by Alina Adams
Craig, who'd had one foot out the door, stopped and turned all the way back in. "Does anybody think he was?"
"Yeah," Bex sheepishly admitted.
"Who?"
"Me?"
Unlike Toni and Gil and Sabrina and Gina and let's not forget the police detective, Craig gave the matter due consideration. He said, "Well, your instincts have never been wrong before."
"Except that time I thought you killed Rachel."
"Except then, yes."
"You really think I could be right?"
"I don't know. But I believe you'll get to the bottom of this, one way or another."
"You know, you're really way too nice to me."
"Yeah. That's one of the side effects to being in love with you."
She blushed so furiously, Bex was surprised the rink's cooling system didn't kick into overdrive just to keep the ice from melting. Craig was always saying stuff like that. Unexpectedly and un-self-consciously, too. And Bex never knew how to react. She wondered if it was simply a matter of maturity — and her lack thereof. Or whether it was something more sinister. And a much deeper, fundamental lack.
"Sorry," Craig apologized again. "That wasn't exactly space giving."
"It's my fault. I'm acting stupid."
"I'll leave you alone."
"Please don't."
Craig apparently found her bipolar disorder amusing. He smiled. "Okay."
"I just feel so... blah."
"That's an interesting state of mind."
"I feel like there's something going on here. Something more than what it seems. But everyone is acting like I'm nuts. And not just Gil. That I'm used to. Toni says there is absolutely no reason why anyone would want to kill Lucian. And his daughter, Sabrina, she did this whole dramatic thing about how all of his students adored him so it's not like they'd lift a finger to hurt him. Now I'm sure this was more about her own issues than about any particular thing I brought up. But it's hard not to feel like you're the crazy one when everybody around you is insisting the guy you think was murdered was categorically loved by one and all and – "
"Lucian Pryce was hardly loved by one and all, Bex. Yes, he had his obsessive acolytes, like well, Eleanor Quinn and Gina Gregory. I'd say marrying the guy was pretty obsessive. And Chris Kelly and Robby Sharpton — though you know how well that last one turned out in the end. But for every Chris and Robby you had a Felicia Tufts or a Rachel Rose — remember them? Obviously, neither is here to do the deed. But do you doubt that they'd at least considered it over the years?”
Bex recalled the hell Lucian had reportedly put both his former skaters through, and she grasped the wisdom of Craig's point. However... "Like you said, neither one of them is here. Neither, for all I know, is any other student with an axe to grind. I mean, if they hated him, they wouldn't exactly show up to skate in his honor, would they?”
"What about Gabrielle Cassidy?”
"What about her?”
"Gabrielle is a couple of years younger than Rachel, but their training time with Lucian overlapped by a few years. They didn't know each other that well; Pairs and Dance don't share sessions. But I could have sworn there was some incident between Lucian and Gabrielle that he tried to hush up. I remember Rachel mentioning the name for sure, and some scandal."
Gabrielle Cassidy was staying at the same official hotel as Bex and everyone else who'd come to town for the tribute. Bex cabbed it back to home base and, without bothering to call first, went knocking on the good PhD's door. She'd learned a long time ago that forewarned was forearmed with a better lie. Truth tended to come out smoother when served as a side dish to ambush.
Of course, Bex didn't leap right into the cross-examination. She opened with, "I spoke to Gil Cahill. He said the show will go on as scheduled. It will still be a tribute to Lucian's life and career. Just posthumous now."
"Great!" Gabrielle enthused. She obviously bounced back from the shock of death rather quickly. "Chris and I have actually prepared a number to do together. It was like pulling teeth, believe me. You know how those Singles skaters are. They think sure, ice dancing belongs in the Olympics — the Special Olympics. But since my partner, Todd Zamir, died a couple of years ago, Chris agreed to step in and do a few moves with me. To honor Lucian. He'll still skate a solo, too, of course. But we did work pretty hard on our routine. I'd hate for it to go to waste."
"I'm surprised," Bex said.
"About Chris? He could have made a pretty good ice dancer, you know. But there's more glory in the Singles."
"No. About you."
"What about me?”
"That you're here."
"Without Todd?"
