by Alina Adams
And, according to Robby's file, Felicia's support wasn't limited to just the adoring glances. When Rachel disappeared, so did Robby's sole source of funding (the Rose family had been paying his expenses, as wasn't uncommon in the skating world. Since male partners, especially talented ones, were so much harder to come by than females, it was assumed that the girl would bear the bulk of the costs. After all, at a certain point, buying a partner was really no different than buying the best skates or costumes or coaches. It was just another career necessity. And investment in the future). Without Rachel and her parents, though, Robby couldn't afford to continue skating at the level he'd become accustomed to (Bex briefly wondered if he shouldn't have sued for some sort of skater's alimony). He could have presumably found himself another sugar-partner, but from what Bex read, it seemed as if Robby had been pretty badly pissed off by Rachel's defection and wasn't about to risk putting his career in another person's hands again. He decided to return to the Singles career he'd abandoned after winning the U.S. Novice and Junior Championships. Which is where Felicia came in. She single-handedly took on the full, financial support of her husband, hustling for sponsors, taking out bank loans, working odd jobs, begging her own (not very happy looking, if the newspapers were to be believed) parents, all to facilitate Robby's traveling to the then U.S.S.R. for a chance to work with a legendary Russian coach. Whether or not all that intense work paid off, Bex supposed, depended primarily on your definition of "Potential," with a side dish of "Living up to." Robby won a U.S. Bronze Medal his first year competing as a Senior Man. He went on to win two silvers and even a gold. He qualified for the 1990 and the 1994 U.S. Olympic team. At the latter event, he finished fifth. Out of the medals. What did an ice-dancer she'd interviewed tell Bex last season? "Fourth place might as well be forty-fourth." What did that say about fifth place, then?
Especially since, after that Olympics, Robby Sharpton just disappeared. Well, not the way Rachel had. Robby actually followed protocol and held the perfunctory press conference, reciting how much he'd enjoyed his many diverse years as a competitor but how it was now time to move on to new challenges. His monotonous tone and lack of sincerity practically leapt off the page. In the picture, he looked shell-shocked. As if the whole time he was reading his carefully prepared statement, he was wondering where all those life plans he'd made had gone. After that lackluster performance, there were no more records on Robby Sharpton.
That was the problem with the 24/7 files. They weren't intended to be complete. They were intended to give the announcers something to talk about before and after (and, according to many skating fans, unfortunately during) the time the skater was on the ice. As soon as Robby stopped competing, 24/7 stopped keeping records on him. How very, very inconsiderate of them. Didn't they know that, what, ten years down the line, Bex would be trying to track down the missing man in the hope that he could shed some revelatory light on what had happened to his Pairs partner five years earlier? Couldn't Bex's researching predecessors have planned ahead or something?
Stuck now without any tangible leads, Bex prepared to engage in some Basic Research 101 (no, Basic Research 50—the one for Mr. Kotter's Sweathogs). The one which screamed that the logical person to call first would be Lucian Pryce, Rachel and Robby's coach at the time of the infamous disappearance. Fortunately, Bex already had a tentative, professional relationship with the man, having interviewed him a year earlier for her feature article on Toni. Lucian was the white Pairs partner with whom Toni won her National Pairs titles all those years ago. They used to teach together at the Connecticut Training Center before Lucian got an offer to head up the faculty at the Colorado OTC and left about a decade earlier. A few years after Rachel's disappearance.
