by Vicki Delany
“You need anything more, Mrs. Mac,” Mrs. Mann said, “I’ll be in the kitchen.” She didn’t approve of a young man such as Angus making tea for visitors.
Ever the gracious hostess, I poured. “You didn’t find this woman, Mary?” McKnight asked. “No,” I said. “Milk, Inspector?” Milk being a relative term, as all we had was the horrid canned stuff.
“Yes, please.” “With all the excitement of finding poor Chloe, we abandoned the search and came home.” I passed the inspector his cup. It wasn’t a proper tea presentation by any means: the heavy brown teapot, the mismatched mugs, the sugar still in the tin it was sold in. Not to mention canned milk. In Dawson one makes do.
“As soon as Ma, I mean Mother, leaves for work, I’m going to look for Mary,” Angus said. “You haven’t seen her, have you?”
The men shook their heads. “Sorry, Angus,” Richard said. He declined a cup of tea, indicating the paper and pencil in his hands.
McKnight didn’t seem the least bit interested in Mary. He asked me about Chloe: who might not have liked her (no one, I assured him), who her friends were (all the dancers, I said), why she had been fired (reduction in staff, I said, with a tinge of regret in my voice).
McKnight put his mug down. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. MacGillivray. If you think of anything else, I’d be obliged if you’d contact me.”
“Certainly.” I stood to show my guests out.
“One more thing,” McKnight said, reaching into his pocket. “Have you seen this before?”
It was a tiny tin-plated cross hanging off a thin chain with a broken clasp. I shook my head, trying to appear thoughtful. “It isn’t original, nor at all valuable,” I said at last. “Probably a good many like that around.”
“It’s Mary’s,” Angus said. “She must’ve lost it.” He held out his hand. “Thanks, Inspector, I’ll see she gets it back.”
McKnight put the jewellery into his pocket. “Sorry, son. I’ll hold on to it for a while. Why don’t you sit back down, Mrs. MacGillivray, and you and young Angus can tell me more about this Mary.”
Angus and I looked at each other. “Not much to tell,” I said. “Constable Sterling knows the story.” I sat down.
McKnight glanced at Richard, but he spoke to me. “Why don’t you tell it to me, Mrs. MacGillivray?”
So I did. The whole story. Leaving out the matter of finding Mary in the shadows behind the Savoy with Tom Jannis and her running off, which I couldn’t see was any of their business. I simply said she hadn’t come to work that morning, and Angus was concerned.
There was a long silence after I finished speaking. I sipped my tea. Sergeant Lancaster attempted to give me an encouraging smile. Richard wrote in his notebook, carefully avoiding both Angus’s and my eyes.
“You’re sure this necklace belongs to Mary, Angus?” McKnight said at last, pulling the object back out of his pocket and turning it over in his hands. His hands were like a lady’s, soft, uncalloused, the fingers long, the nails neatly trimmed.
“Looks like it. But as Mother said, it’s a common enough type.”
He dropped the cross back into his pocket. “If you find this woman, Mary, bring her around to see me would you, Angus?”
“Why?” Suspicion crept into Angus’s voice. “I want to talk to everyone who might have seen
something suspicious in Paradise Alley this morning.”
“Sure,” Angus said. McKnight put his hat back on his head. Lancaster and
Sterling did likewise.
I rose from my chair, but I couldn’t pass the men in order to get to the door to show them out. Instead we all jostled and shifted and spilled out into the hallway. We found Mrs. Mann standing by the sitting room entrance, where she no doubt had been listening. More jostling ensued as Angus opened the front door and the police filed out. Sergeant Lancaster came last.
I lifted my hand to my forehead and swayed with the slightest of moans. The sergeant took hold of my arm as a look of concern crossed his beefy features. “Mrs. MacGillivray?” he said.
I waved my hand (the one that wasn’t pressed to my forehead) and swayed once again. “I feel quite faint. Sergeant, if you don’t mind.” Angus rolled his eyes and followed the police out the door, asking Richard Sterling what would happen to Chloe’s body. Mrs. Mann went into the kitchen. Abandoned by my natural protectors, my son and landlady, who apparently know me too well, I leaned on Lancaster’s arm. “My chair, please,” I breathed.