Bex had never been to a psychologist (though many had suggested it might be an excellent idea), but she couldn't help feeling she was getting a bit of that treatment now. Was Gabrielle messing with her?
"No," Bex replied patiently. "That you agreed to skate at a tribute for Lucian. I hear you two didn't get along too well."
Gabrielle shrugged. "That was all a long time ago. I was a kid."
"Still..."
"Still what?"
"It must be hard for you, being around everyone who thought so highly of him."
"The same people who thought highly of Lucian a decade ago still think highly of him now. And, amazingly enough, even people who didn't think highly of him then, once he made them a champion were able to miraculously reassess their opinions."
Ah, there's that bitterness Bex was eagerly awaiting.
"So you weren't one of his bigger fans?"
"Look, let's stop beating around the bush, okay? You're here to dig up dirt for the TV special, I get that. I also get that no matter how hard Lucian tried to pretend nothing happened, everyone in skating knew then and knows now what I did. I'm not trying to hide it. If anything, that's why I opened my own training center."
See Bex. See Bex lose the conversation's narrative thread. Backpedal, Bex; backpedal to figure out what you just missed.
"Excuse me?"
"I want to prove to the world that you don't have to drive a child to mental and physical collapse before you get a result out of him or her. Champions don't only have to be made the Lucian Pryce way. You can train an athlete under calm, nurturing conditions and still get the best out of them."
"Right," Bex said. She'd read the brochure for Gabrielle's facility when it first opened. She remembered the pitch.
"I thought parents would be happy to send their children someplace where we cared about them as people, not just little skating drones."
"They're not?”
"Well, not enough of them... I mean, we get regular inquiries, especially from parents of kids who have burned out elsewhere. But, the problem is, our competitive record..."
"Isn't very competitive?"
"You could say that. In three years, none of my students has made it out of Sectionals. That's not the kind of result destined to drive customers to your doorstep. That's why I wanted to skate this tribute so badly. I wanted to get the word out about my training center. I thought the more who knew about it, the more likely it was we'd attract like-minded people to enroll."
"So paying homage to Lucian was a marketing opportunity for you?"
"And it wasn't for 24/7?" Gabrielle challenged.
Bex shrugged. "Hey, I'm not judging, just trying to figure stuff out."
"It's pretty simple. Lucian Pryce ruined my life. I figured the least I could do was take his to help put mine back together."
CHAPTER SIX – GABRIELLE
Gabrielle Cassidy's parents were not wannabe athletes who lived their frustrated ambitions out through the accomplishments of their four children. Gabrielle's father had been High School All-City in tennis, swimming, and track. He'd qualified for the Olympic Trials in the pentathlon in college and, as an adult, earned a seeded spot in both the New York City and Boston marathons. Gabrielle's mother had been a nationally ranked Junior golfer at the age of twelve, a collegiate champion at eighteen, and sh
e continued to play semi-professionally while raising her family and serving as a circuit court judge. The Cassidys didn't force their children into sports. They simply could not imagine a happy, fulfilling life without them.
To that end, they allowed each child to experiment with a variety of activities until they found the one destined to be a lifelong passion. Naturally, the possibility that such an epiphany might fail to occur never crossed their minds. Their older son gravitated towards baseball, the younger to gymnastics. Their older daughter picked up a bow and arrow and proceeded never to put it down again. And then there was the case of the baby, Gabrielle. Gabrielle ended up in figure skating because it was clearly the activity she had the most aptitude for. Which, to her parents, was the same as enthusiasm.
Not to Gabrielle.
Sure, gliding and turning and brackets and Choctaws and Mohawks and twizzles came easy for her. Sure, she could do them without thinking while other girls spent hours upon hours with tongues clenched between their teeth just trying to get one of the tricks to flow smoothly. So what if, after only three months of lessons, she passed the tests for twelve compulsory dances and qualified for the Intermediate level of competition on her first try? It didn't mean she liked it. Neither did the fact that, by the time she was ten, Gabrielle had made it up to the Senior and International level by passing her Austrian Waltz, Cha Cha Congelado, Golden Waltz, Midnight Blues, Ravensburger Waltz, Rhumba, Silver Samba, Tango Romantica, and Yankee Polka.
