Legacy of the Grand Master. William Speir

and she couldn’t figure out how the wax seal, which still hung at the end of the silk cord, could be any sort of key. Frustrated, she put the box and letter back in their camouflage coverings and put them back on the bookshelf, vowing to work harder to do as her grandfather asked.

      Shortly after returning to campus for her sophomore year, Jamie found herself in an unexpected position to help someone.

      Every evening after class, Jamie and one of her best friends went running along the trails around the outer edge of the campus. Even though there were tracks and trails closer to the populated parts of the University, neither Jamie nor her friend liked the attention they got from the boys when they ran there. The outer trails were quieter and gave them the opportunity to work out their frustration and tension without distractions.

      Around the beginning of October, Jamie was working on a project that would take most of the night to complete. She told her friend that she couldn’t run that night and went back to working on her project. It wasn’t due for another couple of days, but Jamie didn’t like waiting until the last minute.

      She was working on a stubborn calculation when her cell phone rang. Looking at the caller id, she saw that it was her friend, so she answered the call. Her friend was crying, and Jamie immediately knew that something was wrong.

      “Where are you?” Jamie demanded.

      “I’m at DHC Hospital on University,” the crying friend replied.

      “Are you all right? What happened?”

      Her friend was crying so hard that Jamie couldn’t understand what she was saying.

      “Just stay there. I’m on my way,” Jamie said, ending the call and grabbing her purse and keys.

      A few minutes later, she arrived at the emergency room entrance and asked the receptionist where her friend was.

      “Are you a relative?” the receptionist asked.

      “No, I’m her friend.”

      The receptionist pointed to a waiting area. “Then you’ll have to wait over there until the doctors are finished examining her. I’ll call you when you can go back.”

      Jamie wrote her name on the sign-in sheet and sat down in the waiting area, worried about her friend. She took out her cell phone and sent her friend a text, letting her know that she was at the hospital. Then she waited.

      Thirty minutes later, the receptionist called her name. She walked up to the receptionist’s desk and was directed to an examination room down the hall. When she got there, she looked in the window and saw her friend sitting on the edge of an examination table, wearing a hospital gown and talking with two police officers. Jamie knocked on the door and stuck her head inside.

      “Is it okay if I come in now?” she asked.

      Her friend held out her arms and nodded. Jamie came in, and her friend hugged her tightly, tears running down her face.

      “I guess we have all we need for now, miss,” one of the police officers said. “Do you need a ride home?”

      “I’ll drive her back to the dorm,” Jamie said.

      “Very well,” the officer replied. He handed Jamie one of his cards. “If she remembers anything else, please have her call me at this number.”

      “I will,” Jamie promised.

      When the two officers had left the examination room, Jamie sat down on the table next to her friend and put her arm around her shoulder. “What happened?” she asked softly.

      As it turned out, her friend had decided to go running alone along the outer campus trails. “I know I should have just gone to the track, but I needed to clear my head and wanted to be alone. I was so busy thinking that I didn’t see them until it was too late.”

      Three young men had jumped out of the bushes and pulled her into the woods before she could react. “They threw me down on the ground,” she said, sobbing. “Two of them held me and the third pulled down my shorts.”

      She shuddered, as if it were happening to her all over again. “And then they raped me!” she spat out. “All three of them! And they were laughing the whole time!”

      Jamie held her friend as she started crying uncontrollably again. She wondered what would have happened if she had gone running with her that night. Would two girls have been enough to prevent the attack, or would the three men have attacked both of them? As Jamie thought about this, somewhere deep inside of her a fire started to burn.

      After a while, her friend was able to stop crying. Jamie helped her get dressed and drove her back to the dorm. The next day, her friend’s parents came to take her back home. Her friend withdrew from school and never came back.

      Jamie kept in touch with her friend and learned that, even after a month, the three men hadn’t been caught. The fire that burned in her since she found out what had happened to her friend started to grow. Jamie wanted justice for her friend, and the more she thought about it, the more she knew that this was what her grandfather had been talking about.

      Jamie started working out at the martial arts studio as often as she could, convincing the owner to let her spar with multiple partners like she had done before her first national tournament. In part, this was to help her release her anger at her friend’s attackers, and in part it was to prepare her for a plan she had been working on in the back of her mind. After a few weeks, she felt that she was ready. She started running the outer trails alone in the early morning and late evening every day. If the three men wanted to attack someone again, she’d give them something to attack. Normally, she ran as a way to clear her mind, but now she was maintaining a heightened sense of awareness of her surroundings so she’d be ready if anything happened.

      She checked in with the police to see if there were any updates, but they confirmed that the men were still on the loose. There had been two more attacks, and each was on or near the outer campus trails. The police warned her to make sure that she always ran in groups of at least four to be safe.

      After a couple of weeks of making herself a target, her plan worked. She had just rounded a bend in the trail that was in the middle of a wooded area when she saw two men step out onto the trail in front of her. Without turning around, she knew that a third was behind her and moving quietly forward. She stood still, calming her nerves as she waited for the man behind her to get closer. Just as she felt him reaching for her, she struck.

      Her right heel came up and back, catching him in his groin full force. As he doubled over in pain, she charged forward – not to escape as the other two men thought, but to attack. She leaped up and planted both of her feet in the center of the left man’s chest, sending him flying.

      She turned to face the third man. He swung his fist, but only hit air. Jamie dropped into a split and drove her fist in his groin as hard as she could. As he bent over, she hit him in his lower jaw, rolled to the side, and jumped back to her feet.

      The first man was moving toward her, and she did a reverse somersault kick that drove her foot into his lower jaw, breaking the jawbone and sending him onto his back. She leaped up and landed with both feet on his rib cage. She heard a cracking sound. She then turned to continue the attack on the other two men.

      The first two men were trying to get away when Jamie caught up to them. They clearly had no martial arts training whatsoever and had no way to defend against her attack. Her hands and feet connected with them repeatedly until they were both lying unconscious on the ground. Looking around, she knew that it would be some time before any of them would be able to move again. She walked over to a nearby tree, pulled out her cell phone, and dialed a number.

      “Yes, I’d like to report that the men who have been attacking runners near the campus have just tried to attack someone else. They weren’t successful this time. You might want to send an ambulance and pick them up. I think they’re seriously hurt.”

      An hour later, she was sitting in an interrogation room at the police station. The officer who had responded to