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

by Jay Forman

  “Sorry, I wasn’t eavesdropping,” I lied and continued by adding to it with a fake excuse for wanting to talk to her. “I just dropped by to see if you’d given any more thought to the grad ball. It would be a shame for you to miss it, you only get one.” I hadn’t gone to mine, even though the school’s most eligible bachelor had asked me to go with him. Instead, I’d left our graduation ceremony and headed straight to the airport to fly as far away from Berkshire as I could. It had been the first of many escapes to Australia. “Although, given what’s happened to Ethan, it probably won’t be as upbeat as most grad balls.”

  “Nah, it’s almost two months away. Everybody will be over it by then. Kayla’s only been dead for a couple of weeks and practically nobody talks about her anymore. I don’t know if I’ll go. The whole thing’s kind of lame.”

  She hadn’t told me to go away, so I walked into the room. It was stifling hot. “Want to show me your dress?” Did she like high end designers as much as Kayla had?

  “Whatever.” She stood up and plodded across the small room to the wardrobe that stood beside the bed.

  “If you shut off your radiator your room will be a lot cooler.” I walked past her to the radiator under the window. Sitting in front of it was a life-sized stuffed panda bear. He was blocking my access to the valve and he weighed more than any stuffed animal I’d ever tried to lift.

  “I’ll move him,” Jocelyn quickly came over and heaved him out of my way.

  “He’s cute. What’s his name?” I asked as I tried to turn the radiator valve. Several layers of paint had hardened it into place. It didn’t want to turn, but I won the battle.

  “Aloysius.”

  “What a great name!” He was the only indication I’d seen of Jocelyn having a soft spot. He was her over-sized lumpy teddy bear. Unlike Kayla’s Bert, though, he looked new and untouched, unloved. “Like Sebastian’s teddy bear in Brideshead Revisited, right?”

  “Who?” Jocelyn dropped the bear in the corner by the wardrobe. He landed with a thud. She opened the wardrobe doors and the left one slammed right into Aloysius’ face.

  “Never mind.” I recognised the Holt Renfrew emblem on the dress bag that she lifted out of the wardrobe. A cheap formal gown from Holts would cost at least a couple of thousand dollars. Jocelyn unzipped the bag and held it open. I couldn’t see the shape or style of the dress. All I could see was that it was black, with a red rose floral print running up the length of it.

  “It’s a Dolce and Gabbana.”

  I mentally quadrupled my estimated price of the dress. How could a girl who complained about not getting enough money from her father afford such an expensive dress? Had Kayla bought it for her? “It’s beautiful.”

  “Kayla helped me pick it out.” She zipped the bag up and hung it back in the wardrobe. “We used to spend one weekend every month at her mother’s place in the city and go shopping. It was fun.”

  “It was very generous of her to buy something like that for you. You were lucky to have such a good friend.”

  “Kayla didn’t buy it for me! I paid for it with my own money.”

  “Sorry, my mistake.” Was Mademoiselle wrong about how much money Jocelyn’s father gave her? It was time to play stupid, again. “What do your parents do?” Hopefully, Jocelyn’s lack of friends would make her welcome my interest in her life.

  She flopped down onto her bed and scrunched a pillow up under her chest. “My Dad designs golf courses. That was him I was talking to. He’s in Saudi Arabia right now.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She died when I was two.” Jocelyn grabbed some of her hair and started pulling apart a few split ends.

  There had been zero emotion in her voice when she’d talked about her dead mother. Not even any of the anger she’d shown over Kayla’s death. Did this girl feel anything other than anger?

  “Dad was supposed to be designing a golf course in the Bahamas for Ethan’s dad this summer, but now he’s going to be in Abu Dhabi all summer and I’m going to be stuck in Saguenay with my stupid relatives. This year sucks!”

  “Why isn’t he going to be working in the Bahamas?”

