A Lesson in Love and Murder (25 page)

“I'd say it's remarkably good fortune.” Ray looked up at her with a forced half smile and a tired wink. “Whenever Merinda Herringford opens her mouth, I just turn my head to the left.” He demonstrated, and his eyes met Merinda's.

“Oh, hush, DeLuca. I feel awful about this. And you, Jasper! This is dangerous. Explosives and men losing their lives just to make some silly statement.” She folded her arms and rocked back on her heels.

“There were a lot of explosives,” Jem said. She was standing at Ray's shoulder and absently running her hand up and down his arm. “The boat is in smithereens. And then some. Merinda, you should have seen the explosion in the water.”

Merinda nodded. “Ross told me that he had a much loftier goal than a streetcar.”

“Tell them, Merinda.” Benny instructed.

“Benny and I are helping Ross blow up the Coliseum. That's why the shipments have been so big. Someone in Toronto is getting a huge paycheck for explosives Ross means to use to blow up the former president.”

“Theodore Roosevelt?” Jasper exclaimed.

Benny nodded. “Tuesday—day after tomorrow. The second day of his convention. Roosevelt is slated to give a speech to officially promote his new platform.”

“And we were helping,” Jem said woozily. “I'll never forgive myself.”

“You have nothing to feel badly about, Jemima.” Benny said. “Merinda and I will stop them. Just as you, Jasper, and poor Ray over there will stop Hedgehog.”

“Hedgehog couldn't care less about the president,” Jem muttered. “From everything I have seen, that man only cares about his next influx of money.”

“Precisely,” Benny said kindly.

“There's little more to be done today,” Jasper said. “Don't go to that flophouse tonight. Get a room here.”

Ray laughed and pressed the kerchief harder to his ear. Everything hurt. “With what money?”

“Mine,” Merinda said with finality. “Well, my father's.”

Ray hadn't felt a real pillow under his head in days. It was soft, filled with down. One of the many brilliant amenities in this beautiful hotel. He had never really taken Jem on a proper honeymoon,
and ironically a hotel such as this would be a place worthy of her delicate sensibilities and high tastes. Ironic because, at this very moment, Jem was a sniveling wreck.

Ray cracked a small smile. Her nose was quite endearing when red. “Y-you can't hear!” she sniffled into her handkerchief, her shoulders shuddering with her sobs.

He pulled her tightly into him. “It could have been much worse. For you. For Jasper. For me, even.” He swallowed, his heart turning over at her red cheeks and big, glimmering blue eyes. He could have left her alone. With a baby on the way. The thought seemed to hit him in the gut, followed by the immediate guilt that the severity hadn't registered until now. He had been too startled by the explosion and could barely remember the long, painful trek from the harbor to the Palmer House. Then Benny sat him in a chair, rendered his diagnosis, and Ray was given a clean, quiet room.

Fussing over Jem took his mind away from the fact that he would always hear in halves. At least he had all of her.

They sat on the edge of the bed. “I want you to go home,” he said, cupping her cheek. “This is so very dangerous. Everything here is wrong and dangerous, Jem. I don't want you anywhere near it anymore.” He traced the line of her jaw with his finger.

Jem didn't seem to hear him, staring forward, fingers intertwined in her lap. “I wish it had been me,” she said.

“Heavens no,” Ray said shortly.

“You already need to listen twice as hard as I do. For stories, when you have trouble understanding someone with a heavy accent.”

“I have one very good ear,” he assured her. “And my life. And, as I told you, it will make a wonderful excuse not to hear Merinda drone on.”

Jem tried to laugh, but it came out as a squeaky hiccup. Instead, she defaulted to sobbing more heavily into her handkerchief.

“Jem, I don't even have the will to reprimand you. Or the energy.” He whistled through his teeth. The room was spinning slightly, and he felt nauseous. He wanted to fall on the bed and close his eyes. He flopped backward, feet still planted on the floor. Jem followed suit.

Ray made out the designed plaster of the ceiling. “I can beg you, though,” he said tiredly. “I can plead with you to stay out of all of this—away from the Coliseum, away from the anarchists.”

Jem turned her head and looked at him. He could feel the brush of her eyes on his profile, even as he kept his eyes upward in order to hear her clearly if she spoke.

“Now when the baby cries, you'll have an excuse not to get up and tend to it. You'll say you just didn't hear it.”

Ray flickered a slight smile. “Exactly.”

“I never want to stop having these wonderful adventures. Seeing Chicago for the first time, watching you and Jasper solve mysteries while Merinda and I do our own sleuthing. Even after the baby comes, I will want to keep my foot in this world.”

“You say that now, Jem. But once you're a mother… ”

“No.” She cut him off. “That will be a big part of my identity. But I can't transform just because I have a child. I can't imagine everything I have loved and enjoyed to that point fading away forever just because I have a new adventure.” She stopped speaking, but he could hear her thinking. “I won't expect you to give up everything you love, and you can't expect me to either.”

