Figure Skating Mystery Series: 5 Books in 1

by Alina Adams

  "Our Gina has had a rather difficult day," Chris jumped in, meeting Bex's eyes with a look half forceful, half pleading. "She isn't — she's not herself. It — Lucian — it's been rough on everybody."

  "I understand," Bex said. And she did. In the abstract. Of course a woman who'd just lost her husband was allowed an eccentric reaction or two. The only problem was, of the three people currently in the room, Gina was looking the most tranquil. Unable to think of an appropriate follow-up, Bex decided to change the subject completely and asked, "What did the police want?”

  "Just, you know, they had some questions about Lucian and his overall health and his skating routine, that sort of thing. For their report. The police love their reports."

  "So they're still treating this as just an accident?"

  "Oh, what is your problem?" Gina snapped.

  "Jeans..." Chris sounded like he was warning her about something, but Gina plowed right over him.

  "I mean, really, Bex, I know all about you and your super-skating-sleuth skills, but come on, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, you know what I mean?"

  Chris slid his hand under Gina's elbow and attempted to help her up. "Come now, let's take a break. You need to calm down."

  "I'm calm!" she screeched. "Why doesn't anybody get it? I am the calmest I have ever been in my whole damn existence!"

  Chris took a step back, arms raised as if in surrender. "It's all right, luv."

  "Well, thanks for telling me. Now I can get on with my life."

  "I was only trying to — "

  "I know what you were trying to, okay? If there's one thing I'm finally real, real clear on, Chris, it's what you're trying to."

  Chris looked apologetically at Bex. "She's..."

  "Stressed. I know. I understand."

  Chris leaned over and tried to kiss Gina on the cheek. Gina jerked away. Chris nearly lost his balance but was able to use the catlike grace that had saved many a triple jump from going wonky to retain his dignity. He said softly, "I'm going to take off now, all right? I'll check in on you later."

  "Whatever."

  Chris asked Bex, "Did you ever get an answer, then? Is the tribute show to go on as scheduled?"

  "Oh!" Bex remembered her initial excuse for coming over, feeling silly for having forgotten it in all the excitement. "Yes. Yes, it is. Still going on as scheduled. Obviously we're going to have to tweak some of the copy. But the special is still set for broadcast."

  "Whoop-de-doo," Gina said and threw what once might have been a black, floor-length silk skirt up into the air.

  Clearly unable to match such a dramatic sentiment, Chris merely nodded. "Fine. We'll get to rehearsing, then. I suppose I should speak to Toni about the rink's practice time availability?”

  "I guess," Bex agreed.

  "I will see you both later," Chris said, though his eyes never left Gina until he was actually out the door. Bex wondered what he expected Gina to do in his absence. And then she wondered what Chris was so afraid she would do in his absence.

  Bex said, "I guess you and Chris go way back. Winning the Olympics the same year and all."

  Gina shrugged. "It was his second time. I was the virgin. Pretty sure it didn't mean as much to him as it did to me."

  Bex didn't need a degree in comparative literature from Sarah Lawrence — which she technically did not have, but could have considering how many courses she took in the subject — to understand that Gina's phrase probably covered a bit more than mere skating.

  She was about to pursue the topic further when Gina stood up, kicked the piles of clothes aside, and blurted, "You know yet what you're going to want me to say?”

  "What do you mean?”

  "At the tribute. On TV. You said you're going to tweak the copy. So, I figure at some point the teary-eyed widow's got to make an appearance and sob something for the cameras. Otherwise, how are people going to feel they got their money's worth?”

  "I — I thought there'd be something you'd want to say."

  "Oh, there's lots I want to say," Gina assured. "Starting with: Hey, Mr. and Mrs. American and All the Ships at Sea — do we still have ships at sea? Should I say 'rockets in space' or something? Hey, Mr. and Mrs. America, this is Gina Gregory. Yeah, Gina Gregory. Not Eleanor Pryce. Did you know that? I bet it was hard to tell, what with me skating like her and dressing like her and talking like her and marrying her husband. I bet you all never knew I was a different person, did you?”

