Page 85 of Blade

“Someone else was in the office when they were fighting. I think it was Dr. Westin,” she says. “It was a man, and he wasn’t yelling. And Dr. Westin’s door was wide open, and the lights were on, so I think he left here and went with Dawn to confront Emile. And then I heard someone coming from the back hallway, the one that leads to the small rink. I didn’t want anyone to see me, so I came in here to hide. And then I heard more yelling. Emile knew things, and he said he’d held on to the secrets for too long.”

“What things?” I ask again, Dawn’s words ringing in my ears. About what Emile knew. About the Orphans. About me.

“I heard my mother’s name. And her friend—Kayla,” Grace says. “But then I heard your name.Ana Robbins.That’s when it got quiet. All of them just stopped.”

“When he said my name?” I ask. “Is that why you told me last night that this was all my fault?”

Grace nods. “You did something they’re all afraid of—didn’t you?”

“What did they say I did?”

Grace looks away. She doesn’t want to tell me.

“Grace—what do they know?”

She looks at me with a new kind of fear. Like she’s afraid of me.

“I ... I couldn’t hear them when they stopped yelling. But when Emile said ‘I know everything,’ Dawn said something like ‘No one will believe you,’ and then he laughed at them. That’s when I heard her door open, and I thought Dr. Westin might be coming back, so I sneaked out through there.” She points to the wall behind Westin’s desk.

Okay,I whisper to myself.It’s okay.

Then Grace gets up from the chair.

“I have to show you something,” she says.

She walks across the room to the other side, then behind Westin’s desk. There’s a break in the wall where she was pointing, a panel that opens to a closet with office supplies. But Grace slides the panel to the right and walks inside, and I follow, turning on the phone light when she shuts the door behind us.

“Look.” She points to a spot on the floor, under one of the shelves. I take my phone and shine the flashlight.

There’s a semicircle extending out from the wall. Dark red.

I bend down to touch it. The pool is thick, the center still sticky. I know the smell.Blood.

“Jesus,” I whisper. “How did you know this was here?”

“I came back the next day, before they found Emile’s body. I wanted to look for my skates, but they were gone. I thought maybe someone had moved them into the closet. This is what I saw when I opened the door.”

I study the scene. The wall where the blood seeps through—it separates this room from the office next door. “Emile’s office,” I say. And Grace nods.

“Is there blood there too?” I ask her. But I know the answer. If they’d found blood anywhere in The Palace, the investigation would have taken a sharp turn.

“I think they killed him,” Grace says. “In his office after that fight they had.”

“But the field ... that’s where his body was found,” I remind her.

She starts to panic. I can see the shaking run through her body.

“I ... I don’t know—they must have moved it!” she says. “And then cleaned it up—the blood in his office. They didn’t know about this closet—that it had seeped under the wall.”

And now her behavior begins to make sense.

Grace did know something. Just not enough to come forward.

“I think they used my skate to kill him,” she says, tears beginning to stream down her face. “Then they cleaned them and put them in my locker.”

My head is spinning with the implications of this. Was it a setup? Or did they try to protect Grace by cleaning her skates?

“So you think Emile got your skates from in here, in Westin’s office, then went back to his office, where Dawn found him. And Westin was there too.”