To her parents, though, it meant that Gabrielle was clearly ready for the same sort of intense, specialized instruction they'd been so happy to give their other children in their respective sports. Those three had eventually needed to move away from home to elite training centers to continue with their concentrated lessons. Her parents understood that Gabrielle would have to do the same.
Whether or not Gabrielle wanted to do this never came up. Years later, when her dance partner, Todd, asked, "Why didn't you tell your parents you didn't like any of this?" she'd answered truthfully and somewhat confusedly, "They never asked."
In the same way in which her parents believed they'd never pressured Gabrielle in which sport to take up, the Cassidys also believed it was Gabrielle's choice as to which coach she wanted to take lessons from. The summer between seventh and eighth grade, they piled into the family camper and took a road trip across the country, visiting various training centers, meeting coaches, and allowing Gabrielle to decide which one she thought would be best for her.
The first coach she auditioned was a world-famous Russian defector who looked at the five-foot-two, eighty-three-pound Gabrielle and told her parents, "Girl needs a bit more of skinny, yes?”
The second asked her how long she practiced every day. When Gabrielle told him two hours before school and two hours after, he snorted and judged her not disciplined enough yet to join his group.
The third said Gabrielle had been coached all wrong, she would need to relearn every dance again from the beginning, while the fourth said her technique was too European and the fifth insisted it was much too American.
All of them stressed that the hours would be long, the training excruciating, and the atmosphere less than collegiate — "Competition between students, that's the only way to bring out the killer instinct. Physical and mental. Once a skater gets complacent, it's all over." However, if Gabrielle's parents were ready to pay, the coaches were ready to train her.
Gabrielle's sixth tryout was with Lucian Pryce, then based in Connecticut.
He gave her a twenty-minute lesson during which he never left the barrier, never put down the lit cigar he was holding (or bothered to blow smoke in the opposite direction of her face whenever Gabrielle came up for feedback on what she'd just done), and never offered a remark beyond, "Do it again. That wasn't it."
By the time Gabrielle got off the ice, she felt as though she'd been pummeled. Although, to be fair, Lucian hadn't laid a hand on her.
"So you didn't like Mr. Pryce, either, Gabby?" Any other parent might have been frustrated or even discouraged. But the only time either of her parents acknowledged the existence of such words was at spelling bees (which they didn't consider a real sport, but good, competitive fun, nonetheless).
"Not really," she admitted.
"Well, we've got you booked to spend the night at the training center's dorms, anyway. Why don't you check out how you like it, and we'll regroup in the morning to reassess where we stand. Okey-dokey, Smokey?”
"Okay," Gabrielle said.
The dorm rooms at the Connecticut Olympic Training Center were more or less in line with what she'd already visited all across the country. Four girls to a room, two bunk beds, one closet, two tall dressers with a minimum of one drawer standing open. A pile of discarded socks, hair ribbons, and unmatched shoes in the corner, a bathroom down the hall. The girls, also, were more or less standard issue. In this case, two were white, one Asian. No one was over five feet tall or one hundred pounds — including skates. They slept in size-large T-shirts with either the word "Regional," "Sectional," or "National" emblazoned across the silk screen of an abstract skater doing a layback or a stag jump. All three were adequately polite, saying hi to Gabrielle, asking how she liked the center, then ignoring her completely. Gabrielle didn't particularly mind. She had as little to say to them as they did to her. Besides, she didn't intend to stay.
When it was time to get ready for bed, she pulled out her own size-large T-shirt, this one from her sister's last archery competition. It got Gabrielle a few curious looks, followed by an ultimate shrug of indifference. She crawled under the scratchy blanket, not surprised to discover it smelled of a combination of bleach and vague dampness, and waited to find out which abstract sound would be keeping her awake this night. Because there was always something. If not a renegade car alarm, then a heating system going on and off arbitrarily with a hammering clang. If not a snoring roommate, then a coughing one.
Here in Connecticut, it proved to be a combination of the Asian girl mumbling in her sleep, "Cross behind, then turn. Cross behind, then turn," and, around midnight, an unexpected crash that seemed to emanate from somewhere down the hall. Then a pair of raised voices, not quite arguing, but not exactly keeping it down, either.
