A Lesson in Love and Murder

by Rachel McMillan

  And you carry it with you. You can tuck it into your pocket: the coyote’s yowl and the owl’s saucy hoot. The regal antlers of the moose and the cunning ears of the silver lynx. The birds chattering and the breeze tickling are all the music your ears need carry as you meander through life. It’s a part of you, and when you’re away from its colors and smells, it pricks at your core. You try to relate to people you meet, but if they have yet to sleep under the open, starry sky with the northern lights making light as bright as day, then they can never truly understand.

  In this little book of ours, we present tricks, tips, and guidelines for survival. But there is a part of the Canadian landscape we failed to include. Using this crude appendix, I would like to speak to the wilderness that is the bustling metropolis of the city. The creatures and wildlife replaced by humans, the trees replaced by grand buildings that reach to the heavens. The stars hide behind tall rooftops. And yet there is something magical about the sounds and the smells, even if you cannot tune your ear to the fox’s feather-light footfall or the bison’s snort or the wolf’s territorial growl.

  Sometimes in the city, you find what the solitude of the wilderness can never give you: a sense of constant companionship. You’re connected to everyone around you and you’re never really lonely.

  The Canadian wilderness provides but one kind of happiness. The greatest lesson is learning you can find other kinds of happiness. Other kinds of love.

  Even amid the concrete and urban noises.

  It hadn’t ever mattered if Jonathan wrote back. Not in all of those times Benny stole into their old project. Because he needed to write anyway—just in case Jonathan saw it. He never gave up. Just in case Jonathan… Just in case.

  He slapped the book shut. A part of him was gone forever. But another part—the most important part—was lingering.

  “For once you have fallen low,” he quoted, conjuring Merinda’s detective hero. “Let us see, in the future, how high you can rise.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Should you follow this guidebook closely, you will invariably reach a moment where one or more suitor will make a declaration of intent for courtship or marriage. In these instances, it is best to act demure and coy. Act surprised, even if the proposal is anticipated. Make the gentleman feel valued and worthy of his advances.

  Dorothea Fairfax, Handbook to Bachelor Girlhood

  Merinda had that deflated postcase feeling. Lethargic, she paced back and forth in the sitting room before falling into her chair and bellowing for Turkish coffee.

  Her brain wheels still chugged but for no apparent purpose, and she was saddled with frenetic energy she wasn’t sure where to channel. It buzzed through her fingertips and snaked through the sinews of her arms.

  She picked up Emma Goldman’s book and leafed through the pages, wondering how something so terse and disjointed to her now had once latched on to her. She needed something to believe in. The way Jem believed in God, the way Benny believed in Jonathan and the code of his Mounted Police. Merinda heard a knock at the door and then Mrs. Malone’s welcoming voice from the hallway.

  Into the parlor walked a tall figure in six feet of red with a Stetson tucked under his right arm.

  Merinda gasped as he entered over the Persian carpet, the gold of his buttons licked by the last flames of sun through the window.

  “Benny! This is some getup! Cracker jacks!”

  He chuckled. “You like it? I confess to dragging it out to try and get some of the wrinkles and creases ironed out.”

  “I want one! Full regalia.” She scooped the hat from under his arm and plopped it on her head, waving him into a chair.

  “You’re an amazing woman, Merinda Herringford.”

  He leaned forward in his chair, his long fingers cupping his kneecaps. Merinda studied his face—his playful blue eyes and slightly crooked nose. “You sound so final,” she said.

  “Mounties don’t have jurisdiction in Toronto.”

  “That’s the same as saying women don’t have jurisdiction as detectives.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were sad.”

  “Sad? Why would I be sad?”

  “Because you”—he grabbed her hand and held tightly, so tightly she stopped trying to jerk it away—“are going to miss me as I will miss you.”

  “Miss you? What… you… of all the silly… ”

  “Merinda.”

  “Oh, fine. Fine. I’ll miss you.” She hopped to her feet, and Benny followed suit. “Oh, look at you there. So you’re going to kiss me now?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  He leaned in. His lips were close. The wool of his scarlet serge scratched at the light fabric of her cotton blouse.

