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

  They had a file on me? And they’d kept it for over twenty years? “You have got to be kidding me!”

  “Not at all.” The sharp edge was cutting back into her voice. “We took you in, gave you a safe place to hide behind the name Smith; which I see you’re still using. Imagine how difficult your life here would have been if your classmates had known why you really had to come here?”

  I felt my right bicep clench and the fingers on the hand below it curling into a tight fist. They were doing it without conscious effort on my part. It was going to take a lot of conscious effort to keep me from punching the bitch in the mouth.

  “And if we had called the police about some of your activities here you, too, would now have a criminal record. A conviction for possession of marijuana could have jeopardized the career you’ve chosen by closing some borders to you.”

  My fear of people seeing the real me had stopped me from striking back at the classmates who’d been so cruel to me. But now? I wasn’t struggling to figure out who I was going to be any more. I was the person who was going to enjoying knocking Dr. Campbell out with words that she couldn’t possibly see coming.

  I calmly walked over to her desk and picked up the phone. “Do you want to call Detective Sergeant Lightfoote, or should I? I’m sure Will, Detective Sergeant Lightfoote to you, would be fascinated to hear all about the joints that were found in my room over two decades ago. And if he races over here, lights flashing, siren blaring, and slaps the cuffs on me all your problems will be solved, right? I’ll be in jail and you won’t have to worry about me digging up any embarrassing details about Kayla’s life or your precious school.” I wiggled the receiver in the air. “So? Which one of us is going to make the call?”

  “Lee, there’s no need to...,”

  I slammed the receiver down. “Like hell there isn’t! You want to tell everyone in your incestuous snotty little world who my father is? Go ahead!” My mouth was running ahead of my brain. “And, for the record, your school didn’t take me in. My aunt and uncle paid full price, but people like you are incapable of understanding what that cost them because it can’t be measured in dollars.”

  If you stay in control of yourself, you stay in control of the situation. Get out of my head, Jack!

  I walked slowly back over to the door. “Your poorly veiled threats don’t scare me. We both know that the cops aren’t going to care about some old pot. Especially not cops who served under Inspector Doug Saddler. Uncle Doug to me. They may, however, be interested to hear about who I bought that pot from. Who knows? Maybe they’ll even search her house to see if she’s still selling drugs as a sideline? And Pam sure had a lot of them to sell back then. She was the school’s main supplier of coke. Not that Pam needed the money, seeing as how her grandfather owned Grey Pharmaceuticals.” I walked out and didn’t have to look back to see the expression on her face; I could imagine it quite easily. Her shiny red lips had begun to fall open while I’d been blasting her. They’d probably spread into a big O, kind of like the mouth on a blow-up sex doll, after I dropped the Grey name.

  If Berkshire had kept a file on Pam I was willing to bet that it would soon be grinding through the shredder I’d seen in Dr. Campbell’s office. Berkshire wouldn’t want to risk having the reputation of one of their most über perfect prefects tarnished.

  Pam had been the one to turn me and my joints in when I clocked her in a swim meet. What goes around comes around ... even if it takes a couple of decades.

  For someone with a doctorate Dr. Campbell sure wasn’t very smart. Instead of scaring me off she’d just pointed a big red arrow straight at the school. She could have saved both of us some time, and a whole lot of words, by simply saying ‘Look here!’

  I started by looking for Mademoiselle Cailleux.

  *

  Jack was still stuck in the boardroom with Dick and Andre. They were watching a promotional video on the flat screen television when I stormed into the room to grab my coat. A fan of spreadsheets, architectural drawings and colourful glossy brochures were spread out on the table. On the television screen a beautiful woman (wearing less than a bikini) was walking slowly along a small crescent beach, her hair extensions blowing in the breeze.

  “...and this will be the sand trap at the tenth hole of your private Christophe de Corneille-designed course...,”

  Dick paused the video.

  “How’d it go with Dr. Campbell?” Jack asked.

  “Ask me later.”