  “I don’t know; some boring contract thing. Kayla was just as surprised as I was when I told her, so she called her mum to see if their place would be ready by summer. She was going to invite me to spend the summer with her, I just know it. Like I said, this year sucks!”

  “Did the contract not working out make it awkward between you and Ethan? You know, with your dads not being able to sort it out.” I mentally winced. I was aiming my questions too directly, too bluntly. Would she notice?

  “No, he didn’t know about it either. Greg hadn’t said anything to him about it. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered. Ethan hated Greg. He wasn’t his real father, you know. He was just his stepdad. When I told him he just said Greg was an asshole, but that wasn’t a big shocker. Everybody knows that Greg’s an asshole.”

  I couldn’t help myself; I just had to ask one more direct question. “When did you and Kayla tell Ethan about it?”

  “Kayla wasn’t there, she was already dead. I told Ethan yesterday when we were talking about the grad ball. He was trying to pretend that he wasn’t excited about being able to go with Glyn. Kayla dying probably made his year. Well, except for that whole dying thing, that is.”

  Alarm bells were blaring in my head.

  The lights started flickering in the hallway.

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. Jocelyn had knocked them all out of me.

  “That probably didn’t come out right. Ethan didn’t have anything to do with Kayla dying, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She sounded as if she spoke with absolute knowledge, and I had to wonder what other knowledge she had. “Ethan and Kayla were friends. It was their mothers who tried to make more out of it.” She rolled off the bed and tossed the pillow against the headboard. “Ethan was really bummed about Kayla dying. I want to get ready for bed now.”

  I was surprised that she hadn’t just said ‘I want you to leave now’.

  “Okay, goodnight then.”

  “Goodnight.” She closed the door in my face.

  *

  Grace nabbed me when I stepped out of Jocelyn’s room and put me to work rounding up the girls who hadn’t quite managed to get back to the dorm before the hall lights went out. Then we started doing room checks to make sure everyone turned their electronic devices off. I let one girl break the rules, though. Glyn was lying in her bed crying, the ear buds from her iPod firmly jammed into her ears.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  She pulled out one ear bud. “No,” she snuffled. “I can’t believe Ethan’s gone! Please let me keep my music on?”

  The kid was in so much obvious pain that I couldn’t say no. “Okay, but don’t tell Grace about this. Deal?”

  She almost smiled. “Deal. Thanks.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “He was the one,” she started blubbering. “I’ll never meet anyone like him ever again.”

  “No, you won’t.” I couldn’t lie to her. “But you’ll meet other boys, other men, and there are a lot of good ones. There’s never just one who’s right for you.” Apparently, I was capable of lying to her after all. Sure, everyone had a one who got away. But it was the one who never got there that left the biggest hole in your heart. “It hurts now, I know, but it will get better eventually, I promise. Time really does heal all things.” Even I was having a hard time buying into my platitudes. Time didn’t heal squat. It just dulled things, building up a big ugly scab that itched whenever you thought about it. And Lord help you if you ever scratched that scab.

  “If you say so.”

  I could hear the music coming from her loose ear bud and recognised the song, the acoustic version of Theo Tam’s “Stay”. Glyn had good taste in music. I was a long way from being a soppy teenager, but even I couldn’t listen to that song without tearing up. “Try to get some sleep.”

&
nbsp; I went back to my room and tried to get my head back into working on my article and was completely ignoring the no electronic devices after ten rule when Grace knocked on my door.

  She looked at my bright computer screen and smiled as she came into the room and closed the door behind her. “I just wondered if you want me to change your seating assignment for dinner tomorrow. You looked a little shell shocked tonight, being stuck between Anne and Mem C.”

  I liked Grace. “The religion teacher wasn’t too bad and I just ignored her, but you wouldn’t believe some of the things that Mem C said!”

  “Yeah, she loses her filter after her second glass of wine. How many did she have tonight?”

  “Four.”

