Murder at the Flamingo

by Rachel McMillan

  And nothing could take it away from him. Nothing—not Vaughan, not Luca, not circumstance could separate him from the little idiosyncrasies that pulsed through him in an irregular symphony. The quirks and qualms that made her Reggie and the sound of her indelible music: the rhythm of her heels over the creaky floorboards and the way she wrinkled her nose when she was deep in concentration. That was his—all his—a little corner of the world that Vaughan could never infiltrate. Suddenly the song he had heard a million and one times sounded as if he were hearing it for the first time. Because in a way he was. It made sense now. It was a song about her.

  Hamish passed the doorman at the apartment they’d shared, then took the elevator one last time, noticing his reflection in the wall mirror as he maneuvered his belongings with his good arm, balancing others beside him on the floor. He looked different somehow. Older, maybe, but happier too. No thin lines and angles to his face or cuts of purple under his eyes. Even though he had been shot and lost Luca, he had gained . . . Yes. Gained. Nate and Reggie were waiting in the front hall to help him with his things, and as soon as the elevator dinged, they dashed over to him, laughing about something he had missed. He didn’t look back.

  “You’re coming home with me,” Nate had said. “I have a room to let. When you have money, you’ll pay me. When your detective business begins to boom.”

  Reggie went back to the office to see if she couldn’t start the business booming while Nate helped Hamish move clothes and books into his house. “You still have those fancy suits.” He motioned to a few garment bags. “You can run a nightclub.”

  Hamish laughed. “I think I’ll keep the baseball tickets. You like baseball?”

  Nate nodded. “I’ll let you get settled in.”

  Hamish followed Nate’s eyes around the clean, cozy room. It had a few Harvard and Bruins pennants but was ready for Hamish to transform into home. There was a big, comfy chair by the window overlooking crisscrossing fire escapes, the music of children laughing wisping through fluttering lace curtains. The bed was cozily made with a plaid coverlet and the bookshelves were empty for Hamish to fill with books he had taken from Luca’s penthouse.

  “I’m going to be happy here, I think.” He smiled at Nate. “It’s more my style.”

  “Stay as long as you like.”

  Hamish nodded, rubbing at his stiff shoulder.

  Nate disappeared a moment while Hamish clicked open the flap on his suitcase. When Nate returned, he passed an Action Comic to Hamish. “Here. This one is about Clark Kent. But Kal-El is his real name. From planet Krypton.”

  “That super human who can jump high?” Hamish ran his finger over the glossy cover.

  “He must turn his titanic strength into channels that benefit mankind.” Nate’s eyes narrowed as he quoted, “‘Superman, champion of the oppressed.’” He smiled. “A little like you, Hamish DeLuca.”

  “Oh, I’m no—”

  “A little like you.” Nate lingered in the open doorway. “Now we just need Reggie to see it. If she doesn’t already. You know, Reggie seemed to love the view from Old North Church. I am sure I can get Hal to forget to lock it for a few hours this evening.” He clicked the door shut behind him.

  Hamish flexed the hand that had set Luca free, wondering if he could live with the lie or if it would crawl under his skin and tether him tightly.

  Hamish sank into the chair near the window, focusing on the new space around him, seeing it afresh. He felt lighter. And he supposed he always knew this. Knew there was another turn to the tale. But the story he’d woven in his head had so long convinced him otherwise.

  He unpacked the belongings he’d shipped from Toronto and found in the trunk a package of shortbread cookies from his mother. It smelled of her—like lavender. He found a note tucked inside.

  Nate had said he could use the telephone in the front hall. He asked the operator to connect him to the Toronto Telegraph office, and soon he was speaking to his father’s secretary. A moment later, his dad picked up.

  “Hi.”

  “Hamish.”

  “Listen . . .” Hamish wound the cord around his index finger. “I have to apologize to you.”

