If one is to undertake the unparalleled adventure of the Canadian wilderness, one must be at once familiar with the history of the Force: initially trackers across the prairies, stopping rebellion, whiskey running, and cattle rustlers. Ruling with honest code rather than the threat of bullets. The war against the Boers began and the Canadian redcoats honored Her Majesty Victoria by fighting in her name in a faraway conflict. They returned, a hybrid of the cowboy and militiaman, larger than life, larger than the untamed land they patrolled through sleet and rain.
Benfield Citrone and Jonathan Arnasson, Guide to the Canadian Wilderness
As Jasper was knocking on Tipton’s office door, David Ross was sending a message to King Street. Merinda received it from the messenger and tore open the envelope.
“An address,” she said to Jem, “for when we reach Chicago.” She folded the paper and tucked it in her pocket.* “It seems they cannot do any of this without us. My deductive prowess—not to mention my ability to be a chameleon in any situation and Benny’s proficiency at sniffing out a bobby from a mile away—are invaluable to this cause.”
A few telephone calls, and Merinda’s father’s funds secured two comfortable passages to Chicago as well as a room at the Palmer House Hotel.
“I don’t think we need to stay somewhere quite that extravagant,” Jem said, hearing Merinda relay Walter Herringford’s absolute insistence on the upper-class hotel.
“Nonsense.” Merinda shooed away her reservations. “He has the money and we like the comfort. No one will suspect girls at a grand hotel of being on the trail of dangerous anarchists!”
“I should leave word for Ray.” Jem chewed her lip, wondering if it was best to telephone the office with a message or return home and leave a note there. “Just in case he comes back and… ”
“No!” Merinda grabbed her arm, tugging her playfully in the direction of the attic where a trunk of pants, bowler hats, moustaches, and wigs awaited them. “You can tell him in person! We’ll all be together!” Merinda made it sound like Christmas dinner.
Benny put a few bills on the counter at the Empire Hotel and gave the barkeep a smile and a tip of his cap.
He had just become familiar with the sounds of Toronto, he thought. The whirring automobiles and halting streetcars warring for right of way on the harried streets didn’t faze him as they had just days before. Perhaps Merinda could tame the city for him, he thought before he could stop himself.
He presented himself at the door to the King Street Flat, smiled broadly, and tipped his cap. “Good Morning, Mrs. Malone. I am here to help the ladies with their luggage!”
It wasn’t unlike portaging, he decided while wrestling with Jem’s heavy suitcases and Merinda’s rucksack. He wondered why it clanged so much.†
It wasn’t long before their train was screeching out of Union Station and chugging away under a bright blue sky.
Benny and Merinda settled across from each other in the dining car while Jem looked for the lavatory at the end.
“It’s only in the past few months that I have become accustomed to trains,” Benny said.
“Accustomed?”
“They’re so fast. I couldn’t believe anything went so fast. Or needed to go so fast. In Regina, I used to take a horse out to the track and bump along, and when the train first chugged out of the station, it was easy for me to keep pace. But then it sped up too quickly… ” He shook his head. “And I lost pace. There was nothing even the swiftest animal had on the machine’s steel and wheels.”
“Your life is so different from mine,” Merinda said, watching him.
“And my first automobile ride? When I first moved to training? That was something else. Jonathan talked me off my ledge. I was apprehensive. He said it was like a metal horse.” Benny chuckled. “But an automobile doesn’t feel, nor does it nudge your shoulder with its nose. With your horse, there’s an equilibrium. He talks, just not in the human language, and you form some sort of communication. With an automobile? It doesn’t know what you’re thinking. You can’t clench your feet and move your knees to let the horse know you want to go faster. You can’t jiggle the rein or pull on the bit. You have a wheel and a pedal and a gear.”
“It’s a bit overwhelming, isn’t it?”
“The world’s moving too fast for me, Merinda. Women in trousers and big electric lights? They wouldn’t believe me if I told them at my post up north.”
“How do you get any news up there from… from civilization?”
