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

by Jay Forman

  I rubbed the smoothed top of Aslan 1’s head as I ran up the front steps to the school. The rain the night before had been heavy enough to rinse off anything Berkshire’s cleaning staff may have missed, and I needed all the good luck I could get. I’d called Grace from the car, so she was already waiting for me when I walked into the rotunda.

  “You’ve got thirty minutes before the bell goes, but try not to use all of them. Jocelyn’s in Canadian Issues right now and Mr. Bush usually lets them out early.”

  I walked behind Grace up the circular staircase to the dorm.

  A young girl came out of Grace’s office just as we stepped through the fire door to the dorm hallway. The sparkly amethyst purple accents on her braces lessened the visual impact of her acne.

  “Can I help you, Rosimay?”

  “I was just dropping a leave slip in your office.”

  “Is it signed?” Grace asked.

  “Signed and sealed, literally. I put the Royal seal on it.”

  “When do you have to leave?”

  “Next Tuesday. Dad’s investiture is on Friday so I should be back on the Sunday after.”

  “What about Paula? Has her mother agreed to let her go with you?

  “Not yet, but she will. My mum’s going to call her tonight and lay the whole Queen thing on thick to speed things up. Gotta go, the van’s leaving soon for the swim meet at Havergal.”

  “Good luck,” Grace said as the girl ran down the hallway.

  I’d forgotten about leave slips. We’d had to fill them out whenever we wanted or needed to leave the school property. It would cut into my time in Jocelyn’s room, but I had to ask Grace if the same rules still applied. They did. The only difference was that all the information was now inputted into a program on Grace’s computer. “There isn’t any chance you could print out a copy of Kayla’s leave slips from this year, is there?”

  “No problem. Swing by my office once you’re done in Jocelyn’s room and I’ll have it ready for you.”

  I started down the hallway but spun around and went back to Grace’s office when another thought occurred to me. “Sorry to bug you, but could you print out Jocelyn’s, too?”

  I hadn’t realised that Grace was on the phone when I started talking, so she just nodded and gave me the thumbs up signal as a reply.

  I walked more quickly down the hallway the second time. I had a panda bear to assault.

  I’d brought my backpack with me, just in case I had something to carry out of Jocelyn’s room. Thankfully, I hadn’t unpacked the little travel sewing kit that I took on every trip. The scissors in it would come in handy if I had to cut a hole in the bottom of Aloysius.

  Jocelyn had moved Aloysius back in front of the radiator. I closed the door to her room, checked to make sure that her computer was off (I didn’t want her father popping up on the screen), and then laid Aloysius down on his belly.

  It turned out that I didn’t have to cut anything. Aloysius’ bottom was closed up with two strips of Velcro. From the messy stitching I could tell that the strips had been sewn on by hand. The Velcro made an extra loud ripping sound when I pulled it apart, but I knew no one had heard it other than me.

  I shoved my hand into the opening, my heart racing with expectation. All I felt was synthetic stuffing. I sat down on the floor and pushed my arm further into Aloysius until my hand hit a solid object that felt like a strangely shaped deck of cards. I grabbed it and pulled it out.

  “Show me the money,” I whispered.

  I’d pulled out a stack of Canadian fifty dollar bills that were held together by a white and brown striped paper band that had the date, time, bank, teller’s name and $5,000 in bold brown numbers printed on it. Canada’s tenth and longest serving Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, looked back at me twice from the face of the red polymer bills – once from the centre of the bill and then again as a hologram from the transparent strip that ran down the right side of the bill.

  I dug through Aloysius’ innards with gusto and eventually piled up fifteen more straps of fifties from several different banks – Bank of Montreal, TD-Canada Trust, Scotiabank, HSBC. Eighty-thousand dollars. Wow. I’d never seen so much money at one time.

  But what I hadn’t seen, or found, was another USB key.

