Blade

Chapter Twenty-Seven Ana

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Ana

Now

I hated Emile Dresiér.

This thought consumes me as I stop the car, put it in reverse.

I feel the four tires dig into the snow, skid, and then steady.

I follow my tracks until I can see the path to the guest cottage where Emile used to live, nothing more than a break in the trees now, lit up by the headlights and the traces of the moon that make it through the storm.

And now Emile is dead, and here I am. In Dawn’s driveway. In front of his old house. I know I shouldn’t be here, but that doesn’t stop me. The memories have come alive and yearn for a stage.

I step outside and feel my feet sink into the powder, the wet, the cold, sneaking inside my boots. I pull my coat around me as I walk the path to the front door.

Smoke comes from the chimney, the smell reaching my face. The lights are on. I can see in the window as I approach the entrance.

I knock, once and again, but there’s no reply. No voice or footsteps, and I wonder if Dawn has been here. If maybe she uses this cottage now, in the winter months. She’s all alone in that big house.

I reach for the doorknob and turn it until I feel the release, and then the warmth and light spill into the night from inside.

“Hello?” I call out as my eyes scan the room and my memories tangle.

This place is different.

The table that had been small and round is now a rectangle, with eight chairs around it. A couch and two plush chairs face a coffee table and a fireplace with embers still burning.

Against the back wall where Emile’s bed once was, the sheets always strewn about, never straightened or tucked in, are an Eames chair and reading lamp.

Another small table where a book is laid open.

The light is on. I see a door to another room that wasn’t here before.

It’s closed, concealing the bedroom, I imagine.

Then I see a flash of Emile’s bed and Kayla lying upon it.

I see the round table with two chairs where I sat across from Emile after he joined us for dinner.

The night when there were three settings at Dawn’s table, and my program playing on the TV. Orange soda and stir-fry. The linen place mats and crystal glasses.

“Emile is joining us for dinner.”

I remember thinking the same thought. That I hated Emile after what he’d done to Kayla. How he’d made us feel that night—like we were worthless. Like no one would believe us because we’d been in the field. The Jack Daniel’s and boys in the black van.

And then Jolene—my God—I see him standing in the doorway of the Orphans’ room at Avery Hall.

I feel the explosion on the side of my head and the pain that radiated into my skull, and the rough carpet beneath my body as I lay there, helpless, listening to the sound of a hand striking Jolene’s soft face.

Emile had done that. He’d called Jolene’s parents, then sent us to the clinic, knowing we would be turned away. He must have known. He was buying time for Jolene’s father to come and get her.

I look at the place where that table once was. I can see Emile clear as day.

“Want a beer?”

He’d brought me here after dinner, instead of taking me back to Avery Hall. He’d offered me a beer, and then brushed my shoulder with his arm as he walked past me to the refrigerator.

“Or do you want to go home?”

I didn’t have a home anymore.

I hated him. But I hear the word in my head. My answer that night.

“No.”

And then, “What do you need?” he asked. I didn’t know the answer. But he did.

A burst of cold air hits me from behind. Then the voice explodes in my head, just like the fist that struck me the night Jolene left.

“Ana!” Dr. Westin says with enthusiastic surprise. I turn to see him in his boots and parka, a bundle of wood in his arms. “What are you doing here?”

I stumble with an explanation. “I went to see Dawn, and then . . .”

He walks to the fireplace and sets the wood in a metal stand. There’s a smile on his face as he pulls off his parka and hangs it on a hook by a back door.

“Ah,” he says. “Of course. This place holds your history. Or part of it, anyway.”

I don’t answer. He was a part of that history. He still is—not only working with Dawn but also living on her property.

“How long have you lived here?” I ask. Emile moved into a condo complex soon after I left. I wonder if Westin has been here since then, but he says it’s more recent.

“I scaled back last year—and this place was renovated, no one using it,” he explains, walking to the stove, turning on a kettle. “I don’t need much. And I love the view, being on the mountain.”

He gets two mugs from a cupboard and sets them on the counter. Reaches for tea bags like all of this is perfectly normal.

Like he always did. And I suddenly remember what Kayla told me not two hours ago.

“I saw her,” I tell him.

He turns, curious. “Dawn? Yes—you’ve said.”

“No,” I continue. “Kayla Johnson.”

His arms cross, and his head bobs like he finds this of interest, but not alarming.

“Was she helpful?”

“Very.”

The kettle whistles, and he pours the water into the cups, then brings them to the table.

“Do you want to sit down? You left so abruptly this morning—I was hoping to get an answer to my question.”

