The Bachelor Girl's Guide to Murder (27 page)

“Mrs. Malone is here. And if you go to sleep, as I intend to do, then you'll forget and in the morning, at the breakfast table, in broad daylight, it won't seem so odd after all.” Jem looked pained and unconvinced. “Jemima.” Merinda's voice was firm. “He gave me some amazing insight on Tippy. I'm surprised he made it here at all. Forbes gave him quite a roughing up.”

Jem winced. Was it possible, she thought, to feel someone else's pain?

Jem made to go up the stairs but found her feet weighted to the step. She heard Merinda run the faucet and begin her evening toilette. She inhaled a breath that she held until she felt lightheaded.

Invisible wheels turned in her head nearly as loudly as the grandfather clock tolling the late hour.

From the corner of her eye she spotted Ray's notebook on the desk.
She couldn't believe it sat there, exposed, with him slumbering closely nearby. Mrs. Malone had found it under her bed
*
and Jem had mumbled something about needing to keep it. Thus, it made its way to the front bureau. Her heart skipped in an irregular beat. She moved in its direction on tiptoe, watching carefully as the oil lamp flickered and danced, eerie shadows enlarging objects into towering monsters.

Jem often wondered as to Ray's age. In sleep, she could see his youthful face betrayed more years of life than she initially thought. A shadow beyond the dancing lamp hovered over his unshaven face, the stubble flecked with gray.

She inched closer. Mrs. Malone had tied a white bandage on his forehead. Jem watched his breath whisper across the pillow. She drank in that face, her favorite weakness. Jem balled her fists to fight the inkling pricking the ends of her fingertips. She'd always wondered what his thick, dark hair would feel like to her touch. Surely she had spent enough time over the last several months mulling on it—when he was hatless, or when its luster was restrained by his bowler, or under that tweed cap that took half a dozen years off his face.

Jem leaned forward, extended her arm, intent on a thought that would never cross the mind of a proper lady. She retreated. Then she took a deep breath and extended her slightly trembling fingers and…

It was thicker than she had imagined. The slightest flick of her fingers exposed gray underneath its ebony surface. Her nerves exploded. Was it just that she was taking liberty that made her flush to the tips of her ears, or was it that… that…?

She loved him. She had spent her whole life tripping over interactions with the opposite sex, but she never fathomed that it was because she hadn't met
him
yet. When God made a Jem, she was sure He must have made a Ray. She'd do anything for this man, she decided, still feeling the weight of his hair on her fingers even as she slowly backed away. She would sacrifice, even change or improve or refine.

Her hand, still tingling, fell at her side. She crossed her arms as her mind whizzed in a thousand directions at once, barreling ahead of her.

“You're thinking rather loudly, Jemima.” There was a sly smile in Ray's sleepy voice.

Startled, Jem tripped back and dashed from the room, flurrying up the stairs and slamming her bedroom door behind her.

Ray's head throbbed something fierce but sleep wouldn't come to him again. He sat up and the room spun in the darkness. Outside he could hear the echoing clop of a horse's hooves. He picked up the lamp and washed the room with its buttery light. Vowing that anything he found in the bower of the bachelor girls would never make it into the pages of the
Hog
, Ray walked over to the window where the pale yellow light from the streetlamps was puddling on the pavement. He let the lace curtains rustle to rest. To his right was a chalkboard. He raised the lamp to it and connected the dots of its elaborate web. Articles had been pasted there, and ideas were scrawled in a sure, strong hand he was sure belonged to Merinda.

Many about Gavin Crawley. Many about his gambling debts. A lot familiar to him from the night after he and Merinda broke into the
Globe
. Ray's eyes fell from the board and to the bureau beside it. It was scattered with papers, missives, and telegrams. He tipped the lamp closer to make out writing. Some notes thanked the Ward detectives, while other notes were of a more housekeeping nature: lists and a budget in a much more feminine hand, most likely Jemima's. He fanned his fingers out and searched a little more, peeking over his shoulder to ensure that their housekeeper was still abed—that his exploration was not disrupting her slumber.

Then his fingers felt something so familiar it felt like it belonged in his hand. Its weight filled his palm, and with the sensation a cask of memory spilled open.

His journal
.

She had lied to him. To
him!
Sojourned into the deepest thoughts he had. He was exposed. Not, he supposed, unlike a girl, sopping wet, trousers around her ankles outside a theatre.

The space of the room closed around him. His palm found the throbbing pulse of his injured head. Clutching the book tightly, he mazed back to the sofa and lowered himself gingerly.
The words
… . He deftly thumbed through the pages, words springing and warmly reuniting him with his past…
All of them.

The words
: cajoling and crowded, pricking his skull and plucking his memory. She had held them all in her lavender-scented hands, internalized behind the chestnut fringe of her curls.

She
knew it all.

He sat, delighted at reclaiming a part of himself, yet betrayed that his heart and poetry had been pried open.

