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

by Jay Forman

  “Are you suggesting that Ethan knew about it? I find that very hard to believe. Ethan would never have gone along with something like this.”

  “We need to talk to Jocelyn.”

  “No, we need to talk to Will.” Jack was already scrolling through his contacts on his phone.

  “How about we talk to Jocelyn while Will’s on his way over? I mean, really, what else are we going to do? Sit around talking about what we just saw? We aren’t going to get any answers that way. Jocelyn’s got those answers and I still think she might open up to me more than she would to Will.”

  Jack didn’t acknowledge me; he talked into his phone instead. “I’m with Lee at Berkshire right now... I know, I thought we were going to meet there, too, but we’re here and I think you should come over. Lee’s found some more videos with Kayla in them ... See you then.” He put his phone down on the table. “Will’s going to be here in twenty minutes.”

  “Which gives us enough time to go talk to Jocelyn. She’ll be in the editing suite now, she spends her lunch hours there.”

  “Do you ever take no for an answer?”

  “No.” I put my computer back into my backpack, zipped it up, dumped it into the empty chair next to mine and stood up. “Are you coming?”

  He rolled his eyes, but stood up while doing it. “I’m only coming to keep an eye on you.” He scooped up the spreadsheets. “Did you notice that all of the edited files were exactly the same length? Three minutes and eighteen seconds. If Jocelyn did edit them we should ask her what the significance of that timing is.”

  *

  I recognized Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variation, IX: Nimrod” when I opened the door to the editing suite and knew that Jocelyn was working on the In Memoriam video.

  She was sitting at the control board, watching the video that was playing on the three large monitors on the wall in front of her.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Jocelyn, but we need to talk to you.”

  She looked over her shoulder at us. “Why?” Her eyes stayed on Jack the longest.

  “You know Mr. Hughes, right?”

  “Well, duh! Everybody knows him. What do you want?”

  “Like I said, we need to talk to you. About Kayla.”

  She clicked a few buttons, the screens went black and the music stopped abruptly. “Okay, but you have to see this first. I just finished it! Ethan’s Mum sent over a bazillion photos for his section. She asked me to do a special montage, a longer one, for his funeral this weekend.” She slid a few sliders up on the control board, pushed a button that dimmed the lights in the room, and then flicked a couple of switches. Elgar’s music started and the monitors lit up, each one showing the same images.

  For the second time I watched the touching tribute she’d put together for Mr. Haber and Miss Knowles. Then came her full tribute to Kayla. Jocelyn had used photographs of Kayla that chronicled her entire short life, not just her Berkshire years. Kayla’s dates of birth and death were superimposed over her face as she went out of focus – March 18, 1998 - April 7, 2015.

  “March eighteenth!” Jack blurted out. “Three eighteen.”

  Jocelyn turned the volume up.

  Ethan’s section came next. He’d been a very chubby baby, but he’d grown up into a handsome young man, a happy young man who played almost every sport imaginable. Jocelyn had even included a short video of him racing down a ski hill in the Alps. Pam, looking pale and thin but beaming with pride, was in the background of a shot of Ethan on the stage in the theatre named after Jack’s parents accepting an award from the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip. Then Ethan’s birth and death dates faded up on the screen as he faded out – February 4, 1998 – April 29, 2015.

  The faces of all four lost Berksherians came up on the screens and, as the music gently trailed off, Rest in peace was written across the screen as if by an invisible quill.

  “It’s really good, Jocelyn,” Jack said softly.

  “Thanks, Mr. Hughes.” She turned off the monitors and when she flipped the switch to light up the room both Jack and I had to blink to get accustomed to the brightness. She spun her chair around to face us. “So what do you want to know about Kayla?”

  I rolled a chair out from the console and sat down beside her. “We know, Jocelyn. We know that you worked with Kayla to blackmail those boys.”

  “I knew it!” The surely teenager was instantly replaced by a scared little girl, her eyes open extra wide, torn between anger and fear. “I knew you weren’t really here just as a temp don. You talked to me too much. Nobody does that. How did you find out?” She spoke only to me.

