Chapter Fifteen Ana
Chapter Fifteen
Ana
Now
I’m stunned when Shannon tells me about Kayla.
How she attacked her mother, threatening her with the heel of her blade—the same way Emile was killed.
We heard rumors about Kayla mouthing off to them, but that wasn’t unusual.
She never elaborated, and we didn’t ask.
We didn’t go near any topic related to the night in the field. And then she was gone.
I tell Artis I need to see Kayla and I need to go alone. We’ve planned to meet with Dawn after speaking with Shannon at Avery Hall, but this feels more urgent. I don’t tell him why—how Shannon’s story has struck a nerve.
When that girl in the video, Tammy Theisen, told Grace to ask Emile—he knows the truth—we both assumed it was the truth about taking Dawn’s skaters to California, breaking up the program and not bringing Grace with him. Grace was devoted to Dawn. She would never leave, from what Jolene told me.
Maybe this angered her because of what it would do to The Palace.
Or, maybe, we didn’t know the nature of her relationship with Emile.
That thought has been with me from the start.
That Grace and Emile were in a sexual relationship.
But Shannon said he was paternal with her, like a father.
And he was so much older than when we were here, when he was just starting as a coach.
He’d been a skater right up to the year before we arrived. One of us.
Still, there is another possibility—one Artis wouldn’t know about. The other things Emile knew. Things from the past.
I have to see Kayla, one of the four Orphans who shared this story.
It’s just past noon. The morning is gone, and the storm has fully arrived. Half an inch of snow covers Artis’s car when we leave Avery Hall.
“Let me drive you,” Artis offers, as he turns on the wipers and waits for the windows to clear. “This is just the start of it.”
“I’ll be fine,” I insist. “I’ll take Jolene’s car. You should see Dawn—and Westin—about Emile’s plans to move the skaters. Find out what they knew and when.”
“I don’t see how Kayla can help,” Artis says. “What could she possibly know about Grace and Emile?”
“You were there,” I remind him. “Shannon brought up that story about Kayla and her mother for a reason. And the fact that Kayla lives an hour away.”
Artis steadies his face and says what I’ve just come to suspect is in his mind.
“Do you think it’s a possibility? That Kayla killed Emile?”
“No,” I say, shutting this down. “That would mean she framed Grace. Put Emile’s blood on her skates.”
“Exactly,” Artis says. “So we need to stay focused on the here and now. This new information is clutch, Ana. You know that. There must be a dozen skaters who are pissed off about Emile leaving and not taking them along. Not to mention their crazy mothers. The cops have a lot more to investigate before they can charge Grace.”
I don’t know how to explain it—my need to see Kayla—without telling him about the story, and the connection to Indy.
So I don’t try. Artis—reluctantly—drops me back at the condo, where I tell Jolene that I need her car, that I’m going to see Kayla.
At first, like Artis, she doesn’t understand.
But then she bites her lip and nods. “She knows what’s happening. I’ll tell her you’re coming.”
This stops me in my tracks.
“You’ve been in touch with Kayla?”
Jolene nods. “Yes. Soon after I left here, I found her. We’ve kept up over the years.”
I don’t know why this shakes me, but it does. In my version of the story, each of us left and never wanted to think about this place again. And now Jolene and Kayla are still friends.
Jolene gives me the keys, and I walk away.
Twenty minutes later, I’m halfway to Pueblo.
Headed south on the highway into the storm.
A gust of wind smacks the car like it did earlier at the field, pushing it to the right, and I wonder what the hell I’m doing.
I clench my hands around the wheel and keep it from moving onto the shoulder.
The road’s been plowed once but is again covered with snow.
I think through the arguments for tomorrow—the ones I would make if I had no connection to the case.
They start with Dawn and Dr. Westin. The two people who had the most to lose from Emile leaving. I would also raise the possibility of other skaters and parents psychotically invested in their children’s skating careers.
But, then, I would point to the past.
To us—the Orphans.
I clutch the wheel, my eyes glued to the tracks on the road made by the last vehicle to pass along the highway, and I think about the way he was killed. The four strikes to his head with the heel of a blade.