Benny laughed. “Oh, there’s civilization up at Fort Glenbow. It’s just different from what you’re used to with your streetcars and your marquees.” He kindly took the cup of tea the waiter offered him, and Merinda followed suit. “Mostly the community westward takes a lot of patience and communication. What you find is two very different groups of people trying to understand each other. I don’t always speak the language the natives do. When I try, they lapse into English with far more proficiency than I would ever share in their tongue. We live with nature too. And animals. I can tell when a wolf is near. I can trail a criminal using a path of broken twigs. I can map the stars.” He shrugged. “And who needs the city when he can see the stars?”
Merinda was spellbound, but she couldn’t let him know that. So she said, “I can see the stars.”
“Can you? High above those skyscrapers? That big arcade on Yonge? The rail building? It’s the tallest in the empire, isn’t it? Blocks the stars.”
“I can!” She was adamant. “Besides, what company do you have out there with you? Just you and a few wolves?”
Benny nodded thoughtfully. “It can get lonely. But I’ve never minded much being on my own. I understand the world better when I can live in my own thoughts.”
“When you don’t have to explain yourself to anyone,” Merinda translated.
“Exactly.”
“When you don’t have to worry about anyone mistaking your tone or the way you talk for being… cold… or odd.”
Benny smiled. “Of a sort.”
Merinda traced the windowpane with her index finger, thinking it would be nice if the train took forever to reach its destination.
Jasper Forth had never done anything quite so spontaneous, so reckless or foolhardy, as telling Tipton he was taking leave. First Tipton asked why he needed a warrant signed for Spenser’s requisition and shipping orders. Jasper lied for the second time in his life.‡ When pressed, he had described the time off as “well, a sort of vacation, to see about an old friend.” And then he’d dashed to the train station to secure a ticket to Chicago.§
Now, parched and unsettled, wishing for something to settle his nerves as he pursued a trail of uncertain consequence, Jasper twisted ungracefully through the aisle. He had not yet mastered the art of squeezing his tall frame through enclosed, moving spaces. Bumping up against another passenger, then, was not wholly a shock to him. But stepping back and registering that person? A shock indeed.
“Jemima!” His eyes went wide. Her face betrayed the same surprise.
“Jasper!”
“Jem, you look most unwell.” Indeed, her skin was almost translucent.
“I’m not used to the motion.”
He nodded. “Me neither, eh? I plum ran into you.”
“I need to sit down for a moment,” she said. Jasper quickly found them two seats and guided her into a chair. “I wish the world would stop spinning,” she said after a minute, opening her eyes.
“You’re sure you’re all right?”
“Just a little dizzy.”
The color was returning to her face. “So now you can tell me where you’re going,” he gently prodded.
Jem swallowed. “Ch-Chicago,” she said slowly.
Jasper narrowed his eyes. “So Ray summoned you too?”
Jem shook her head. “No. Of course not. He… Wait. Did Ray ring for you?”
Jasper nodded. “He’s found a… Well, it’s something attached to a case I’m working on in the city.”
“The anarchist bombs and Jonathan?” Jem’s eyes were saucers.
“Something like that. Jem, it’s dangerous. He wouldn’t want you to be following him unescorted into a strange city and… ”
“Oh, I’m not alone,” Jem said easily. “Benny Citrone and Merinda are waiting for me in the dining car.”
Jasper Forth held a small plastic bag up to the light of the train window. What was inside the translucent cover was tiny, like string.
“What is that?” Benny asked.
Jasper slid the object across the table. “A bit of wire from the explosion yesterday. We’ve found similar bits at every one of these bomb sites. Our engineers say no such wire is used in the making of the cars.”
“This is a wire from a bomb,” Benny said. He motioned for Jasper to lean in and pointed out the delicate craftsmanship of the evidence. “That’s a Turk’s knot.” Benny used his index finger to point, and Jasper squinted in concentration. “Every member of the Force uses a Turk’s knot to tie the lanyard at the neck of his uniform. It’s regulation.”
“So this is Jonathan’s knot?”
“It seems very unlikely it would be anyone else’s,” said Benny.
“So the streetcar bombings and the bomb that killed Jones are definitely the work of Jonathan Arnasson,” Merinda said.
Benny groaned. “I keep thinking I’ll wake up and all of this will be a horrible dream, but that seems impossible now.”
The server poured coffee in three ceramic mugs and left the carafe. Merinda sipped, burned her tongue, wrinkled her nose, and took a few mental steps back. “What are you doing here, Jasper? Now that Benny’s identified your silly knot, you can tell us.”
