The Bachelor Girl's Guide to Murder by Rachel McMillan Read Free Book Online

them cookies and bread. This man—a stranger—takes better care of them than Tony does.
    D AY N INE . Viola sent a tear-spattered note. She’s sure I’m on the peg for something I was driven to do out of poverty from supporting her. I wonder if Tony receives the same heartbreak every time he’s tossed in jail after a drunken rage somewhere.
    D AY T EN . The fellow on the other side of the cell is rambling. I can make out his face just barely in the slight shaft of sunlight. He might be drunk. He lights up a cigar. He’s talking about flowers from his garden. Flowers he cut for a girl. She’s not good for him, he tells me. He’s stuttering a little. Probably a nervous habit. He asks me, half-mad, if I knew of a path under Yonge that connects the old bank to the Massey Hall. I thought that tunnel was a legend. He’s rambling about the Count of Monte Cristo and how he could escape. He knows about tunnels. They were built in the 1812 war in case of a siege.
    He doesn’t sound like the others here. He’s a bit of a dandy. Muttering something about the Ward. Gota girl in trouble. It’s a story I’ve heard countless times before. Then he starts on again about his knowledge of the Dominion Bank. There’s a tunnel there that stretches from under it to the Massey Hall on Shuter Street. I’ve sketched it in my mind. It was the most amusing thing I’ve heard in days…
    D AY T WENTY-ONE . It’s fortunate Constable Forth’s mother has been kind to Viola. For, currently, Tony is in the Don as well. Seems to know my bunkmate, Forbes, quite well. He broke into Spenser’s. Heaven knows what he wanted from a department store. Well, I know that whatever the reason for his crime, it was farmed for a pretty penny. Sad how the same story plays over and over. It seems those of darkest hearts and cleanest hands know exactly who to prey upon for a fast dollar.
    I watch Tony and think of the little boy who once played jacks with me by the river. He’s still pleasant enough when he laughs. But he rarely laughs. Life in America was supposed to be better for us, but it has taken all the lightness from him.
    Merinda closed the journal. “This gives a little more depth to those Don Jail articles, eh?”
    They said good night, and Jem ascended the steps, performed her evening toilette, and went to bed. And there, tucked beneath her floral eiderdown, she explored Ray DeLuca’s journal more carefully.
    From her brief encounter with him, she had not imagined he would have such delicate handwriting. She brightened the lamp on her side table and flipped through the thin pages. She read his notes, dated and detailing the scenarios of the day as well as appointments and ideas for articles. Some entries were difficult to understand, and some involved a shorthand code of names and places.
    This Ray DeLuca was a reformer, as was evident through his observations on the horrid conditions of St. John’s Ward. Some pages borenothing but quotations and overheard statements of a judicial, legal, or municipal tone. And there were even a few poems—terrible ones, she was forced to admit—in the style of Wordsworth. They were ill-fitting, like his coat, Jem observed.
    Reading his notebook was like reading a cadence of the city. It was a strange little book, this collection of thoughts and poems and scribblings. Jem’s favorite aspect of it was the running lexicon he kept in the back pages, proof that English still presented a challenge: Beguiled. Ornery. Significant. Precipice. Cumulonimbus.
    She bit back her smile, and with a jumble of vocabulary words lolling around in her head, she fell fast asleep.

    * A year earlier, Ray DeLuca had feigned arrest to be tossed in a cell at the Don Jail with a poor excuse for a trial. From its depths, he investigated the unfair treatment of the prisoners there. Along the way, he learned how easy it was to bribe guards—and to