  “An argument takes two people, Hamish. I feel that—”

  “Listen,” he said more forcefully. “I think I used what happened at the court that day to stand in for my feeling inadequate in your eyes. Please don’t say anything until I am finished. You always told me that I had to keep myself in check. Check my heartbeat, assess my surroundings. I always took that as your way of trying to get me to hide myself. I figured it was because you were ashamed of me.” Hamish stopped a moment, sure that his father would interject. When he didn’t, Hamish continued. “But I was really ashamed of myself. It took coming here, and fresh surroundings, and finding out . . .” He wasn’t ready to tell his father about Luca. It wasn’t his story to tell. “When I found out the truth about a murder I saw, I realized that I have something no one else has. A perspective. A natural empathy. A very wise person once told me that empathy is the greatest gift. So I am sorry that we fought. But I’m not ready to come home. Except at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And probably Easter if you buy me a ticket.” Hamish stopped and waited. Silence. Had he said something wrong? Had he made things worse? He wound the cord more tightly.

  “You sound different,” his father finally said. Hamish had to press the receiver more closely to his ear, the voice on the other end was so low.

  “I’m content here. It fits me.”

  “Of course you know it’s rubbish that I was ashamed of you. I was trying to protect you. All of those doctors. Those studies. I edit a national newspaper, Hamish. Every time something crossed my desk, my heart stopped. I read about people with some of your . . . challenges being taken away.”

  “So you were scared.”

  “Of course I was. It sounds like you’re just discovering what I knew all along.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you’re exceptional.”

  Later, ducking out for fresh air and a stroll to Leoni’s, he thought about how his conversation with his father had ended. “Thank Luca for me,” his dad had said.

  Luca. Hamish thought of him and was put in mind of a line from Notre-Dame about the romantic figure Phoebus, who survives while Esmeralda the gypsy girl perishes: “Men of his kind are not easily killed.” Luca would start somewhere else and be fine. He would. And he had. “Thank Luca.” Thank Luca for binding him to a terrible secret? No. Thank Luca for unfettering him and setting him free.

  CHAPTER 28

  The Court of Miracles glowed an incendiary orange under a sky so bright it gleamed turquoise. Mrs. Leoni’s doorstep stood host to two jack-o’-lanterns. Banners for a harvest festival drooped over Hanover Street. The children who had overflowed the Prado during the summer months were buttoned and collared and sent to school in uniform lines. A solemn and hallowed quiet ushered in the colder days and shorter nights, where a harvest moon languorously spread over the crimson brick houses and crimson leaves on the trees below.

  The streetlights from the square filtered into the office, bathing the staircase in gritty light. Outside, car tires screeched and dogs yelped. A mother barked at two children playing stick hockey over the shimmery stones. Reggie was probably helping Mildred Rue with paperwork. She took on quite a load each week at the Temporary Employment Agency, never expecting any type of payment and far happier, Hamish thought, for the work.

  Hamish passed Leoni’s and turned on Prince, following it to Hanover. He could navigate with his eyes closed now, the city wrapped so tightly around him. It was a map of Reggie: every turn and nook and alley sparked a memory they shared, and he could kick himself for not letting himself linger in every moment their shoulders brushed and they fell into step. The night cackled at him: If you had known she would slip through your fingers, you would have slowed time down. If you had known she would turn and find her nose at the height of Vaughan Vanderlaan’s broad shoulders, you wou
ld have appreciated the soft laughter hallmarking your conversations. You would have. You should have.

  Hamish’s secret was tucked in his pocket with his right hand. It didn’t tremble as often anymore. He was relaxed painting the office with Reggie, moving furniture, and spending his free moments curled in the overstuffed chair in his bedroom at Nate’s, learning property law with the same velocity and steel-trap mind that had seen him to the top of his class at Osgoode.

  A footnote cited Winslow, Winslow, and Smythe, and Hamish’s mouth turned up a little. If he hadn’t come here he might still be sitting in a stuffy courtroom taking instruction from the interchangeable Winslows.

