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

by Jay Forman

  “Fine,” Jack sighed. “So, are you going to trash the cruise in your expose?”

  “I’m getting paid to tell the truth and the cruise itself didn’t suck. The food was amazing, our suite was huge, and having our own veranda was nice. I liked starting every day sitting out there, watching the world go by. And get this – we even had a butler. His name was Rajiv, such a nice man, he’s from Matara on the south coast of Sri Lanka. He’s got a wife and five daughters back at home. Rajiv brought me a pot of tea super early every morning and...,”

  “Let me guess, you talked him into pulling up a chair and having a cup with you, right?”

  “Not every morning!” It had taken me a few days to convince Rajiv to take fifteen minutes for himself. “So? Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” Several days’ worth of black stubble was sticking out of Jack’s face, and given the healing scabs all over his cheeks I had to wonder when he’d be able to shave again. I usually hated facial hair, but his stubble was surprisingly sexy.

  “Not much. Except for that truck hitting me it’s been same-old, same-old.” He smiled but I could tell it hurt; he’d smiled more on the right side of his face than the left.

  “What the hell happened, Jack?” Joking around and being sarcastic were our normal modus operandi, but I couldn’t keep up the act any longer. My very best friend was lying in a hospital bed; battered, broken and bruised. I felt my eyes start to water and chose to blame it on the pollen count in the room rather than raw emotion.

  “It depends on who you talk to.”

  “I’m talking to you.”

  “Someone at Berkshire knew I was there to look into the girl’s death, saw me walking to the boathouse, put the truck in neutral and sent it down the big back hill and into me. The wind off the lake was really whipping around, so I didn’t hear it coming until the last minute.”

  “And if I asked someone else?” Jack’s fear of moving vehicles (and their operators) often strayed into irrational territory.

  “The police say it might have been the age of the truck; that the parking brake was probably rusted and just let go, but they’re wrong.”

  “Are we talking about Old Pete’s 1950 Chevy? The one he used to leave parked at the back end of the soccer pitch?”

  “It’s not there now! It went through the ice. They’re going to pull it out and examine it once the ice has gone out.”

  Oh boy. We were in irrational territory. “Jack, that thing has been up there for decades. Old Pete probably hasn’t driven it since the eighties. The parking brake could have easily rusted out, heck the body was fifty percent rust when we were there and that was over twenty years ago, and the ground’s wet from the thaw, so the most likely thing is...,”

  “Kind of strange that it chose that exact moment to go, don’t you think?”

  “What moment?”

  “The moment when I was just starting to investigate a possible murder.”

  I stood up and looked at the bags hanging from the IV stand. “How much of this stuff are they pumping into you?”

  “Not now, Lee. I’m being serious. Just hear me out, okay?”

  “I’m listening.” I carefully stretched out on the bed beside him. I didn’t have to worry about my feet bumping into his cast; his feet were over a foot away from mine. We’d had some of our best conversations while lying side-by-side on slabs of sun-heated Pre-Cambrian Shield. The lumpy mattress was softer, but the hospital-beige ceiling was a poor substitute for clear blue skies or the galaxies of stars over the Torrance Barrens Dark-Sky Preserve.

  “Three weeks ago, Kayla Wilkes either fell or was pushed out of the tower window. I was there, at a Board meeting, when it happened. A suicide note was found...,”

  “Then why...,”

  “You can’t listen if you’re talking.” He waited to see if I’d stay silent. It took effort, but I kept my mouth closed. “The police are investigating and Kayla’s mother is pushing for them to say it was suicide. Her father, on the other hand, thinks someone pushed her. He asked me to look into it. And before you bite your tongue off I’ll answer your unspoken question – why me, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Because I have some clout with the school so he knew they couldn’t tell me not to. And he knew that his ex-wife’s financial power wouldn’t faze me.” I felt his head turn on the pillow to face me. “If you’d met him I know you wouldn’t have been able to say no to him, either.”

  I just shrugged my shoulders. The girl’s father may have touched me emotionally, but I still would have said no to any involvement in anything related to Berkshire.

  “I told him I’d do what I could and decided to start by talking to the one person who has always known all the school gossip. The truck hit me when I was walking to her apartment over the boathouse. She moved out of the teacher’s residence last fall. Mademoiselle Cailleux...,”

  My mouth flew open. “She’s still alive?”

  “Very much so. She’s gone a little dotty, but...,”

  “She’s been at the school since the Nonsuch sailed back to England with the first load of Hudson’s Bay fur pelts!”

  “Berkshire wasn’t even built until the late eighteen hundreds, so that’s a gross exaggeration.”

  “She hated me.”

  “You think everyone there hated you.”

  “They sure acted like it.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “True.”

  “Anyway, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted...,”

  I poked him, very gently, with my elbow.

  “... Mademoiselle Cailleux has always had her finger on the pulse of the place and I was hoping she’d be able to tell me more about Kayla, but then the truck hit me. So, as of right now, I know very little about Kayla other than the basic facts that are in the yearbook. She was just seventeen and her father is absolutely devastated. She was his only child.”

  I felt bad for him, but I’d never admit that to Jack.

