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

by Jay Forman

“He didn’t give you a specific time or place to meet up tomorrow?”

  “He just said he’d find me.”

  “I was thinking that I should come over to the school after I get the walking cast tomorrow. Maybe talk to the gym teacher about his students’ knees?”

  “Sounds good to me. I’m going to head out of here right after I meet with the English teacher. I’ll pop home for a shower and then come to get you. We can come to the school right from the hospital.”

  “Oh, no we won’t. You’ll take me home and I’ll drive my own car to the school.”

  “What about the painkillers? Aren’t you still taking those?”

  “I won’t take any tomorrow. A little pain in the leg is nothing compared to the pain of watching you drive.”

  “You’re such a butt head!”

  “Love you, too. Now get some sleep.”

  But I couldn’t sleep; too many names and faces and details and rumours were running around in my head. And the bed was painfully uncomfortable. So I worked on my article some more.

  I’d just written a paragraph about the excessive wealth on display during the formal dinner night on the cruise and was trying to find the right words to describe one of the gowns I’d seen when I remembered Jocelyn and her gown.

  I grabbed my phone and sent a quick text to Jack.

  Can you dig up financial information on people?

  Maybe. Who?

  Jocelyn.

  If Jocelyn really had paid for her own dress I wanted to know where the money had come from.

  Chapter Twelve

  I’d thought that the gym would be empty first thing in the morning; teenagers weren’t known for excessive energy early in the day. One other person was there, though – Jeff Kaufman. He was on a treadmill, running hard and fast. Given the amount of sweat splatter on the rubber belt he’d been at it for some time, and given his muscle definition it wasn’t his first time in a gym. The kid was buff, really buff. So buff that he was well on his way over the line between being a boy and being a man. I didn’t know what music he was listening to on his iPod, but it had to be something with an insanely fast beat.

  He nodded at me to acknowledge my presence as I stepped up onto the treadmill beside him. I nodded back and set in my program. My feet soon began to match the beat of his and I was sweating in less than a minute.

  He slowed his treadmill and began his cool down. I decided to switch up my routine and slowed my treadmill down, too. My brief burst of activity on the treadmill had warmed me up. It wouldn’t kill me to do my weights first; my cardio could wait until after he’d left the gym. There was a better chance of getting him to talk to me if I wasn’t out of breath. But gym etiquette could be tricky. I didn’t want to interrupt his concentration while he was lifting free weights. I knew what it was like to be in the zone and got really ticked off if someone tried to talk to me when I was doing them. So I went to the weight machines instead. I went up and down on the Gravitron, working my biceps, deltoids, triceps and pecs until they quivered. After loading more weight onto the leg press I worked on my quads and glutes, and caught Jeff looking at me a few times. He’d noticed how much weight I’d added to the machine and I think he was impressed. I caught him looking at me again when I was wiping the machine down. If I’d been twenty years younger I might have thought he was checking me out, but I could tell he wasn’t doing that. He was too nervous. I hoped he was just building up the courage to talk to me. (If he’d been ten years older I would have been tempted to do more than just check him out from a distance.)

  He finally spoke to me when I was almost finished my second set on the leg curl machine. It wasn’t the best place to have a deep and meaningful discussion; I was lying face down with my butt up in the air.

  “You’re the temp don, right?”

  I exhaled for one last lift. “Yeah.” Two sets would have to be enough. Talking to Jeff was more important than the third set. I got off the machine as gracefully as I could. (Which wasn’t very gracefully at all.) “I’m Lee.”

  “Jeff.” Our sweaty hands slithered more than shook when they met.

  “I know. I’m sorry about your friend.”

  “Thanks.” He looked uncomfortable, he was staring at his shoes.

  “What were you listening to on the treadmill?” Maybe music would break the ice for us?

  “Jimmy Eat World’s ‘Pain’.”

  “It’s got a great beat.”

  “Yeah, it’s good for pushing past the burn. I’ll let you get back to your workout.”

