Page 2 of Blade

This girl I’ve been asked to defend, who’s been accused of a brutal murder, stands just inside the doorway from the front hall, arms at the sides of her slight frame, back straight, gaze steady—on me, but without expression—dressed in black joggers and a long-sleeved shirt. Her hair is pulled tight into a ponytail as if she’s heading to the rink. Her feet are bare, and her toes dig into the carpet.

“You’re Grace, right?” I ask. I’ve been here all afternoon, but she’s refused to leave her room.

“I’m Ana Robbins—the lawyer from New York. I’m here to help you.”

She responds with a curious tilt of her head as she runs her eyes over me, assessing, judging. Her arms cross in front of her chest.

I know this reaction, the dismissiveness. It’s a common response, given her age and what she’s been through. What she’s now accused of and the charges she might face. I’ve been working with teen offenders for my entire career.

I turn back to the window so she can observe me but remain, herself, unobserved. Maybe this will get her talking. Maybe not. But it’s worth a try. We’re running out of time.

“It gets so dark here,” I say. “I’d forgotten about that.”

I’d watched the night sweep in through the picture window as I sat waiting for her. It was startling, like a portrait of the dark hanging on the wall.

I hadn’t seen this night for fourteen years.

While I waited, I read her file, learning about the four strikes to a man’s head, made with the heel of a figure skating blade, the scene where his body was found, blood on Grace’s skate, a missing dress, and lost hours in her alibi.

The victim is a man I once knew.

I picture Grace behind me now, across the room maybe twenty feet long. Separated by the sparse furnishings, a couch, two armchairs, the coffee table. There’s a TV on a stand in the corner. All of it, and everything else in here, is the kind of stuff that arrives in cardboard boxes with assembly instructions and an Allen wrench.

Even the Christmas tree is made of plastic, the lights and ornaments now tucked away in boxes on the floor beside it.

I continue as if we’re having a conversation.

“We don’t get dark skies like this in New York City,” I tell her. “I moved there after college and never left.” I stop and take a breath, clearing out the sudden urge to be back home, to be anywhere but here, in Echo, Colorado.

I’ve spent my entire life ridding this place from my mind.

But now I recall how an Echo night demands attention. The way it covers both land and sky until the line between them disappears. No horizon. No shapes or shadows, not even those of Cheyenne Mountain, less than a quarter mile in the distance. We’re in a void, an ebony globe where nothing from the outside world can get in. Or out.

It’s the kind of night you prepare for. I remember that as well.

Grace spent the day being processed for release. I know she’s tired. She hasn’t been formally arrested—not yet—but only because of the deal made by her local attorney, Artis Frauhn. I remember him from my time here. A local kid from eighth-grade science class. Not a skater. Just some boy I barely noticed until he found me on Facebook years later. And now here we are, trying to keep a fifteen-year-old skater from being charged for the murder of her assistant coach, Emile Dresiér.

“I trained at The Palace a long time ago,” I tell Grace, trying to steer us in the right direction. “I had the same coach too—Dawn Sumner.”

She’s not surprised by this, and I suspect it’s her mother who’s told her. Jolene tracked me down at a conference in Aspen where I was the keynote speaker.

Now the DA’s office has given us just two more days to provide a statement while they gather evidence—and decide how to charge her. Which degree of murder, if any. As an adult or a child. Or, perhaps, not at all, if there were mitigating circumstances. They won’t want to make a mistake with one of Dawn’s skaters.

“I can see the lights from Avery Hall.”

Grace still says nothing but walks, step by step, to stand beside me, and I think I’ve struck a nerve, or a pang of curiosity, with the reference to the place where she was living, and where I once lived.

Avery Hall is the dormitory for skaters who train here without a parent. A rectangular structure with a flat roof and stucco siding, with two wings inside that separate the girls from the boys. I can feel it now more than see it. Rough, commercial-grade carpet in the bedrooms, cold linoleum in the hallways, stairwells, and bathrooms. Steam from the metal trays of food lined up in the small cafeteria. Thin paper napkins and silverware I could bend with my bare hands.

What a strange thing to remember. Bending forks and spoons.

My history oddly mirrors her own. I, too, came here to live year-round when I was just thirteen.

“And that’s The Palace—there,” I say, pointing to the four specks of light near the base of the mountain. Her eyes are already fixed on them.They outline the training facility. An enormous windowless structure. Two ice rinks, a gym and dance studio, locker rooms, a snack bar. For decades, skaters have come from around the world to train here because of the altitude. A free skate at six thousand feet felt like nothing at sea level.

But it was Dawn Sumner who put The Palace on the map, producing champions one after the next, like an assembly line of human excellence. The kind of excellence she had failed to achieve herself, though she’d come painfully close—missing her third and last try for the Olympic team by “two-tenths of a point,” she would say, as if that could take away the sting.

Away from the rink, snaking up the right side into the dense evergreens, is the residential access road. Avery Hall is the first house along it. Dawn Sumner’s, the fifth—a Mediterranean design with terra-cotta tiles, arched doorways, and window frames. It hid from the road behind half an acre of forest, the driveway coming to a fork, the main house to the left. To the right was a second driveway, and at its end, the guest cottage where Emile once lived.