  “I’ve called a Board meeting to discuss all of this the day after tomorrow, which brings me to...,”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t even said what...,”

  “I’m not going to Berkshire.”

  “But I have to be there. I gave Kayla’s father my word.”

  “Then go. I’m not stopping you.”

  “I can’t drive while I’m on painkillers and they say I’ll probably need them for a couple of days, at least.”

  Crap. With anyone else in Jack’s position I could have suggested a chauffeur, a taxi, anything other than what he was asking for. But it was Jack. He hadn’t trusted his life to another driver (of any sort of vehicle) since the day a pilot’s error had buried his parents in the Arctic tundra. He didn’t even let me take the stern when we went canoeing. They probably had to drug him heavily just to get him to agree to get into the ambulance that brought him to the hospital. Driving him to the school didn’t mean that I’d actually be entering the place. I could stay outside, or go for a drive and then come back to get him when his meeting was over.

  “How long is it going to take you to think this one through?” He knew me too well. “The painkillers are on a timed release and I should be getting another squirt soon. I’d like to still be compos mentis when you give me your answer.”

  “Fine. I’ll drive you. But I’m not going inside.”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “You said it was the day after...,”

  “I’ll need a ride home tomorrow.”

  That was an easy favour to grant. “No problem.”

  “Now about the sponge baths, I won’t need one tomorrow, the nurses will give me one before I check-out, but when I’m at home...,”

  “You’ll either figure out how to do it yourself or you’ll smell. Your choice. Nice try, though.”

  “I must be doing something right. This is the first time I’ve managed to get you into my bed.”

  “You never give up, do you?”

  “No
pe.”

  The comfort and safety of being in Jack’s presence enveloped me in a blanket of relaxation and the very long day of travelling caught up with me. I didn’t realise that I’d started to doze off until I heard him say something about me working with him to look into the Berkshire girl’s death.

  “...and her dad, he’s broken. Completely broken. I know you’d want to help him, help me, if...,”

  “That morphine must have kicked in because you’re hallucinating if you think I’m going to help you with anything that involves Berkshire.”

  “If you won’t do it for him, will you do it for me? I can’t do this on my own, not now that I’ve been crippled.”

  That woke me up! “Don’t you dare pull the pathetic wounded act! You fund guys on the Canadian Paralympic team who have had both of their legs blown off by IEDs. Their injuries are permanent and you don’t hear them crying ‘poor me’. Your injuries are temporary!”

  “You’re right. I shouldn’t have gone there.” Even through his stubble I could see the blush of shame spreading across his face. “And I’m sorry. But you yourself said how much Mark’s book touched you...,”

  What was he talking about? How long had I been asleep? “Who’s Mark?”

  “Kayla’s father. He wrote Needles and Pins.”

  “Kayla’s father is M.B. Wilkes?”

  Jack nodded.

  Kayla’s father’s book hadn’t touched me; it tore me open. My tears had literally stained a couple of pages. His description of the emotional wound left by his lost connection with his daughter hit too close to home. I knew how it felt from the other side of that equation. But his story had a happy ending; he reconnected with his daughter on a camping trip in Labrador. “The girl’s parents are divorced in the book. Are Kayla’s?”

  “Yes, and it was a really ugly split. His book is more autobiography than fiction.”

  I’d felt jealous of his daughter. I’d never get that camping trip. Now he’d lost his daughter permanently. And he wanted Jack to tell him why. I was still too scared to look for the answer to why in my own life, even though I wanted it, needed it, just as badly. But ... his daughter was a student at Berkshire. “I’m not getting involved.”

  “Why not? You don’t hesitate to stick your nose into the life stories of the people you meet when you’re travelling. You know more about your butler on the cruise than you’re willing to learn about a seventeen year old girl who may very well have been killed.”

  “Why are you doing this? It’s not one of your Sudoku or crossword puzzles. The only crimes you’ve ever solved were financial.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Oh yeah? Who shot the bear behind the liquor store?”

  “I’m getting close on that one.”

  “It’s been two years!”

  “Kayla Wilkes wasn’t a sick four hundred pound black bear rummaging in a garbage bin. She was a seventeen year old kid who may have fallen to her death because someone shoved her out of Berkshire. I’d think you, of all people, would want to find justice for a girl who may have been ostracized. Her ostracism was permanent. Yours was temporary, but you still cry ‘poor me’ about it whenever I mention Berkshire.”

  That blanket of comfort hardened to a sheet of ice. I locked my jaw shut because I knew if I let out one-half of the angry words that were filling my thoughts they might permanently damage our friendship. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was worth risking that. Not even my pride.

  Damn, Jack!

  The worst part?

  He was right.

  For the first time I let myself think about the girl. Had she been bullied to the point of suicide? I knew something about that. Too much about it. I could still clearly remember what it felt like to stand at the tower window, looking down at the stone lions on either side of the front steps, wondering if the pain of landing on one of them would be worse than the pain of turning around and facing my tormentors again. But I hadn’t jumped.

  I hadn’t jumped because of Jack.

  “I’ll come to the meeting with you.”