  Damn. What could I say to get him to start talking? I slid sideways onto the seat of the leg extension machine, not that I needed to fire up my quads again. I wanted to be sitting upright if he decided to say more.

  But he’d gone over to the water cooler.

  I held off on putting my own earbuds in and turning on my iPod. I wasn’t going to give up hope until he walked out of the gym.

  He almost walked out but something made him turn around and come back to me.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  I didn’t pull a Mademoiselle and correct his grammar. “Sure.”

  “You’re working with Mr. Hughes, trying to figure out what happened to Kayla, right?”

  My legs dropped too fast and the weights banged down loudly. “Who told you that?”

  “Ethan. That’s what his mum told him.”

  Dick’s stupid confidentiality agreement might as well be written on the roll beside a toilet. At least then it would serve a useful purpose. “Yes, I am. Why?”

  “So, like, what if somebody knew something, but they didn’t know if it was important or not? Should they tell somebody?” He wiped his towel over his face and then wrapped it around his neck. “Forget it. It’s probably not important.”

  “There’s only one way to find out if it is. I know you don’t know me, but I promise you I won’t tell anybody whatever you say if it’s not important.”

  “Ethan thought it was important. I’m not so sure.”

  “Did Ethan tell anyone?”

  “He was going to. I tried to talk him out of it. He said he’d think about it some more. I think that’s why he went kayaking, to get away to think. He said being on water helped clear his head.”

  I wished I’d met him. “I do the same thing.”

  “Yeah, but, seriously? Kayaking on a frozen lake? How fucking stupid can you get? Sorry, I didn’t mean to swear.”

  “Don’t worry about. I’ve used that word once or twice myself.” And I could get incredibly fucking stupid sometimes. “Whatever it is it’s obviously eating you up. I think you should tell somebody and I’m here and willing to listen, if you want. I’m not a cop or a teacher or even a real member of the staff and, believe me, I don’t feel any loyalty to this place so I’d be impartial.”

  “Ethan’s mum said you went here.” He sat down on top of the leg curl machine that I’d just vacated.

  “A long, long time ago. Jack Hughes was in my class and we’ve been friends ever since.”

  “But you’re not friends with Ethan’s mum or Kayla’s mum?”

  “Nope.” I resisted the urge to add Not even close! “Let’s just say I didn’t fit in well. In fact, I hated it here.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Seriously? This place is awesome, for a school.”

  “It’s changed a lot since my time.” He went silent again. I had to keep him talking, so I stayed with a neutral subject. “Where are you going to go next year? I saw what you wrote for the yearbook, but it was rather nonspecific.”

  The corners of his mouth turned up, just a bit. “I just wrote that because I haven’t decided yet. I’ve narrowed it down to two places – Harvard or Cambridge.”

  “Have you already been accepted at both?”

  He nodded. “I got early acceptance at a bunch of other places, too, but those two were my first choices. Ethan had already accepted his offer from Cambridge. He wanted me to go with him. I was going to, but now I’m thinking I’ll
stay closer to home and go to Harvard.”

  “I can understand why, but take some time to think about it. You’ve had one hell of a shock.”

  “Yeah,” he said softly and then stared at his shoes again. “Fuck it.” He sat up straighter and looked right me. “There was this party in the boathouse, last fall, right after the term started. Somebody brought some BC bud. That’s a kind of ...,”

  “Pot. I know.” I’d bought it from Ethan’s mother. “What was it? Romulan, Kush, God Bud...,”

  “Whoa.” Now Jeff looked truly impressed, more impressed than he had when I’d loaded up the leg press. “How do you know about that stuff?”

  “I may have smoked it once or twice when I was a teenager.” It wasn’t the time or place, or audience, to admit that I still enjoyed it from time to time.

  “I think it was Romulan and there was a lot of Canadian and Molson Ex, too, so everybody was feeling pretty good.”

  I’d never mixed beer with pot, but knew that I was the exception to the rule. More importantly, I knew that Jeff felt more comfortable talking to me now and that I’d probably get the whole story, not one that had been edited for grown-up ears.

