The Bachelor Girl's Guide to Murder (28 page)

He shoved the watch back in his pocket and grabbed her forearms tightly through her gossamer dressing gown.

“You're hurting me!” she said.

Ray flinched and though his grip slackened, he didn't let go. “Why did you have to tell me that?”

“I didn't say anything you didn't already know.”

“You used the words.” He turned to the door.

“Don't go away. Isn't there some way? Any way at all? Can you look me in the eye and tell me you don't love me? I always thought maybe you did.”

Ray kept his eyes on his shoes while he listened to her heart break. “I will never regret using those words,” she said. “Not to you. Not ever.”

The door swooshed open. Then it clicked shut and she was left alone.

*
Perhaps not Jem's most inspired hiding spot.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

To successfully draw a conclusion to any mystery, one must have a solid plan. Scope out your perimeter, map every moment, and prepare for the worst-case scenario.

Guide to the Criminal and Commonplace, M.C. Wheaton

E
lection Day. Ray twirled his pocket watch around his finger as he watched the throngs outside the
Tely
office.

How impatiently they waited for election results. Men leaned forward, bouncing on the balls of their feet. An invisible line cut between the one set of reporters who were eager to hear that Horace Milbrook had taken the majority and another set who waited with bated breath for the news that Tertius Montague would continue his reign. Ray felt an affinity with those of the
Tely
and the
Star.
He wanted to see Horace Milbrook have a chance to fulfill all the promise his campaign had predicted.

The doors opened and the
Tely
newsboys hoisted unfolded papers off their shoulders. The ink was barely dry, the pulp and fibers still warm, the energy of the reporters' rapid typing not yet a memory. Men tripped over themselves, handed over their ready coin, and snatched their slice of history.

Tertius Montague had won another term.

Ray rapped his knuckles on the door of Viola's house.

She appeared and smiled when she saw him. But then her eyes went to the scab on his forehead, and she reached up to touch it. “Did Tony do this?”

Ray winced. It still smarted a bit. “And that henchman Forbes.”

Viola's nose wrinkled at the funny word
henchman
.

Ray followed her to the kitchen table. Luca was playing with a wooden train in the corner, and Ray stooped to ruffle his hair and kiss his forehead. Viola poured tea from a cracked pot and set out a plate of biscuits. Beside his plate was a small jar of lemon curd. He spooned out a large dollop and smiled for the first time in ages.

“Just like Nonna's.”

“Yes. She taught me to make it,” said Viola. “I remember stirring the pot with her, her big hand covering mine… ” Her voice broke. “We had everything. Why did we come here?”

“No, we didn't have everything, Viola. The past does that. It lures you back and tricks you into thinking it was better than it was. The English word is
nostalgia
. It means a pain for home.”

“Home pain.” The words in English were mournful in her alto voice.

He took out his journal and opened it to the photograph pasted on the front flap.

“I forgot about this.” Viola said, running her finger over the photograph's sepia browns and muddled yellows that couldn't keep the sun from shining alive on the print. His hand held Viola's in the scene, shoes hidden under tall grass whistling from a wind he could even now feel across his cheek.

“Home pain,” he repeated, gently unpeeling the photograph and handing it to her. “You keep it.”

She pressed it to her heart. “I want a home again, Ray.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “I want a home. I don't want… this life for me and Luca.” She tilted her head in her boy's direction. Luca was a little cherub playing on an heirloom quilt, one of the few things retained from their passage.

“Vi, I will always take care of you. Both of you. I will provide for
you. Tony only takes. He takes from you and he hurts you and he takes you for granted.”

“I love him.”

Ray blew out a sigh of frustration. “You have to start loving yourself and Luca more, Vi. More than that shiftless, useless—”

“You have never been in love,” she said in Italian. “You do not know. It is not that easy.”

Ray wasn't ready to talk about love. Not after the words Jem had spoken. Not when the memory of that girl wouldn't leave his mind even for a moment. “Practice your English,” he said lamely.

