Murder at the Flamingo Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR RACHEL MCMILLAN

  “In Murder at the Flamingo, McMillan, author of the Herringford and Watts Mysteries, offers us a new generation of sleuths. And in her skilled hands, 1937 Boston comes to life with rich sensory detail and clever winks to books and films. You’ll love the happening and opulent nightclubs, the fast-paced dancing and daring, and especially the two sleuths who will steal your heart.”

  —KAHERINE REAY, AUTHOR OF DEAR MR. KNIGHTLEY AND THE PORTRAIT OF EMILY PRICE

  “On its surface, Murder at the Flamingo is a fun and engrossing pre-war murder mystery that will keep readers turning pages. It’s beautifully atmospheric, taking us to late 1930s Boston in such vivid detail you can almost taste the decadent cannoli cream so beloved by McMillan’s amateur sleuth protagonists. The pacing is taut without sacrificing development of the endearing cast of characters. But more significant than this, McMillan gives us a story that highlights the struggles of people living with anxiety and panic disorders long before the conditions were properly understood. Her portrayal of Hamish’s challenges is sympathetic and uplifting, and only serves to make his character richer. This delightful series is one I will be following for what I hope is a very long time.”

  —AIMIE K. RUNYAN, INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF DAUGHTERS OF THE NIGHT SKY AND PROMISED TO THE CROWN

  “A perfectly-flawed hero and a liberty-seeking lady are the backbone of this delightful and lively mystery novel. Grounded in a city that is no stranger to independence, Hamish and Reggie seek what it means to be free beneath the lights of Boston’s glitziest nightclub . . . and a murder that taints its opening night. Fast-paced and at times humorous, the satisfying ending leaves the reader content and anxious for more all at the same time.”

  —HEIDI CHIAVAROLI, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF FREEDOM’S RING AND THE HIDDEN SIDE ON MURDER AT THE FLAMINGO

  “Adventure—the very thing both of Rachel McMillan’s lovable characters seek is exactly what she delivers, sucking the reader back to the 30s with distinctive style. Fans will be clamoring for the next installment!”

  —ROSEANNA M. WHITE, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE SHADOWS OVER ENGLAND SERIES ON MURDER AT THE FLAMINGO

  “Boston comes roaring to life with fullness and flair, a character in its own right. Endearing protagonists carry the tale with wit, charm, and struggles that make them human. Bursting with rhythm, Murder at the Flamingo is a toe-tapping, heart-pumping immersion into the world of Reggie and Hamish. A delightful experience.”

  —JOCELYN GREEN, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF A REFUGE ASSURED

  “You will want to add Reggie Van Buren and Hamish DeLuca to your circle of friends when you’ve read this book. This highly originally story is a delight. Excellent historical detail and setting.”

  —MAUREEN JENNINGS, AUTHOR OF THE DETECTIVE MURDOCH SERIES, WHICH INSPIRED THE MURDOCH MYSTERIES TV SERIES, ON MURDER AT THE FLAMINGO

  ALSO BY RACHEL MCMILLAN

  HERRINGFORD AND WATTS MYSTERIES

  The Bachelor Girl’s Guide to Murder

  A Lesson in Love and Murder

  The White Feather Murders

  Murder at the Flamingo

  © 2018 by Rachel McMillan

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please email SpecialMarkets@ ThomasNelson.com.

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Published in association with William K. Jensen Literary Agency, 119 Bampton Court, Eugene, Oregon 97404.

  Epub Edition May 2018 9780785216940

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McMillan, Rachel, 1981- author.

  Title: Murder at the flamingo / Rachel McMillan.

  Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Thomas Nelson, [2018] | Series: A Van Buren and Deluca mystery ; 1

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018018135 | ISBN 9780785216926 (paperback)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR9199.4.M4555 M87 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018135

  Printed in the United States of America

  18 19 20 21 22 23 LSC 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Ellie

  Contents

  Acclaim for Rachel McMillan

  Also by Rachel McMillan

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  A Note from the Author

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Then he climbed to the tower of the church,

  Up the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,

  To the belfry-chamber overhead . . .

  —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, “PAUL REVERE’S RIDE” (1860)

  Love is like a tree: it shoots of itself; it strikes its roots deeply into our whole being, and frequently continues to put forth green leaves over a heart in ruins. And there is this unaccountable circumstance attending it, that the blinder the passion the more tenacious it is. Never is it stronger than when it is most unreasonable.

  —VICTOR HUGO, THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME (1831)

  CHAPTER 1

  Heartbeat, Hamish. Assess your surroundings. Acknowledge the trigger point. Assure a corner for quick retreat before the symptoms draw attention.

  When he could finally blink his surroundings into focus, all he saw were dozens of perplexed eyes studying him concernedly. Others coughed and turned away. The courtroom seemed smaller, suffocating. He loosened his tie with one hand, feeling his heart’s rhythm with the other. But it was too late. He was supposed to take preventative measures.

