Page 65 of Blade
I move in for the kill now, the way I wanted to then.
“Emile was going to leave and take your skaters with him, and I think you knew. But more than that,” I say. “You knew about the information he was giving to a reporter. The exposé about The Palace.”
She stares at me, her face steeled. But I can feel her blood pulsing through her veins as if it were my own.
“It’s okay,” I say. “You don’t have to answer.” I hold my hand in the air and trace her outline with my finger. “I can see it,” I tell her. “On your face.”
Dawn leans forward again, her arms crossed at her chest. “And I can see that you think you’re clever. All grown up. Some big lawyer,” she says. “You think you’re somehow better than this place. Better than these girls who are making it to Nationals and the Olympics. Because it’s just skating, right? It doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?”
She says this to drag me back to the time in my life when skating was everything. When I lived and breathed it. When I lived and breathedher. But she’s wrong. I don’t know if I realized that until just now.
“This isn’t about me,” I say. “I’m a lawyer now—and Grace is my client. And tomorrow I’m going to tell the assistant district attorney that she needs to widen the investigation. There’s a three-day window for Emile’s murder. I imagine there’s some time in there that you can’t account for. Living alone the way you do. You had access to Grace’s locker. And she was such an easy target, wasn’t she? You knew exactly how to do it. You showed me, right here in this room.”
I look directly into Dawn’s eyes. I hear the question inside my head.Are you really doing this? Do you really have no fear?How many times have I sat in this room, desperate for her affection? Hanging on her every word?
I look at her now, saggy skin hanging over frail bones. The smell of cheap cosmetics. But something else. A rotting from the inside. Maybe that’s just the anger coming out, any way it can. Through petty, juvenile cruelty. But I swear I can smell the weakness.
Then Dawn tilts her head to the side like she’s having a pleasant recollection. “Rhapsody in Blue,” she says. “I remember now. It was a free skate, wasn’t it?”
And I think,yes,the free skate my last year at The Palace. The one Jolene was playing on her computer earlier that morning.
“You had the most beautiful layback,” she says. “We put it at the start of the program, didn’t we?”
I make split-second calculations about where this is going. Whether I should respond, let her lead us down this road, diffusing my accusations.
“Yes,” I answer. There’s no point in denying it. I haven’t forgotten one moment with this woman.
“I remember,” she says. “We did that so you would get more points for the jumps.”
“Yes,” I say again. Everything was about the points. We put the hardest jumps after the halfway mark.
She smiles now, and I know—I just know—I’ve made a tactical error opening this door to the past. Behind the armor plates of my accomplishments, my knowledge, is the girl crying in the closet, and she knows it.
“The truth is,” she says. “It was really the only thing you were any good at.”
The words worm their way inside and start to rewrite the past. I was never a promising skater. It was all a lie. Dawn was just doing her job. She wasn’t trying to hurt me, hurt us. We were just weak, alone. The Orphans. She did nothing wrong. We just couldn’t handle it.
I look to the entrance of the foyer where she held that blade to my temple. Then the dining room where she served me dinner with linen place mats and crystal glasses. And I think of the night when there were three settings.
I try to shrug her off.
“I’ve thought over the years,” I tell her, “that if I’d been a better jumper, I could have made it to the podium at Nationals. Maybe even to the Olympics. And then what?” I ask. “I would have wound up right back here. Or some other rink. Never anything more. I suppose it was a stroke of luck that my jumps were for shit.”
Dawn lets out a guttural sound from deep inside her. And then she says, “Not like your friend Indy. She was a fabulous jumper.”
Heat rises inside me. I want to grab Indy’s name from the air and shove it down her throat until she chokes on it. I want to see her gasp for air. I want to see nothing but fear in her eyes. But I stop myself, because that’s what she wants. And I won’t give it to her.
“I should get going,” I say. “My office is following leads on that exposé. I have a lot of work to do before tomorrow. And the storm is getting bad.” I stand up as if we’ve just had a pleasant cup of tea. I know how to do this. Still, I’m hanging by a thread.
She stands as well, now mirroring my actions. I follow her out of the room, into the foyer, and to the front door. She places her hand on the knob. Then she stops and turns to face me.
“Have you considered,” she begins. “All the things Emile might know? From the time when you girls were here? If there is a story, mightyounot be the headline?”
I hold her stare and keep the blood from rushing into my cheeks.
“Thank you for your time, Dawn,” I say. Then I put on the boots that sit by the door. And the coat that hangs on the hook on the wall. I zip up the coat and pull the hood over my head.
She opens the door, and I walk past her without saying another word. Into the storm. To Jolene’s car, which has gathered an inch of snow.