  “Ouch. Sorry about that. I should have warned you. Despite some of the stuff that comes out of her mouth, she really is a sweetheart. We all love her to death and she’s like a grandmother to the kids. Did you notice that she was waving one of the electric candles out there?”

  “Yeah, I saw her on her balcony.”

  “I’d put money on her being the staff member who helped the kids get those candles. She’s got a master key and the lock on the stores room door wasn’t broken. She adored Ethan and would have done anything the kids asked of her to honour him. On the flip side, some of the advice she gives the kids is so old school that we have to do a lot of damage control. Moving her out of the staff residence and down to the boathouse has helped a bit. She’s not in the kids’ faces as much.”

  “When did she move down to the boathouse?”

  “Last October. The second floor was the upper form’s lounge, but their parties were getting out of control so we turned the dungeon into their lounge. Having them in this building gave us a bit more control.”

  I’d forgotten about the dungeon. It wasn’t really a dungeon, but that’s what everyone had always called the dark rooms under the dining hall. “The kids in my year got in trouble for partying in the boathouse lounge, too. But my class shut it down all by themselves. They burned the boathouse down.”

  “You were here then? What form were you in?”

  “The upper form.”

  “Again, ouch. Your year is famous.”

  “Why? Because of the boathouse fire?”

  “That and the bullying. It was so brutal in your year that we use it as an example of how wrong it can all go if the staff doesn’t take bullying seriously. Glyn’s mother had a really rough time here, but nobody did anything to stop it. It’s because of her that every staff member has to go on a yearly weekend retreat for sensitivity training. Glyn’s grandparents started it by bringing psychologists in to talk to the teachers and now it’s just part of our on-going training. We still get kids like Ms. Talbot and Mrs. Horscroft, but we watch them like hawks and don’t let them get away with anything.”

  Erica and Pam bullied Marcy, too? I’d run away. Marcy’s family had stuck around and instigated changes. I wished I’d known Marcy better.

  “Mem C doesn’t go on those weekends, though. There wouldn’t be any point; she’s too stuck in her ways. So what really started the boathouse fire? I heard it was a candle that fell over.”

  “Something like that.” That was the official story. There had been candles. There’d also been several bongs and a couple of hookahs. The combination of stoned kids and open flames would have turned deadly if the building hadn’t been over water. “I wasn’t at that party.” I didn’t go to any parties in my last year at Berkshire.

  “It must have been something to see.”

  “It was.” Jack and I had been on the point, sitting on the dew soaked moss that blanketed the smooth slab of pink granite. We’d watched Mr. Griffin marching over to the boathouse on a mission and figured that mission was to shut the party down. Then the flames started. And the screams. And Mr. Griffin shouting at the kids to jump out the front windows into the lake. I wondered if Pam Grey Horscroft still had the burn scar on her arm or if she’d had it covered up by a plastic surgeon.

  “Well, Mem C’s been read the riot act about smoking up there, so hopefully the new boathouse should last for a while. I’ll see about getting you moved to a different table.” She turned and opened the door, but stopped and turned her had to look at me. “Oh yeah, put a towel or something along the bottom of the door. It helps block the light from your computer screen.”

  I rolled up the scratchy wool blanket from my bed and put it on the floor across the bottom of my door. Then I tried to get back to work, but I’d just transferred my photos of my dive day on Allamanda Cay from my camera to my computer. The aerial shot I’d taken of the lighthouse on San Salvador as our helicopter flew over the island filled my computer screen and reminded me that I hadn’t talked to Jack about Jocelyn’s father yet. I started a slideshow of my photos from the Bahamas stop on the cruise and called Jack.

  “That place that Ethan’s dad is building in the Bahamas, how sure are you that it’s going to happen?”

  “Positive. They’ve already broken ground. Why?”

  I explained about Jocelyn’s father no longer having the contract to design and build the golf course and about my email from Simon. “I was just on that island, Jack. There’s nothing being built there.”

  “How big is it? Did you see the whole thing?”

