by Jay Forman
“There are very strict rules in place about that, it’s absolutely forbidden and grounds for immediate suspension. You see, there once was a student at Berkshire who was so stubborn that she thought she could handle anything, so she repeatedly did things to test that theory – things like risking her life by going kayaking in the channels. Sound familiar? It’s because of her that the rules were put in place to protect others from being so stupid. She’s legendary. Every year some dumb kid tries to copy her kayaking stunt.”
The scoot came back closer to the shore and three of the dry-suited members of the dive team slipped off the side of it into the open water and disappeared, one by one.
“I think they’re about to find Ethan.” My anger was slowly being drowned under the weight of my guilt. Please, please, tell me he didn’t die because he was copying me.
I wasn’t near the chapel for that silent prayer.
They pulled Ethan’s body out of the water half an hour later.
Chapter Ten
Afternoon classes were cancelled. A funereal quiet filled the hallways, only interrupted by the sound of crying. The crying wasn’t limited to just the girls. I saw red noses and puffy eyes on just as many of the teachers and boys when I made my way back up to my room to put Blaze’s painting in a safe place.
Will looked all business when he arrived at the school. I sat alone in the viewing balcony in the aquatics centre and watched him talk to his men outside. A large white van joined the rest of the police vehicles that had congregated down by the boathouse, and I didn’t have to get closer to read what was written in yellow on the black stripe along the side of the van. I recognised the OPP forensic identification unit vehicle. Will was talking to the forensic officers when a female uniform came out of the boathouse with Mademoiselle and an old, slightly hunch-backed man. Was that Old Pete? Even from a distance, he still looked like Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons”, except his daily suit was denim overalls and a thick Aran sweater. (And chances were Auntie Em had knit him that sweater.) Will finished with his officers and started walking with Mademoiselle along the paved road that led to the front of the school. I ran to meet up with them in the rotunda, but Will just shook his head quickly when they came through the front doors. They walked by me without saying a word. Mademoiselle looked as if she’d aged ten years in one day.
I didn’t know where to go. I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, pretend to feel a personal loss. But I could feel the very real sorrow emanating from everyone I’d passed. Ethan was going to be missed by many.
I slipped into what had been the most calming room in the school for me, the original library just off the rotunda. Someone had lit the logs in the fireplace, even though the temperature outside was shooting up by the hour. A group of boys were sitting on and around one of the long tables, talking quietly. Blaze recognised me and introduced me to his classmates.
“Do you know anything?” he asked.
“Nothing, sorry.”
Another boy came into the room and walked over to the table. “Jeff’s a basket case.”
“Was he close to Ethan?”
The boy looked at me as if I was an alien. A repulsive alien. “Uh, duh! They’ve been best friends since forever.”
The boys didn’t want me intruding into their sorrow. I’d probably get the same reaction in the dorm. The girl’s didn’t know me either. They’d lean on each other and the dons they trusted. There wasn’t anything I could do to help and it certainly wasn’t the time to bug people by asking them questions about Kayla. Or Ethan.
I spotted the familiar red spine of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations as I walked toward to door and went over to see if it was the same edition that I’d found my graduation quote in. The corner of page two hundred and twenty-seven was still folded over. The red ink circle I’d made around the quotation near the bottom of the right page had faded only slightly.
I decided to go old school, literally, and took the book up to my room in the dorm. (Totally against the library’s rules, but that had never stopped me before.) After bringing the photo of the suicide note up on my phone and digging the scrunched up piece of paper with my handwritten copy of the blackmail note out of my backpack, I started to look up where the quotations had come from.
As I’d suspected, Shakespeare had written them all. But they came from different works. The two lines in the blackmail note both came from Henry IV, while each line in the suicide note came from a different work. ‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry’ was from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66. ‘And Death, once dead, there’s no more dying then’ from Sonnet 146. ‘Death, death; O, amiable lovely death!’ was from King John. And all that information told me what? Kayla was into Shakespeare? If it really was Kayla who wrote the notes. Once things settled down in the school I’d make a point of finding Kayla’s English teacher. I wondered what had happened to my English teacher, Mrs. Kerwin. Auntie Em was right about one thing, not everything at Berkshire had been awful. Mrs. Kerwin was the best teacher I ever had.
But Auntie Em had been completely, one hundred percent, absolutely wrong to call Steve!
Nothing was pure black or white. Grey always got in the middle of things and muddled everything up.
Greys like Pam Grey. I could still see her self-satisfied smirk as she watched me being hauled into the headmistress’ office after my joints had been found. I could still hear her laughter when she and Erica goaded our group of friends into humiliating me about Lucerne. They’d all been there, many times. I’d only seen it on a map. I still hadn’t been there. I would never go there.
Their cruelty had sent me to the tower. But I hadn’t jumped. And that was a long, long time ago; before bullying could be captured on a cellphone and broadcast to the world over the internet. (Thank God.) I’d rebuilt my life, rebuilt me. Now their lives were falling apart. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t take any pleasure from that knowledge. I couldn’t begin to imagine how painful it must be to lose a child, even for someone as icy cold as Erica. I’d seen the cracks in her persona when Jack and I had gone to see her in Toronto. Now Pam was about to experience the same horrific pain.