  Once again, Bex didn't need a degree to pick up on the veiled subtext. What with it not being so veiled and all.

  She said, "Lucian tried to turn you into Eleanor?"

  "What gave it away?" With her foot, Gina kicked the pile of clothes. With her free arm, she indicated the pile of cosmetics on the vanity.

  "Why?" The question was out of Bex's mouth before she knew what sort of answer she was hoping to receive. All she knew was what answer she was most certainly not hoping to receive.

  "Because," Gina spoke as if to a dullard. "He wished I was her."

  And there that answer was. Even a dullard could see it.

  "How — how can you be certain?"

  "The part where he tried to turn me into the mirror image of his dead wife, Bex. Were you listening?" Gina's response was flip. But, when she saw the look of utter devastation on Bex's face, her demeanor suddenly turned serious and, as if actually, genuinely concerned, Gina asked her, "Why are you so interested?"

  "What? Me? No, no reason. I'm just doing research. For the special."

  "Yeah. And I'm just doing spring cleaning," Gina said.

  Bex waved her hand in the air, fingers splayed, striving for a nonchalance that, even if she had managed to pull it off, wouldn't have fooled anyone. "It's just that, the guy — the guy that I'm dating now. He's — he's a widower, too. And he's older than me. Not a lot. But enough. And he has a kid. And — "

  "He skates?"

  "No. Not that." Bex attempted a laugh, demonstrating how not seriously she was taking all of this, then sheepishly admitted, "His kid skates, though."

  "Oh, well, in that case, it's a totally different matter."

  Bex looked up hopefully, only to realize Gina was being sarcastic. She'd known that. She'd just been... hoping... she wasn't.

  "I know it can be hard," Bex admitted. “Trying to follow in the footsteps of somebody else. Especially somebody he was really crazy about."

  "It's not hard," Gina said.

  "No?"

  "It's impossible."

  "Oh."

  "Every time he says something to you, you wonder, did he say the same thing to her? Every time you do something and he doesn't like it, you wonder, did he like it better when she did it? And even when he does like it, you just wonder, is it because I remind him of her?"

  "All the time?”

  "All the frigging, every minute of the day, time. It can drive you crazy. You start second-guessing yourself about every little thing."

  "But you stayed married to Lucian," Bex pointed out. "You didn't need to. You could have left. You could have moved on. It's not like, once you say yes to marriage, you're trapped for life."

  Gina sighed. "Eventually, it gets so hard to think for yourself — because of all the doubts — that you just give it up. You do what he says, how he says it, when he says it, and you don't fight it. And then he's happy. And you're miserable. If there is still a you left to feel anything at all."

  Following her delightful conversation with Gina, Bex left the bedroom, walked down the stairs and towards the front door on the equivalent of automatic pilot.

  She practically bumped into Sabrina as they both rounded the same corner at the same time from different directions, barely recognizing her, so lost was Bex in her own thoughts.

  "So what did the stepmoron have to say for herself?" Sabrina asked lightly.

  Bex, as if waking up still groggy from anesthesia, merely shook her head and continued walking towards the door.

  "Bex. Wait." Sabrina thrust out her a
rm to block Bex's path. "Do you have a second? I — I need to talk to you."

  Bex paused. She may have been trapped in a vision of a future even more hellish than anything Dickens dreamt up for Ebenezer Scrooge, but that didn't mean the research part of her was totally out of commission. If there was one thing she'd learned over the past few months of amateur snooping, it was when someone wanted to speak to her — especially if they seemed cryptic and hesitant about it — it would behoove Bex to listen.

  She stopped. She said, "I'm listening."

  Sabrina looked around, as if expecting eavesdroppers. When none materialized, she let out one breath, took a second, deep one, then let it out slowly, the air from her mouth ruffling her bangs. She said, "You're the only one... I mean, you said earlier. No one else... The police, they're acting like... You're the only one who seems to think my dad's death wasn't an accident."

  Bex nodded. She wanted to hear what else Sabrina had to say.