  “Kiss me?” she mouthed, dazed. The ruddy fire was overheating her—and then she remembered it was August and there was no fire and the light through the open front curtains and the room was too hot and his jacket too warm and why was he standing there so close? His breath brushed her cheeks, along with his spicy scent. Wretched man! He had put on cologne! A Mountie wearing cologne. She had never felt undone before. Her knees hadn’t threatened to buckle, perspiration had never pricked up over the back of her neck and her arms, and… She surrendered, throwing herself at him and locking her lips on his.

  They remained thus for moments, at once infinite and finite, and when they backed up, breathing heavily, staring at each other stupidly, Merinda’s heart beating so loud and so fast she thought it would pop out of her chest, they were drained of words the moment had soaked up.

  For all of his cocksure countenance, even Benny Citrone couldn’t keep steady. He swaggered slightly in those knee-high boots of his.

  “Bet Emma Goldman’s never felt like that,” Merinda murmured.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Oh. Never mind.”

  “You know what they say”—he gave her a wink as he wound one of her curls around his finger—“a Mountie always gets his man.”

  Merinda rolled her eyes and shoved him back. “Yes, but does he always get his woman?” She spun on her heel and settled back nonchalantly into her armchair, drawing her knees to her chest. “Mrs. Malone!” she hollered, refusing to meet Benny’s starlight eyes until her housekeeper rounded the door frame. “Show the constable out, would you?”

  Unfazed, Benny strode toward her. “I’ll be seeing you again, Merinda.”

  “I’m never going to follow you to Fort Glenbow and darn your socks and raise your brood of children and hunt moose.”

  “And I am never going to live in a city of smoke and grime where the all the sounds of nature are shut out by trolleys and sirens,” Benny countered.

  “But you’ll be seeing me again?” A whisper infused with hope.

  “But I’ll be seeing you again. Someday,” he said with finality. A beat later she heard the door click.

  Merinda didn’t have two minutes to let the world dance around her before Mrs. Malone brought Jasper in, his face eight shades of melancholy.

  “I saw you through the window,” Jasper said before Merinda could string a cohesive thought through her befuddled brain.

  “Oh.” Merinda was wondering why flames brandished her cheeks as his blue eyes bore into her.

  Jasper straightened his shoulders and gripped his hat so tightly his knuckles whitened. He cleared his throat and stood erect as if a steel pole fixed him in place. “A-are you going to marry him, Merinda?” His voice broke three times with adolescent uncertainty.

  “Can you imagine my marrying anyone?” Merinda asked lightly.

  “The way you look at him. The way he held you… ”

  “Jasper, close your mouth. You’re gaping like a fish. You’re also pale as a ghost! I’ll have Mrs. Malone bring you a sandwich.”

  “I… I think it’s important we talk about this, Merinda.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “There is! I always just thought you weren’t much of the romantic type, which is why… why… ”<
br />
  “Jasper.” They were treading in dangerous water, and though she knew what came next, she tried to cough it off. Shrug it off. Stroll across the room. “I’m sorry we quarreled.”

  “I know.” He smiled away any sentence she could conjure. “I forgive you.”

  Merinda sank into her chair and stared into the empty fireplace. “What a case, Jasper. This one. It branded itself on all of us, didn’t it? Me, you, DeLuca and Jem, Benny perhaps most of all.”

  Merinda could still sense Benny near. She hadn’t had a chance to process his touch or his leaving or the fact that she might never see him again. And here was Jasper dropping into Jem’s usual chair and piercing her with blue eyes so wide and expectant. Waiting. She was sure he had stilled his heart, and it wouldn’t beat again until she said something in return.

  “Answer me. Are you going off with Benny Citrone, Merinda?”

  Merinda watched his heart catch in his throat. He was diminished somehow despite his stature, and she knew he was probably grabbing at the bravest moment of his life.

  She kept her voice light. “I wouldn’t dash after Benny and live in a tent in the Yukon.”