  As long as he could remember, and often without rhyme or reason, he would have an episode of nerves. According to his doctor in Toronto, “nerves” accounted for his bouts of panic, tremors, shortness of breath, and a myriad of other things. The doctor had heard of relaxation treatments prescribed to patients who shared Hamish’s symptoms. Other doctors had more advanced treatments, some more drastic than others, including frontal lobe surgery or the shock treatment he had read about in studies reported by the Telegraph. He didn’t belong in one of the asylums he read so much about by the light of a torch under his quilt when he was a kid, spending a night wide-eyed in terror that he would be locked away. Yet something caused his fingers to tremble and his heart to speed up and his words to trip over themselves—sometimes for no reaso
n at all. Something that turned his first real court case into a waking nightmare. In that moment of humiliation, he would have done anything to get away. But he saw it through: tripping through an apology and sitting back down, the world closing in around him as he studied his shoes, the air so heavy he finally rose and rushed out of the double oak doors, their broad weight slamming behind him.

  It would have been all right, of course. He could explain momentary panic and fall back on his proficiency. Most of the time, no one knew. He kept it well hidden.

  In chambers, one of the two Winslows (Hamish had trouble telling them apart) stabbed him with the words that set his life in motion: “I hired you as a favor to your father.” Of course he could have been angry, but it was the terse inaction that instead startled Hamish. He would have rather been yelled at. The slightly checked anger made Hamish think that he was getting some kind of special treatment.

  Hamish barely caught the gulps of breath that had driven him from the floor after the sentence had been read. And that was what clinched it. Hamish’s father had gotten him his first real position.

  “Cat got your tongue, DeLuca?” said one of the interchangeable Winslows with a snarl.

  Hamish thought he had done it on his own. He was top of his class at Osgoode Law School. His grades were impeccable. He was well rounded in everything but sports. When you hid away a lot, you had ample opportunity to refine skills like playing chess and solving math problems. And it still wasn’t enough. He hadn’t gotten into one of Toronto’s top legal firms on his own. His editor father had paved the way.

  He went back to the office on nearby Yonge Street and, ignoring the secretary’s chipper greeting, wandered in a daze into Mr. Winslow’s office on the second floor. No doubt the reporters were having a field day, scratching in shorthand about the young lawyer who froze and panicked in the middle of a case.

  But he wasn’t fired. Mr. Winslow wasn’t even angry. Well, not angry enough anyway. “It’s all right, DeLuca. Everyone has a moment.”

  Hamish didn’t remember if he gave his leave or mumbled anything politely before hurrying down the corridor of City Hall and into the sticky June air. The Toronto Telegraph office was a quick stretch from the offices on Yonge to King Street West.

  As he was more prone to nerves than anger, the heat crawling beneath his collar was an unfamiliar sensation. He gave his father’s name and lied that he was expected. As the elevator girl adjusted her small hat and stepped to the side of the sliding door, Hamish’s mind buzzed with what he would say the moment he crossed into his father’s window-side office.

  The chime announcing his arrival at the thirtieth floor came much too early for Hamish’s liking. He gave an absent thank-you to the elevator girl, failing to notice how she watched after his mumbling.

  Hamish passed reporters, their desks strewn with folders and papers. It was a chaotic space. A noisy one. One that made Hamish tense up, his shoulders rise a little in the direction of his ears, even as he smiled and acknowledged a few hellos from people who recognized him. A constant tapping from a telegraph machine accompanied the rest of his journey.

  “I thought I had done something on my own!” Hamish’s voice creaked a little on the ascent when he told his father why he was there. “Without anyone. That I had finally conquered enough of . . . enough of . . .” He spread his hands, unable to think of how to describe what startled him from his sleep and hiccupped his voice in anxious moments. That forced him to double over sometimes, trying to catch his breath, trying to focus his eyes on a corner of the wall until his head stopped rushing and the air returned to his lungs.

  “I will do something on my own,” he vowed. “And I will be good at it. I will prove it! I don’t need you to open doors for me. I will rise above this . . .” He raised his still shaking hand. “And I will be exceptional at something.”

  “Hamish, calm down. I’ll get you a glass of water.”

  “I am not a child.” Hamish hated how he stuttered on a statement he hoped would be liberating.

  “Don’t throw away a good opportunity,” Ray DeLuca said. “You’re smart. You were top of your class. You can still prove yourself. You still will prove yourself. You had one setback. I am sure that they would have hired you anyway—or you would have found an equally prominent firm. There is nothing wrong with accepting a little assistance. You just have to believe in yourself the way that I—”

  “The way that you believe in me?” Hamish shook his head. “If you believed in me, you would have trusted me to find my own way without interfering.”

  “Jobs aren’t falling from the sky like rain, Hamish. You have to think rationally.”

  “I have thought rationally my entire life. I have never once stepped out of line. I still adhere to the curfew you gave me when I was sixteen years old. What kind of life is that? And now I find out that the one stride I made toward independence—well, that was you at the oar, wasn’t it?”