  I took a couple of pictures of the stacked up money with my phone and then started to richly re-stuff Aloysius. Once he was full I closed up both Velcro straps and sat him upright again. And that’s when I noticed that one of his ears was floppier than the other. I squeezed his ears. There was something hard, something that felt a lot like a USB key in his right ear. The stitches in the seam that joined that ear to his head had been cut, but it wasn’t something anyone would notice just by looking at him. Only when I ran my fingers along the seam did I feel the opening. I stuck one finger inside his ear, then another, and using my fingers as pliers I was able to slowly pull out the hard object.

  “Show me the USB key.” I shoved it into the front pocket of my jeans and quickly went down the hallway to my room. I wanted to know what was on that USB key before Jack showed up at the school. And, knowing Jack, that would be soon. He was probably driving faster than he ever had before. He would have known exactly where I’d gone after disappearing from his place. And he wouldn’t be happy about it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I’d just fired up my computer and shoved the USB key into a port in the side of it when Grace knocked on my dorm room door. She opened it without waiting for me to invite her in.

  “I thought you were going to come to my office to pick these up?” She walked into my room, holding a couple of sheets of paper. “Kayla and Jocelyn’s leave records?”

  “Sorry, I just wanted to look at something first. Thanks.” I reached up and took the papers from her when she walked over to me.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I found something, but I’m not sure what it is yet.”

  “I wish I could be more help. The one night I miss dinner and go down to the kitchens and something like this happens. If I’d been in my office I might have seen something or someone. Mem C’s mad at me for it, too.”

  “Why? You couldn’t have known...,”

  “Not because of what happened to Kayla. She’s mad because of what I told Gareth, our head chef. Mem C came into the kitchen when I was there and helped herself to a bottle of wine from the cellar. Apparently, Gareth’s had a lot of wine disappear from the cellar and he couldn’t figure out how somebody kept getting in. The door’s always locked and he’s the only one with a key. But I saw Mem C unlock the door. Apparently, she’s got a set of master keys to the whole place. Gareth’s changed the lock now, so Mem C can’t steal any more wine, and she’s not happy about it.”

  “Was she in the kitchen when you got there?”

  “No, she came in from the service stairwell. Scared the crap out of me, too!”

  “You said before that you two heard a commotion upstairs while you were there. That happened while you were together, right?”

  “Ye...no. That’s why she scared me so much. I was making a sandwich when I heard everybody running around upstairs, so I went over to the main doors and opened them to see if somebody in the hallway might know what was happening and Mem C freaked me out when she came in from the other side of the kitchen. I grabbed my sandwich and headed back up to the dorm. She was in the wine cellar when I left. You don’t think she...,”

  “No! Of course not.” But maybe? “I’m just trying to place where everyone was when it happened.”

  Glyn appeared in the open doorway and knocked on the frame. “Sorry to interrupt, but the office sent me up to find you, Miss Smith. How are you feeling?”

  “Better. Much better.” Marcy had taught her daughter nice manners. “Thanks for asking.”

  “Everybody was really worried.”

  Berksherians were worried about me? If I’d had an allergic reaction to something when I’d been a student most of my classmates woul
d have enjoyed watching me suffer. Maybe not Marcy, though. “Why is someone in the office looking for me?”

  “Mr. Hughes is here. He’s waiting in the boardroom for you.”

  Oh, boy.

  *

  I took the longest route I could think of to get down to the boardroom, while telling myself that I wasn’t doing it to avoid Jack. I was doing it for research. It had been over twenty years since I’d taken that route and I couldn’t remember how long it took.

  I went up to the tower room, then down one flight to the chapel balcony and through the secret passage in the chapel ceiling, then down the service staircase behind the pipe organ. I stepped into the kitchen. The door that opened to the school’s vegetable garden was right in front of me. Whoever pushed Kayla could have easily disappeared by following the same route.

  Angry Jack was sitting at the head of the long table. (He looked so much better without the facial hair. Even if he was scowling.)

  “Hi.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say for yourself?”