  Jasper shook his head. “No. I didn’t suspect so. But you love him?”

  Merinda waved him off. “I don’t… ”

  “Then I will wait for you.”

  “For what? Wait for me to drop into your arms and swoon and let the world fall away? For me to traipse after you like Jem runs after DeLuca? That’s not the girl you want me to be.”

  He looked her over, appraising her, and she saw her worth reflected in the sheen of his eyes. He treasured her, despite every flaw, despite every rough edge. He cherished every imperfection. It startled her. She should rise to be worthy of this unadulterated love, shouldn’t she? Heat flamed her face. She was careless in undermining Jasper’s passion. His authority. She didn’t deserve the way he looked at her.

  She swallowed. “Mrs. Malone,” she called, even as Jasper’s eyes implored her. It would have been easier if he had plunged a knife into her chest. “Please show Constable Forth out.”

  Jem wondered why the stars didn’t fall from their heavens around her. For she was safe and he was safe, and they were back in the city that seemed safer somehow, maybe because it was their own.

  Jem interlaced her fingers with Ray’s. He was going to go to the Hog and start typing up an adventure in Chicago. She was going to revel in Mrs. Malone’s cooking. Jasper had orchestrated Viola and Luca’s transportation back to Toronto, and they were currently settled in with his mother. “You need to stop thinking that you failed Viola and Luca the way your father failed you and your mother.”

  Ray’s ear thrummed. “I don’t want you to make me feel better about this. There is nothing you can say, Jemima. I murdered him.”

  “Viola and Luca would not have survived without you,” Jem said adamantly. “Her situation is not a result of your inability to care for her, and it kills you. But it isn’t your fault. And it’s not our story.”

  “Jemima, please… ”

  “We have a lot more hope.” She gripped his hand more tightly. “Your unbelievable devotion and care for your sister and Luca is part of the reason I fell so hopelessly in love with you.” She sniffed. “If you could see yourself in my eyes for but a moment, you would never doubt yourself again.”

  But he wondered if it would be a matter of moments until she focused on what he had done. How it would follow them forever. Maybe someday she would shirk away, untwine her fingers, and that passionate, hopeful faith in her eyes would be replaced by disappointment.

  For now, Ray kept his right fist clenched, trying to wring out the memory of the act it had committed. Jem put her hand over his and grasped tightly. Her feet were solidly on the ground, her shimmery eyes on his face. Feet on the ground. Eyes on the stars. This didn’t look like a girl who was one step away from turning and leaving him. This looked like a girl who would face it all head-on.

  Ray cleared his throat. “The whole of my life is playing before me, Jem. And in that lifetime, Tony was a close friend of mine. We fished together and played jacks by the creek. We talked about the great, green land that is Canada, and we booked our passage. I watched him flirt with my little sister. Tony is… was Luca’s father.”

  They stopped silently under a streetlight. Jem made out the contours of Ray’s face clearly, and it was tired and worn and rimmed with worry. She wanted to swipe her palm over it and iron out every crease.

  Ray’s eyes glistened. “She hates me. I was supposed to protect her and make sure she was safe and happy, and she hates me. She threatens to go back to Italy. That treacherous passage. We barely made it the first time. And Luca… ”

  Jem nodded.

  “I killed my childhood friend and broke Vi’s heart and left little Luca without a father. A poor father is better than no father, Jemima. I would know.”

  “She’ll see, Ray. Someday she’ll see, and the pain will turn into a dull ache, and she will realize that Luca needs you. That she needs you.” Jem set her chin. “I promise you that this anger and hurt is as much her grief over a man who was lost to her years ago as the act that ended his life.”

  Ray felt a slight lightening in his heart. “Do you think so?”

  “I know so. In the meantime, you will miss her and Luca. But you will write and you will visit no matter how many times she slams the door in your face, no matter how many tearstained letters she sends back. No matter the silence. You’ll pursue her. And I’ll be there. Always. Thinking of presents for Luca and picking and pressing little flowers for you to send in your notes.”