  After a mutual moment of silence, Sabrina demanded, "Is it true?"

  "I don't know. I'm trying to get more information but — "

  "Well, you won't get anything useful out of Gina."

  Actually, Bex felt like she already had. But it probably wasn't what Sabrina had in mind. On the other hand, overbearing husbands did have a nasty tendency to end up dead. And their put-upon wives were, more often than not, at least in the vicinity.

  Bex said, "Gina seemed to have a lot of... anger... towards Lucian."

  "What? Did she give you the 'it gets so hard to think for yourself that you just give in and do whatever he likes' speech?"

  "Um... well, yeah."

  "Yeah. It's a classic. We've all heard it. The only problem is, Gina forgets her giving in and obeying Lucian has little to do with my father, and even less to do with my mother. It's all about Chris Kelly."

  "Chris Kelly," Bex repeated.

  "Everything Gina does, one way or another, comes back to Chris. Heck, I'm pretty sure she even only married Lucian because of what Chris did to her."

  CHAPTER EIGHT - GINA

  Unlike 99 percent of the students who came under Lucian's — or, frankly, any skating coach's — elite tutelage, Gina Gregory possessed something the rest did not. Gina genuinely and completely and unabashedly loved to skate.

  She loved it when she stepped onto the ice for the first time at the age of three. She loved it through group lessons and private lessons and reconstructive surgery on her elbow after she broke it trying a Double Axel when she could barely do a single. She was always the first girl at the rink when it opened in the morning and the last one off the ice, even as the Zamboni was rumbling out of the gate to signal an end of session for the night. She was always the one eager to try a trick once more to get it perfect, never complaining about injuries or not having enough time to do other, normal-kid things.

  Gina Gregory would have been the perfect student. Except that, like 99 percent of the students who came under any skating coach's elite tutelage, she also had something the rest of them did — a mother keenly interested in her child's progress.

  Tina Gregory was the reason Lucian Pryce initially refused to take on Gina. Yes, he saw how talented the girl was. Yes, he saw how teachable she was and how easy to deal with. But her mother was a horror. And Lucian was no fool.

  It wasn't until Gina was twelve years old and picked one morning when Lucian was teaching another skater to circle him incessantly and keep doing Double Axel after Double Axel after Double Axel until Lucian was dizzy — even if she wasn't — that he threw up his hands, laughed, and gave in.

  For the next decade, he had cause to regret it every day of his life.

  Not because of Gina. Gina was exactly what he'd expected. But because of Tina. Because Tina was exactly what he'd expected, too. (When a woman tells you she named her only daughter after herself—G[regory] + [T]ina = Gina — you kind of know what you're in for.)

  Tina Gregory wasn't just content to, like the other mothers, sit rinkside every day and coach her daughter from the sidelines — even though she was ostensibly paying Lucian good money to do the same thing. Serious money. Top dollar, as a matter of fact. (Lucian believed customers understood they were getting the best only if they were also paying the most.) No, Tina prided herself on cornering Lucian each and every time he stepped off the ice, so they could have a little confab about Gina's progress and potential. And when Lucian came home at the end of the day, more often than not, the phone would already be ringing, and it would be Tina on the other end, with yet another question or notion. They talked about Gina's programs. They talked about Gina's music. They talked about her costumes and her diet and her ballet lessons that Lucian insisted she take to lose some of the coltish qualities that judges tended to disdain in their international-level skaters. But, most of all, they talked about the fact that Gina thought too much.

  The older she got, the more it became a problem.

  By the time she turned sixteen, Gina was, even in the opinion of her fiercest (and cattiest) competitors, the World Ladies' champion of the practice ice. Fortunately for her competitors, however, about half the time now, her championship moves remained right there on the practice ice. All because, when it came time for competition, Gina started thinking.

  She thought about which girls might be able to outskate her, and she thought about which moves she was most likely to miss. As a result, she missed the moves and the girls she most feared did, in fact, outskate her.