He almost carried me into the sitting room. I collapsed delicately into the chair and arranged my skirts around my legs. I opened my eyes wide. “A glass of water, perhaps,” I whispered.
Lancaster bolted from the room.
When he returned with the water, I accepted it graciously. “Do pardon me, Sergeant,” I said, a touch of strength returning to my voice. “The events of this morning have been most distressing.”
He picked up my empty hand and patted it. “Quite understandable, my dear. As I’ve told you before, I simply don’t understand how a gentle lady such as yourself can continue to mix with the more undesirable elements of society.”
I managed to avoid copying Angus and rolling my eyes. Lancaster had indeed told me his opinions on the proper milieu for a lady such as me: making his dinner and washing his socks.
I pulled my hand away, politely, and sipped the water. “Thank you for your gallantry, Sergeant. Due in no small part to your courteous attentions, I am feeling a good deal better.” I have learned that it’s simply impossible to go too far in praising a man’s concept of his own chivalry.
He smiled hugely. Lancaster’s nose appeared to have been broken on more than one occasion, but he still had most of his front teeth. “I’d best be on my way then,” he said, reluctantly.
I smiled and placed the glass on the table. “Perhaps you should. But before you go could you tell me why Inspector McKnight is carrying that cross around.” I refrained from batting my eyelashes.
“He found it…” his voice dropped “…on the body of the dead woman.”
I gasped and held my hand to my forehead once again. Lancaster grabbed the water glass and pressed it back into my free hand. “So it was hers then, Chloe’s, how sad.”
“It wasn’t on her body, as in around her neck, Mrs. MacGillivray.” Lancaster bent forward so as to whisper. “It was clutched in her hand. Like she’d ripped it from the woman who’d killed her.”
I didn’t bother to gasp again. I’d suspected as much. The only question was whether Chloe had been gripping the cross and chain before or after Joey LeBlanc had bent over her body.
Chapter Fourteen
“What do you know about this Mary, Constable?” McKnight asked as they headed back across town towards Fort Herchmer.
“Not a great deal, sir,” Sterling said. “Nothing more than what Fiona…Mrs. MacGillivray told you. Mary’s not from the Yukon, so she’s far away from her tribe. I think she’s a Christian; there was a bible among her belongings, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the necklace belongs to her.”
“The necklace seems to be the key, wouldn’t you say?”
As they walked through the streets, men stepped aside to let them pass, nervous eyes watching them go. News of the finding of the body had swept through town on the wind. Miners tended to be a superstitious lot, and no one wanted to cross the path of men who had so recently been in the presence of death. McKnight and Sterling had questioned the onlookers, but none of them, to no one’s surprise, had seen or heard anything unusual. Apparently no one—whore, customer, or passerby—had laid eyes on Chloe before.
McKnight liked to talk out loud, to hear his thoughts as if they were part of a conversation. Sterling found it fascinating.
So deep in thought was McKnight, he didn’t notice the tall, scrawny figure of Angus MacGillivray tagging along behind.
Lancaster hadn’t been seen since he’d fallen for Fiona’s fainting trick like a pig trotting after the farmer to the slaughterhouse, tail waving. Sterling c
ould take a guess as to what Fiona was up to—trying to find out more about the investigation—particularly as her protégé Mary appeared to be involved in this mess. He hoped she’d stay clear. A murder investigation in a community as isolated as Dawson was difficult at best, without the added complication of the lovely but somewhat headstrong Fiona MacGillivray trying to take charge.
Sterling felt the edges of his mouth curling up in a secret smile.
“Constable?” Sterling tore his thoughts away from an image of Fiona
MacGillivray in red serge and crispy ironed jodhpurs tucked into shiny boots issuing orders to the investigating officers.
“Uh, sorry, sir. Didn’t hear.” Sterling gestured to a passing wagon, loaded down with crates, the driver of which seemed to be under the impression that screaming at his miserable nag of a horse would make it go faster.
“I said that the necklace is most interesting. What do you think about it?”