I looked over at the notes from my trip that I’d scattered on the bed while searching for the blackmail note. My trip notes were in serious need of some black and white words, because I needed the green money that would come from the American travel magazine once I’d strung the words together into a publishable article.
The notes I’d flattened while Auntie Em blasted me were held together with a paperclip. I started to flatten out the few remaining wrinkly balls, glancing at what was on each one as I went. When I came across the contact information for my dive buddy Simon I opened my computer and added his email address and phone number to my contact list. The next ball ripped when I unfolded it and it smelled of pineapple and coconut. The sticky dried drop on it had probably come from one of the virgin Piña Coladas that I’d had on my dive day in the Bahamas. I’d scribbled down the name of various flowers that I’d seen that day – yellow elder (national flower of Bahamas), bougainvillea, allamanda (looks a lot like yellow elder), hibiscus, poinciana...
Wait a minute. Allamanda?
I pushed the speed dial button for Jack and listened to his phone ringing as I walked across my dorm room and closed the door.
“What’s Allamanda Cay?”
“Why?” He still sounded miffed at me for not being willing to accept his help with the property taxes.
“Erica asked you if Dick and Andre had talked to you about it.”
“Yes, she did.”
“Come on, Jack. How long are you going to stay angry?”
“I just don’t understand why you won’t let me help. It’s okay to lean on your friends sometimes, you know. It’s not a sign of weakness, and I know how big you are on not showing that. I lean on you all the time. I’ve even been leaning on you physically lately.”
“It’s not that.” I lied. Had he been talking to Auntie Em? Both of them seemed to be on a lean
ing roll. But I couldn’t tell either of them that I didn’t lean because, in my experience, you couldn’t count on anyone to always be there to catch you. Leaning on myself was safer. “Look, maybe I was a bit sharp about it...,”
“A bit sharp? A Henckel knife is a bit sharp. You were more like a Katana.”
“A what?”
“It’s the sharpest samurai sword in the world. It can slice through bullets flying at it.”
“I wasn’t that bad!” I waited to see if he’d argue more, but he stayed silent. “And I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.” I almost kept going, starting my explanation with a ‘but’, but stopped myself just in time. “I’ve got the property tax thing figured out. Honest.” Mostly.
“What do you want to know about Allamanda?”
“What is it?”
“A private island in the Bahamas. Greg Horscroft is developing a luxury community on it with the usual things; big houses, polo field, designer golf course, members’ clubhouse with a Michelin chef. You know the deal.”
“That’s what the video Dick and Andre showed you was about?”
“The video, the offering memorandum, the designs, the photographs. They want me to buy in, but I don’t need another house, especially one that’s next door to them. You know how you said the Platinum cruise was like Berkshire on a boat? Allamanda will literally be Berkshire on an island. Greg’s even hired Jocelyn de Corneille’s father to design the golf course. Why are you asking about it?”
“Because I just saw the name on one of my notes from my trip.”
“Did you go there? I thought you said you went diving and frolicking around with ducks.”
“No, I didn’t go there. The island we went to doesn’t have anything on it. Allamanda is the name of a flower that I saw. I just came across a note about it and it reminded me of what Erica said.” I quickly flipped through my notes to find the name of the island Simon had taken me to, but couldn’t find it. “Where’s Allamanda?”
“In the Bahamas.”
“Really? I never would have guessed that!” I smiled. Jack was back to joking around. Our little tiff about the property tax issue was history. (Even though I knew that history had a nasty habit of repeating itself.)
“Let me check the map that Dick gave me.” I heard some papers rustling. “It’s near Cat Island.”
“Look for San Salvador.”
“The only islands on this map are Eleuthera, Cat, Long and Allamanda. Hang on, I’ll Google a better map.” I could hear the click of his mouse. “Where’s San Salvador?”
“Southeast of Cat Island.”
“I see George Town and Moss Town, but no San Salvador.”
“Try your other east. You’re looking at The Exumas and they’re southwest of Cat Island.” It was a good thing Jack had GPS in his car and on his plane. Without it he could easily end up in Canberra instead of Caracas.
“Oh. Found it. Okay, Allamanda is about halfway between the southern tip of Cat Island and San Salvador.”
“I’m going to get back to work.” But first I was going to Google Allamanda Cay.
I had to zoom all the way in to find Allamanda between the southern tip of Cat Island and San Salvador. I switched to satellite view, but couldn’t see any development on the island. Then again, who knew when the satellite had taken the picture? Google maps were often a few years behind the times. What bothered me was that I couldn’t see any other island in the same area and that was definitely the area I’d just been in. I zoomed out and looked closely at a larger area around San Salvador. Still nothing. Could the great and powerful Google be wrong? I closed the browser, opened my email program and fired off a quick fact-checking email to Simon. The fact I wanted to check was the name of the island we’d visited.
Then I spread out all my notes on the bed. Sure, it would have been easier to organize them if I’d inputted the information as I got it on an iPad or the Notes app on my phone, but I still preferred to use a good old fashioned pen. It worked on just about everything and never needed recharging.