  Lucian realized soon enough that Gina's best performances took place when she didn't have time to overthink them. Most girls hated to draw first to skate in the Short Program. Common wisdom held that judges "saved" their marks, meaning that the skater who went first could never hope to score as high as the one who went last, even if their actual performances were identical. Lucian believed "saving" marks to be an actual phenomenon. But he also knew that it was better for Gina, and so he rejoiced when she pulled her arm out of the sorting hat with a single-digit number. Unfortunately, Gina skating so well in the Short Program meant she was usually scheduled to skate in the final group for the Long. And that left more thinking time than anybody felt comfortable with.

  Since Lucian couldn't very well (no matter what his own competitors believed) fix the draw to assure Gina going early in the Short, and since he couldn't change the rules to keep her from ending up in the final group for the Long, Lucian went with the factors he thought he still might be able to affect, and banned Tina from attending competitions alongside her child. He'd believed for years that Tina and her never-ending need to discuss every bit of minutia surrounding her daughter's career was what filled Gina's head with the stress and anxiety that then tripped her up. So Lucian gave Tina a choice: Either she stay away from Gina at competition (and that meant far away; not in another room, not in another hotel, but preferably in another state) or Lucian would walk away from coaching her. After several years of having paid top dollar for every lesson, Tina was adequately convinced that Lucian was the best coach available, and so knew enough to back away when faced with such an ultimatum.

  Initially, Lucian's gamble worked. Without her mother constantly whispering in her ear, Gina did grow more relaxed about such issues as her program, her music, her costumes, her competition, and her chances. She trusted that she could skate as well when it counted as when it didn't. But, without her mother to take care of the associated details like she always had, Gina replaced her previous performance anxiety with a new list of worries: What if she didn't fill out her entry paperwork correctly, what if her plane wasn't on time, what if her luggage got lost, what if she misplaced her room key, what if she missed the practice bus, what if she misread her schedule, what if, what it, what if... The girl was a twitching bundle of nerves and Lucian was getting sick of it. So he went with yet another Plan B. Lucian always had a Plan B in case things didn't go according to plan. He'd learned it from coaching Toni.

  To execute Gina's Plan B, Lucian sent in Chris Kelly.

  Chris
, at this point, was the undisputed king of the Pryce skating stable. Having won Olympic Gold two years earlier, then followed it up with a World Championship that year and the next, Chris was, at age twenty-two, the best-known name in Men's skating. In addition, having obviously gotten over the death of his wife from a year before, he was the acknowledged catch in the very small pool of male skaters who were successful, good-looking, and most important, straight. And Chris knew it.

  He'd gone through at least a half dozen girlfriends since Lauren, including media personalities, heiresses, and fellow skaters. He'd never given eighteen-year-old Gina a second glance. Until he showed up at her hotel room at the World Championship under strict orders from Lucian to "For God's sake, son, get that girl to relax. I don't care how you do it."

  Having placed first in the Short Program and then drawn to skate last for the Long in a record field of forty-seven girls, Gina had several hours with nothing to do but think about what could go wrong before she was finally allowed to leave the hotel, catch the appropriate shuttle, arrive at the arena, change into her competition outfit, and do the one thing in the entire process that she still loved to do — skate. Equally unfortunate was the fact that these particular championships were being held in Amsterdam. Which meant they were being shown on Eurosport. Which meant that, at any time, Gina could turn on the TV and watch, live, all the lucky girls who'd already gotten their programs over with.

  Gina, as it had already been established not only by Lucian but also by the U.S. figure skating press corps as well as the fans who liked to discuss such matters in grave detail each time they gathered at yet another championship, did not know how to relax.

  It was up to Chris to show her.

  At first, when he kissed her, Gina had no idea what he was doing. (Well, she had some idea. She wasn't a complete innocent; in fact, she had read a great deal on the subject and fully intended to explore it further once her busy schedule allowed.) When he peeled off her robe, she was, momentarily, utterly befuddled. But that didn't seem to bother Chris much. He apparently had no interest in her actively participating beyond not getting in his way. Which Gina had no intention of doing, in any case. To be honest, she wouldn't have known how. And to be really honest, she was too curious.