  “Okay, I know you’re pissed off, but...,”

  “Pissed off? Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been? You knew how I felt about you coming back here, especially alone, but you just went ahead and did what you always do - whatever you want to do, consequences be damned, including my feelings.”

  I sat down in the chair on his right and felt positively miniscule, like a guilty student about to get a lecture from the headmistress. “I’m sorry if you were worried but, as you can see, I’m fine. And you knew how I felt about coming back here. I wanted to look in that panda...,”

  “YOU wanted.”

  “...and I have looked. Do YOU want to know what I found?”

  I could tell he wanted to know, but didn’t want to admit it.

  “Why don’t I call Will and ask him to come over? Then you can tell both of us at the same time.”

  And get another lecture on deliberately ignoring their manly protective orders? No thank you. “I found eighty-thousand dollars.” Jack’s jaw dropped just a little bit. “And a USB key.” I waited for him to say something, but didn’t have the patience to wait very long. “I’ve also got printouts that show when Kayla and Jocelyn left the school property during this school year.” I bent down and pulled the spreadsheets and my computer out of my backpack. I put the computer on the table in front of me and turned it on. I put the spreadsheets in front of Jack, seeing as how he seemed to like looking at paper more than at actual physical things. “They’ve even got numbers on them,” I said as I pointed at the spreadsheets.

  He looked down at the spreadsheets and then separated them into two piles.

  I hadn’t looked at the information on them yet, so I was stuck looking at them upside-down while Jack read them very carefully.

  He turned one of the top pages over and started writing notes on the back of it. “They both left the school on a lot of the same nights, but only once for riding lessons. Jocelyn’s listed ‘driving Kayla to Chestnut Stables’.” He looked up at me. “Does Jocelyn have a car?”

  “No, but Kayla did. A car that broke down a lot, according to Greg.” And according to someone else, but I couldn’t remember who. I closed my eyes and tried to remember where I’d been when I heard that. If I could remember the location, some visual image, I knew I’d be able to remember who said it. But all I could remember was the voice, a man, and I couldn’t put a face to it.

  “Well, according to this, Jocelyn drove Kayla to just one riding lesson, last October. And there are a couple of times when they both went over to Erica’s cottage together. Again, most of them in the fall.”

  “Maybe Kayla had Jocelyn drive her over to Greg’s place and then, while Kayla was there, Jocelyn drove over to Erica’s cottage to get everything ready for the recording? Greg did say he heard someone walking around in the house when he was there. It might have been Jocelyn.”

  “Or it may have been a maid.”

  “Do you want to see what’s on the USB key now?” His phone was still in his pocket, so he wasn’t itching to call Will anymore. I pushed the USB key into the port, rolled my chair around the corner of the table to be beside Jack, and turned my computer so that we could both see it.

  There were four folders on the USB key – Ethan, Damien, Paul, Glen. I clicked on the Ethan folder first and saw that it had two files and one subfolder in it. The files were labelled “Edited” and “Raw”, the subfolder was labelled “Notes”. The edited file was the same video that we’d already seen. The raw file was a longer version of the same thing. Unlike the edited video, it had audio. We both watched and listened to Kayla giggling and teasing and almost tugging Greg into the shot. She pushed him down on the bed and took off his clothes with the skill of a professional call girl. Then, while he lay there and watched, she took off her own clothes. I didn’t want to watch Kayla or Greg in action again, but knew that I had to. Jack looked down at his notes a couple of times and wrote a few more.

  Greg tried to sit up, but Kayla pushed him back down and told him how she wanted to do it. She kneeled on the bed and then turned around to face the camera before lowering herself onto him. Greg cried out repeatedly. In fact, he was the only one who made any noise. Kayla was silent, her gaze focused right on the camera lens.

  “Fucking amazing!” Greg screamed out breathlessly just before every muscle that we could see in his body and legs tensed and then buckled.

  “I know,” Kayla calmly said as she lifted herself off of him and stood up. She turned her back to the camera and we could only see her bare butt. “Get dressed. I have to get back to school. Curfew’s in twenty minutes.”

