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.”
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
Election 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.
She no longer cared about propriety. She no longer cared to be one of those girls who married at the proper age, who had their lives figured out, who wouldn’t be caught dead in trousers. The girls who kept better company. A surge of her earlier giddiness returned, and she raised her fist to the sky. “Hallelujah!” she shouted to King Street, catching the eye of many passersby. Even more turned to look when she shouted, “I’m not going to be one of those girls!”
And since she wasn’t going to be one of those girls, she could do exactly what she wanted. She could love whomever she wanted—even if he refused to love her in return! As for her parents’ expectations and every young lady’s etiquette guide, why, expectations be hanged. She pulled her parents’ note from her pocket and kissed it with fond remembrance.
And promptly ripped it to smithereens and watched the tiny pieces float like wings on the air.
Ray sat back in his chair as Skip droned on about working for a better paper.
“After the election, I decided I don’t want to be stuck here forever.” He pushed his red hair back from his face. “I don’t, Mr. DeLuca. I want to work at one of the papers people wind around the block to get a headline from.”
Ray let him go on, hoping he would stop soon. He wanted to get this St. Joseph’s piece in perfect shape before presenting it to McCormick for the next edition. He had stayed up all night working on it, eating the rest of Viola’s jar of lemon curd, drinking the last dregs of coffee, convincing himself that his jumbled thoughts were a result of a story in action and not of Jem. He had his journal back but it sat untouched on the corner of his desk. He was convinced it still smelled of lavender.
When the door jangled open he was ready to hop up and show McCormick his working draft. But his boss’s large shadow failed to appear. Rather, a slight girl dressed in ragged boys’ clothes stood panting and red-cheeked in front of him.
“Which one are you?” asked Ray.
“Mouse.”
“Right.”
“I need you to send a telegram.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because it was faster to run here then to the west side of King Street and I just saw Mr. Crawley and Forbes put a sack over Jem Watts’s head.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
I beseech those tied up with rope to breathe slowly. The tighter and more rigid you become in your struggle, the deeper your bonds will cut. A survey of your perimeters and a quick, rational assessment of your circumstance, however dire, is the most prudent action.
Guide to the Criminal and Commonplace, M.C. Wheaton
I need someone with whom to share my golden moment,” Merinda said into the telephone. She was in the sitting room staring at the ceiling, having spent the better part of the previous night and that morning working out every last detail of the case. Everything pointed to Gavin Crawley, as she had maintained since the beginning. But now she felt she had ironed out every wrinkle.
“What do you mean ‘golden moment’?” Jasper asked. “And where’s Jem?”
“She’s gone out—had to work today. What matters is that she’s gone, and I’ve solved everything, and I want you to come over so I can share my stunning deductions.”
“Shouldn’t you be calling the police?”
“You are the police.”
She could hear his exasperation even over the telephone. “Merinda, must you continue this ridiculous and dangerous pursuit of a criminal?”
“I bought a revolver.”
“Which you can’t even shoot in target practice.”
“Nonsense. I didn’t purchase it to fire it. I just threaten and point. It startles a perpetrator and puts them ill at ease and—”
“Merinda, my lunch is getting cold.”
“Well, eat fast and skip dessert and take a cab over here just as fast as you can.”
“It’s apple pie!”
“Constable Forth, with whom do your loyalties lie? Me, your dearest friend and most esteemed colleague in all things scientific and detection, or… or… pie?”
Less than twenty minutes later, Jasper was seated on Merinda’s sofa. “So it’s Gavin Crawley?”
Merinda nodded. “I should telephone DeLuca too, shouldn’t I? He’ll want this for the Hog. He can be there to document the moment I peel back the curtain like Sherlock Holmes and reveal the brilliant solution that, heretofore, even the police have failed to see.”
It was at just that moment that Mrs. Malone brought in the Turkish coffee, saving Jasper from making a comment Merinda would not have appreciated.
Merinda hopped up and dashed to the blackboard. “Our suspect board.”
“With which I have become very familiar over the past few months.” He sipped the coffee.
“We know the obvious,” Merinda said, beginning to pace. “The threatening letters that Brigid and DeLuca received were clearly sent from Gavin Crawley.”
“Based on what evidence?”
“Because Gavin is left-handed, of course. The letters were clearly cut by someone who is left-handed.”
Jasper shrugged. “There are hundreds of left-handed people in the city. Thousands.”
“But Gavin has a motive, Jasper, and everything comes down to the motive. Several of the men listed on the board”—she pointed at it again, like a teacher in a classroom—“had the opportunity. But they didn’t have the motive.”
“And only Gavin did?”
“Precisely. Fiona’s only crimes were being pretty and working for Tertius Montague. Our Mr. Crawley, as we know, has a weakness for a pretty face, as evidenced by his pursuit of Jem. Fiona must have told her new beau about an arrangement Montague had with Chief Tipton.”
&nb
sp; “Tipton?” Jasper’s eyebrows rose.
“Even those in power can be bribed into silence—and to turn a blind eye to certain conditions in the city,” Merinda said. “In a moment of poor judgment, Gavin Crawley opens up to Fiona about this great debt he carries. He loves living as a wealthy man, so he keeps his shoes shined and his hair plastered perfectly. But he can’t resist trying his luck at the racetracks. And his fortune begins to dwindle, rapidly.”
“You realize that you are overbalancing any actual detective work you have done with hefty doses of hypothesizing?” Jasper said with a grin.
“It is my golden moment,” Merinda argued, as if that were explanation enough. “Gavin was determined to move upward, and in Fiona he saw his chance. He promised to take Fiona with him on his meteoric rise if only she kept feeding him information about Montague. Fiona, like many silly women before her, was besotted with him and the prospect he presented. Soon he learned about the involvement of your Chief Tipton. And now he had lots of puppets to play with. When Mayor Montague began talking about his new initiative to improve the morality of the city, Gavin decided it was the perfect opportunity to step closer to a man whose influence he wanted to exploit.”
Jasper savored a sip of coffee. “And then?”
“You know, don’t you?”
He put his cup on its saucer. “I surmised. You forget, Merinda, that I am the actual detective in the room. Oh, put away that scowl! You’re proving more adept at this than you think.”
Somewhat mollified, Merinda continued. “They quarreled eventually. Probably Fiona began wanting more than his now-tenuous finances could give her. He wanted to be rid of her and move on to someone else, but he had told her too much.” She shrugged. “So he chloroformed her. Then strangled her with a rope. We found no signs of struggle on her body because she knew him. She trusted the man who murdered her, Jasper. Can’t you just see him approaching her with his dapper suit and his honey-dipped tongue?”
The Bachelor Girl's Guide to Murder Page 17