Jasper swallowed his mouthful of coffee. “Ray called me. He wants my help getting his sister out of trouble, but mostly I think he really wants my help in uncovering… ”¶
“Ray called you?” Merinda cut him off, eyebrows shooting up to her hairline.
Jasper shrugged. “He’s my friend, and he senses trouble, and he trusts me.”
“Well, if DeLuca’s in trouble, that means we’re all involved,” Merinda said resolutely. “So now we just have to find Benny’s cousin, stop whatever bombs Ross and his men have in their grand plan, infiltrate whatever group of troublemakers is blowing up streetcars, and check on DeLuca.” She exhaled.
“You missed the part of the sentence where Ray summoned me, Merinda, not you and Jem.”
“Cracker jacks, Jasper! By calling you, of course he meant us.”
“I assure you,” Jasper said, “at no point did he say, ‘Oh, and make sure to bring my wife and her nosey friend.’ ”
Merinda mumbled something neither of the men could understand.
Benny turned from the window. “You said something about Ray DeLuca’s brother-in-law?”
“Tony. Ray thinks the fellow’s up to his ears in all manner of crime.” Jasper stared ruefully into his coffee cup, wondering whether or not to tell Benny what he had the right to know, that Ray had found Jonathan’s knot on another corpse, and the evidence now pointed to outright murder on top of destruction on a larger scale. He took a deep breath. “Looks like Ray stumbled into some crime of his own too. He was unloading a few barges for this fellow named Hedgehog to make a quick buck, and he found a corpse stuffed inside a long crate. And a jar with the Spenser’s logo emblazoned on it.”
Moments later, having finished her coffee and avoiding Jasper’s insistence that they speak about their row concerning the Hog article, Merinda made her way back to her cabin, where Jem was waiting.
She took one look at Jem, seeing that she was white as a sheet, with dark circles under her eyes, and felt every hope for her future drain away. “Oh, no!” She slapped her palm to her forehead. She wasn’t sure why clarity hit her at precisely that moment, but it did so with the weight of an anvil. The dizziness, the long naps, the constant yawning. The general air of peakishness and the complete inability to string together a logical sentence. “No. No. No. No, Jem! It can’t be.”
“Merinda, desist your prattling,” Jem said from under the arm flung across her face. “The train is jerking and… ”
“Jemima! My beautiful detective business! Our beautiful detective business. No.” Merinda sank on her bed.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Jem said sulkily from the bed adjacent. “We can still… detect. We’re here now, aren’t we?”
Merinda buried her face in her pillow. “Oh, Jem!” she cried. “I can’t bring you to Chicago! Explosives! Anarchists! DeLuca would have my head. We have to get the conductor to turn the train around!”
“You cannot be serious. Turn on that brain of yours, Merinda. Be reasonable!”
“I can’t bound about with you at my heels in your condition.”
“Nothing has changed,” Jem grumbled. “I’m still me.”
“I’m not playing nursemaid,” Merinda said in a surly voice.
“You’re jumping eight steps ahead of me.”
“You didn’t tell me!”
“Was there a point in telling you? You should have figured it out already, O Great Deductive One.”
“I was so daft. Fainting at the Goldman rally!”
“I was just light headed. Everyone was. It was a furnace in there.”
“You have to tell me. From now on. Anything. Anytime it’s too much for you.”
Jem felt herself suppressing a giggle. “You’ve never refrained from tossing me headfirst into danger before.”
“It’s different now.”
“It doesn’t have to be. We watch out for each other.”
Later, though, when Jem’s even breathing let Merinda know she had fallen asleep, Merinda stared at the ceiling as the train jerked and started over the tracks.
“Don’t leave me behind,” she said to the dark air. “Don’t you dare leave me behind, Jemima.”
*The telegram actually read, “CALL AT 170 N STATE STREET 430 PM.”
†Merinda’s traveling necessities included a single change of men’s clothing and every picklock she could find.
‡The first time Jasper lied was when he was ten years old and said that it was his brother James who tossed the rest of Aunt Marjory’s fruitcake in the rubbish bin when it was really himself.
§This was purchased with some of the savings he holed away for a proper home and honeymoon, should he ever find himself fortunate enough to step into nuptial bliss.
¶What he really wanted to say was, “Running away from you. But here you are anyway.”