I lost all track of time, letting myself relive each experience, writing about the ones that were fit to print, and almost jumped out of my chair when someone knocked on my door.
Grace opened the door before I got to it and stuck her head into the room. “We could use some help corralling the girls for dinner. They’re all saying they’re not hungry, because of the news about Ethan, but we’d like to keep some normalcy in their day.”
“Be right there.” I pulled my thoughts back into the here and now. They’d been spending that last ten minutes enjoying the memory of my good night (very good night) with Hunter after our day at sea. He’d been feeling lucky after a profitable afternoon in the ship’s little casino. He got even luckier after dinner. The little black dress that Jack had given me almost became an expensive silk fish net when a gust of wind lifted it off the teak deck of our veranda.
*
I didn’t get a chance to talk to any of the students at dinner. My place was at the High Table, the long table on the raised platform at the end of the dining hall that looked down over rows of even longer tables, each one stretching the length of the hall below us. The students sat on perfectly straight benches in the perfectly straight rows. The room hadn’t changed at all since I’d last eaten in it. The bottom half of the ridiculously high walls were panelled in dark wood, the top half covered in time-dulled plaster. Oil portraits of former headmistresses and masters watched over us from those walls. I minded my table manners.
Dr. Campbell sat at the centre of the High Table. I was a good distance away from her, on her right. The very-soon-to-be (probably-should-have-already-been) retired religious studies teacher sat on my left. We didn’t have much common ground to talk about. And I totally confused her when I said that the only church I wanted to be taken to was Hozier’s. (I didn’t bother explaining the sexual connotations in his song. I didn’t want the old biddy to have a heart attack.)
I turned to speak to Mademoiselle, who was sitting on my right, leaving the religious studies teacher to complain to herself about the decline of civilized society caused by the lack of decent Anglican prayers before every meal. (I thought the school’s chaplain, an Anglican priest, female no less, had given an excellent non-denominational blessing to the meal.)
“I saw you talking to the police earlier today. Do you know what happened to Ethan?”
She nodded. “It’s just so awful. That poor boy. He was such a dear. The police think I may have been the last one to see him alive and he was so looking forward to his future. He came to see me to get my opinion on which university he should go to. He’d been accepted at all of them, of course. If I’d known what he was planning on doing next maybe I could have stopped him?”
“What did he do?”
“He went out on the lake. Old Pete noticed that Ethan’s kayak paddle was missing from where it usually hung on the wall in the boathouse and he called the police. Ethan must have slipped out of his kayak when he was paddling through the channels in the ice. Such a stupid thing to do. Such a waste.” She lifted her crystal wine glass to her lips and took a big sip, more like a gulp, then daintily dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her linen napkin. “The lamb’s lovely tonight, isn’t it?” She batted her snow white eyelashes at me as a member of the kitchen staff refilled her wineglass, for the fourth time. “Have you had a chance to meet Jocelyn yet?” she asked.
“Just briefly. She showed me some of the videos she’s putting together for the graduation ceremony.”
“Ah, yes, that will be quite the afternoon. Jeff Kaufman’s father is coming up with the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra...,”
“She said that...,”
Mademoiselle barely took a breath. “Mr. Kaufman’s the conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He’s a nice man. Jewish. Just like Jeff.”
And that mattered because...why?
“Their people are quite invested in the arts, big supporters of it.”
Jewish people or Kaufman people?
“It will be a real treat to hear some good music for a change. Don’t get me wrong, I think our little orchestra does a decent job, for a high school orchestra, except for Petra. She’s as big and cumbersome as her tuba. No wonder her parents chose a name that’s derived from the Latin word for rock. And she’s completely tone deaf. Having talented musicians playing will make it so much more enjoyable.” A little burp slipped past her lips. “I must say, Jeff seems to have pulled himself together.”
I followed her gaze and recognised the boy I’d seen in the hallway earlier. He was sitting near us at the table in the centre of the hall. No one around him was laughing this time.
“Jeff’s smart as a whip, our top student. He’s a nice boy.”
I could almost hear her unspoken completion of that pseudo compliment – for a Jew. The girl sitting directly across the table from Jeff was wearing a hijab and I was tempted to ask Mademoiselle if she was a nice girl, for a Muslim. Jeff seemed to think so. The girl had just reached across the table to touch his arm and said something to him that brought half a smile to his face.
Mem C saw it, too. “We’ll have to nip that in the bud! Goodness, can you imagine if it got serious and their parents met? They’d be throwing explosive devices and lit menorahs back and forth in no time. Jeff and Ethan were close, but there was always that cultural divide between them.”
I wanted Moses to unpart the Red Sea and let it swallow up the religious bigots on either side of me.
“So tell me, what did you think of Jocelyn?”
“I haven’t really spent much time with her. Can I ask you a question, straight out?”
“Yes, you may,” she corrected my grammar.
I leaned in closer to her, not that I was really worried about being overheard by the mostly deaf, now-retired Latin teacher who was sitting on the other side of Mademoiselle. “Do you think Jocelyn had something to do with Kayla’s death? She said a few things that were kind of, well ... kind of strange.”