  “How much later?” He looked pale. No surprise; he hadn’t taken any pain medication since leaving the hospital.

  “I’m not sure, but I’ll be as fast as I can. I’m going out for a smoke.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll explain later.”

  I put my coat on as I walked with purpose down the hallway. The bell had rung to signal a class change and I had to weave through the throng of uniformed teenagers shuffling between classes, but I knew where I was going. Or so I thought.

  I took the side staircase down to the lower level and walked past what had been the sewing room in my day. Through the half-moon window at the top of the arched wooden door I could see that it was no longer an exclusively female classroom. Both boys and girls were taking their seats and there wasn’t a single sewing machine in sight. At the end of the long hallway I expected to find a set of fire doors that would open to the tennis courts, but quickly discovered that the gravel pathway that had run the length of the tennis courts was now a slate-floored hallway. Perfectly rectangular classroom doors lined either side of the institutional cement brick walls in the new addition to the school. I hoped to find an exit door at the end of that hallway. I found doors, but they didn’t lead to the outside either. I stepped into a bench-seated viewing area that looked out over one very new indoor swimming pool that had been built into the side of the hill on the waterfront side of the grounds. Wow! The pool I’d trained in had been less than half the size. Two of the four walls around the pool structure were made entirely of glass. From where I stood I could see all the way down to the lake in front of me, and over the tops of the trees in the ravine to my left. Somewhere down in that ravine, Mademoiselle Cailleux was waiting for me. All I had to do was figure out how to get there.

  I heard the cash register cha-ching ring tone of an incoming text from Jack and felt my phone vibrate somewhere in the depths of my coat pocket just as I pushed open the fourth set of doors that I’d hoped would lead to the outside. I stepped into a clinically clean cafeteria and excavated my phone.

  Where are you?

  Lost! Trying to find Mademoiselle. (I began to understand why the students had shortened her name to Mem C as my thumbs tapped out every consonant and syllable.) She wants to tell me something – meeting at old bench – how do I get there? I’m in a cafeteria.

  Service elevator in back of cafeteria kitchen - down 1 level – turn right, then left, then right – go thru main kitchen – door by freezers goes out to staff parking – go around arts centre – it’ll look familiar after that.

  Thank you!

  Hurry up – need rescue from these 2!

  Fast as I can – promise

  I finally found my way out of the buildings by following Jack’s directions. The arts centre was another new addition that had been built onto the side of the Berkshire I’d known. It had landed like Godzilla on top of what had once been the stables. Where had the horses gone? Their riding trails through the forest had been paved over, too. Mankind’s insatiable desire to pave over paradise continued to bewilder, and depress, me. Not that Berkshire was or had ever been a paradise. And they hadn’t followed Joni Mitchell’s lyrics exactly; the arts centre wasn’t a parking lot. But still! Why couldn’t they have left the trails alone? Walking or riding along them had been one of the few things I’d actually enjoyed at Berkshire. Instead of snow packed down by heavy hooves, my feet walked on ploughed pavement until I spotted the crooked stone steps that led down to the cedar grove at the bottom of the ravine. The st
eps were coated in a thin layer of ice that was trying to melt. So was the cute little arched bridge that crossed over the brook. Anywhere else in Canada it would have been called a stream, but in the indubitably British world of Berkshire it was called a brook. And it was even babbling a bit as the spring run-off ran over the smaller chunks of the Pre-Cambrian Shield that the glaciers had pushed around when they scraped their way south during the Ice Age.

  I spotted the unmistakable white, blue, yellow, red and green Hudson’s Bay stripes on Mademoiselle’s woollen duffle coat through the hanging branches of the massive willow tree as I circled around its wide trunk. She looked so quintessentially Canadian that I was tempted to pull out my phone and take a picture of her sitting on the bench. She was even wearing a pair of bright red mittens. Plastic tubing ran out of the taps in the trunks of the maple trees behind her and down into the metal buckets that were there to collect the sap for maple syrup. Thick snow blanketed the forest floor and its whiteness only made Mademoiselle’s stripes stand out more.

