Point of Betrayal (12 page)

“This is
not
foreplay,” Jane disagreed, shooting Rory a distasteful glance. “That woman is the last person in the world I’d want to sleep with.”

“Right back at you, sister,” Rory replied. “Now, what are you two doing here?”

Ari held up the key and said, “We’ve figured out where Nina kept her journals.”

“Where?”

“Here at the school,” Jane said. “In one of the lockers.”

Rory stared at the key and slowly nodded. “That actually explains a lot. Once when I was here in the evening, I saw Nina coming out of the locker room. She said she’d been interviewing students, but I knew it was too late for any kids to be around. I wondered if maybe she wasn’t having a walk on the wild side with the girls’ P.E. teacher, but I never said anything. I’ve seen her going into the gym during the school day, but I didn’t think anything of it.”

“Isn’t that pretty risky?” Jane asked. “I mean keeping your personal journals in a school locker?”

“Maybe Evan or the gym teacher knew about it,” Rory offered.

“Can we get in there now?”

Rory looked doubtful. “I don’t think I’d chance it during class. Coach Case is pretty tough.”

Jane flicked some lint from her blouse. “She plays for our team?”

“Yeah,” she said suspiciously. “What are you thinking? I don’t want to get Coach in trouble. She’s good people.”

Jane waved her off. “I wouldn’t dream of annihilating her career, but a little distraction wouldn’t hurt. Where’s the gym?”

They followed Rory to a tall building just behind the school. Instead of heading through the front entrance, they walked to the side, where the words “Girls Locker Room” were spray-painted on a gray door. Three bursts from a sharp, high-pitched whistle told them class was in session. Ari cracked open the door and they listened as the coach gave the girls directions and ordered them into the gym. When they were certain the students had filed out, the three of them moved inside.

“You two find the locker,” Jane directed, “and I’ll make sure the coach doesn’t wander back here until you’re done.”

“What are you going to do?” Rory asked in an annoyed tone.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said with a smile.

She sauntered out and they studied the lockers. There were different styles and sizes, all with combination locks that had a keyhole in the center that gave the school the option of a combination or a key.

“Try one of those,” Rory said, pointing to a large set of blue lockers. “Those are the ones for the athletes. There’s always going to be one or two that’s empty, so maybe Nina commandeered one of them.”

The key slid into the first lock Ari tried, but it wouldn’t turn. “You’re right. It’s one of these,” she said, moving from locker to locker with little luck.

Ari heard Jane’s cackle a few times amid all of the teenage girls’ chatter. Rory peeked out a window and groaned. “Unbelievable. Your friend has absolutely no boundaries.”

“That’s Jane,” she agreed. “What’s she doing?”

“Well, she’s not really
doing
anything except distracting Coach from supervising the students. They’re standing off to the side laughing and carrying on. She keeps touching Coach’s arm and flicking her hair back.” She paused and added, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Coach Case laugh.”

“Got it,” Ari said, pushing up the handle. A gym bag filled with sports clothes and toiletries took up most of the space inside.

“She and Evan sometimes played racquetball together,” Rory said.

Pulling the gym bag out, Ari discovered the locker was deeper than it appeared. A large metal box filled the rest of the space. She surmised the box would go unnoticed by most people. Inside it was a pile of journals and spiral notebooks. She grabbed the top journal, a beautiful leather-bound book, and flipped to the last page.

“This is her last journal,” she said.

Rory grabbed one of the spirals. “This belonged to a kid named Devon, but it’s from last year.

“I don’t think these are in any particular order,” Rory said.

“We’ll need to take all of them.”

“How are we going to get them out of here?”

Ari’s gaze settled on the large duffel bag. “We need to make a swap.”

They’d just finished the transfer when they heard the rush of students returning to the locker room. They scooted outside and waited for Jane.

“Did you find them?”

“Yes, and what did
you
learn?” Rory asked pointedly as they started back toward the parking lot.

“Well, your friend Melinda is quite a talker. I pretended I was from the district trust and I needed to examine her safety features.”

Rory rolled her eyes. “She fell for that?”

“Hey, it’s the best I could think of,” Jane snapped. “Are you always so negative?”