  “I found the money and the USB key in Aloysius.”

  “But...you went into my room? Through my stuff?” Her fear won out over her anger. “Am I going to go to jail?” She looked up at Jack.

  “I don’t know,” Jack answered gently, but honestly. “I think it will depend on how honest you are with us and with the police.”

  “The police?” She looked back at me.

  “Detective Sergeant Lightfoote is on his way over to the school right now. I thought you might be more comfortable talking to me, to us, first.”

  She nodded quickly.

  “Jocelyn, what happened?”

  Her lower lip quivered and tears started to pool in her eyes. “It was all Kayla’s idea! She didn’t even know I was alive until this year. She never talked to me. But then those guys shot that video of her in the boathouse. She saw me shooting some stuff for the year in review video and asked me if I’d help her shoot something. She said we could get a lot of money, so I said yes. But I didn’t know what she wanted me to do, honest! Not at first, anyway. And she started to hang out with me, like friends even. I told you – she was even going to get me a date for the prom!”

  Kayla opened the door to the magical kingdom, the cool crowd, to Jocelyn. “What exactly did she ask you to do?”

  “Set up my webcam in her mother’s bedroom and then edit the stuff. She didn’t want them to see their own faces, just hers.”

  “What about the blackmail notes?” Jack asked and I worried that his intrusion would shut Jocelyn down.

  “Did you do those?” I refocused her attention on me.

  “Uh-uh. The Shakespeare thing was Kayla’s idea. But we used my computer to do them.”

  Kayla had pulled Jocelyn into her scheme, and she’d made sure that the only physical evidence was on Jocelyn’s computer – not hers. She handled her business well, just like Mem C suspected she would. “We’ve watched the raw footage, but we couldn’t see the face of who she was within the Paul video. Was it Paul Allenby?”

  “No!”

  I was surprised by the vehemence of her response. “Then who?”

  Jocelyn looked as if she was struggling with the answer. “But if I tell you, he’ll come after me!”

  “Who would come after you? And why?” Jack jumped in with too much enthusiasm. He wanted details. I did, too, but I didn’t want Jocelyn to shut down.

  “It’s okay, Jocelyn. I promise. We’ll make sure that you’re safe. So will the police. Who was in that video?”

  “The guy who killed her. If he knows that I know it was him he’ll shut me up, too.”

  “You saw him? You could have told the police, Jocelyn. They would have arrested him and made sure that he couldn’t hurt you.” She’d kept silent out of fear? That didn’t ring one hundred percent true to me.

  “But then everyone would have known, you know, about the money and everything. They already treated me like dirt. And what if I got expelled? It would totally mess up my UCLA acceptance.”

  Mem C had been right. Jocelyn was selfish. But she was also very scared. And smart. Had she taken an extra step to avoid getting in trouble? “Did you write the suicide note?”

  “Uh-uh. He must have. And he was pretty dumb about it, too. He didn’t even use the same play. Like how obvious was that!”

  She still wasn’t saying who he was. I had to think of a way for Jocelyn to come out
of this looking like a hero. She’d have no hesitation if she thought she’d look good at the end of everything. “Jocelyn, you’re the only one who can identify the man who killed Kayla. The police can’t solve this without your help.” Her lips stayed firmly clenched and she was shaking her head. I gave it another shot. “You’re the key to the whole thing.”

  She stopped shaking her head and I watched her mouth relax. “It was the big fat guy, Mr. Allenby.”

  Dick? Humpty Dumpty Dick? But the legs we’d seen… wait a minute! I hadn’t recognised Dick because the Dick I’d known had been athletic, fit. The Dick I’d seen in the boardroom didn’t match the guy I’d known. He’d even joked about it. ‘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...’ “How do you know it was him?”

  Jocelyn visibly relaxed a bit; she didn’t have to hold anything in anymore. “He’s who was supposed to be paying her that night. I went up to meet her after to get my share. She used to bring it to me but she tried to keep all the money herself once so I started meeting her in the tower room after the guys had left.”