  “Kayla was totally wasted and these three guys started messing around with her. Nobody knew it was happening, though. They’d gone down into the room where Old Pete stores the lifejackets and buoys. One of them shot it all on his cell phone. The next day somebody shared the video with all the guys in the class. It was pretty graphic and you could tell that Kayla was too wasted to even know what was happening to her. Ethan was pissed. Really pissed. And he went nuts when somebody said they were going to put it up on Facebook. I’d never seen him so angry. He wanted the three guys thrown out of the school, but Dr. Campbell said she’d deal with them.”

  So much for Dr. Campbell’s scandal free claim. “Ethan went to Dr. Campbell?”

  He nodded.

  “What did she do about it?”

  “Not much. One of the guys transferred out of here and went to Upper Canada College for the rest of the year. But two of them stayed; the two you could actually see in the video. I know there was a big meeting in Dr. Campbell’s office with their parents. Everybody heard them yelling. And Dr. Campbell made us all show her our phones to prove that we’d deleted the video.”

  “And Kayla? What did she do?”

  “It was weird. She treated it like a joke, but you could tell she wasn’t really laughing. Even if the guys claimed she wanted it she was too wasted to say yes and they should have known that.” Jeff had character, not just brains and muscles. “She still hung out with the same people, the same guys, but I never saw her touch a joint or drink again. And it was like she was icy, you know what I mean? Like nobody could hurt her because she wouldn’t let herself care about anything.”

  Dear God. Kayla and I had more in common than I ever could have imagined. I’d acted like nothing mattered after a group assaulted me. Different kind of assault, same result. “Was Jocelyn at the party?”

  He looked surprised by my question. “No. She wasn’t part of our group. Not then, anyway. She and Kayla didn’t start being friends until after.”

  “And you think the video might have something to do with Kayla’s death?”

  “Ethan thought it might. He knew Kayla better than I did. He wondered if maybe that was why she jumped. Maybe it bugged her more than she let on.”

  “Do you think that?”

  He shook his head. “Kayla could be a lot of fun, but there was a hard side to her, too. If anything, I think she would have done something to the guys, like get revenge or something. She didn’t strike me as someone who’d ever break. You know what I mean?”

  I knew exactly what he meant, but I also knew that no matter how tough a person’s exterior was, everyone had a breaking point, especially if there were already cracks deep below the surface. “If the school and the boys’ parents already knew about it, why did Ethan think he should bring it up again?”

  “He wasn’t going to talk to Dr. Campbell about it. He lost all respect for her when she didn’t throw the guys out. He was thinking of telling the police about it, because he knew Dr. Campbell never would.”

  “So he was going to call the cops?”

  “Nah, he wasn’t ready to do that. He was going to talk to Mem C to see what she thought he should do.”

  Oh boy. That conversation would have required extensive damage control by the dons and teachers if it had ever happened. But it hadn’t. Ethan had died before it could. “Was Ethan close to Madem...Mem C?”

  “I don’t know if you’d call it close, but she’d always been nice to him and everybody knows that she doesn’t like Dr. Campbell.”

  “Do you go to her for advice, too?”

  “Hell, no! She’s an anti-Semitic dried up old cu...oh wow, I can’t believe I almost said that. Sorry.” His face turned little boy beet red with embarrassment.

  “It’s okay.”

  “And I already know what she’d say if I did talk to her about it. She’d tell me not to cause a fuss. That’s her big thing – don’t cause a fuss. I don’t know, what do you think I should do? Tell the police? Or just leave it?”

  “How about this for a third option – I’ll talk to Det. Sgt. Lightfoote, he’s an old friend and I know I can trust him. I won’t tell him how I found out about it. If he thinks it’s important I’ll let you know and then you can decide if you want me to tell him who I heard about it from. Does that sound okay to you?”

  Jeff didn’t need to consult with his shoes for very long. “I like it.”