“Are you always so slutty?”

Jane whirled and faced her. “How dare you call me that!” Her open palm flew toward Rory’s cheek, but she deflected the blow. “Ow!” Jane cried. She rubbed her wrist and stared at Rory. “You hurt me.”

“I barely touched you.”

Ari dropped the heavy bag. “I can’t deal with this. Rory, I could use your help, but this isn’t going to work. You bring out Jane’s inner child. Sorry.” She picked up the bag and walked away. “Let’s go, Jane.”

* * *

Jane was still prattling about Rory’s uncouth demeanor when they returned to the resort. “She’s horrible!”

Ari hefted the duffel onto the dining table. “For god’s sake,” she shouted. “Just sleep with her!” Jane gasped. “This is what happens when you don’t act upon your lust,” Ari explained. “You can’t bottle up your libido. It controls your personality and when it’s not satisfied, we all suffer!”

Realizing she was shouting, she took a deep breath and fell into a chair. She rubbed her temples, wishing she were home in her garden—alone. She was tired of people and problems. Jane’s optimistic attitude was what she loved about her, and she couldn’t stand it when Jane was as negative as everyone else.

“My libido doesn’t control my
entire
personality,” Jane announced, “but I see your point. I am a very sexual being and my passion is at my center, literally. But there’s no way in hell Rory’s getting a key to the kingdom. I’ll just have to stay away from her.” She opened the duffel and picked up a handful of journals. “Let’s focus on Nina.”

They spread them out and created a timeline of three years, the length of Nina’s tenure at Brayberry. The spiral notebooks were student journals, and after a quick glance at the contents and the old dates on the inside cover, Ari set all of them aside, except for the one written by Michaela.

Her pages were filled with crayon drawings, most of which depicted a little girl, who Ari assumed was Michaela, who was always happy in the school scenes, such as playing on the monkey bars, but who wore a frown in the drawings of her house. One picture in particular was very disturbing. Michaela was sitting on a sofa in a room with black walls. She’d drawn a picture on one of the walls—a fire-breathing dragon with teeth. A pool of yellow tears sat at her feet.

“That’s a red flag,” Jane said.

“Nina’s concerns were probably justified. Let’s focus on her journals. Happy reading,” Ari said, handing Jane one with a bright pink cover. She took the leather-bound book, Nina’s last completed journal. “This one should lead up to the first one we found.”

It was quickly apparent that although Nina had kept the journals at school, she had interspersed entries about her adult clients from the apartment complex with the reflections about the schoolchildren she saw at work.

The content suggested Nina wrote to untangle her own thought processes. Many entries were strung together in stream of consciousness style and she consistently used the names of Shakespearean characters to disguise the identities of her clients, making it impossible to tell who was who.

Jane asked, “Who was Banquo?”

“Uh,” Ari said as she searched her memory of senior English. “I think that was the villain who murdered Macbeth.”

“So I guess whoever this guy is, he’s probably scum.”

She peered over Jane’s shoulder. “I’d say so if he’s pushing his wife’s head through a wall.”

“These are the people who live in her apartment complex?”

“I think so,” Ari said, skimming ahead through several pages of the journal she was reading. “The names are odd, but the problems are definitely from the twenty-first century.” She held up the book and said, “Listen to this. ‘Adriana is at her wit’s end. Needs to confront Frederick. Flaunting his indiscretions with Audrey is destroying her. Must have her list her strengths. Hotspur could help. Key: stop blaming herself for Cordelia’s death. Bulimia is a disease.’
”

“Wow,” Jane said. “So we’ve got a wife with a cheating husband and a daughter who died from an eating disorder.”

“Yes, and apparently a friend who could help. That would be Hotspur.”

“And who was he?”

“I don’t remember exactly, but I think he was in one of the Henry plays.”

Jane raised an eyebrow and stared at her. “How do you know all this?”

“Unlike you, I actually went to class. I loved Ms. Amos’s British literature class.”

Jane snorted. “Sounds like a total snooze, if you ask me.”

She offered a sly smile. “You never saw Ms. Amos.”

