The Bachelor Girl's Guide to Murder (6 page)

Ray had to rap on the doorframe twice before Viola appeared in the soft lantern light of her front sitting room.

“You're sure it was Tony?” she asked as she listened to her brother's story, punctuated with a few colorful words in their native language.

“Can you at least let me in?” Ray shook the water out of his hair. Viola stood to one side of the cottage door. “I'm going to stay the night,” he said.

“That's not necessary.”

“I am staying until Tony arrives. When do you expect him home? Why was he at the Elgin, Vi? What work is he doing?”

“He works odd jobs for Mayor Montague. You know that.”

Ray stepped out of his shoes and plopped onto the mismatched cushions of the sagging sofa. Viola's home was threadbare. The wind whistled too liberally through the cracks of the roof and the rain spattered into a bucket in the middle of the sitting room, but the cottage succumbed the best it could to her domestic pride.

“Where is your coat?” Viola took her brother's bowler hat and dabbed at it with a towel.

“I did something chivalrous and loaned it to a girl. And then I saw Tony. Somewhere I shouldn't have seen him. This is becoming a habit.”

Viola tugged her shawl more tightly around her nightgown. “Must you stay the night, Ray? I hate it when the two of you get in a row.”

“We get in a row because I can't stand to see him treat you the way he does.” Ray inclined his head in the direction of the cottage's single bedroom, if one could call it that. It was a corner of the home partitioned off by a ratty blanket that offered minimal privacy from the living area and the kitchen's sputtering stove. There, he knew, slept his nephew, Luca, a little boy who would be half-starved alongside his mother if Ray didn't subsidize Tony's sporadic income with some of his own.

“He's trying.”

Ray stifled his first response. “Vi, I want to know why he is working for Mayor Montague. He certainly doesn't work on the books. It's common knowledge that Montague pays men under the table for performing… less than legal jobs. How else could he run half the city? One of the men at the Don Jail
*
told me all about it. He said… ”

“Not the Don Jail again, Ray.”

“And who knows what Tony does to scrape up his liquor money?”

“You hurt my feelings.” Viola's long, purple-black curls fell haphazardly around her face, much as they had done when she'd been a little girl.

She looked more and more like a little girl each day, Ray thought—cornered, cajoled, and beaten down by her husband. Ray intervened as much as he could, but Viola loved Tony, so coming to fisticuffs with him resulted in little more than black eyes and more tears for his sister.

Viola's English was far poorer than Ray's, and she lapsed into Italian now. She defended Tony as she always did, explaining how hard it had been for him to adjust to their new life in Canada. He hadn't always been this way. He would be himself again someday. But even after five years in the country, these Canadian men didn't give him a chance.

“You make your own chance here, Vi. You have to make your own chance.”

“I'm tired. You woke me up.” She clicked her tongue. “Look at you. You're soaked to the bone. I will make you some tea.”

She moved toward the stove and put a kettle on to boil. “Here. Put this on.” She took one of Tony's cable-knit sweaters from the clothesline strung across the ceiling over the dinner table. Ray turned his back to her, wrestled out of his soaked shirt, and settled into the warm woolen folds of Tony's sweater.

He was much more comfortable now, especially with a cup of hot tea. He told Vi about the funny girl who had his coat. “The worst part is, I left my notebook in the pocket. It just dawned on me that I don't have it.”

“What a strange girl.” Viola wrinkled her nose. “Going about begging.”

He didn't want to come back around to Tony, but it was inevitable. “Then I saw Tony and I had to leave her there without explanation.”

“Did Tony see you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Good.” Viola grabbed the fabric of Ray's sweater and tugged him closer. “I want you two to get along. Like in the old days.”

Ray tried to smile. “I worry about you.”

“I worry about you too.” She sipped tea from a cracked china cup. “When was the last time you went to confession? Father Byrne said you haven't been 'round in weeks.”

Ray looked for something to settle his eyes on. There was a week-old copy of the
Globe and Mail
on the side table. The headline written by golden-boy Gavin Crawley. What with his all-Canadian pedigree
and looks, British family, and inherited money, Crawley didn't have to scrape by at a third-rate paper like Ray did. “I haven't been to confession, no.”

“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.

D
AY
O
NE
.
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.

D
AY
T
HREE
.
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.