  “I was just about to give up on you,” she said when she noticed me approaching.

  “I was about to fire off an emergency flare. I got lost and couldn’t find my way out of the school.”

  “Yes, there have been a few changes since you were a student, and not all of them for the best, in my humble opinion.” She pointed one mittened paw up at a birch tree near us. “That surveillance camera, for instance.”

  I spotted the circular shiny cap of a security camera just below a big black burl on the tree’s trunk as I sat down. The bench chilled my butt instantly and I wished that I’d worn Grandpa’s coat. Jack would have died of embarrassment if I had, but my pea coat wasn’t long enough to act as a layer of insulation between my glutes and the frozen bench.

  “They say it’s for our protection. I, on the other hand, feel that it’s an Orwellian invasion into one of the few peaceful places left on the grounds.” She turned to look at me. “Like you used to, I come here for the solitude. Now, when I sit here, I feel more disconcerted about whomsoever might be watching me through that lens than I ever felt worrying about some stranger sneaking onto the school grounds to attack me.” She pulled the mitten off her right hand, undid the top leather toggle of her coat and reached inside. Really inside. Her hand slid inside the button opening of her dress and right into her bra. “Now, before they take the next step and install microphones in the spiraea, the most appropriate bush for such a device, let me say what I have to say.” She pulled a long, thin, plastic tipped cigarillo out of her bra. “You must give me your word that you won’t tell anyone that it was I who shared this information with you.”

  “Promise.”

  “Of course, I do understand that you’ll share this with Jack, but that’s all right.” She fished a disposable lighter out of one of the pockets of her coat, lit her cigarillo and took a good long draw on it. “Ah, that’s better,” she said as she exhaled the smoke. “I’m going to assume that your meeting with Dr. Campbell didn’t go well. You may have aged, but it’s highly unlikely that maturity has tempered your rebellious streak in any significant way.”

  “She basically threatened me and I...,”

  Mademoiselle patted my knee. “Don’t waste your breath, dear. You are you and Dr. Campbell is ... well ... it’s not important. Now, let’s talk about what is important – Kayla.”

  “What kind of person was she?”

  “That’s a hard question to answer. I never taught her, I retired before she came to the school. They weren’t quite sure what to do with me when I retired and, quite frankly, neither was I,” she said with a little giggle. “I’m officially called the Resident Student Advisor now. All that means is that I still live on the grounds and I’m a set of ears or shoulders for the boys and girls when they need it. Oh, dear, I’ve digressed. You don’t want to hear about me. Back to Kayla. The sad truth is that, even after spending a lot of time with her, I didn’t know her. She always spoke to me in French. She’d learned the words and the tenses, and she could mimic a Parisian accent exceptionally well. But French is the language of love. Like Italian, it can only be properly spoken with passion.” She took another long drag on her cigarillo. “Kayla was, I don’t know how to describe it – she delivered what everyone wanted from her. When someone plays the piano well, as I remember Jack did, emotions flow through each finger as it hits an ivory key. A painter feels every brushstroke. The photographs you take for your articles capture emotions, not just faces and places.”

  “You read my articles?”

  “Of course I do! You’ll always be a part of my Berksherian family and I like to stay on top of what all my children do after they leave home. One of your photographs even made me a bit weepy. It was of the woman who’d grown up on Tasman Island, the woman who took you over to see the lighthouse. The way you captured her face,” she sighed, “I could feel the sadness she must have experienced when she and her family were forced to leave the island when the lighthouse was automated. She wasn’t looking at the spectacular view; she was looking at what had once been her home. Being banished from her home was a more painful type of isolation than living on the island had ever been.”

  I couldn’t have said it better. And I hadn’t said anything about it in my article. Instead, I’d written about the squawking and chattering of the hundreds of thousands of pairs of resident fairy prions, the bizarre flying fox contraption that all the inhabitants (both two-legged and four) had used to travel between the top of the sheer cliffs and the rough seas in Storm Bay almost a thousand feet below, and the thick fogs that would roll in and leave the flat top of the island floating in a solitary world above the clouds. I’d kept my guide’s intensely private emotions completely out of the article.