When Bex initially interviewed him, he'd been very complimentary about Toni, about her skating, especially praising her perseverance and bravery in the face of obvious racism from the judges, the other skaters, and their Federation ("Can you imagine it? There were coaches who not only wouldn't dare train her, they wouldn't even let their students share the same ice! Imbeciles! She was the most talented creature in their midst and they were letting stupid politics get in the way of success! Morons! Fools! Losers!"). But, at the same time as he was going on and on about Toni's incredible courage and unequalled skating ability, he also managed to take several swipes at women skaters in general, noting how, in the past twenty years, they hadn't pushed their technical skills nearly as far as the men had, how they had a tendency to crumble in competition, how trying to seriously train one was the equivalent of riding a perennial hormone train destined for Tantrumville. In short, Lucian Pryce may have given Bex several laudatory quotes about Toni, but overall, a cloud of general misogyny appeared to hover, like smog, around each compliment. At the time, Bex wondered what else she should have expected from a man who married his first Olympic Gold Medal-winning student, despite her being ten years younger, and, shortly after she was killed in a car accident, married his second Olympic Gold Medallist—this one barely older than his daughter.
Which was why, speaking to him now by phone, Bex wasn't at all surprised to hear, after the perfunctory hellos and "Oh, yes, yes, I remember you, the girl doing Toni's piece. I saw that. Read it. There wasn't enough about me," Lucian Pryce told her. "You know what the main problem is with Pairs skating, Bex? You're absolutely required to have a girl in it."
Bex wondered if now would be a good time to tell Lucian about the new International Gay Games, which actually offered competitions for same-sex pairs and dance teams, but then she decided he wasn't the sort of man who would find the information useful or even amusing. In the year Bex had spent swirling about the skating whirlpool, she'd made one key observation: The men of figure skating all tended to fall into the categories of One: Gay, Well Adjusted, and Open; Two: Gay and Closeted, Thus Coming Off as Strangely Asexual; Three: Gay and Prone to Macho Posturing to Convince People That They Weren't; and Four: Straight and Prone to Even More Macho Posturing Lest Anyone Think They Might Belong in any of the Previous Categories. Lucian Pryce, she suspected, was definitely a Type Four kind of guy. And no, for the record, she had never, as of yet, met a skating man who fit into a possible fifth category: Straight and Secure Enough Not to Beat You Over the Head With It.
But, enough about Bex and her observations. The one thing all of the men had in common, no matter what their category, was that none of them wanted to be blatantly confronted with which segment they actually fit in. And so Bex swallowed her urge to enlighten Lucian about Dance and Pairs requirements for the International Gay Games, and instead stuck to the topic at hand, asking him, "You weren't a fan of Rachel Rose then, I take it?"
"Rachel Rose," Lucian scoffed. "She could skate, I'll give you that. A natural. Everything looked like it came easy for her. Well, I suppose being rich will help with that. She never had to work for a single thing in her life, why should skating have been any different?"
"Was she a better skater than Felicia Tufts? Did you agree with Robby's decision to change partners and skate with her, instead?"
"Agree? It was my idea! I told Robby to switch from Felicia to Rachel. You want to talk about being a natural? You take whatever Miss Rachel had, you double it, then you multiply it by a hundred and one, and you might come close to what my Robby had in just the tips of his fingers. We've got a problem here in America, Bex. I'm sure you know, you've been to Nationals. Our boy skaters, they're horrible. Putrid. Oh, not all of them. Just most. And you know why that is?"
"Um? Why?" Bex was having a hard time figuring out which questions were rhetorical and which ones required at least a grunt on her part. This seemed to be the latter.
"It's because we all grow up being taught to think you can't be masculine and graceful at the same time. Bullshit! You ever see a boxer dancing around his opponent? A football player outrunning an entire defensive line? A basketball player hovering suspended in midair for a slam dunk? That isn't grace? It's poetry in motion! But try to convince a boy to do th
e same thing on the ice, and suddenly you're putting him on a one-way train to Faggotville!"
Now Bex really did have to physically bite her tongue to keep from asking if Faggotville might be on the way to Tantrumville, and what sort of thesaurus-challenged people were naming all these fine towns, anyway?