He grabbed her hand. “But you're everything I love,” he said.

“No. Not all. And that's good. That's right.”

“I am still pleading with you to go home.”

“When all my friends are here?” The down quilt rustled slightly as she shook her head vehemently over the coverlet. “Not a chance. How very lonely that would be!”

“So you're staying.”

“I am. I am staying close. So very close.”

And Ray smiled, truly—stretched wide across his face—for the first time in days.

*
Merinda was only familiar with this popular treatise on ladies' fashion and lifestyle due to her years as Jemima's flatmate.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

Perhaps your method of deduction will differ from other great sleuths as they pull back the curtain on their brilliant revelations. Maybe you will think aloud, weaving threads into the tapestry of your solution. The true detective realizes that it is not the means to the solution, but rather its ultimate resolution, that matters most in the study of deduction.

M.C. Wheaton,
Guide to the Criminal and Commonplace

W
hile Jem was in the adjoining suite, Merinda had fought the persistent urge to finally flick open Benny's satchel and go exploring. But with Jem safely tucked in with DeLuca on another floor, no prying eyes would notice if she took a few moments.

Merinda exhaled, bit her lip, and then flicked the loose latch of the satchel open. Inside, a notebook. On them lines of sometimes smudged, sometimes worn ink slanted in Benny's precise hand. There were years of papers at her fingertips, some bound in hard-backed journals, others leafed out, their corners reaching toward her. Letters he never sent to his cousin. Thoughts and descriptions painting a wilderness canvas as clear in her imagination as day.

She slid a carefully folded letter out, its once sharp creases dulled. She guessed she should feel guilty, but Benny was a client, and these letters, she tried to assure herself, were part of a case.

Benny wasn't a great writer, she decided. He didn't have DeLuca's
hyperbolic flourish, but his whole heart was on each measured line. Questions layering questions—did he remember Mad Old Johnson from the Regina detachment and his habit of bringing his pet squirrel to the barracks? Did he remember playing with swords and lances atop that lame old donkey in Riverton? Did Jonathan remember the green vapor of the northern lights, the sweep of the snow, the voice of their grandmother calling them from the brush of woods where they had been playing Indians?

Merinda's chest constricted. The letters enshrined Jonathan as the smart one, the one with potential. The one who could have risen to the highest ranks.

She opened another book—
Benfield Citrone and Jonathan Arnasson's Guide to the Canadian Wilderness.
The first pages were written in block letters as if by a schoolboy, but as she flipped through the pages, the writing became more and more assured. A young man's writing. Peppered with language and phrases that, despite their brief time together, she already associated with him. Little flicks of wisdom here. An anecdote there. He had contributed to this book for years.

Wear your snowshoes backward so your tracks are easily recognizable on newly fallen snow.

She fell asleep with the letter on her chest.

She was just rereading a paragraph about backward snowshoes the next morning when Jem returned for her toiletries, forcing Merinda to look up and quickly return the sheets to their place.

“You're as bad as I am when I kept and read Ray's journal!” Jem chastised while rummaging in her case for toothpowder.
*

“I-I wasn't. I was hoping there might be something on… on… ”

“Spare me.” Jem sat down beside Merinda on the sofa, waiting for an explanation.

“Jonathan is Benny's whole world,” Merinda said, her eyes welling. “And that will be taken away from him. We are helping our client
find his cousin so that justice will see him hanged. My conscience is all in a knot.”

“You have a conscience?” Jem winked. “That's why you need something solid to believe in, Merinda. More than Goldman, who will leave after she has said her piece and rallied a few followers, or Ross, who will forget you exist the moment his grand plan for the Coliseum is complete. You need something stronger, some anchor beyond these anarchists and their ideas of justice and this big banner they're waving to make a point.”

“I believe in us,” Merinda said solemnly. “And what we do.”

“Running around strange cities until we trip onto a solution?”

“Ross believes in his cause. That he devotes himself to some greater good that will ripple through people and inspire them to fight for their freedom.”

“But Ross is only a man,” Jem said gently. “And men are fallible. Men can let you down.”

“I did not sign up for a church service, Jemima.”

“I know. But God stands for justice too. God stands for equality.”

Merinda stopped a moment. “Equality?”

“Merinda, there's so much more than what you see in your Wheaton and underneath your microscope. There's a completely different and vast and wonderful mystery.”

Merinda rolled this around in her mind for a moment. “Mystery?”

Jem nodded. “God is the greatest mystery. And when you believe in something, no matter how grand, no matter how invincible, you are willing to do anything, however preposterous, to see it to its solution.” Jem smiled.

“That's it!” Merinda clapped her hands.

“I take it this is not Merinda Herringford on the brink of a spiritual awakening,” Jem said lowly.