  His chest was always a balloon expanding until near bursting when he caught the first sight of the regal steeple piercing up from Old North Church. It was silly to fall for a city, but he had. It was more than familiar now. It was home.

  People fall in love with people, not cities. Not Hamish. When you weren’t always comfortable with people, the silent reassurance of place was the next best thing.

  His pulse raced when he swerved around a corner, or looked up in pursuit of the starlight, and caught the ornamented rim of a very old building.

  He shrugged. Explaining this to Reggie made his pulse quicken, his ears redden, and the inflection of his voice rise and fall.

  And then she was standing beside him. She told him she trusted him, even as he took each careful step to the top of Old North Church, whiling away the first yawn of evening. Up on top of the world. A long day it had been, yes. First, reading up on property law. Then Mrs. Leoni had arrived at the office with cannoli and vendor contracts, which Hamish examined and consulted. He and Reggie hadn’t been paid in money yet. They were paid in plants and cannoli and good wishes and prayer candles lit at St. Leonard’s in their name. And even while Hamish worried aloud about sustainability and how many more months of rent pearl beads would purchase, Reggie just smiled.

  Just as she was smiling now after they reached the top, overlooking Boston below, the kinks of the day ironed out with the appearance of the stars. Heartbeat, Hamish. Reggie’s index finger found the precise spot on his chest where his beat was speeding up, just under his pocket square. He swallowed.

  He put his hand over hers and slowly moved it away from him.

  She smiled. “And see? Just like that.” He wondered if she knew how her eyes sparkled under the starlight and how when he was near her something drummed through his trembling fingers and spun through his head—something that had little to do with murder or new business ventures.

  You’re my adventure, he wanted to say. I’m braver with you. I can do anything if I am with you. I don’t have to hide anything. I can just be me . . . with all of my flaws. You steady my heartbeat, Reggie . . . “What a surprising summer.” He dipped his chin.

  She nodded and gave him her content smile. The natural one that told him she was completely comfortable in the moment. “You never know, do you?”

  Her hair was ribboned by starlight. Now her impish smile—so different from her coy smile or her sad smile or her reassuring smile. All the smiles he now knew by heart.

  “Know what?” Hamish asked.

  “When someone is going to change your life,” she said.

  Her chin tilted slightly. Her lips were darker with the evening, cranberry red and parted a little.

  “Vaughan will be by any moment.” She looked down to the street below where people were pinpricks in the darkening evening.

  Hamish reached into his pocket and extracted a small parcel.

  “A celebratory gift for our new business adventure. And because you pawned your pearls to make it happen.”

  He could feel his ears redden a little. She gave him a quizzical look and unfolded the paper, removing the locket with her delicate fingers.

  “It’s beautiful.” She turned it over in her palm. “Spira Spera.”

  “Breathe. Hope,” Hamish translated. “It’s from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.”

  “Your favorite book.”

  She clutched the necklace in her hand. “It’s a treasure. Shines here, in the moonlight.” She held it up for the North End’s inspection. Yet while she spoke of the necklace, her big brown eyes stayed with him. “I have to go. You’re coming with me?”

  “I think I’ll stay here.”

  “Up here, all alone?”

  “I’m fine now.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow then.” She turned and left, and Hamish wriggled out of the moment’s spell.

  He tried to blink her away, but her eyes were still with him and she was still there—a breath away, her dress brushing the open space of his shirt over his collarbone. He imagined her catching up to Vaughan, brown curls bouncing in the moonlight, taking his offered arm, offering a delighted laugh. Hamish swallowed.

  It could have been him feeling the tendrils of her hair under his chin and brushing arms with her in the dark. He wondered if it would ever be him. She was so different from other girls. The kind of girl he could imagine a future with. But only a future with the unexpected at every turn.