His anger rose, flushing his face. He wrestled out of his coat and vest, repositioning himself on the sofa in his shirtsleeves, collar buttons open, wincing as his careless movements wreaked havoc on his ribs. Finally, in that strange moment wedged between deep night and the promise of hovering day, he drifted to sleep.

Morning came, peering through the window and spilling over the Persian carpet. Mrs. Malone followed with a pot of fresh water and a smile.

Ray rubbed his eyes. Opening them, he recalled why he was here, feeling the bandage at his head and, like a similar wound, found the notebook Jemima had taken.

He removed the blanket from his stretched frame and accepted coffee while declining breakfast. If he could escape with but a note to Merinda for her kindness and get out into the safe, sane day, he would do so. He didn't want to see Jem. He didn't want to see the flash of embarrassment on her pretty face, nor did he want to experience the temper he would fail to swallow down while he listened to her recant and give whatever explanation she would trip over for the book being in her possession.

Jem couldn't believe how stupid she had been to have kept the journal as long as she had, knowing full well Mrs. Malone's efficiency. Why the housekeeper was a downright busybody at times. She stared at her pale, sleep-deprived, worried-wracked face in her mirror and noted the purple moons under her blurry eyes. Her fingertips held a memory that her heart sped up to snatch and keep. She straightened her shoulders.

Finally, she tilted her chin and descended the staircase. Best dispel the strange looks and small talk before Merinda arrived.

Ray was at the bannister, slowly, painfully shrugging into his coat.

“You can't leave!” she told him. “You can't. You're not well enough. We'll ring Jasper to bring Jones by.”

Ray turned, and the smile that met her was sardonic, while his eyes flashed fire: “I'm sorry, our housekeeper took your coat to launder,” he imitated in sarcastic singsong while holding up his notebook.

The blood drained from Jem's face, throat, and all the way down to her toes. She gripped the bannister. “Oh.”

“Why do you have this, Jemima?”

“I kept it.” She watched him swallow, even as those coal eyes of his sparked. “I couldn't bear to give it back to you because I would miss it. And I thought a hundred times of how I would explain it to you, but… ”

She inched closer. He stepped back. She closed in again. He was now nearly at the door, his hand reaching for the knob. The book was clutched possessively, but every part of him seemed magnetically drawn in her direction. Then, unexpectedly, his ink-stained fingers found their way in her hair. Close, her body unsure which sensation to follow, his fingers explored her loose, unkempt curls. He touched her cheek then. His finger trailed down her face, claiming her with words yet to be spoken.

She caught her breath as he stiffened and retreated.

“You shouldn't have kept this!” His voice was surly. “It means a lot to me and I thought I had lost it. Now you know everything. The bad, the horrible. You had no right.”

“I… ”

His hands found her wrists and gripped tightly. “Stop being ridiculous, Jemima.” His eyes lingered over the open book of her face.

“I can't stop it!” Jem's voice was a stubborn sob. “I won't try.”

When he spoke again, he made a concerted effort to even his voice to passionless and stale: “This is a silly schoolgirl fantasy. It's not worth it.” He threw her arms down and crossed his own. His hands moved at a speed that matched his thoughts. “I don't want to hear you talk to me about this again. Do you hear me?” He tucked the notebook in his breast pocket and adjusted his bandage.

Jem knew she had taken a piece of him. Knew and wanted to safeguard it, even still. She wanted to act as keeper of his beautiful words. The vulnerable bits of their beautiful city that no one ever saw.

“You changed everything for me,” she admitted tremulously, thinking of the way that his journal and his terrible poetry inspired her to walk the city streets as if viewing it for the first time. She would look up to note the ornamentation rimming every roof; she would look down and notice the homeless with their hands outstretched, the children lacing through the traffic, knee-high, attempting to beat each other at a game of tag. “I see everything differently now. I wake up and the city is new. I go to work and that is new too, and when Merinda and I go out and solve these little mysteries of ours… well, you're there too! I believe in everything you've ever written and everything you will ever say. Your thoughts are my thoughts. Don't you see?” She emboldened herself; erected her spine. “But I can't say them. I can't speak for those who can't speak for themselves. I am just a woman. But you… ” she pointed at him. “You can tell the world. You can use those words of yours like a knife that cuts through everything that is unjust and horrible and you can make it right.”

Ray was wise enough to read between her lines: “I couldn't take care of you. Even if I wanted to.”

“I am not a girl who needs taking care of. I'm like you. I don't want anything else. Neither do you. Look at the way you're looking at me!”

“You and Merinda.” He cursed in Italian. “I write you into these little columns and you make it out to be some… some… ” He faltered into Italian again.

Jem took advantage of his search for words. “I love you!” she blurted. He must have known it! Everyone knew it, but his eyes flashed all the same. He shoved his hands in his pockets. All he found therein was a scratched and rusty old pocket watch. Nothing that would get more than a few dollars from the pawnbroker.

He held it up to her. “Here's my whole fortune, Jemima. Here's what you gain by telling me this.” He turned the watch around. “A piece of junk and a whole lifetime of terrible mistakes to go with it.”