The Bachelor Girl's Guide to Murder Read Free Page B

for his upcoming article. But despite all he saw around him, he had trouble focusing on anything other than the corpse at the theatre. Why would anyone murder someone there the same day as Montague’s first campaign party—unless that was the reason for the murder in the first place?
    Turning down his wrinkled blanket to mark his spot, he grabbed his coat and set out to meet Skip again.

    Jem wanted to take the streetcar from the theatre back to the residence she and Merinda shared at King Street, but Merinda was in nomood for the stifling crowds of the trolley. Assuring Jem that the fresh evening air would do their minds some good, Merinda set a frantic pace, straining ahead, her rapid stride made easier by the shortened length of her skirt.
    Too short. The Morality Squad would write her a ticket if she wasn’t careful.
    For her part, Jem was dressed with decorum and decency and couldn’t help but lag behind. In addition, Merinda’s figure was far more lithe, with a boyish flatness of angles and lines, whereas Jem’s soft, feminine curves filled out daysuits well but were not ideal for racing down to the West End at the speed of streetcars.
    Autumn had rustled in with evenings as crisp as russet apples and skies a tangy cerulean blue. But the clear, bright days of September were all but behind them. Currently, showers threatened to burst from the low-hanging clouds, and the prospect of long, gloomy nights broken only by the flickering light of tallow candles stretched before them. The church bells of St. Andrews and St. James mixed with the whip of the wind in an eerie musical contest.
    Finally, breathless and blistered, Merinda and Jem ascended the steps to their lodging. Merinda slid the key in the lock and opened the door while wriggling out of her coat. She tossed the coat on the floor, ignoring the glare it inspired from their landlady, Mrs. Malone, and stomped over the Persian rug in the front sitting room, bellowing for her Turkish coffee.
    And thus they sat, causing Mrs. Malone to wonder loudly from the kitchen why two girls on the wrong side of twenty were oblivious to Toronto’s numerous options for perfecting one’s domestic skills and meeting appropriate young men. Especially when said girls were of such good breeding and high pedigree.
    Mrs. Malone was not alone in her puzzlement. Jem wondered that too, constantly. Merinda was the most productively useless person she had ever met. Hardly ever gainfully employed, she spent hours in medical study at the university laboratory—despite the fact thatshe’d abandoned her plans to practice medicine. And she followed Jasper around like a dog promised a bone whenever there was a whiff of mystery in the air.
    They kept their heads above the tide of impropriety—barely—thanks to Merinda’s family’s fortune and the watchful eye of Mrs. Malone. Jem felt the lack of romantic prospects more acutely. She had exchanged her parent’s social circle for Merinda’s odd moods, temper, and the air of constant excitement that followed them, especially when in the vicinity of a problem overseen by Jasper Forth. Merinda was so competitive in the company of the opposite sex that men had little choice but to cower. And she was oblivious to the way said police constable looked at her.
    Back in university, the pair had been far more interested in the disappearance of a stolen watch or the conveniently circulating answers to a test than the realms of social and cordial respectability. Now they sat on either side of their hearth, another mystery buzzing at their fingertips, reliant on Jem’s employment at Spenser’s Department Store and Merinda’s father’s liberal allowance. Adrift on some urban island, marooned from respectable society.
    Merinda couldn’t have cared less. “Do you really think that Tertius Montague is the murderer? It seems too easy.”
    But Jem’s mind was far away. “Do you