“Seems rather conveniently placed to me, sir,” Sterling said, managing at the last minute to avoid a pile of recently deposited, steaming horse dung.
“Sometimes the easiest solution is the answer all along,” McKnight murmured, as much to himself as to Sterling. “Don’t go looking for complications if you don’t have to, that’s what I always say. And I’m usually right. But I’d be more comfortable had that bloody LeBlanc woman not interfered with the body before we had a good look at it. Don’t suppose you noticed this necklace before LeBlanc’s performance, did you, Constable?”
“No, sir. I didn’t.” “Too bad.” McKnight stopped abruptly in the centre of
the intersection. “I’m assigning you to assist me in this investigation, Constable Sterling,” he said, heedless of the traffic forced to detour around him.
“Sir?” “You heard me. I’ll speak to your sergeant.” McKnight pulled the cross and chain out of his pocket and handed it to the startled constable. “Ask around, find out if anyone’s seen LeBlanc with this thing. Can’t imagine that if it belongs to LeBlanc, and it innocently broke from around her neck when she fell over the body, how it would wind up clutched in a dead woman’s hand, but we have to ask all the questions. Then find this Indian Mary. I want to talk to her. You can use young MacGillivray here; the woman might show herself if she sees him. Should have asked Mrs. MacGillivray if she knows where this Chloe lived. I’ll find out and head over to talk to anyone who knows her.”
Without another word or a backward glance, McKnight carried on up the street.
Sterling and Angus looked at each other. A man staggering under a weight of crates marked “canned tomatoes” almost collided with them and yelled at them to “Get the ’ell out o’ the way, bloody fools.”
Angus was grinning from ear to ear. “Did Inspector McKnight ask me to assist you, sir?” he said.
“I believe so. But you’re not coming with me to talk to any of Joey LeBlanc’s associates.” The boy’s smile disappeared. Sterling dangled the necklace by its chain, watching as the cross twisted in the wind. “You’re pretty sure this belongs to your friend, Mary?”
Angus grimaced. “It looks exactly like the one she was wearing when I pulled her out of the river. There must be lots of crosses like that one around, like Ma said. It’s not as if it’s covered with diamonds or nothin’.”
“Or anything,” Sterling said. “You know how to talk properly, so don’t pretend you don’t.”
“Sorry, sir. Inspector McKnight did think it might be Mrs. LeBlanc’s necklace, right? Accidentally torn off when she fell over the body. I bet that’s the answer. Mrs. LeBlanc has the same necklace as Mary.” Angus grinned, happy to have solved the problem of his new friend’s possible guilt.
Sterling didn’t bother to correct the boy. Let him think, for a while, that Mary was in the clear. If Joey LeBlanc hadn’t planted the necklace, and he reminded himself he had no reason—other than his own intense dislike of the Québécois whoremistress—to think so, and if the necklace found clutched in Chloe’s dead fingers belonged to Mary, the Indian woman would almost certainly hang.
“We have to find Mary,” Sterling said. “Are you working this afternoon?”
Angus’s eyes opened wide, and the colour drained from his face. “Oh, no. I forgot. Miss Witherspoon invited Ma for tea, and I forgot to tell her. What time is it now?”
Sterling checked his watch. “Quarter past one.” “Miss Witherspoon has appointments with men…I mean appointments to interview men about their experiences in Dawson, I mean, their experiences with mining and…”
“I know what you mean, Angus.” “She’s paying me two dollars a day to show her around town.”
“Escort your mother to tea and tell Miss Witherspoon you have to assist the North-West Mounted Police for a while this afternoon. She’ll have to excuse you. I’ll meet you at four o’clock in front of the Savoy, and we can start our search for Mary then.”
“But she pays me two dollars a day!”
“Two dollars, or service to her Majesty, Mr. MacGillivray?
Whether Mary did this or not,” he held up one hand to silence Angus’s objection, “she’s probably hiding and won’t be forthcoming to the police. Inspector McKnight is right: she might come out of hiding if she sees you.”
