One Way Ticket (A Smith and Hughes Mystery Book 1)

by Jay Forman

  “Don’t worry about it. Young Pete can cut the snorkel open.”

  “No! It’s my favourite one.” I went over to the stone hearth and repeatedly hammered the snorkel against it. “Do you know how hard it is to find a good one with a mouthpiece that isn’t too big for my mouth?”

  “Probably easier than mining diamonds,” Jack said, sort of under his breath, as he finished cutting open the envelope in his hands.

  The big chunk of a diamond clanked against the granite and the platinum chain tinkled out after it. “Got it!”

  “Gee, I hope your snorkel’s okay.”

  “You’re annoying,” I said as I dropped the necklace into his waiting hand and heaved my backpack up out of his lap.

  “Take a good long look in the mirror when you’re up in my bathroom.”

  *

  My teeth started chattering as we waited for the wrought iron gates to open at the end of Berkshire’s drive. I could have blamed it on the temperature; it had taken a few minutes (with my window open) for the security guard to answer after I’d pushed the button on the intercom panel on the stone column beside the gates, but I knew my nerves were reacting to the bad memories I was so close to.

  I felt Jack’s hand slide over mine and his gentle squeeze was calming.

  “Thank you. I know this isn’t easy for you.”

  The gates slowly started to open and I lifted my foot off the brake pedal.

  The driveway had been paved since I’d last driven up it and there was a much larger new maintenance shed at the T-intersection. I wanted to turn left; the boathouse didn’t hold any bad memories. I turned right instead. Only in England had I seen such neat and tidy forested land. If a tree fell in the woods over at my place (whether or not a bear heard it) it just lay there and waited for Mother Nature to deal with it. Any tree, branch, or even leaf, that had the audacity to fall on Berkshire land was quickly picked up and disposed of. Had the cleaning staff at Berkshire been able to contain themselves long enough for the police to arrive after Kayla sullied the front steps?

  We swept around the big circular driveway in front of the school and I instantly realised why I’d felt a sense of familiarity when I’d visited Warwick Castle in England. Berkshire could have been modelled after the medieval castle; even though I knew that Berkshire had supposedly been modelled after Lord and Lady Berkshire’s ancestral home. Warwick had been owned by the Greville family for centuries, not the Berkshire’s. And Warwick didn’t have creepy gargoyles grinning down at all who dared enter.

  Lord and Lady Berkshire spent so much money on building the monstrosity when they were banished to the Colonies, for whatever reason, that the next noble generation had been forced to turn the place into a private school to keep the creditors at bay.

  From the visitor’s parking lot everything looked the same. It wasn’t until I was pushing Jack across the former drawbridge over the poor imitation of a moat (a creek) that I started to notice the changes. Thick glass doors had been put in to control access from the archway under the keep to the quad. They were open now, but the fancy electronic keycard device on the wall beside them told me that they could be closed and locked with a single swipe. The guard in the security office off the archway told us the Board was expecting us, so we didn’t have to wait to be announced or escorted.

  Nothing had changed in the quad. It was still just a big quadrangle with a fountain in the dead centre, surrounded by turreted stone buildings, with gravel pathways winding through and around four snow-covered gardens that would soon display the exceptional topiary skills of Berkshire’s gardeners.

  Ontario’s accessibility laws had added a cement ramp by the stairs. It was discreetly hidden behind some spiralling boxwoods.

  “It feels strange to not rub Aslan 1,” Jack said as I grabbed the handle of one of the massive oak doors.

  He remembered our nicknames for the stone lions. That brought a smile to my face. But the thought of rubbing the head of Aslan 1 for good luck on entering and Aslan 2 for good luck on leaving flattened that smile quickly. I didn’t know which lion had killed Kayla, and no matter how good Berkshire’s cleaning crew was I didn’t want to rub something that might still have remnants of her stuck to it.

  “They do something similar at Trinity College in Dublin, you know.” I held the door open with my butt and pushed Jack into the building. “In the old engineering building there’s a frog on the newel post on the main staircase and they rub its head for good luck, too.”