"So who do we get in our figure skating programs? The best of the best? The boys with the most athletic potential? The gifted ones who could have just as easily been champion boxers or football and basketball players? No! We get the kids too spastic to stay upright in hockey, so their parents stick them in figure skating to use up the lessons they already paid for! Oh, well, them and the actual fags, of course, but there's nothing you can do about them, and at least those boys have some potential, if only as costume designers farther down the line. But the rest? The rest? The ones who've failed at absolutely every other athletic endeavor? These are the ones we're supposed to turn into champions? It's a travesty. It's a national disgrace!"
"Except for Robby Sharpton," Bex prompted. Much as she enjoyed listening to right wing rants on a variety of subjects, she did have a reason for making this call. And she was paying for the long distance, too.
"Except for Robby Sharpton. Pure talent and a real man's man, to boot. He was lucky I rescued him from Toni when I did. A few more months with her and ..." Lucian sighed. "Don't get me wrong, Toni is a fine enough coach for girls. She's got a lot to teach them, if maybe not all about skating, at least about being a lady. Toni's an honest-to-goodness lady and that's important, a lot of those spoiled brats would do well to take a lesson. But, give her a boy to teach and, what do you know, a couple of years down the line, she's turned him into a girl as sure as if she'd taken a pair of scissors to his balls!"
Bex winced at the vivid imagery. And thought of Jeremy Hunt. He certainly hadn't seemed castrated to her.
"You took over teaching Robby from Toni?"
"I had to. Couldn't let her turn a boy that good into a girl. Besides, Toni doesn't train real champions. Everyone knows that."
Yes, apparently….
"I taught Robby singles for a couple of years. Took him to National Champion in Novice and in Junior, too. But, the problem is, you want to make that jump to Seniors, you need money. A lot of it. And Robby didn't even have a little. Kid practically slept and ate at the rink, and I don't think I ever saw his parents around. I gave him lessons for free. Got the club to throw in free ice-time, too, on account of his being so good and representing us at Nationals. But, when it came time to move up to Seniors, I didn't know what we were going to do. That's why, when the Tufts came to me and asked if Robby would be interested in doing Pairs with Felicia—them picking up all the expenses, of course—I had to say yes. Only way Robby could keep skating, really. And Felicia, she was a good little skater. Hard worker. Got too nervous, though, in competition. Robby really had to put up with a lot from her. She'd cry and make herself sick practically every day. And she could never really take some constructive criticism. High-strung, that was the thing. Rachel was better in that respect. Cool. Too cool, I suppose. That Grace Kelly I'm-above-it-all sort of thing. Mommy and Daddy's little Princess. You should have seen her—them. The Roses thought, since they were paying for the lessons and the costumes and the ice and the travel, that meant they owned Robby. Like he was a puppy they picked up from the pound. They told him what to wear and what to say and how to stand up practically. It was sickening. They didn't appreciate what they had. A partner that good comes along maybe once in a lifetime, and Rachel treated him like garbage. She barely let him get a sentence out. Rachel picked their music, Rachel picked their costumes, Rachel had approval over their pictures for the programs and any publicity shots. Also, she wouldn't let him touch her unless they were on the ice. Even then, for a split second, she'd get this look on her face, like he made her skin crawl."
"How did he stand it?" Bex asked.
"Well, first of all, he knew she was his only shot at hitting it big. It wasn't just the money, we might have been able to get another girl to pony up the money, Robby was a hot property and practically everybody but the Roses knew it. The problem was, despite her attitude and her fancy airs, the girl—damn it—the girl was a good skater. Nerves of steel, perfect in practice and perfect in competition. And they looked like magic together. Their legs matched, their arms matched; hell, in the middle of a program, they even breathed in sync. They were the perfect pairs team. It wasn't fair, but it was true."
"So Robby kept skating with Rachel, even though he hated her, because he didn't think he'd ever find another partner as good?"
Lucian sighed. Bex imagined she could feel the phone wire between them trembling from the weighty angst he managed to infuse into that one exhaled breath. He said, "Robby kept skating with Rachel because the poor, deluded boy was madly in love with her."
"He was? Really? Even after the way she treated him?"
