The Bachelor Girl's Guide to Murder (7 page)

“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.

D
AY
S
EVEN
.
I want to hear the St. James church bells.

D
AY
E
IGHT
.
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.

D
AY
N
INE
.
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.

D
AY
T
EN
.
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…

D
AY
T
WENTY-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

W
ho 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.

D
AY
T
WENTY-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?