A Lesson in Love and Murder by Rachel McMillan Page B

wouldn’t need your money—or anyone else’s. We’d be more than wealthy.”
    Benny tipped his hat and continued on Yonge Street.
    â€œWait!” Merinda jogged up to him. “Please wait. We weren’t finding a cat, were we, Jem?”
    Jem, catching up, shook her head. “No.”
    â€œWe met with David Ross, the leader of the People’s Labor Movement. They’re headed to Chicago, and we think Jonathan might be joining them.”
    â€œChicago?”
    â€œSo Jem and I are going, of course, and you must come. What better way to be near the men your cousin flocks to? We can find Jonathan and still manage to keep anything disastrous from happening.”
    Benny looked around him. Strange city. Strange woman. New adventure. He stole a moment to study her. Her features were not soft or round like the women in the advertisements and billboards heralding every large building in Toronto. She cut a finer, more natural image than the other women he had encountered during his stay.
    â€œWhat do you say?” She cut into his thoughts, hope tinging her voice.
    He studied her profile. Was it possible that she was as fascinated by him as he was by her? “It will bring us closer to Jonathan.”
    â€œAnd I think it will be a lark!” She looked between Jem’s smiling face and Benny’s apprehensive one. “An absolute lark.”
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    * For the uninitiated, a palliasse is a poor excuse for a mattress—a scratchy affair made of straw matting.
    â€  At least, that’s what he told the matron at the hotel he was doing. The careful reader might conclude that he hoped to encounter a familiar face.

C HAPTER T EN

    After a while, Toronto will become such a part of you that you won’t be able to see any other place without comparing it. That bustling patchwork quilt of a city with its ruggedly sewn-up neighborhoods, the mottled smoke roping up from soot-streaked buildings, the tower clocks ticking, the compass point of the St. James’s steeple piercing the sky… I will see it everywhere should I ever be fortunate enough to travel beyond it.
    An excerpt from one of Ray DeLuca’s less poetical journal entries
    D espite Ray’s attempt at feigned sleep, the passenger adjacent him was endlessly fascinated by his traveling companion.
    â€œRight hot out there!” the man said, scrunching a red-tinged nose over a bushy moustache. “Nice and comfortable chugging along. * When I was a young man, you never thought of leaving so quickly and easily… ” He prattled on, Ray dreamily catching a few words while his own thoughts spun.
    Any question directed at Ray was answered in his first language in an attempt to put the fellow off. But he was a jovial, persistent thing. Traveling on business. Sad to leave his missus behind. Ray wished he could take the overcoat he was using as a blanket and fling it over his companion’s head. He hated small talk on his better days.
    â€œYou’ll miss home too, young fellow,” the man continued.
    Ray couldn’t wrap his voice around the word home . It was a fraying sweater. A shattered glass place he couldn’t patch together with glue. Shivery when the wind whistled in, with a crack in the window. Mismatched dishes and a note telling her he was gone.
    The man soon found a more willing conversationalist across the aisle and ladled his attention on her. Ray was left to peacefully regret every decision he had made in the past year, while the winking sun spilled in through the broad window and the world swished by.
    On cool nights, Jem wore several layers just to keep comfortable. What would happen in the winter? With a baby? He didn’t want Jem to have the scrape-by life he had seen so often in Toronto flophouses or the Ward. If he continued to send more money than he could afford to Viola and Luca, the Ward might just be their fate.
    He took out his journal and his watch. Jem usually kept the