Another sigh. Another trembling wire. And then, the final profundity. "Bex, I'm afraid the reason the boy was so mad for that little bitch was precisely because of the way she treated him."
At that point, Bex suspected that Lucian Pryce's general misogyny had just slipped over the rim into a general distaste for the whole human race.
Things were definitely getting psychologically interesting, but at that point, Bex really had only one more pertinent question to ask him. "Mr. Pryce, do you have any idea why Rachel Rose disappeared the way she did fifteen years ago? And where she might have gone?"
"She disappeared, Bex, because Rachel Rose always did whatever she damn well pleased whenever it damn well pleased her, regardless of who it affected or hurt. And where she went, I can only say I hope it was straight to hell, for what she did to Robby."
Well, wasn't that terribly pleasant? It was even enlightening, if one didn't fancy the word enlightening to mean "shedding some light on the particular issue at hand," rather than on the state of the union in general. Lucian Pryce was certainly a wealth of information. Bex only wished some of it was useful in helping her track down an errant skater or two. Or three. Because as long as Bex had no idea how to go about finding Rachel Rose, she figured the least she could do was go for the next best thing and try to track down either Robby or his partner turned adoring wife, Felicia.
As a child of the new millennium, it never occurred to Bex to look in the phone book or to call 411 to check on contact information for either a Robby or Felicia Sharpton. For Bex, hitting the obvious meant hitting the Internet. Was there another way to find things out?
Bex typed "Robby Sharpton" & Felicia & skating into her favorite search engine, knowing that, without the latter word, she'd be flooded with results on anyone who happened to share their names. She waited for a fraction of a second, wondering how, in the olden days, people survived being put on hold, or worse, waiting for a letter to arrive. And then, she got her results.
The link on top was an extract from a nine-year-old newspaper article. Detailing how ex-skating star Robby Sharpton had just been sentenced to an eighteen-month prison term.
For assault.
CHAPTER EIGHT
And not, it seemed, just any old assault. This wasn't some bar fight or an argument gone bad over who had the better Salchow. The charge was assault and spousal abuse. According to the newspaper article, Robby had beaten Felicia violently enough to put her in the hospital. It wasn't the first time, either, just the first time that charges were pressed.
According to the article, Robby Sharpton had quite a problem keeping his temper and his fists to himself when it came to women.
The article did not happen to mention that Robby's last Pairs partner had disappeared without a trace. But, it was the first thing that flashed through Bex's mind.
And, on the spot, she had a new theory: Robby killed Rachel. It was obvious.
Now, all she had to do was prove it.
And how hard could that be?
Two hours later, Bex was willing to concede that it might be a little trickier than s
he initially assumed. Despite diligently poking around on the Internet, typing in every relevant word she could think of and following up on what seemed like the most obscure but possibly relevant links, she had yet to turn up any irrefutable evidence to back up her latest conjecture. Imagine that! Who would have thought she'd have trouble turning up a Web site conveniently called, "YesRobbyDidIt.com."
Well, all right, so Bex hadn't really expected to come across "HeresWhoKilledRachel.com" (it would have been nice, but there was no breath-holding involved). Nevertheless, a clue, or, at the very least, a phone number (in a bow to tradition, Bex had eventually turned to 411—well, 411 on-line) would have been helpful. Instead, at the end of the fruitless two hours, Bex gave up and decided it was time to turn retro and actually contact a human being for the information she needed.
Bex called Toni.
It was a cop-out and she knew it. It didn't feel like real research if, whenever you needed something, you went running to a source. Even if that was how the old muckrakers and Pulitzer Prize winners did it. But, what did they know? Bex bet, if they'd had the Internet, they'd have never left their comfy homes to dig around in slaughterhouses and war zones and whatnot.
Bex called Toni and asked if she knew how to get in touch with Robby Sharpton. Wasn't there some ex-skaters' newsletter everyone subscribed to? Like an alumni bulletin?