  Chapter Three

  What had I agreed to?

  And why?

  It made sense when I was lying beside Jack on his hospital bed, but as I stared at the ceiling above my own bed I seriously questioned my decision to get involved with the Berkshire girl’s death. I blamed it on exhaustion. Jack had hit me at a weak moment, made extra weak because of seeing him so battered. I’d been so tired that I hadn’t even bothered to get undressed when I finally got home, and curled up under my lusciously thick duvet with all of my clothes still on, save for my shoes.

  I tripped over those shoes when I got up and walked down the hallway to the bathroom. I leaned over the tub and turned the shower on, but it didn’t take long for me to realise that Auntie Em had forgotten to turn my water heater on. The steady stream of heart-stoppingly cold water coming out of the showerhead was only picking up minimal warmth as it passed through the pipes in the insulated walls of the house. I looked out at the lake through the window over the toilet. Technically, I might be able to fit in one of the thin channels of open water between the slabs of ice, but jumping in for a quick rinse wasn’t really an option. It had been a long, long time since I’d been stupid enough to test my inner fortitude by jumping into the lake when it was barely warmer than a Slushee. The May 2-4 long weekend was the earliest I’d ever gone in and that was almost a month away. (Every time I thought of the Victoria Day weekend the silly song we’d sung in elementary school played in my head – “The twenty-fourth of May is the Queen’s birthday, if you don’t give us a holiday we’ll all run away”. Queen Victoria would not have been amused.)

  I’d have to use one of the showers at Jack’s place when I got there. I’d change there, too. Neither Auntie Em nor I had remembered to turn my furnace up and the thought of putting on cold clothes was significantly less appealing than the thought of wearing day old slept in, yet warm, clothes. My T-shirt definitely needed an extra layer over it, though.

  I pulled my grandfather’s thick green plaid wool jacket off the hook by the backdoor in the kitchen and put my knee high snowmobile boots upside-down over the closest air vent to let them heat up along with the house while I made some tea. To keep my feet warm I stood over the air vent beside the refrigerator as I waited for the kettle to boil. Thankfully, Grandpa’s old jacket warmed up quickly. It was so long on me that the warm air from the vent blew up into the jacket like the air from the subway grate had gone up Marilyn Monroe’s dress in the iconic photograph. But Grandpa’s jacket was too thick to flap in the furnace’s breeze.

  What little snow there was remaining on the pathway was barely ankle deep and as I walked down to the shore of the lake I saw several spots where there wasn’t any snow at all. In the thick forest, where the sun still didn’t have the strength to make a difference, the snow was deeper. There must have been a couple of really warm days when I’d been gone; warm being a relative term. I’d been basking in thirty-plus degrees in the Caribbean, but up here a couple of days above freezing had generated enough heat to melt all of the snow off of my favourite chunk of the Canadian Shield at the shore. I noticed a tiny little green sprout of a crocus poking out of the snow as I sat down on the dip in the rock that was my morning chair. Colour was starting to return to the black and white landscape. Yellow and green buds would soon soften the dark bare branches of the deciduous trees.

  A bright red male cardinal landed on the juniper bush near me, knocking a miniature avalanche of snow to the ground. He looked like an ornament on a Christmas tree. I heard some splashing and turned to look at the mouth of the creek where the spring run-off was licking away the ice. A small paddling of bufflehead ducks were taking a break from their annual northern migration, looking for breakfast as they bobbed and dove in the pool of open water. One drake in particular was putting on a quite a show. He had the most beautiful blue-green colour on his round head, made even more striking by the brilliant white patches that extended
out from the corners of his eyes. He was in constant motion, head up, looking around in one instant, pure white butt and black tail feathers sticking out of the water in the next. His upturned butt reminded me of an upside-down bowling pin. They were my favourite ducks.

  And this was my favourite place to start any day, no matter the season. My veranda on the cruise had been nice, but it wasn’t peaceful. The ship’s engines hummed in the background like constant white noise. The man in the suite next to mine started each morning on his veranda, coughing up the after effects of the cigarettes he’d smoked the day before. And if we were in a port the man-made noise level increased significantly.

  Here I could hear the creak of two bare branches being rubbed together by the wind, the splashing ducks, the drip-drip-drip of the snow melting off of the balsam fir that leaned at an angle over the water, and the tinkling sound of snow crystals tumbling down the icy mountain range that rose up when two slabs of ice bumped together like tectonic plates. A big fat flake of wet snow landed on the toe of my boot and instantly melted. It was so quiet that I could hear its fellow flakes landing on the water in the open channel nearest to me; they sounded like fingertips touching velvet.

  Here was home. The place I kept running away from. The place I always came back to.

  I swallowed the last mouthful of tea, closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, mentally trying to suck in and hold dear as much peace as I could. Because where Jack wanted me to go was the antithesis of peace. The emotional turbulence I’d gone through there had been far more terrifying than the turbulence I’d flown through when I was evacuated from the Kimberley coast as a category five cyclone approached. I’d been alone on that flight and had only had the armrests to hang onto for dear life. I never would have survived Berkshire if I hadn’t had Jack to hang onto.