“No, you stop with this English. You always say that when you want me to talk about something other than the conversation we're having.”

“You need to learn it so Luca can get by, so he can have a life here.”

“I don't want a life here, Ray. I don't want to be here at all. Tony would never be in this trouble if we had stayed home. Never.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “It is too cold here. No one wants us.”

“There's nothing left for us in Italy. Nothing. You remember how it was, how hungry we… Everything is here. Our future is here.” He reached for one of her hands. It was red and cracked from the cold, and her nails were chipped. “I will always take care of you. I will provide. But I need you to be strong so that… so I can have a life too.”

A crease appeared in her forehead. “What do you mean?”

“Do you ever think I've wanted more too, Vi? But I've had to put you first. Put Luca first. Of course it's been my joy to do so, and I'll keep doing so, but sometimes I feel that I've delayed my own life so you could… ” He stopped, and Viola's eyes flooded with tears.

She sobbed an apology that he could barely make out in any language.

“English, Vi.”

“Ray, I've ruined your life. Like I've ruined Tony's and Luca's—”

Ray put a finger to her lips. “Shush. You have done nothing, my beautiful sister. You, with your good heart and your darling little boy.
I should not have said anything. I've used you as a barrier. I've put you in a position you didn't deserve to be in. My mind uses you as an excuse not to move forward with my life.”

Viola looked puzzled.

Ray swallowed and tightened his grip on her hand. “I… I must try to understand myself.”

“Good luck with that,” she teased, a slow smile tickling her cheek.

He smiled in return. At first just a small one, but then it stretched wide.

“Il tuo sorriso è bello”
she gushed, seeing his smile. “Nonna would melt in her chair.”

The day started out innocently enough. After a sleepless night, Jem stepped into a shirtwaist and skirt, preparing for a shift at Spenser's. And while Merinda stayed behind studying her case files, Jemima stepped out into the city. Her city.

She got on the streetcar and watched the passing houses, mercantiles, milliners, and grocers. Then the broad, bright steeple of St. James came into view, and she stepped off the trolley, forsaking all thoughts of tardiness.

Jem climbed the steps and let the light filtering through the stained glass bathe her face. Then she sat in the empty sanctuary, watching the sun on the polished tiles, listening to the silence speaking all the languages in the world.

“Miss Jemima Watts.”

Reverend Ethan Talbot was standing in front of her. She smiled at him, and he took a seat beside her. “Is something troubling you?”

“What makes you think that?” Jem asked.

“You don't usually grace us with your presence midweek. Off solving mysteries, usually. Or working at Spenser's.”

“Do you think I'm very ridiculous?”

“Ridiculous?”

“Don't most respectable women have houses and families?”

Reverend Talbot smiled “Many of them do, don't they? But not all.”

“I have a friend,” she said, “who believes that all of life's questions seem to be answered here, within these very walls.” She remembered the line scrawled in Ray's journal in his fine, slanting handwriting. “Do you think there are places where we can hear God more clearly than others?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. But God is going to speak to you no matter where you decide to meet Him.” And he left her to her thoughts.

Silence. It was a funny thing, Jem thought, to finally realize where one stands, to peel back the curtains of wisdom from other sources, to supplant the Wheatons and Fairfaxes of the world with one's own ideas. She had a voice! She could speak! For others, surely, but also for herself. Merinda's voice may have cut more sharply, but Jem's passion matched it. Her integrity never wavered. She had a voice and she could make it heard.

The seamstresses did not speak. The Corktown Girls did not speak. Could not. Would not. Instead, they were fearful of words. But Jem would embrace words to honor them. To speak for those who were deprived of a voice.

She saw more clearly than she ever had.

Jem took her time getting to Spenser's, opting to wander. The energy she'd felt in the cathedral had mellowed to contentment. In her pocket she kept the well-creased note from her parents, received the morning they'd found the first dead Corktown girl. She kept it and its attached pamphlet of respectable activities near at all times. It was a crinkled emblem of something she had once been but would never be again.