“Look at this,” Kersti says, grabbing the note. “It’s not the same handwriting as the other C love notes. This one is from Cressida, not to her.” And she reads it out loud.
C, Thinking of you every minute. Your fingers inside me, mine inside you.
C
Kersti lets the note slip out of her hand. Jay picks it up and stares at it. “How did we miss that?” he says, his skin flushing deep red. “It’s a woman.”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s Hamidou.”
“Please welcome one of our One Hundred Women of the Lycée, bestselling author and soon to be mother of twins, Kersti Kuusk-Wax.”
Kersti rises amid the applause. She decided to wear her strapless black empire sundress and ballet flats. Less chance of tripping and falling on her face. Turns out it was the right call because the sun is blazing hot today. She can already see the redness flaring up on her shoulders.
It was Jay who convinced her to come and give the speech as planned. In the end, she agreed. Not because she wants to be part of the celebration, but because she wants to confront Hamidou.
Kersti should have put it together a long time ago. Hamidou had everything to lose, everything to hide. She was the one who’d wanted those girls expelled, just like Bueche said. He hadn’t lied about that. Even telling the police about Cressida’s car accident was a way for Hamidou to plant the seed of an alcohol-related accident; it gave the police precedence.
Cressida must have threatened Hamidou the night she got the ledger. Assuming there was incriminating proof of the abuse in it, she probably warned Hamidou she was going to go to Bueche and Harzenmoser with it. Hamidou must have panicked. How could she not? She was a small slip of a woman, but she was athletic and strong. She had remarkable energy. Fueled with fear and rage, who’s to say she couldn’t have pushed a drunken eighteen-year-old off her balcony? And then faked a suicide note?
All this is going through Kersti’s mind as she makes her way across the lawn to the podium. She hasn’t seen Hamidou yet. She looked for her earlier, heart pounding, palms sweating, and was secretly relieved not to have found her.
“Bonjour,” she says, her voice a tremor. “Thank you, Monsieur Bueche.”
She looks out into the crowd and sees Jay, Noa, and Raf, front and center, beaming at her supportively. A few rows back, she spots Hamidou. Their eyes lock. Hamidou smiles and waves. Kersti holds on to the podium and lowers her eyes. She’s sweating. Trickles of water rolling down her back, clinging to the modal fabric of her dress. I know what you are, she thinks.
The audience is silent, waiting. Kersti forces a smile and draws a breath. Her heartburn is killing her. The boys are fluttering wildly inside her belly, probably feeling her stress, reacting to her nervous energy. “It’s an honor and a privilege to stand up here as one of the One Hundred Women of the Lycée,” she begins. “I would not be here speaking about my literary career had it not been for the foundation I received as a student in the nineties.”
She looks up from her notes and connects with Jay. He looks worried.
“My English teacher at the Lycée, Mrs. Fithern, used to tell me I had an unpolished diamond,” Kersti continues. “She always said, ‘You must polish your diamond.’ She encouraged me to read. She’d say, ‘Writers read, luv.’ She suggested I write a short story and I did and it was terrible and all she said was, ‘Keep polishing that diamond, luv.’”
The audience chuckles.
“I didn’t have the confidence back then to even think I could be a writer when I grew up,” Kersti says. “I knew I enjoyed writing, but it was here, at the Lycée, that I first discovered I actually had something worth pursuing.”
She’s struggling to stay focused; her mind keeps going off on tangents. Hamidou. The naked Polaroids. Cressida’s eyes. The dirty note. Who left it for her? And why now?
“But I didn’t just learn to write here,” Kersti plods on. “I also learned to observe and to absorb. We were exposed to so many extraordinary places and experiences, which helped to shape me and pave the way for a lifetime of wanting to create extraordinary places and experiences. I’ll never forget visiting Shakespeare’s birth house in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and then seeing Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Who gets to do that?”
A few people applaud. “I was a kid from Toronto,” she says, glancing up and accidentally making eye contact with Hamidou again. Child molester. Murderer. Are you still a murderer if you take away someone’s life without actually ending it? Kersti looks away, but as she’s about to resume her speech, she notices someone standing behind the last row, over by the path to the tennis courts.
Alison Rumsky.
Kersti’s mind starts racing. What is she doing here? She wasn’t supposed to come. Said she couldn’t. And then all at once, the puzzle pieces slide into place. When they met for lunch in Toronto, Kersti mentioned the ledger, how she was trying to connect it to what happened to Cressida. Alison never asked what the ledger was, didn’t show the least bit of curiosity. It was like she knew.
It never occurred to Kersti at the time that there was no reason for Alison to know about the ledger. She wasn’t even friends with them when Amoryn Lashwood sent it to Cressida. And yet she knew about it. Who told her?
It’s starting to make sense now. Her resentment toward the Lycée. Her wound, her darkness. I can’t go.
Alison was one of Hamidou’s victims.
Chapter 32
LAUSANNE—June 1998
Volleyball is torture. All Kersti wants to do is get back to Huber House and read the ledger with Cressida, but it’s like each game is unfolding in slow motion. Usually Alison’s deadly hitting makes quick work of the other teams. They’ve been the undefeated Vaud champions three years in a row, but tonight the Aiglon team has stepped it up and is challenging them on every point. Now they’re in a third game tiebreaker.
Kersti is still second setter. She’s spent most of the time on the bench tonight, which makes waiting all the more excruciating. All she can do is watch and keep checking the time. M. Mahler is pacing the sideline, pumping his fist in the air, shouting at the team in German. Set. Set! Zree hits. Ovah! Du idioten! Set to Alison. Set to Alison, Dummk?pfe! Time out! Time out! What are you doing, imbeciles? With his old-fashioned uniform and overused whistle, his cartoonish accent and wiry, white hair sticking out of every possible socket—head, nose, ears—Mahler has become something of a celebrity, renowned throughout the canton for his boisterous Germanic slurs and his impeccable record.