Gabrielle stayed still for a moment, wondering if this was par for the course. No one else seemed disturbed by the racket. Then again, Gabrielle was willing to bet no one else was nicknamed "The Princess and the Pea of Sound" by her family thanks to an uncanny ability to wake up at the slightest pin drop somewhere in the same area code.
The shouting continued, piquing Gabrielle's curiosity. What was so important that it necessitated an argument in the middle of the night? Especially since it was very likely that the participants needed to be up in a mere few hours for the first ice session of the day. Figuring she wouldn't be getting to sleep until it was over anyway, Gabrielle slipped out of bed, shrugged on her terry-cloth robe, and, barefoot, padded down the hall.
The last room before the stairs leading to the next floor proved to be an office. At least that's what Gabrielle assumed it was used for during a normal day. At the moment, it looked more like the aftermath of a tornado. Papers were scattered over and around the desk as if somebody had snatched them up in wild handfuls, then flung them in the air. A chair lay on its side, not tucked in the nook of the desk, but by the door. Shards of glass sparkled on the floor next to broken picture frames that had clearly been ripped off the walls and smashed. Amongst the carnage stood Mr. Pryce, dressed in a jogging suit of baby blue bottom and dark green top, indicating that Lucian had thrown on the first things he got his hands on without worry for color coordination. His hair was uncombed and one of his sneakers flapped off and on as he tramped about the room, apparently trying to calm down a student in the middle of a hysterical rampage.
The student, it took Gabrielle a moment to recognize, was the Olympic champion Christian Kelly. Despite being in the skating world, Gabrielle wasn't particularly a fan of the sport. No
t like her siblings, who worshiped the respective winners in their fields and plastered their rooms back home with posters of assorted champs mid-spectacular-action. Gabrielle would under normal circumstances be hard-pressed to identify the winners of last year's World or National Championships. But Chris Kelly was different. He'd won the Olympics the season before. And in the Cassidy household, watching the Olympics — Summer and Winter — was a nonnegotiable event, like tooth brushing or looking both ways before crossing the street. So she'd had her fill of Chris Kelly. On the ice, off the ice, skating, interviewing, strolling about the Olympic Village deep in cinematic thought.
Right now, however, he appeared to be deep in borderline psychotic meltdown.
It was obvious from the way Lucian was fruitlessly struggling to pin Chris's arms to his sides and grabbing him from behind as if in a wrestling hold, that Chris was responsible for all the damage to the office. And he wasn't using only his hands for the rampage. He kicked a solid wood chair to knock it over. He was wearing sneakers. Gabrielle couldn't imagine how a blow of such magnitude didn't send excruciating pain shooting all along his foot and straight up to Chris's spine. He twisted his upper body, trying to wrench out of Lucian's grip, but the older man had gotten a better grasp this time around and managed to keep him pinned. He shook Chris from side to side, trying to calm him down, and then yelled, "Christian! Christian, listen to me!"
Chris continued struggling. But he did inch his head ever so slightly in Lucian's direction. Clearly, after years of automatic compliance to Lucian's instructions, it was a tough habit to break, even amidst hysteria.
"Listen to me, son." Lucian's voice, commanding only a split second before, grew softer, almost hypnotic. "There is nothing you can do about it, do you hear me? You can rage all you like. You can curse and you can flail and you can promise revenge, but in the end, there is absolutely nothing you can do to keep some idiotic, moronic, irresponsible drunk driver from taking to the streets and recklessly plowing into your wife's car." Chris whimpered at that, but Lucian kept talking. "Just like there is nothing you can do to stop an insidious, cruel disease from taking her away from you before you even know it's set to happen. There is nothing that men like you and me can do about those things. They are out of our control. They are arbitrary and capricious and merciless. But you know what we can control? We can control you. We can control your training, your physicality, your performance. The rest of the world, they're out of our influence. But what you do on the ice is not. That's why the only way to respond to what goes on out there, is for you to return back here. This is where you belong. This is the only place on Earth where your life and your fate are your own. Do you understand me, son? This is the only place where you can be in charge of your destiny. Do you understand what I am telling you?"
