Final Breath

'Friday, July Fourth, ten-twelve P.M.,' the recording continued. Then there was a beep tone. 'Hi, Sydney, this is Judy Cavalliri in the news office. Sorry to call so late. I have some pretty awful news. I thought you should know, since we recently reran the story you did about that Portland couple, Leah Dvorak and Jared McGinty. It just came over the AP. They were killed tonight, shot in their apartment. It looks like a burglary gone from bad to worse. A bunch of their stuff was missing. A neighbor found both bodies in the bathroom. There's a chance we'll show part of your Movers & Shakers piece tomorrow on the network news. They might want a comment from you, too. Anyway, Sydney, I thought I'd give you a heads-up. I'm terribly sorry. They seemed like such a nice couple.'

Dazed, Sydney listened to the beep, then she slowly put down the phone.

She'd gotten to know Leah and Jared pretty well when she did the story on them last Christmas. She and Leah had sent Christmas cards to each other and there had been a few e-mails back and forth in January, but they hadn't had any further correspondence. That was typical of her work. She became close to nearly all of her Movers & Shakers subjects while working on their segments. Then a week later, she was already involved in her next story and her next subject. She was in and out of these people's lives so quickly. Way too often, she didn't hear about any of them again--not until something awful happened.

She just couldn't believe Leah and Jared were dead.

Slumped in her desk chair, Sydney remembered something. She told herself there was no connection, and yet she still thought about that cryptic e-mail from a few days ago.

'You can't save them,' it had read.

CHAPTER SIX

'Hang on, Eli! Hang on!' she called to him.

Four stories above her, Eli clung to the storm drain on Kyle's roof. Screaming, he helplessly dangled in the air. Kyle's town house was on fire. Flames shot out the windows of the top floor, licking at Eli's feet.

'I'll catch you!' she called to her son. 'I'll break your fall!'

Eli's clothes started to catch on fire. His screams turned to agonizing shrieks. He let go of the gutter, and his body plummeted down toward her.

Sydney suddenly sat up in bed.

Her heart was racing. She started to reach for the light on her nightstand, but hesitated. Sometimes it was easier just to sit there in the dark and face her fear. She knew she was alone right now, no ghostly visitor. If she turned on the lights, then switched them off later, she'd just have to get used to the dark again.

Sydney settled back down and rested her head on the pillow. She glanced at the digital clock at her bedside: 2:11. She heard some firecrackers popping in the distance. The Fourth of July celebration was still going on for some people.

She rubbed her eyes. That dream had everything screwed around, of course. It wasn't Eli who had fallen from a burning building. It had been another boy.

The incident had been a pivotal chapter in her bestselling autobiography from fourteen years ago. But the paperback original had been out of print for years. Not many people remembered it or the hokey TV movie based on the book. The people who only knew her as the pretty correspondent for On the Edge, the ones who asked if her slight limp was from a recent injury, those people didn't know Sydney was once an awkward, homely girl whose legs worked beautifully. In fact, they worked wonders.

Ever since she was seven--with her Dorothy Hamill wedge-style haircut--Sydney had dreamed of skating in the Olympics someday. From the Jordan's home in Seattle's Queen Anne district, her mother drove Sydney to the Highland Ice Arena in Shoreline three times a week so she could practice. If Sydney did enough household chores, her mother rewarded her with an extra trip to the ice arena. Once she was old enough, Sydney took the bus there: a seventy-minute trek both ways with a transfer--six days a week.

She had a long, awkward puberty: bad skin, frizzy hair, and braces. In family photos, Kyle was always the cute one, damn him. She was shy, and hopeless around guys. But on the ice, she felt beautiful and confident--for a while at least.

Sydney's high school physical education teacher recommended a private coach for figure skating, and Mr. Jordan hired her. Donna Loftus coached several girls who competed nationally. Two of her former pupils had ended up on the U.S. Olympic teams--in 1984 and 1988. She was a thin, homely woman with rank body odor that reminded Sydney of bad vegetable soup. Sydney never saw her crack a smile. She practiced and practiced until her ankles were ready to snap. She felt lucky to be working with such an accomplished coach, but nothing she did seemed to please Ms. Loftus. Sydney finally asked her what she was doing wrong. Was it her spirals? Her landings?

Leaning against a post at the rink's sideline, Ms. Loftus folded her arms and heaved a sigh. 'I don't think you're right for figure skating,' she frowned. 'I probably shouldn't have taken this job. You've got a lot of talent, and you're not afraid of hard work. You're very graceful on the ice, but your looks are awkward. I don't mean to be cruel, but most people expect figure skaters to be pretty.'

Sydney was devastated. But she didn't give up. She was going to dazzle Ms. Loftus if it killed her. But before she had a chance to prove herself to her, Ms. Loftus quit. She told Mr. Jordan, 'Sydney just doesn't have the right look for a figure skater. There's no nice way to put it. She's rather plain and awkward.'

Sydney's father was furious. 'That woman--who looks and smells like the backside of a horse--she said you weren't pretty enough?' He immediately hired another coach, and Sydney worked even harder--just to prove Dog-Face Donna wrong.

Her Olympic dream took over and dominated the whole family. Sydney's mother found temp work to help pay for Sydney's trainers. When he wasn't working overtime, her father worked closely with her trainers on weekends. They entered Sydney in local and statewide competitions. The family scheduled their lives around her practice sessions and those competitions.

'You wanted to skate like Dorothy Hamill, and I wanted to skip down the yellow brick road like Dorothy Gale,' Kyle once pointed out. 'I mean, how many eleven-year-old boys save up their allowance to buy their own copy of Judy at Carnegie Hall? But Mom and Dad didn't even notice that I was different. They were too busy planning for your big Olympic moment. God, sometimes I thought I'd barf if I had to sit through one more dinner-table conversation exclusively devoted to the subject of you and your double axels.'

By the time Sydney was nineteen, people compared her to her idols, Dorothy Hamill and Peggy Fleming. She'd also turned into an attractive young woman, and not just on the ice. The braces came off, her complexion cleared up, and she had developed a toned, taut body. No one would ever call her awkward-looking again. She moved up from junior to senior level and shined in the U.S. Nationals. She didn't make the Olympic team for the 1992 games in Albertville, but she came in at thirteenth place and was written up in several newspapers and magazines.

She graduated from the University of Minnesota, where she'd majored in broadcasting. Sydney's respect for good reporters came through whenever she was interviewed or profiled, and those reporters loved her. They predicted she'd come home from the 1994 Lillehammer Games with a medal.

There was a lot of pressure on her. The dreams of that driven homely little kid with the Dorothy Hamill haircut had touched so many people--the reporters, her trainers, and her family. She started receiving fan letters and e-mail from total strangers. All these people had gotten caught up in her dream, too, and she didn't want to disappoint them. Sydney trained harder and harder. She kept thinking about how much her family had sacrificed and what she'd given up, too.

Sydney was profiled in Sports Illustrated and had a page and a half in People during the fall of 1993. The Seattle Times wanted to do an interview. They planned to put her on the cover of their Sunday magazine section. Hoping to look decent for her first magazine cover, Sydney made an appointment at a chic beauty salon downtown. She kept thinking Donna Loftus might see that magazine cover--and be sorry as hell.

It was a beautiful, crisp, sunny autumn afternoon, and she'd decided to walk to the beauty salon from a friend's apartment on First Hill. Tall trees lined the residential area's parkways, and as she strolled along, Sydney