Then I see Indy bouncing around the room, telling a story about a blade, about me, and Dawn.
I picture Kayla marching into the stands with her fist inside a skate, threatening Mrs. Finch.
The method of his killing—the image lived inside us. And we all had motive—each and every one of us.
I think about the way we were trained here.
The push and pull, the desperate attachments Dawn created.
And then Westin and the sessions in the office next to Dawn’s.
He frames it now like it was nothing more than cognitive behavioral therapy, learning to overcome our fears.
Our instincts. Eliminate our innate response to situations that screamed out for retreat, caution.
We were trained to override it—the fear of falling—with a greater fear: of Dawn and what she might do if we didn’t succeed.
“Does that make you sad?”
“Does your sadness make you angry?”
“Feel the rage.”
“Fight the fear.”
And what did that do to us? What did it do to Grace?
I see her face in that video. The still shot at the end, right after she attacked that girl over whatever it was she first said, the words not captured by the other girl’s phone.
And then the words Shannon heard when it was over—about Emile knowing the truth.
Tammy would be following Emile to California.
They were undermining Dawn and The Palace.
That much we know. But that look on her face—it doesn’t fit with the narrative we’ve been building around this altercation.
It’s a face I recognize from Indy Cunningham but also from my clients accused of violence.
Guilty of violence. And I think about what I’ve learned since leaving this place, both in my life’s work and in my own recovery.
What I know about fear and what happens when it’s caged inside us.
How it can turn to rage, all on its own.
That’s what I saw on the face of the girl in that video. Grace. Jolene’s daughter.
This is the argument—the training, the mindfuck. I know it well, and I can sell it if I have to. If the evidence keeps pointing to Grace and only Grace.
I follow the GPS to the exit off the highway.
I’m still north of Pueblo, and it feels like I’m driving toward nothing.
Into empty space. Finally, I get to a mailbox and a narrow road that leads to a small rustic house at the end of a clearing.
On either side are structures that look like chicken coops or barns for small animals.
Through the gusts of snow, I see a pickup truck in the driveway, and I park beside it, turn off the engine. Kayla is there, already at the door.
The woman I see is both different and familiar, and it elicits confusion as I walk toward her.
Long brown hair that was once short and jet black.
Soft, bare skin and gentle eyes. She smiles as she steps aside, letting me in from the storm.
The wind blows snow into the small foyer and she quickly closes the door behind us to keep it out.
“My God,” she says. “I can’t believe it’s you.” And then she pulls me into her arms with strength that belies her tiny frame.
When she backs away, there are tears in her eyes. But all I can do is study her, head to toe, as I shake off the disorientation.
“How long has it been?” she asks. And I have to think for a moment before arriving at the number. It’s been sixteen years since I last saw Kayla. She left a year into my stay at The Palace and Avery Hall. Her journey cut short by that night in the field and the betrayals that followed.
She takes my coat and hangs it on a hook while I stomp the snow from my boots. I follow her down a narrow hallway into a kitchen that faces the back of the property. Through the window I can see vast, open space all the way to the base of the mountain.
She’s made a pot of coffee, and she pours cups for both of us.
“When Jo called to tell me you were coming, and why you were coming, I couldn’t believe it—any of it,” she says. “I heard things on the news, but I had no idea they even had a suspect, let alone Grace Montgomery. Did you know Jo had sent her daughter there? To The Palace?”
“No,” I tell her. “I had no idea.”
There’s a small rectangular table against the far wall, and I sit in one of the chairs across from my old friend. I try to be here in this room and in this moment, but my mind has traveled back in time. Stunned by the power of the past.
When Kayla left, I was certain she would be destroyed. I realize that, just now, as I look at the grown woman before me. That’s what’s thrown me. This expectation I’ve formed.
But here she is, Kayla—not destroyed, but with kindness in her eyes and a home she’s created. An entire life she’s built after leaving Echo.
She lifts her coffee cup to her mouth. Her hands are delicate. Her movements, gentle. Her eyes stay glued to mine.
“So you came here to help her daughter?” she asks, hanging her head and giving it a slight shake. A mannerism I don’t remember, another piece out of place.