  “And he was still in the room with her?”

  “No. Nobody was in there. It was weird. I thought maybe she was going to try to rip me off again, but her cigarettes were sitting on the pew. Then I saw the note, it was under the cigarettes. I figured out what he’d done when I read it. That’s when I went and looked out the window and saw Kayla.”

  “So, you never actually saw anyone in the room with Kayla?” Jack just had to clarify.

  “No, but I know who it was. Kayla only booked one payment per Board meeting.”

  I wanted to get back to the generalities. The details would sort themselves out eventually. They always did. “What did you do next?”

  “I went to Kayla’s room to get the bear.”

  I knew why. She’d taken the bear because of the money. If no one knew about the money it would all be hers. “But why did you bring the USB key to Mem C then?”

  “I knew she’d give it to Kayla’s mum. I figured Kayla’s mum wouldn’t let anyone look any deeper if she thought Kayla had been … you know. And Kayla thought that Mem C was already suspicious, anyway. She’d been asking both of us a lot of questions about why we were spending so much. She’s so nosey! So I thought if I gave her the USB key she’d think she had all the answers and she’d back off and it would look like I didn’t know anything about... you know.”

  “Did Ethan know about any of this?”

  “No!”

  “Then why did Kayla blackmail his father? He wasn’t one of the boys who assaulted her in the boathouse.”

  “He’s not Ethan’s dad! He was his stepfather. And he’s a jerk. He’d been trying to hit on Kayla for a couple of years, so she figured she’d do him, too.”

  Jack cleared his throat. “Lee, Will should be here by now.”

  I didn’t have any more questions for Jocelyn, because I didn’t know what to ask. Maybe Jack was right? Maybe it was time to hand everything over to the OPP? But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were missing something. Even if Dick had been the one to push Kayla, what reason would he have had to hurt Ethan? Had he even been at the school the day Ethan went missing? I hadn’t thought to ask Karl that. Or if Dick had been at the school when Jack was hurt.

  As much as I disliked Dick, thinking he was guilty of all three crimes felt like trying to shove a square peg, a big fat block really, into a pinprick of a round hole.

  “I’ll explain everything to Detective Sergeant Lightfoote first, if you want me to,” Jack offered to Jocelyn.

  “Yeah, that’d be good. You want me to come with you, though, right?”

  “Yes, I do.” He was using his CEO voice, the one that most people (but not me) usually obeyed.

  “Will I need a lawyer?” Jocelyn asked as she stood up and started to walk to the door.

  “I’ll take care of that if you do,” Jack offered.

  I stayed seated. What was I missing?

  “Lee?”

  “Okay, coming.” I noticed Jocelyn’s USB key still sticking out of the control board. “Don’t you want to take this with you?” I asked her.

  “Nah. We can just lock the door.”

  It wasn’t until Jack opened the door to the headmistress’ reception area for me and Jocelyn that my thoughts started to coalesce. It was the door that did it.

  ‘...lock the door.’

  Will was standing with Dr. Campbell in front of her receptionist’s desk. He looked surprised to see Jocelyn. Dr. Campbell looked like she’d shrunk. Even her beehive had drooped a bit.

  “Mr. Hughes, Det. Sgt. Lightfoote’s been telling me how helpful you’ve been. Thank you for doing the right thing for Berkshire. And thank you, too, Lee.”

  I bet she had to force that last thank you out. But it sounded like she meant it.

  “You should know that I’ve just had some very stern words with Mademoiselle Cailleux. I told her that I’ll be recommending her immediate termination to the Board, due to her not coming forward to the police with all of the information she had. She asked me to ask you to come see her in her apartment. I believe she’d like to give you her resignation.” She didn’t have any trouble getting those words out, or the ones that came next. “I’ll also be tendering my resignation, for the same reasons. Berkshire deserved better, from both of us.” She tried to stand up a little straighter, but it was a weakened attempt. “And as for you, Jocelyn...,”

  “Jocelyn’s been very helpful, too.” Jack immediately jumped to Jocelyn’s defence. “Maybe we should all go into your office?”

