Chapter One Ana
Chapter One
Ana
Now
I see Grace when I turn from the window. I don’t know how long she’s been there. Silently watching me.
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.
It was no more than one large room with a square table. A love seat against the wall. An unmade bed with gray plaid sheets, always tangled and strewn.
The access road turns at the base, until it ends at the highway that passes along the edge of town, running north to Denver and south to Pueblo.
Hidden in the darkness somewhere between is the abandoned property that was once a dairy farm—the place we all knew simply as the field—where Emile’s body was found, frozen in a pool of his own blood, making the time of death uncertain.
And in the other direction from the highway is this rented condo.
It’s in a complex—one of several that were hastily built when The Palace doubled in size.
Gray prefab two-unit structures. I could never tell them apart when I rode past them on my bike on the way to school.
No one stayed long enough to place a welcome mat by the front door, add a name to a mailbox.
All these years later, they haven’t changed, just multiplied.
Thousands of skaters have come through The Palace since it was founded.
I try not to think about the ones I knew, though some have found me over the years, on Facebook or LinkedIn—mostly coaches now at smaller rinks.
Lesser rinks. They reach out, desperate to reconnect with that past through the people who might hold its pieces.
To lasso it, perhaps, and drag it into the present. Rewrite it, even just a few chapters.
In between how are you? and what have you been up to? was the question they really wanted to ask.
How do I leave this place behind?
That’s what they crave when they begin to reminisce, then see that I’ve truly moved past it, not having skated since the day I left, no longer even owning a pair of skates, not poring over old photos and videos of my performances.
When they learn that I have reinvented myself so completely I can stand in this room and look at The Palace and still feel my feet planted firmly on the ground.
They want to know how. They want me to show them the way.
But how can I? Leaving this place, and skating, behind me has felt like an exorcism.
It wasn’t pretty.
I turn my gaze back to Grace.
“My first year at Avery Hall I had a room with a view of the mountain. But I think I lived in every one by the time I left—even the one in the back where your mother stayed. Did you know that?” I ask her. “That your mother and I were here together?”
She answers with a nod.
More reflections about Avery Hall and my time there take shape in short sentences, snippets, but I don’t say them.
I stop myself because I still don’t know how to use this, the fact that I knew Jolene.
And because I haven’t found a place to contain my feelings about her sending her own child here after everything that happened to us.
Me, Jolene, and the other two girls who lived here year-round, alone.
Kayla and Indy. The girls they called the Orphans.
Grace walks until she’s beside me, and together we look at the lights through the window.
Side by side, though every detail about her lingers behind my eyes.
The tightly drawn ponytail. The doll-like features of her face.
Long dark lashes, delicate nose, a natural blush in her full cheeks and lips.
Beneath her joggers and shirt are limbs that are slight but toned.
Athletic perfection beneath a facade of youth.