  “Well, no, but...,”

  “And your diving friend said they were trying to make it a nature preserve, not that they have. I’ve seen the prospectus and offering memorandum. The numbers add up and were audited by a very reputable firm.”

  “And I’ve seen the actual island.” Sometimes Jack had his head so firmly stuck up his spreadsheet that he wasn’t capable of seeing beyond it.

  “But not all of it. As for Christophe’s contract, those things fall apart all the time. Greg’s a bit of an asshole. I wouldn’t be surprised if Christophe is the one who bailed.”

  “Maybe. But there’s something not right about this. I can feel it.” I heard him sigh and knew what he was thinking – that I was thinking with emotion, instead of paying attention to the facts. “Next topic.” I didn’t want to get into another fight with him. “I find it interesting that the day after Ethan found out that Jocelyn’s father had lost the contract to work on Greg’s island he ended up dead.”

  “But you said it was a kayaking accident.”

  “That’s what Mademoiselle said Will told her. Speaking of her, I had an interesting dinner.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Well, I found out that Jeff Kaufman is a nice boy for a Jew, his girlfriend’s Muslim family likes to lob explosives and the English teacher is a darkie. Why is she allowed to be near children?”

  Jack was laughing!

  “There’s nothing funny about it!”

  “Yes, there is. I told you, she’s starting to go a little dotty, but she means well...,”

  “How could any of those comments be construed as meaning well?”

  “It was socially acceptable to say those things when she was growing up.”

  “That was a million years ago and times have changed. She should be more sensitive...,”

  “She is sensitive, despite what she says. She really does love all the kids, no matter their religion or colour.”

  “Yeah, but darkie?”

  “Liloe is very dark. She’s Maasai, from northern Tanzania. And she’s absolutely gorgeous.”

  I had friends in Tanzania and I’d never, ever, wanted to call any of them darkie. Then again, they’d taken great pleasure in teasing me about how pale I was and had even nicknamed me Whitey and I hadn’t taken any offence. “I’m going to meet the English teacher tomorrow. I want to know which Shakespeare works Kayla was studying.” I told him about matching the lines from the suicide note and blackmail note to different Shakespeare works. “It’s weird that these lines come from so many different sources, don’t you think?”

  “Liloe may have an explanation for that.”

  “And I heard a rumour about Kayla possibly having an abortion, that a boy named T
homas got her pregnant.”

  “I definitely won’t be asking Erica about that! Thomas is Art Chapman’s son and he’s persona non grata with everyone at Berkshire. Kayla may have been dating him last year, but not this year. He doesn’t go to the school anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “His dad was running a ponzi scheme and tricked a lot of the staff into investing their pensions with him. The economics teacher was the first one to start asking questions. He had Marcy look over everything and they were able to salvage some people’s money, but a couple of people lost everything they had.”

  “That wasn’t his son’s fault, though. Why did he have to leave the school?”

  “Because his mother couldn’t afford it anymore. All of Art’s assets were seized by the Crown. And he didn’t really want to stay. He was too embarrassed, especially about Mem C. He was very close to her and she lost the most. Thomas’ mother had to take the kids and move back in with her parents. I made a few phone calls and found Thomas a spot at Crescent, but he’s a day student.”

  “But Kayla could have...,”

  “She couldn’t have done anything. Not with Erica as her mother. Erica didn’t lose any money, but she’s got zero patience for crooks. Say what you will about her, she earned her position and her wealth. Her father voted against her when she was up for a company board position. It was the other board members who gave her the top job when he had his stroke. Erica is respected, not liked, but respected, and she doesn’t respect anyone associated with getting money the easy way.”

  Erica’s own father had voted against her? That must have hurt!

  “If Kayla was pregnant, especially with Thomas’ child, she never ever would have kept it. But I don’t see what a pregnancy could have to do with her jumping or being pushed. Thomas wasn’t there so he couldn’t have pushed her.”

  “I’ll ask Will about it. Maybe their coroner saw something when they did the autopsy?”