  “Certainly.” Dr. Campbell stepped aside to let Jack and Jocelyn go first.

  But I didn’t move. “Jocelyn,” I said more loudly than I’d planned to.

  She stopped just inside Dr. Campbell’s office and turned around. “Yeah?”

  “Did you do any of that editing on your computer, or did you use the editing suite?”

  She glanced guiltily at Dr. Campbell before answering. “I used the editing suite. I was already in there a lot anyway.”

  Jack looked at me quizzically, but I wasn’t going to explain. I was going to go get a few more answers first.

  “I’m just going to go get my backpack. I forgot it in the boardroom.”

  “I need to talk to you, Lee. Now. With Jack.” Will wasn’t asking, he was issuing a command. “There have been some developments.”

  “I’ll be right back.” I bolted before anyone could stop me. I planned to come back with the answers that would stop them from accusing the wrong person.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Maybe Dick had pushed Kayla. It made sense. But I couldn’t picture him wrestling with Ethan, or hitting him with a polo mallet or anything else for that matter. Just walking down to the boathouse would have winded him. And then there was Jack. Dick didn’t have any reason to hurt Jack that I could think of.

  Greg, too, had a reason to want Kayla dead, but he was supposedly in Texas when she died. He may have had a reason for wanting Ethan dead, if Ethan had discovered Greg’s on-going fraud in the Bahamas, and he was certainly fit enough to swing something hard enough to knock Ethan out, or out of a kayak. But, again, Greg didn’t have any reason to hurt Jack.

  And neither Dick nor Greg had been at the school when I’d had my allergic reaction.

  Jack hadn’t told either of them about agreeing to look into Kayla’s death until after the truck ran over him. So whoever hurt Jack must have known before that.

  There was only one person who knew why Jack was on school property that day. One person who knew exactly which pathway Jack would be walking along.

  It was the same pathway I was about to walk along, but first I was going to take a detour to the dungeon.

  The old servant’s tunnels under the school hadn’t been moved or changed, but I still got lost in the labyrinth. It had been a long time since the nights Jack and I had spent exploring them. The uneven stone floor
s and dusty brick walls in the cold and dimly lit passageways still made me think of Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado. I shivered more from the creepiness than the temperature. I followed the thumping bass beat of music coming down one tunnel. Hopefully, it would lead me to the dungeon. The old wine casks stacked up near an arched door looked familiar, but someone had turned them into bookcases since I’d last seen them. The bright red exit sign over the new glass and metal door at the end of the passage I was in was a stark reminder of the modernization of Berkshire. Through the glass upper half of the door I could see the first few steps of an institutionally beige stairwell. The low arched door to the dungeon hadn’t changed at all, though. I rapped my knuckles against the thick dark wood but didn’t have to wait for someone to answer my knock. The door slowly opened on its own and my eardrums were assaulted with Walk Off The Earth’s “Rule The World”.

  “Staff!” A girl yelled and someone turned the music down.

  There weren’t many students lounging in the room, but one boy really stood out. Mainly because he stood up, way up (his head almost hitting the ceiling), and came over to talk to me. He looked so much like his father that he was more of a clone than an offspring.

  “You’re Paul Burgess, right?”

  “That would be me.” His voice was just as deep as Andre’s. “And you’re Miss Smith. You look a lot better than you did at lunch yesterday. How are you feeling?”

  The concern from so many Berkshire students confused me. I wasn’t used to dealing with it. “I’m great. Um ... is Jeff Kaufman here? I need to ask him something.”

  Paul turned around and shouted “Kaufman!”

  Jeff had been lying on one of the sofas. His head popped up over the back of it, his mouth broke into a big smile, and his body quickly headed my way. “Hi! What are you doing down here?”

  “I just wanted the double check something.”

  He came out into the passageway with me and closed the door behind him. “Sure. What?”

  “You said that Ethan had accepted his admission offer from Cambridge, right?”