Yes—his question. The one about Jolene and what happened to her. The question Grace didn’t want me to answer.

I walk to the table and sit, leaving my coat and boots on. I watch the steam rise from the tea and think about the night before. The questions about Grace and that video. The rage I saw on her face.

“I think you may know more about Jolene’s history here than I do,” I say. “You’ve been working with Grace for two years. I’m sure she spoke about her childhood. If I recall, you were always quite interested in our lives back home.”

I take a beat, and then add—“Especially the things that made us vulnerable.”

Westin sits and blows on the hot water.

“You know how important the past is. How it shapes young minds.”

“Yes,” I say. “So what did you learn about Grace that I might not know—from Jolene and Artis? I think I have a rough draft.”

“Well,” he tells me before bringing the cup to his lips, then setting it back down to cool some more. “She and Jolene lived with her parents until she met her ex-husband. Eventually, she and Grace moved in with him. He was older. He had other kids who came around on weekends and such.”

I know all of this. “And then he left—for another woman. Moved to California.”

“Right,” Westin says. “Jolene had enough money from the settlement to get her own place and send Grace here. But I’m more interested in how it all came about—Grace, I mean.”

This place—I begin to smell it as the air settles.

Something familiar. Just like Avery Hall.

The odors living in the floorboards and the walls.

I feel the hard wood of the chair against my back and my feet planted on the ground as my eyes move to the reading chair and table.

The lamp. The corner where the bed used to be.

And I remember why I came here.

“Well,” I say, “I’m interested in something else. Something I learned when I was driving back from Pueblo. About Emile leaving to run a rink in California. And a story he was giving to a reporter—about The Palace. The training.”

This gets more of a reaction, though it appears to be genuine surprise.

“What kind of story?” he asks.

“My source said he was trying to ‘burn the place to the ground.’”

“Really?”

I nod. “Before, when we were talking about Emile and his conflicted relationship with Dawn—we never got to finish. But I think this new information answers that question.”

“It certainly gives you leverage for tomorrow’s meeting with the prosecutor. Ample suspects now, right?” he asks.

“Yes. And we’re both on that list,” I confess.

He dives into the hot tea, slurping it into his mouth. Swallowing as it burns his tongue.

“Ah,” he says when he’s done, and the tea is back on the table. “Because of the exposé—he was talking about the past, wasn’t he? When you were here?”

I feel this sink into my gut. The past that is now front and center in my mind. The smell seeping from the floor and walls. The ghost whispering in the room.

“What do you need?”

“Because you were in Aspen. At the conference.”

Yes—and I was gone the second day. Spooked by that text message, the emoji of the blade.

“You knew I was there before it even started,” I tell him. “Who else?”

Westin shrugs. “You were on the website—as the keynote speaker.”

“For a conference on childhood trauma. Not exactly a rock concert.”

“True,” he says.

I pull out my phone and find the message. I hold it up so he can see, squinting his eyes to focus.

He leans back, and I place it face down on the table.

“You think Emile sent that? The day before he died?”

“I don’t know. I’m asking you.”

Now a long pause. A deep breath. “Maybe. Emile was . . .”

“Damaged.”

Westin nods. “And this exposé . . .”

“It was about this place—now, but also fourteen years ago. It was about Indy.”

“Well,” Westin says. “I didn’t know anything about it. Not the exposé, not the text message.”

I study his face. I can’t decide if he’s lying, which is unlike me. I can read my clients, a judge, a juror—like the back of my hand.

“But I do know something you may not,” he says. “That’s what I was trying to get to earlier, when I asked you about Jolene and her experience here.”

“Why don’t you go first,” I tell him. Grace didn’t want me to tell him about Jolene. She must have known why he was asking. The dots he was trying to connect.

Finally, he tells me.

“Have you read her file? The one that came from her school back home? From her doctors?”

I think about the papers sitting on the passenger seat of Jolene’s car. How I was reading them by the side of the road when Jill called.

“I got through most of it,” I tell him.

“Well—you might want to start from the beginning.”

That night—that’s the piece to the puzzle I didn’t see until just now. Jolene went home, pregnant with Grace. A home that was filled with violence.

Violence begets violence. It was the first thing I learned when I started to work with child offenders.

Westin has been wondering the same thing. Trying to understand Grace’s behavior—he must have seen it before that video. The rage that was inside her.

I get up from the table, pushing out the chair. And do what I should have done that night fifteen years ago.

“I have to go,” I tell Westin.

And then I leave this place like it’s the black van in the field that night. Like a bat out of hell.