  He slammed the door of his father’s office and cycled home at a furious pace, wondering if he would have been so upset had he not been so humiliated. He threw his beloved copy of Hunchback of Notre-Dame amidst clothes and shoes and left a note for his mother, who was visiting a friend.

  So he ran away.

  Hamish had a pretty good idea when people were lying. It snagged in his chest the same way the signs of a panic episode did. No, if he had been truly angry and not just miffed, Hamish might have been able to weather it. He might not have tossed all of his clothes in a canvas bag and booked a train ticket to Boston and Luca Valari.

  Living in the back of his parents’ two-story Victorian on College Street saved money and space. He even had a separate entrance from the backyard. Toronto’s boarding houses and bachelor apartments were overrun with men and women funneling into the city to find work that was scarce in rural towns in 1937.

  When people had pennies to scrape together, they allotted some for the purchase of the Telegraph, maybe to compare their situation with those less fortunate, perhaps to hold on to hope’s slippery slope, even as tensions on the other side of the world boiled and brewed. Ray DeLuca, chief editor, was certain that bad news sold as well as good. And so Hamish enjoyed what so many others did not—a safe environment, a roof, a table full of food, and now a train ticket to see his cousin.

  Now, staring out the train window at the whir of green speeding him far away from Toronto and home, he waited for his pulse to slow. It would—eventually. Though he had never done anything so drastic as storm out of his father’s office at the Toronto Telegraph and cycle at two times his normal speed home to make a long-distance call to Chicago—only to be told that his cousin, Luca—the closest family he had beyond his parents—had relocated to Boston. He frantically stumbled through a few sentences with the operator in hopes of finally reaching his cousin before his mother returned home. Staticky seconds later, Hamish was patched through.

  “Cicero!” exclaimed the voice on the other end. Luca was seven years Hamish’s senior, but looked—and sounded—younger, especially when he used the old nickname. He didn’t seem fazed when Hamish spilled everything. The court case. His father. “You’re twenty-five years old. It’s about time you ran away from home. What have I always told you? You have to be the hero of your own story! And you will be. Come to Boston. I’m opening a new club. Stay as long as you want.”

  Hamish rationalized he was merely going to spend some time with his cousin, but he knew it was his pride—and his disappointment that he had failed to live up to expectations. It humiliated him into adventure.

  Hamish could be anything as long as he wore a disguise. As if he were in a carnival of people—as exposed as Quasimodo on the Feast of Fools, a hunchback mistaken for wearing a mask even when it was just the vulnerable ugliness he wore. The court had seen the real Hamish then, under the bright lights, the clock above the jury’s box ticking loudly and matching the thud of his heart.

  In the end it was the feeling of hopeless humiliation that drove him to Luc
a. Humiliation at a courtroom of his peers and Toronto’s legal masterminds seeing him at his weakest when he most wanted to seize the day, like Quasimodo stepping out of the cathedral and into the sun. Humiliation at realizing that his firm had taken pity on him and that everyone knew—that everyone saw—no matter how he tried to iron out his voice, often taking a few ticks before speaking on anxious days, working it into an art so people assumed he was just thoughtful about what he was going to say. No matter how he hid his hand behind his back and monitored his heartbeat as his father had taught him when he was a child. Humiliation at not even being able to get his own foot through the first wide-open door of his life.

  He reached into his bag and extracted The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, rolling the pages between his fingers.

  The book knew where to open as Hamish reached for it, its pages transparent with wear, its words imprinted inside him. He nudged his black-rimmed glasses higher on his nose.

  Beside it lay a pair of bellows no less dusty, the upper side of which bore this inscription incrusted in copper letters: SPIRA SPERA.

  Breathe. Hope.

  When the bells in his mind clanged. When his heartbeat wasn’t tempered no matter how often he counted, when he looked out the window for hours, unsure of how to step out into the sun, he would conjure the words and tremulously repeat them. From one of the many chapters in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame tattooed on his brain, for when his father compelled him to hide his hand behind his back or excuse himself before his chest pains overtook him and a sheen of perspiration crossed his brow. As long as no one saw. As long as no one knew . . .

  He pushed his hair back. “Sometimes stories are in the people whose life’s pages no one thinks of turning,” his father once told him. Maybe it was time to land straight in the middle of the adventure. Not just peer through a glass and count his heartbeat.

  If he didn’t take a massive step now, he never would.

  Hamish retreated to the lavatory and splashed cold water over his cheeks. He combed down his black hair and met his eyes in the gold-plated mirror. He adjusted the buckles on his braces and attempted to smooth out the creases in his shirt. Never possessing anything close to vanity, he studied his visage in the harsh light of the upscale lighting, his hands splayed steadily over the marble counter, lips tightened and accentuating the comma of a dimple inherited from his mother set firmly in his left cheek. Unremarkable blue eyes magnified by his thick glasses.