  A moment later, Jem’s fingers closed around a cold circle Ray had pressed into her palm.

  “Quite shockingly,” he said with a wink at her under the halo of streetlight, “the pawnbroker on Michigan Avenue hadn’t found anyone to sell it to.”

  Jem pressed it to her heart. “I love this rusty old watch,” she said with a lilt in her voice, and she leaned up lightly to kiss him on the cheek. But he had another idea and circled his arms around her waist. His hand didn’t shake when he was embracing her. So, he thought, brushing his lips over her cheeks, her eyelids, her nose, and then her slightly parted lips, he’d just have to do it more often.

  EPILOGUE

  Jem gave Mrs. Malone a quick peck on the cheek.

  “It is truly wonderful to see you,” she said as her dear old landlady’s face brightened.

  Merinda’s face was flushed and her eyes bright as she called for coffee.

  “You kissed him!” Jem said, feeling a jolt of exuberance pass between them. It was something new, of course, and something strange and something that evidently made Merinda visibly uneasy no matter how hard she tried to shield her face from uncertainty and straighten her shoulders.

  And things had changed. Merinda might try to tie them up with an invisible string and keep them, but her world was fraying even as everything seemed the same.

  The cookies and the tea.

  The bellows for Turkish coffee.

  The fanned-out newspapers, the chalk from their board on her fingertips.

  But a force was pulling Jem away to her own sphere. A corner of which would, of course, always have room for a radical woman with blonde hair and a Cheshire cat grin. The same blonde girl who was blushing to high heaven and shrugging out of her bold exterior. The same blonde girl who now was prone to vulnerably talk about the man she could almost see herself following as far as the northern lights and into the cloak of the unknown.

  While Jem couldn’t keep her heart from racing at the sheer surprise of it all, Merinda was surprisingly buoyant and enraptured. “Yes! I almost followed him! I almost did, Jemima!” Merinda flung her arms out dramatically. “But so much of myself is here.” She motioned about her, taking the King Street townhouse, its stories and secrets, and subsequently all of Toronto in her embrace. “I need to be here. I like to think that here needs me too.”

  “Promise me, Jem,” Merinda s
aid after the clock ticked away a few silent moments.*

  “Promise what?”

  “I want you to swear we’ll never be like these men. Benny and Jonathan, Ray and Tony. Growing apart.”

  “Of course we won’t be!” Jem said. “How could you think that?”

  “Friendship is a kind of power balance,” Merinda said, studying Jem.

  “Merinda, you are making very little sense.”

  “It requires being completely, selfishly happy for someone even if they step ahead and leave you behind.”

  “I’m not leaving you behind, Merinda.”

  “All I have heard from DeLuca and from Benny are strings of how they thought things would turn out differently. How if they had only said one thing or done another… if they could turn back the clock. Jem, that won’t be us. It can’t be us.”

  “How are you frightened of something that hasn’t shown the slightest sign of happening?”

  “Besides, we are narrowing in on our Moriarty,” Merinda said. “Just as you are going to be at home raising babies.”

  “Tertius Montague.” Jem couldn’t keep disdain from shadowing her voice, adhering to the first part of Merinda’s sentence and not the latter.

  It appeased her friend. Merinda prattled on about the mayor and the puppet strings that kept his marionettes bouncing. If he had a connection to these bombs and explosives, who could they trust? Where were their allies? There was a tarnished surface on their glistening city.

  Jem half listened, watching shadows web through the rustling curtains as the breeze funneling through the open window flounced them. She took an old, tarnished watch from her pocket. Its familiar tick was as natural to her as a heartbeat. Its circumference and chain as familiar to her as her own skin. It tingled memories across the sensors in Jem’s fingers as she gently pried it open. She knew its interior too, its face and composition. On the right, an assuredly ticking watch face, and on the left, a photograph of Viola and Luca, one that never quite fit the watch’s circumference. This photograph, this past that Ray had kept close to his heart, was impressed in Jem’s memory. It was a token transferred when he used the selfsame gift in their harried proposal, transferring his faith and hope for their future to her waiting hand.