  Rubbing either of the Aslan heads hadn’t ever brought me good luck, but I’d still gone along with Berkshire tradition every time I went up or down the front steps. It was kind of like buying a lottery ticket – you knew you really didn’t have a chance of winning, but you still bought into it just in case you might.

  Jack’s chair slid more easily on the smooth black and white marble tiles in the rotunda, but my heart almost stopped when I saw the tiny little woman who was sitting on one of the plush couches in the bay window area to our right.

  She smiled as she stood up. The thick soles of her orthopaedic shoes padded softly across the tiles as she walked toward us. My God, she’d barely changed at all. In fact, the flowery dress she was wearing underneath her thick cardigan looked vaguely familiar. Her snow white hair still circled her round face in tight curls.

  “It’s so good to see you again, Lee.” She took both of my hands in hers.

  I heard a voice that sounded very much like my own say, “Holy shit,” followed quickly by rote with “Pardonnez-moi, Mademoiselle Cailleux”.

  Dear Lord, I silently prayed to no one in particular and to anyone who just might happen to be listening, help me get through this. (Rather an appropriate time and place for that plea, given that the school chapel was directly on my left through a set of intricately carved doors that had been salvaged from a late 17th century church and shipped over to the Colonies on the same boat that brought both Aslans and a small army of Scottish stonemasons. Strange the minute details a brain could remember during a time of crisis.) I hoped someone had been listening.

  The woman who stood before me looked honestly pleased to see me. Did she not remember all the detentions she’d given me? (Most of them deserved, but that was a detail I wish I hadn’t remembered.)

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d remember me, even though we did spend many hours together in detention hall, if I remember correctly,” she winked. “At my age, one can never put one hundred percent faith in memories.”

  “Me remember you? I’m surprised you remember me.” How old are you? I wanted to ask.

  “You left a lasting impression.”

  I did?

  “Your accent isn’t quite as polished as we once had it, but I’m thrilled to see you nevertheless. And when I heard that you were coming with Jack today I positively insisted on being the welcoming committee.” She glanced down at my jeans and instantly looked less pleased to see me.

  Did she really expect me to start obeying the no jeans during school hours rule over two decades after I’d graduated?

  Two boys wearing crested green blazers, grey pants, black oxfords, white shirts and loosened green and grey striped ties came bounding through the front doors and were just walking by us when Mademoiselle said in her strictest teacher voice, “Smarten those ties up, gentlemen.”

  “Yes, Mem C.” They said in unison as they tightened their ties and turned left down the hallway just past the chapel. In my day, that hallway had only led to the circular back staircase to the chapel’s upper balcony, then the girl’s dorms and the tower above them.

  “Now, Jack. Poor, poor, Jack. How are you?”

  “I’ll be okay.” He pointed at his wheelchair. “This is only temporary.”

  “I couldn’t believe it when I heard what happened to you! I’d made us a pot of tea and was wondering what was taking you so long to get down to the boathouse when they called to tell me why you wouldn’t be coming.”

  “I’d still like to talk to you, actu
ally we both would...,”

  “Of course, dear. We’ll sort something out after your meeting. On the bright side, I’ve been telling Old Pete for years that that truck of his was an eyesore, so something good actually came out of all this. Now come along, the Board’s waiting for you. We’ll chat later.”

  I gripped the handles of Jack’s wheelchair and watched Mademoiselle walking away from us.

  ”Dépêche-toi, Lee!” She commanded when she realised that I wasn’t right behind her.

  I had to force myself to move forward. With each step I felt as if I was taking twenty steps backwards. The wheels of Jack’s chair squeaked as I pushed him along the well-worn oak plank flooring in the long, long hallway. Hundreds of pairs of eyes looked out at me. Every graduating class since Berkshire’s inception was pictured on the walls.

  A gaggle of girls came walking down the hallway toward us. The hems of their grey pleated kilts didn’t hang down to anywhere near just-above-the-knee regulation length and I knew, from personal experience, that they’d accomplished that leggy look by rolling the waistband of their kilts over several times. Mademoiselle used to give me one detention for each roll of my waistband, but those girls got off with a simple “Cover your thighs, young ladies!”

