his pistol and fired.

  Merinda stopped dead in her tracks, the blood draining from her face. But she felt no pain, and now Forbes was lunging at her again.

  She reared back with her crowbar and pounded him on the head with it. He collapsed in a heap.

  “I should have known you’d be a wretched shot,” said Merinda, and she set off through the side door in pursuit of Jem.

  “I heard a gunshot!”

  Jem’s eyes were wide. “I did too.”

  Gavin swung his pistol from Jem’s head and in the direction of the sound, which was down the corridor where Forbes had left them a few minutes before.

  “Don’t shoot!” It was Merinda’s voice, echoing down the tunnel.

  Gavin shook his pistol down the corridor. “Don’t try anything!”

  “I won’t!” Merinda sounded almost chipper. “I surrender!”

  That seemed to give Gavin pause, but he quickly recovered. “Get in here and sit down, then.”

  Merinda stepped into the room where Jem and Tippy were tied up. She was dressed in her customary trousers, of course, but she’d lost her bowler. Why had she surrendered? Jem shot her a look, but Merinda only winked.

  “Where’s Forbes?” Gavin asked, grabbing Merinda and beginning to tie her up.

  “No idea. You brought that goon with you, did you?”

  Gavin tied Merinda up, feet and hands. It annoyed Jem how cheerful Merinda seemed. Jem’s own heart, by this point, was in her throat.

  When Gavin had secured Merinda to his satisfaction, he waved the barrel of his pistol. “You three don’t go anywhere, you hear?” He headed off down the corridor. “Forbes!”

  “He’s robbing the bank, Merinda!” Jem said frantically. “With Forbes.”

  “That much is evident, Jemima.”

  Jem started crying softly, a luxury she had not afforded herself before, when she’d been trying to stay strong for Tippy.

  Merinda struggled against her bonds. “These ropes are pretty tight,” she said.

  Tippy, still gagged, silently watched Merinda, who was all smiles and sparkly eyes.

  “Gavin is going to kill us,” Jem said through chattering teeth. “Why are you so blasted cheerful?”

  “Ooh,” Merinda said, “I think my foot fell asleep.”

  “Merinda!” Jem said, stomping her bound feet together. “You shouldn’t have come here without a plan! Do you have a plan?”

  “You’re not still crying, are you?”

  “Yes. Yes, Merinda, I am crying. Our lives are almost over. And look at poor Tippy.”

  Merinda laughed. “It’s not nearly as dire as all that. Jasper is here and the police are on their way. And I’ll bet a dollar DeLuca’s not far behind to get it all down for the Hog. He was the one who telegraphed that you’d been taken.”

  “I’m a horrible bachelor girl detective,” Jem whimpered, not even brightening at the mention of Ray’s name. “I wasn’t cut out for this.”

  “Then what were you cut out for, Jemima?” Merinda tsked at her. “You’re my adventurous and perfect Watson.”

  Jem fought back a sob. “I was cut out to tend house and have babies and marry some man who doesn’t mind a girl who”—she hiccupped and gulped a few tears—“sometimes gets in danger and—”

  “Nonsense, my darling Jem. Such a man does not exist.”

  In a
ll of the romantic novels Jem had ever read, this would be the precise moment when the heroine would feel faint and require smelling salts. Instead, she straightened her shoulders. “I beg to differ.”

  “Cracker jacks,” Merinda said. “You are much better off here with me.”

  “Better off here! With you? Perhaps the gravity of our situation is not clear to you,” Jem hissed. “Gavin has a gun and he means to kill us, and our poor corpses will be found somewhere just… just like F-Fiona and Grace and… ”

  “Shh!” Merinda said, looking down the corridor.

  Jem heard heavy footfalls. More than one set. It had to be Gavin. No one else knew they were here, did they? Oh, he would not give Jem a painless death, she knew that now. She said a quick prayer and resigned herself to whatever would come next.

  But the man who stepped into the light was not Gavin, not Forbes, but Constable Jasper Forth, leading a detachment of Toronto’s finest.

  “Jasper!” Merinda said. “Perfect timing!”

  “Merinda!” Jasper went straight to her and began working on the ropes binding her. Then he seemed to remember himself and noticed the others. “And Jem, and Tippy! What luck! Come on, gents. Hop to. Untie these ladies and let’s get them out of here.”

  The policemen got them all untied quickly.

  Jem stood, rubbing her wrists. “What happened to Gavin?”

  “In custody,” Jasper said, jabbing his thumb in the direction of the corridor. “Forbes too. Waiting for the paddywagon.”

  “Good,” Jem said, and promptly fainted.

  Merinda adjusted her bowler and happily watched two constables trundle Forbes and Gavin out to the police automobile. A small crowd had gathered outside Dominion Bank to watch the spectacle.