  Mademoiselle tapped her cigarillo against the arm of the bench, knocking the ashes off to fall to the ground next to a collection of numerous brands of cigarette butts. “Emotion shows, but Kayla never showed any real emotion, other than anger. She was as tough as nails, very much like her mother. And that’s why I just can’t picture her doing what they say she did. It doesn’t fit with the girl I knew.”

  An outdoor bell pealed in the distance, informing any Berkshire student within a fifteen kilometre radius that it was time to change classes again.

  “Oh, dear, I promised to meet with a delightful young Indian boy to help him sort out which courses he should take next year. Blaze is our first Aboriginal student, here on a bursary of course.” She stubbed her cigarillo out on the arm of the bench (not for the first time, if the burn marks on the wood were any indication), and slipped what was left of it into her pocket. “Now I’ve gone and wasted all this time…,”

  “You didn’t waste my time. You gave me a glimpse of who Kayla was and that can only help us to…,”

  Mademoiselle Cailleux rolled her eyes. “Do stop talking, Lee. I have to make this quick.” She stood up and did up the top toggle on her coat. “I haven’t even touched upon what I need to tell you. Something happened after Kayla died; something that’s being kept very hush-hush. Shortly after this school year began Kayla befriended a girl named Jocelyn. You’d be well advised to get to know her. I suppose Jocelyn’s a nice enough girl, but she’s definitely not the sort with whom Kayla normally associated. She’s not really Berkshire material. Her father isn’t particularly wealthy; something Jocelyn complains about bitterly. She was mortified when her father didn’t buy her a car when she turned sixteen, which really is the norm for our children. It’s practically a rite of passage. And she’s rather dumpy, you’ll see. Their friendship never made sense to me. Jocelyn was devastated when Kayla died and she insisted on being the one to pack up Kayla’s things. And she claimed to have found something in Kayla’s room. Walk with me, dear.” She linked her arm with mine but it wasn’t for assistance. Despite her age and minute stature, she was as sure footed as I as we made our way back up to the school. “She came running to my apartment over the boathouse, verging on hysteria. She’d found one of tho
se stick things that people store computer information on.”

  “A USB key?”

  “If you say so. I don’t know the first thing about computers. It was hard to make out what Jocelyn was saying because of all her histrionics, but the basic gist of it was that there was some sort of video on the stick. She wasn’t sure what to do with it – give it to Kayla’s mother, take it to Dr. Campbell, or throw it out.”

  “What makes you think it had anything to do with…,”

  “Let me finish.” She used a tone I was all too familiar with – a firm teacher tone. “Apparently, the video was pornographic and Kayla appeared in it.”

  So much for Dr. Campbell’s claim of a scandal-free school. “What did you do with it?”

  “Took it to Dr. Campbell, of course.”

  “Did you watch it first?”

  “Good heavens, no!”

  “What did Dr. Campbell do with it?”

  “Well, that’s the interesting thing. Within a few hours of me giving the stick to Dr. Campbell, Kayla’s mother’s helicopter was touching down on the helipad. She marched straight into Dr. Campbell’s office and stayed for only a few minutes. As she was leaving she was overheard ordering Dr. Campbell to not tell the police about what Jocelyn had found. One has to presume that Dr. Campbell honoured that demand. Those who defy Erica Talbot are few and far between, as I’m sure you remember.”

  Jack’s life expectancy had just been shortened. Considerably shortened. If my hands had been on the handles of his wheelchair at that very moment I wouldn’t have hesitated to give him one almighty push toward the lake, sending him crashing through the ice to go look for the sunken pick-up truck himself.

  Erica Talbot.

  Jack’s offer to go speak to her without me made sense now.

  Did Kayla jump to get away from her mother?

  I almost had.

  Chapter Six

  Killing Jack would have to wait until there weren’t any witnesses.