  We made our way from the graduating class of 1894 to the class of 1945 when Mademoiselle stopped by a closed door.

  I was thankful that the photo of our graduating class was farther down the hallway; I had no desire to see my former classmates. Nor did I have any desire to walk through the door Mademoiselle had just opened for me. It had been my upper form homeroom. Would the Board of Governors be waiting for us, sitting in the wooden chairs that were permanently indented from the pressure of having hundreds of butts and thighs weighing them down for over a century? Had they written the agenda for our meeting in chalk on the blackboard at the front of the classroom? Would tonight’s homework assignment be on the far left side of the board?

  I pushed Jack into the room and looked out the windows first. They were the same windows, the view of the side lawns and the track oval beyond them was slightly distorted and wobbly through the well-aged glass. The flat iron strips separating the panes still reminded me of prison bars. However, the room itself looked nothing like the classroom it had once been. It had been turned into a modern boardroom, complete with carpeting and an excessively long and over polished mahogany conference table surrounded by padded chairs. A large flat-screen TV now hung where the blackboard had been. In four of the sixteen chairs at the table sat people who looked as I would have expected a Board member to look – formal. All of them were wearing suits. The only woman was wearing the suit with the sharpest pinstripes. (Jack would have worn a suit, too, if he could have fit his cast down the leg of one of his bespoke suits. I offered to slit a leg open for him, but he turned me down and went with a baggy pair of khaki pants, instead.)

  “You still haven’t mastered the art of being on time, eh, Lee?” The massively large man at the head of the table guffawed.

  Did I know him? I highly doubted that I would have forgotten someone who so closely resembled Humpty Dumpty.

  “Dick Allenby.” He stood up and held his hand out for me to shake. “Long time no see.”

  I shoved Jack over to the table and shook the man’s hand. Dick Allenby? The name sounded familiar but the face didn’t match anything I’d seen in real life.

  “I’ve packed on a few pounds since you last saw me. It’s the drugs they’ve got me on. I’ve got a thing, nothing contagious, though.” He tried to make light of his girth, but I noticed that no one in the room was laughing or even smiling.

  “Lee, you remember Dick,” Jack said. “He was the coxswain of our crew.”

  “Oh yeah, Dick,” I vaguely remembered a moody guy named Dick who’d been on Jack’s rowing crew but this Dick couldn’t be the same person. The dick I remembered had been a sex obsessed jerk who tried to have sex with all of my dorm mates (preferably all of them at the same time, if they’d been willing). His handshake was painful. The thick gold ring he wore on the little finger of his right hand left an indentation in the side of my right hand.

  “Here, let me introduce the rest of our bunch.” He pointed to the woman who sat on his immediate left. “Marcy Tory, chair of our finance committee.”

  She stood up and surprised me with the internal strength she obviously packed inside her tall, nearing-anorexic frame. Her claw-like hand shot out to shake mine. “Nice to see you again, Lee.” Her voice was deep and rough.

  “Have we met before?” I shook her hand and didn’t flinch under her skeletal grip.

  “I was in your year.”

  I wanted to crawl under the table and hide.

  “You wouldn’t remember me, though. I wasn’t in the cool crowd like you were.”

  I tried to catch the breath Marcy had just sucked out of me. I wasn’t in the cool crowd! I’d been chewed up and spit out by the cool crowd.

  “And this is Lang Hendrie, chair of our governance committee.”

  The man on Marcy’s left stood up, mostly. Still bent at the waist, he leaned across the table to shake my hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  “You, too,” I said and meant. Finally, someone I didn’t not remember, someone I was meeting for the first time. He looked sweet; not too tall, not too big, with a mop of extra thick sandy hair and a jolly little jelly belly.

  Dick nodded toward the man sitting in the chair on his right and started to sit back down. “And this is the chair of our advancement committee, Andre Burgess.”