  Heartbeat, Hamish. He placed two fingers under his braces and counted. He looked out to Charlestown across the river, a few boats bobbing in the water, the lights winking in the dark, the Bunker Hill monument piercing the sky. Then he edged over to the other side of the steeple, to the side that looked out at Salem Street and the North End and Boston. He was sure the movement at such a height would speed his heartbeat. But it stayed the same. It didn’t quicken or thrum or pulse against him. Funny, it had a mind of its own when he’d stood with Reggie under the starlight just moments before . . .

  Like Quasimodo greeting his bells, he greeted the city below. The uneven roofs of the red-bricked North End, the maze of fire escapes teased by moonlight. The steeples of the Old State House, the Old South Meeting House, and Park Street Church, and the top of the Parker House, and even, yes, even a little speck of the building he and Luca had shared. Boston paid in dividends all he had believed about its possibility of home. He recalled all those moments on his bike, skidding over the cobblestones and finding the familiar in the unknown. Just like that first day after departing South Station.

  He swallowed any more thoughts of Luca down for the moment, running his hand over his wounded arm. It smarted a little with the exertion. Then he lost himself in Boston again. The symphony of rooftops and cobblestones, stories dripping from the streetlamps and heavy glass windows. It was familiar. Just as he hoped it would be.

  What if home wasn’t something you were born into but rather something you found and ultimately chose? Hamish’s smile stretched beyond thoughts of Reggie or Luca or trembling fingers or a court case of early summer. Any of the thoughts that led to his wishing he were the Superman of Nate’s comics while facing the Quasimodo of his anxious episodes. He could handle anything here.

  “I’m not going back,” he told Boston, assured the city heard him. “I’m not going back because this is where I belong.” He flexed his still fingers, then gripped the rail before him. Several steps forward from when he and Nate and Reggie had been here before. Before he knew Luca’s secret. “And I will get the girl,” he promised to himself and to the night sky.

  The bells marking the hour tolled. The sound surprised him and he tumbled forward a little, catching onto the rail, leaning over it, the ground a long way below, shoe cap ramming into the wooden spoke partitioning him from a quick drop. He instinctively placed his palm over his heart, his fingers catching in his brace. The thrum. The pulse. The familiar beat. Not sped up or irregular from the quick bout of nerves. Just his heartbeat.

  “Maybe Boston’s your heartbeat, Hamish,” he thought aloud as the bells continued to chime.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  If Hamish DeLuca were alive today, he would be treated for an anxiety and panic disorder. In Hamish’s time, however, the world was still learning about mental illness. Primitive—and often violent—treatments were at the forefront of medical study.
While I had to research how Hamish’s illness would be viewed through the lens of 1930s medicine, I required no research in presenting his symptoms. I have suffered from a panic and anxiety disorder my entire life. Every symptom I have ascribed to Hamish is something I—along with millions of others—have experienced. Fortunately, with medicine and the modern strides to eliminate stigma, I have been able to live and work through what in Hamish’s time could have been a debilitating illness. It was very important for me to find some way to channel what I always thought of as my greatest weakness into something empowering. In writing this series, I am dedicated to creating space for the conversation about mental illness and normalizing it in the fictional community. I want my readers to know there is help out there. Talk to someone. Let’s end the stigma. There is no shame in taking the first step on a path toward help.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1.Hamish’s reporter father believes that often “stories are in the people whose life’s pages no one thinks of turning.” Can you think of someone in your family, church, or community whose inspiring story might be overlooked?

  2.Reggie arrives in Boston with little clue of what she is doing or how she will make her new life work. What are the some of the ways you have adapted to the consequences of a rash decision?

  3.Reggie always carries her journal of independence and writes down things (both big and small) she wants to accomplish. What are some of the things we might find if you kept a similar journal?

  4.Throughout the book, several characters speak to the loyalty Luca Valari inspires. Can you think of an instance where you showed blind loyalty to someone close to you? What were the implications of letting your love for that person get in the way of your conscience?

  5.“You are only as strong as the moment that finds you braver than you have ever been.” Hamish relies on his father’s quote before stepping into an uncertain situation with Reggie. Can you think of a time when you have stepped completely out of your comfort zone?