Chapter Forty-Two Ana
Chapter Forty-Two
Ana
Now
There it is—on the back seat of Artis’s car: my dress.
From that night I ran through the woods, down the mountain. Away from Dawn and Emile and Westin because Indy was dead and they were all to blame. The same night I took a ride from a stranger. Desperate to be home.
I left that man in the woods and returned to the cab of the semi. I took his coat from the seat where I’d been sleeping and put it on. I rummaged through the truck, finding a bag for my skates, a pair of boots, and socks.
I shoved the socks into the toes of the boots to make them fit.
Then I climbed into the driver’s seat. Turned the ignition. I could barely see over the steering wheel to the road. I pulled the seat as far up as it would go, my toe just reaching the gas. I slid the gear into drive and began to move.
I drove that truck fifty miles straight ahead until I got to the entrance of the highway and a gas station. It was there I left it in the middle of the parking lot because I didn’t know how to do more than make it go forward. I found a pay phone and called Mio.
Now, I stare at the dress in the bag. Not Grace’s dress with Emile’s blood. But my dress with the blood of that trucker. A man named Jeb Clayton, who wouldn’t be found until six years ago.
“You come across all kinds of things being a criminal lawyer,” Artis says, braking to a stop.
“So when these bones were found in the middle of nowhere, north of Denver, in the woods where they were excavating to expand a back road into four lanes, well—I didn’t think anything of it.
But then the bones were matched to a missing truck driver.
And the cause of death was found to be fractures to his skull—four of them, oddly shaped like a skating blade. ”
I run through the rest of that night in my head.
Mio came to get me, brought me back to Avery Hall.
We went in through the window on the first floor, then up the stairs to the bathroom, where I changed and showered and Mio took everything I was wearing and put it into a garbage bag and put the bag in the dumpster out back.
“Do you want to tell me?” she asked as she scrubbed the blood from my skate in the bathroom sink.
I shook my head. “No.” I sat on the cold tile, wrapped in a towel, my whole body trembling. I never wanted to speak of it again.
One day, I got a Google alert from the words I’d entered when I started working at my firm.
Truck driver. Remains. Bones. Colorado. Blade.
I saw the picture of the man and learned his name.
I ordered a copy of the paper where the article was printed, cut out the report, and sent it, anonymously, to Kayla.
But now a thought rushes in.
“Shannon,” I say out loud, but in a whisper. “She was staying at Avery Hall that month. Her mother had gone back home . . .”
Artis nods. “Right,” he says. “Her brother broke his leg. He couldn’t drive to school. And Shannon didn’t want to stop training.”
“She lived on the first floor,” I remember now. She would have been there . . . that night.
“She heard you and Mio come in through the window. Then she saw Mio go back out—and throw something in the dumpster.”
What is going on here? Even if Shannon went to the dumpster to see what Mio had thrown away, why would she keep my blood-soaked dress all these years? Why not give it to the police or Edie? Or even to her mother, who had gone out of her way to destroy the other Orphans?
But then Artis has the answer.
“She went to Dawn the next day and told her what had happened. She gave her the dress. She thought Dawn would do the right thing. She didn’t want you to get in trouble.”
“How do you know all this?”
His face changes again, this time to something cold. Indifferent.
“We dated in high school, after you left. But then she quit skating and moved home. She came back eight years ago when Edie died and the job opened up at Avery Hall. She started seeing Emile.”
My God. Artis and Shannon. They acted like strangers before.
But Dawn had the dress—he just told me that. How did he get his hands on it?
Then I think—Artis, the lawyer. His practice dependent on The Palace. If he has my dress from fourteen years ago, he must have gotten it from Dawn, who’s kept it all this time. Which means they’re working together now.
Artis is not working to help Grace.
No. He’s helping frame her for Emile’s murder.
But then why my dress? It had to be Shannon who took Grace’s dress the night Emile was killed—in his office at The Palace—and his body later moved to the field.
And now I remember about the four cars Grace said she recognized that night. And the footsteps she heard coming down the hall toward Emile’s office.
“It was you,” I say, staring incredulously at Artis. “You were there when Emile was killed! Did you do it? Did you kill him?”
Artis puts the car in gear and starts to drive.
He says nothing, but I feel myself moving further toward one conclusion.
“It was you. Oh my God, Artis.” The custody files are right there on my phone. Emile wasn’t just taking down The Palace, then leaving with its skaters. He was taking his son with him. The son Shannon had with Emile just five years ago.
“It wasn’t just business—you wouldn’t kill over that.
You could move your practice somewhere else.
It was personal, wasn’t it?” I race through the pleading that’s still open on my phone.
The affidavit Artis filed to try to keep Emile from gaining custody of Shannon’s son and relocating to California.
“You stepped in when Emile abandoned her, didn’t you? You raised Caleb like your own child. You were planning to marry Shannon, and Emile was ruining everything. Your law practice. Your family. Your entire life.”
Still, no answer. Not even a flinch. Which means he has a plan to get himself out of this.
I feel the car accelerate even though the road is buried in a foot of snow, nothing visible from any window.
“What are you doing?” I say, my heart racing as we skid out, then swerve back.
He keeps driving.
“Artis! Stop the car!”
He reaches back and grabs my dress in the plastic bag. He holds it up to my face, and he smiles.
“I don’t know, Ana. Did I? You had much more to lose. This dress proves you killed that trucker fifteen years ago. Dawn kept it all this time because she didn’t know what it meant—and because she didn’t want any of that night to come back to bite her.”
Right, I think. Of course—the night they told me Indy died. Because of what they did to her. The falling and the bruise and then having her disqualified. They all played a role.
Artis continues. “When I told her about the murdered trucker and the wounds in the skull, how they were shaped like a blade—she remembered that night you ran away. Right after they told you about Indy. And then she showed me the dress.”
I get it now. “So, what, you both kept this secret? To protect The Palace and Echo?”
“We also protected you. All of us. Shannon could have gone to the police when she found the dress in the dumpster. Dawn could have done the same when Shannon gave it to her. And when I read about the body and Dawn told me about that night—I could have gone to them as well.”
The car skids again, and Artis goes faster, bringing it back onto the road. The lights shine on the path carved by the plows.
And a figure up ahead. Someone walking.
“You did it to protect The Palace. Don’t pretend any of you cared about me.
I would have been fine. That man assaulted Kayla.
He’d been convicted of rape and domestic violence—it was in that article after they identified his body.
He was a predator. And Emile convinced Kayla to stay quiet.
He took her clothes. He gave her a bath. It could have destroyed her.”
I look ahead to the figure, and as a gust of wind clears away the snow, I can make out the coat. The bare head. The ponytail.
“There she is!” I tell him.
But he just keeps driving. “No, Ana. I didn’t kill Emile.”
And now he starts to move to the right, onto what would be the shoulder if it wasn’t buried in snow.
The shoulder Grace is walking on.
“What are you doing?” I ask. He’s heading right for Grace, and there’s no way she’ll hear the car with the wind whipping past her ears.
“Artis!”
“I didn’t kill Emile. And neither did Dawn or Dr. Westin.”
“It’s over!” I scream now. “Grace already told me Dawn and Westin were there! And the fourth car she saw—it had to be yours!”
And now, as he steps even harder on the gas, Grace just yards away, he says, “Maybe you’re lying.”
“What? Why would I lie?”
“Because maybe you did it,” he says. “Maybe you killed Emile.”