  Before me rose the most beautiful man I had ever had the pleasure of laying my eyes on. He wasn’t black; he was hot melted dark chocolate. With thick liquid slowness his large hand reached out for mine.

  “A pleasure to meet you.” His deep, Barry White voice poured over me like warm massage oil.

  By God he was sexy. The only thing wrong with him was the gold band on the fourth well-manicured finger of his left hand. It had a large octagonal ruby in it; a stop sign my hormones wanted me to drive right past. I didn’t do married … but in his case I’d be willing to seriously reconsider that as-yet-unbroken self-imposed rule.

  I walked around the table and sat beside Lang in the chair with the best view of Andre. (Reading the menu was allowed, ordering from it wasn’t.)

  “Obviously, this isn’t the full Board,” Dick blared out. His voice was just as inflated as his body. “But we do speak for the whole Board and we’ve got some serious concerns about this investigation, as Jack wants to call it.” He opened the leather portfolio that lay on the table in front of him and lifted out a couple of sheets of paper. “Before we get into that matter, however, Jack we need your John Hancock on these. Merely a formality, of course.” I could feel the reverberations from his heavy footsteps as he walked over to Jack and gave him the papers.

  Jack smirked as he read the top sheet. “You’re right, it’s merely a formality.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket (he’d insisted on wearing a casual sport jacket with his khakis), pulled out a pen and signed the papers with a flourish. “You can relax, Dick,” he said as he sent the papers sliding down the table toward Dick. “I wasn’t going to sue anyway. Berkshire’s officially off the hook from any financial liability for the accident.”

  “Knew you’d understand.” Dick put the signed papers into his portfolio and closed it. “So, let’s talk about our next concern.” He looked at me. “Jack tells us that you’re writing travel articles now which means that you have existing relationships with news and media outlets. Before we can grant you permission to be on school property we’ll need your assurance, in writing, that you will not write or distribute any material pertaining to this school or Kayla’s unfortunate death, either in part or in full, to any printed or online newspaper, magazine or website, or through any form of social media.” He pursed his pudgy lips and raised his eyebrows up high while still looking at me. (His face reminded me of a puffed puffer fish.)

  “Okay.�
� I didn’t need to use a bunch of unnecessary words. I’d never write anything about Muskoka, or even Berkshire. I wanted fewer people to discover the place, not more.

  “Dick, this isn’t about liability.” Jack was using his stern voice, the one that few could ignore. “Let’s stick to the issue at hand – a girl died here. We, as Governors, have a responsibility to find out why. Not because of the legal issues, but because of the human issues. The school, the students, their families, they all deserve to know what really happened. If you try to limit Lee, you’re limiting me by association and I’m not prepared to...,”

  “Might I suggest a compromise?” Andre could suggest anything as far as I was concerned. “Lee, would you be agreeable to giving the Board a twenty-four hour window on anything you find?” He turned to look at Dick. “If the police determine it was in fact suicide the information she’ll find will add to our understanding of the reasons why Kayla would do something like that. We can learn from it and act to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again at our school.”

  “And if Kayla was killed?”

  Andre turned and bowed his head slightly toward Jack. “If that’s the case, Lee’s information may expose the truth. Giving us twenty-four hours before releasing it to the public…,”

  “Via any news or media outlet,” Dick added.

  “Giving us that window won’t change the outcome.” Andre continued on as if Dick didn’t exist. “It will only offer us an opportunity to assess the information and deal with it appropriately.”

  “What about getting to the truth for truth’s sake? Shouldn’t that matter?” Jack was getting angry.

  “The truth matters to me.” I’d almost forgotten that Lang was in the room. “My two girls are here and if there’s something going on I want to know about it as a parent, not just a Board member.”

  “And it matters to me,” Marcy cawed her way into the conversation. “Whether you like it or not, this school is a business. Uncertainty and supposition don’t do any good to our bottom line. We’ve all heard the chatter on the gossip grapevine and we’re already seeing that reflected in the applications for next year. If we find out the truth, with certainty, we can deal with it and move forward. I second Andre’s motion.”