  The camera kept recording as Greg and Kayla got dressed and left the room. We heard the bedroom door closing and their voices moving farther and farther away from the camera and microphone.

  “Dear God.” Jack dropped his pen. “You can close that file now.”

  “No, someone has to stop the recording. It was already on when they came into the room.”

  We didn’t have to wait very long before we heard the bedroom door opening again. Then a chunky girl wearing a Berkshire kilt walked in front of the camera and turned it off. We only saw her torso, but I knew who it was. “That’s Jocelyn. I’m sure of it.”

  I opened the Notes folder. There were five files in it, all of them listed by date, all of them with the same Shakespeare quotation that we’d seen on the note on the USB key that Erica had given us.

  “So he was telling the truth about her hitting him up five times, but why is the folder named Ethan when it’s Greg in the video?”

  I didn’t understand it either. “I don’t know.”

  I closed the Ethan folder, opened the Damien folder and clicked on the “Raw” file. Once again, Kayla came into her mother’s bedroom with a man. But this man was black, dark chocolate black. He was taller than Greg so we couldn’t see his face and Kayla was blocking the camera when he lay down on the bed. He wasn’t as willing as Greg had been to stay still. His big strong hands grabbed Kayla’s hips and he controlled her speed, but she didn’t complain. She’d closed her eyes and was thoroughly enjoyed the ride. I couldn’t take my eyes off the large octagonal ruby in the gold band on the fourth finger of the man’s left hand. “That’s Andre. I recognize his wedding ring.”

  We saw his face when he sat up after Kayla got off him.

  Kayla had sent Andre seven blackmail notes, using the same two lines from Shakespeare’s Henry IV as she had in the notes to Greg.

  “Let me check something.” Whatever that something was it had really caught Jack’s attention. He tapped the screen of his phone until he found what he was looking for. I could tell by the way he was looking back and forth from his phone to the files on the computer screen that he was either matching or comparing information. “I’ll be damned. Every single one of the payment dates on those blackmail notes matches the date of a Board meeting.”

  I wasn’t going to bother opening the “Ed
ited” file, but Jack wanted to see it. It was basically a repeat of the shortened version that had been on the USB key that Jocelyn had given Mem C, showing just the climax of the scene – literally. Jack picked up his pen and wrote something down.

  The man in the “Raw” file in the “Paul” folder was pasty white. Again, we didn’t get to see his face. The muscles on his long legs were well defined. And he giggled like a little school girl at his luck.

  “Love it, love it, love it. Great idea, Erica’s bed ... really sticking it to her, like I’m going to stick it to you...,”

  “Shut up.” Kayla expressed my sentiments exactly.

  Kayla looked bored through the entire video.

  Even when she and the pasty man left the camera’s view we didn’t get to see his face.

  “Do you think that’s Dick’s son, Paul?” I asked Jack.

  “It could be, he’s got a very deep voice. It sure isn’t Dick. One of his legs would be twice as wide as both of the legs on that guy.”

  Kayla had sent that boy or man six blackmail notes, all of them with a delivery date that coincided with a Board meeting.

  The “Edited” file in the “Paul” folder had been edited the same way as the others.

  The same wide-bodied girl wearing a Berkshire kilt had come into view and stopped the camera on all three raw videos.

  Finally, I opened the Glen folder. There was nothing in it.

  I began to understand Kayla’s motive. I’d wanted to hit back at Hunter, too. “She did it for revenge.”

  “What? Revenge for what? You mean for the incident in the fall?”

  “Yup. Think about it. The folders are named after the guys who were in the boathouse that night. But Glen was pulled out of the school so she couldn’t get to him and his father’s not on the Board, that’s why his folder is empty. I don’t get Ethan, though.”

  “And she didn’t have sex with him. She had sex with Greg.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t trying to hurt Ethan? Maybe she was doing it for Ethan? To get some revenge for him? Jocelyn said that Ethan thought Greg was an asshole...,”