They laughed and waded through Nina’s difficult handwriting. After an hour Ari’s head was throbbing. She’d read through the entire journal, encountering at least thirty different names of clients facing serious issues like domestic abuse, homophobia, schizophrenia and incest.

Two-thirds of the way through the last journal, she found some of the familiar names again—Horatio, Orlando, Cesario and Valeria—listed in five separate entries, each one more intriguing than the previous one.

May 4th

Horatio is closer. Benedick unaware. Cesario involved somehow? Ultimatums given. Where is Orlando’s voice?

August 15th

Benedick growing distant. Orlando remains neutral—for now. Valeria knows Horatio is a hypocrite. Cesario is key!

September 5th

Valeria’s undoing is Benedick’s weakness. Horatio is silent ally. Orlando and Cesario—too strong.

October 6th

Horatio is a true friend to Valeria!

October 22nd

Valeria caught in secrets thanks to apothecary. Share with no one except H. Maybe Orlando? Must investigate! Can Benedick be trusted? Will it destroy? Cesario, oh, Cesario… It is Aguecheek.

She picked up Nina’s last journal and reread its lone entry.

October 30th.

The secret will be revealed—DANGER. Poor Benedick! Poor Horatio! And poor Orlando—a pawn?

The secret would be revealed. Had Nina learned something so important that she was killed for it?

Ari flipped through the notes she’d taken and realized there were two other sets of characters that made multiple appearances. One was those involved in the drama over Frederick the cheating husband and the other involved a trio of characters—Edmund, Emilia and Caliban. The content was disturbing. All of the entries mentioned horrible things Edmund had done and Nina’s grave concern for Caliban and Emilia, but the last one caught her attention.

Poor Caliban! Such a sweet soul with no voice. Emilia cannot protect from Edmund. She is in DANGER.

Could Emilia be Nina? She realized nowhere in the journal did Nina refer to herself in the first person. She pondered the fact as Jane snored quietly next to her, having given up her own reading after only twenty pages. She’d proclaimed exhaustion, but Ari suspected it had much more to do with a lack of interest in anyone who wasn’t
her
. She nudged Jane’s shoulder and one eye flew open.

“Have you learned anything?”

“Some of this is heavy-duty stuff. Who would have thought kids would have so many issues?”

“Well, you did,” Jane said quietly, alluding to Ari’s less than idyllic childhood.

“Yeah, but I had my mom for most of it. She was my rock. She made losing Richie and my dad’s abandonment bearable.”

Jane sat up and offered her a generous kiss on the cheek. “You are the most amazing person I know.”

She smiled at her best friend with a love she’d never felt for any woman, including Molly. Lately she’d wondered if she and Jane had made a mistake in dismissing a romantic relationship after only an hour of dating years ago, but she’d always concluded it was a place they couldn’t go. She wanted to protect their friendship at all cost, especially now when she felt so terribly alone.

Jane dropped the journal she’d barely read. “So, what do you think? Are the answers to Nina’s murder somewhere in these tomes? That means books, by the way,” she added.

“I know,” she said, but the vocabulary lesson had given her an idea. “I think the murderer may be mentioned somewhere, but we’ll need the help of someone who knows a lot more about Shakespeare than I do.”

“Well, that won’t be Biz…” Jane’s face darkened. “Don’t say it.”

“Yes, I’m afraid I must. We need Rory’s help.”

When Molly saw Andre she threw her arms around him. “Thanks. You don’t know why, but thanks.”

He looked at her completely bewildered. “You’re welcome.”

They were standing outside Uptown Fitness, and Andre recounted his previous conversation with the front desk clerk. “I need a way to jog her memory.”

She nodded. “What we need to do is give her a type so she can see one person and think of others who might fit the description.”

He grinned. “Great idea. Let’s go.”

He flashed his badge at the front desk clerk and they strolled through the rows of elliptical and fitness machines, most of which were occupied by women.

“Her,” Molly said, pointing to a short, wiry woman with incredible tone. “That’s her body type.”

“Wow, I wouldn’t have guessed that. I would’ve thought it was someone taller and bulkier from the way the bartender and a few other patrons described her.”