“Four o’clock it is then.” “Good boy.” Angus dashed off. Despite what he’d said to Angus, Sterling knew they had very little chance of locating Mary. A white woman would be easy to find; she’d have to confine herself to the few square miles that made up the city of Dawson. A few square miles of light and noise, laughter and tears, surrounded by the northern wilderness. In the early hours of a rare night, when the drunks quieted down and the dance hall singers and musicians paused to take a break, and the noise in the street stopped, you could hear the wolves howling in the hills. Mary was an Indian. Even without the support of her tribe, she should be able to survive, at least until winter, in the wilderness. If she were guilty, she’d have been long gone, probably before Fiona MacGillivray tripped over Chloe’s body. And even if she had nothing to do with Chloe’s death, as soon as she heard, as everyone in town would soon hear, that the Mounties wanted to talk to her, she would leave town.
He’d liked Mary, in the brief time he’d known her. She had a lot of fight in her.
Sterling dropped the necklace into his pocket. He’d spend a few hours in the cheapest of the saloons that backed onto Paradise Alley asking a few innocent questions. Joey LeBlanc normally wore dresses as prim as his own mother’s, but occasionally they would be cut with a bit of a neckline. If she’d worn this necklace, someone would have noticed it.
* * *
Once everyone had left, I discovered that I was simply ravenous. The house was quiet; Mrs. Mann had returned to her laundry shed. I considered summoning her to fix me something but decided I would try to be an independent Canadian woman. There was a good-sized piece of last night’s tough, stringy roast remaining in the ice box and a nice fresh half-loaf of bread in the bread box. I sliced off a generous hunk of the meat and cut, after several attempts, two rather crooked slices of bread, then added plenty of mustard. I put all the ingredients away and rinsed the dirty knife in the water bucket. Standing in front of the counter, I took an enormous bite of my sandwich, feeling quite proud of myself, as well as a bit avant-garde eating while standing over the sink.
The front door slammed, and Angus shouted for me. I grabbed a plate from the shelf, slapped my sandwich onto it and collapsed into a proper sitting position at the kitchen table. I was dabbing mustard off my lips with my handkerchief when Angus came in.
“Good,” he said. “You’re still here. Ready for tea?”
“Tea? Why should I want tea? Would you care for a sandwich, dear?”
He glanced around the kitchen, perhaps expecting Mrs. Mann to be hiding behind the stove.
“I made it myself,” I said. “Would you like me to make you one?”
“I’m sorry, Mother, but I may have forgotten to tell you. Miss Witherspoon and Miss Fore
ster invited us to join them today. At two. It’s one thirty now.”
“Angus, I can’t possibly have tea with your friends today. What were you thinking? I’m exhausted. And this dress is not at all suitable for tea.”
He picked the sandwich off its plate and handed it to me. “Finish your lunch, Mother. You’ll feel better. You’ve told me many times that no one here worries about following convention. That dress will do. Although the skirt is a bit dirty around the…uh…middle bit.”
“Perhaps we can have tea tomorrow,” I suggested, biting into my sandwich. A piece of beef refused to budge under the force of my teeth, and I shook my head back and forth to wrestle it from between the bread.
“It’s our duty, Mother, to keep an appointment. I told the ladies we would join them. I myself should probably change.”
I hate it when he’s right.
* * *
Euila and Miss Witherspoon were waiting for us. They were staying at the Richmond, which tried to be the best hotel in town, but somehow everything managed to fall short. Not far away, Belinda Mulroney was building the Fairview Hotel, which was due to open next month and which promised its prospective guests the best of everything.
Belinda and the Fairview were the talk of the town, People were saying the hotel would even have electricity!
The drawing room of the Richmond always reminded me of a country estate gone to seed. The sort of place the heirs of medieval bandits could no longer afford to keep up, but tried terribly hard. I’d been to a few places like that when I’d travelled with the Prince of Wales’s party. The family would literally bankrupt themselves to put the Prince, his household, and useless hangers-on (like me) up for a week or a month. It was no fault of the Prince that I’d relieve the long-suffering family of the smaller pieces of silver and some of her ladyship’s jewellery the night before we all grandly took our leave.