  “Who are the two boys who are still here?”

  “Paul Allenby and Damien Burgess.” He said without any hesitation or affection. “They’re pricks.”

  It didn’t surprise me that Dick’s son had been one of the boys. Or that Andre’s son had been the other one. “And who was the boy who left?”

  “Glen Tory, Glyn’s twin brother. But he didn’t touch Kayla, he just shot the video.”

  It didn’t make him any less guilty.

  It wasn’t until I was heading for the teacher’s lounge that I made the third connection to the Board of Governors. Glen Tory was Marcy Tory’s son. I almost (not quite, but almost) felt sorry for Dr. Campbell. The children of three of her bosses had done something that was expulsion worthy, but if she’d expelled them she had to have known that they would probably expel her right out of her job.

  The only person who’d done the right thing, the decent thing, had been Marcy. She’d pulled her son out and sent him to a place where he wouldn’t be a daily reminder to Kayla of what had happened to her. What had been done to her.

  *

  Thankfully, the teachers’ lounge was in the same place it had been twenty years earlier and I was able to find it easily. On the rare occasions when I’d had to go there as a student a billowing cloud of smoke had rolled out of the room when the door opened to my tentative knocking. This time, when I purposefully opened the door without knocking, the air was spring meadow clean.

  I spotted Liloe standing at the buffet table on the far side of the room. She was taller, by far, than any of the other women in the room, and several of the men. And Jack had been right, she was beautiful; long and lithe.

  I went over to stand beside her and picked up a water bottle from the table. (I still had a lot of rehydrating to do. I’d gone a little overboard on the cardio after Jeff left the gym.)

  “You’re Lee, right?”

  “And you’re Liloe.” I smiled at her. “Let me guess, Mademoiselle told you I’d be dropping by.”

  “And I bet she told you I was the darkie.” She said it without any bitterness. In fact, she was almost smiling. “That woman’s bat shit crazy, so crazy that she doesn’t even realise what century it is.” Liloe jerked her head to the side and I got the message and followed her to a quiet corner of the room, away from the other staff members. “I’ve got a student meeting in ten minutes, so we’re going to have to make this fast. Shoot. What
do you want to know about Kayla?” she said as she sat down on a small sofa.

  She’d caught me off guard. I hadn’t expected it to be this easy. I sat beside her. “How about you tell me what you think I need to know?”

  “She was exceptionally talented. Through her writing she showed a side of herself that I don’t think she let anyone see. It was beautiful. There was a gentle and loving person hidden inside her.”

  Her admiration of Kayla surprised me and it dawned on me that she was the first person to include an emotional adjective in their description of Kayla.

  “She wrote poetry, lyrical, sensitive poetry. Like song lyrics, actually. Her words sang.”

  “Any chance I could see some of them?”

  “No. Her mother’s got all of Kayla’s things now and I doubt she’d let you see them. She’d probably see Kayla’s tenderness as a sign of weakness. That woman put so much pressure on Kayla, to be the best, to be tough. She had no idea who her daughter was under the tough exterior that Kayla put on to keep everyone happy. I think the only place she let her real voice cry out was through her poems. Maybe if someone other than me had read them, appreciated them, she’d still be here? The world has been sadly quietened by her silence.”

  I was more confused than ever about who Kayla was. “She quoted Shakespeare in her, um, last note.”

  “So I hear. You’re talking about her supposed suicide note?”

  I nodded.

  “That doesn’t make any sense to me. She hated studying his works. Why would she quote someone she disliked so much to write such a personal note, when she was capable of writing something just as good in her own words? The only time I could see her using his words would have been in anger, not in pain.”

  “Which works did you have her class studying?”

  “Henry IV. Did she quote from it in her note?”

  “I’m not sure,” I lied. That’s where the lines in the blackmail note had come from. Not the lines in the suicide note. “What about King John or any of the Sonnets? Did you cover them, too?”

  “No, there’s only one Shakespeare work on the syllabus in senior form.”