Fade to White (12 page)

Stacey pulled up behind Chip’s Wrangler, checking the clock on her dashboard and hoping she hadn’t made him wait too long. The Wrangler was an old army-green wreck with a sagging canvas top that was no use against the wind and the cold. He wasn’t in the car, though. He was on a bench in the park, sitting there in the darkness and admiring the mountain through the moonlit trees. She went over and sat beside him, shivering a little bit already. On the mountain the groomers swarmed from trail to trail, little points of light moving against pale snow and black woods.

“It’s cold,” Stacey said.

“Yeah.”

She thought he might take advantage of the opportunity to put an arm around her—boy and girl, park bench, freezing cold, darkness—but he didn’t. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

He pointed toward the groomers on the mountain. “Those guys aren’t cold, I can tell you that. They’re riding in the lap of luxury.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I’m not kidding. Leather seats, cup holders, big honking stereos—the works. I’ve never been in one, but Andy Paxton’s told me all about it.”

“I forgot. You two are like this.” She held up a mittened hand. Chip had to take it on faith that she had two fingers crossed inside of it.

“We are. Andy and me.”

“I know.”

Andy Paxton was the patriarch of the family that owned Spruce Peak. It had been in his family for generations. He’d raised two sons on the mountain, both of them as different from their father as people could be and still be walking around upright. One of them, in fact—David, the younger of the two—wasn’t actually walking around upright anymore. He’d died earlier in the winter, a month or so back. And the other—Richie, the older one, the philanderer and egomaniac—had had more to do with the reasons for it than anyone could ever be entirely comfortable with. No wonder that as Chip’s path had crossed with Andy’s they’d recognized each other as kindred spirits. The father and the son that life had denied each of them, delivered better late than never.

“Andy’s my
other
night-skiing buddy.”

She knew all about how Andy and Chip liked to skin up the mountain after the groomers were through and sail back down on the freshest of corduroy. So now she was Chip’s buddy, just like old man Paxton. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that, either. “Right,” was all she said.

“How about we get going?” Chip said. So they stood up and walked to the curb and swapped her stuff into his car.

EIGHTEEN

A light in the woods. It was the cabin Chip had mentioned, yellow windows glowing through the leafless trees. Stacey saw it as they rounded a switchback on the road that led up the back of the mountain. She was amazed at how empty and dark it was back there. Compared to the front side, which had been civilized with trails and lift towers and lodge buildings and condos galore, the back side was pretty much a wilderness, except for this narrow and barely plowed road, and that light in the trees up above.

“What is it, a couple of miles up here?”

“Seems like it,” Chip said. “The odometer’s busted, so it’s hard to say.”

“There are some hiking trails back here someplace, aren’t there?”

Chip said there were, although he’d never given any of them a try. He was more the biking and kayaking type.

“We’ll have to check them out in the summer,” she said. Kind of trying that out.

“We will,” he said. “We’ll bring a picnic.”

A picnic. That put her a step ahead of Andy Paxton. All right, then.

Stacey’s instinct was to expect a road like this to get narrower as they went up, but that was pretty much impossible. The road was basically a tunnel through three feet of packed snow, precisely the width of two passes of a pickup-mounted snowplow—one going up and one coming down. It didn’t get any wider than that and it didn’t get any narrower, either. They rounded a few more bends, the lights of the cabin flickering into view and out of it again, and then the road straightened out and made directly for the cabin. Just a hundred yards or so, and they’d be stopping.

The Wrangler’s headlights, dim as they were with age and a crusting of ice, must have cast some illumination on the inside of the cabin, because before they’d gone so much as fifty feet past the curve a black silhouette appeared in the front picture window.

“Uh-oh,” said Stacey. She crouched down instinctively in her seat.

“What?”

“I don’t know. It’s just—is this private property, or what?”

“Who knows?” He didn’t slow the car. “Everything’s fine, though. Trust me. We’re not causing any trouble.”

The cabin was on Brian’s side of the car, the uphill side. In the window where the first shadow had appeared there was now another, this second one materializing slowly from the dimness on the other side of the room. Perhaps from down a dark hallway, or from out of an ill-lit kitchen or someplace. There was a sheer curtain across the window that shifted and swayed a little with the movement of the two figures, growing dense in places and airy in other places. It gave the whole prospect a ghostly look.

“I guess he’s got somebody there with him,” Chip said.

“Probably he’s married.”

“Could be. Probably. I don’t know.”

The second figure was at least a head shorter than the first, and broader in every dimension. Stacey studied the two of them, man and woman, and imagined the painting
American Gothic.
She saw her as a farm wife living a hard existence here on the mountain. It was better than picturing her as second in command to an ax murderer, or some kind of Mother Bates, ready to work mischief.

While she was persuading herself, the first figure ducked out of sight. The farm wife stayed put as the Jeep drew nearer, standing stoically behind the curtain, not moving a muscle that Stacey could see. Chip flashed his lights, trusting that it would be taken for a friendly greeting. A little tip of the hat, a neighborly wave. Hoping further that the figure in the window might raise a kindly hand in return.

Nothing.

“Why would you live all the way up here, anyhow?” said Stacey.

“I guess because you wanted your privacy.”

“Great,” she said, leaning forward to peer through the windshield and wondering if the figure in the window could make her out past the headlights. “That’s great.”

*   *   *

The road was plowed for a little distance past the cabin, up to a shack that wasn’t quite big enough to be a garage and probably held tools, a snowmobile, maybe a little powerboat for trolling on the lakes come summer. Either that or chain saws and meathooks and bloody carcasses, swaying ever so slightly in the cold night air. Stacey shivered at the thought and a porch light snapped on, throwing light across the cabin’s front yard and pitching the shack behind it into deeper darkness. The paintless old pickup truck that had cleared the road was pulled up in front. The only real color in the whole stark tableau was the blade of the plow mounted on the pickup, a swath of wrenchingly brilliant yellow against the darkness. It looked like acid, ready to eat through something.

They looked back toward the window to see the woman standing there still, planted like a fireplug. She may have actually moved back a step or two now that the porch light was on. Her silhouette had taken on a little bit of color in the light of the room, but her presence had become vaguer yet, blurred and shadowy. Then the front door cracked open and the man swarmed out onto the snowy porch. He was even taller than they’d guessed, long as a scarecrow and just as thin, and he hollered something at them that they didn’t hear over the noise of the Jeep. He jutted his chin up and snapped his head back and shouted it again, and this time Chip cut the engine.

“Not a good idea,” Stacey said. “We want to stay mobile, right?”

Rather than take her advice, Chip had started rolling down the window. “Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I don’t think turning around right now is much of an option anyway. And I’m sure as heck not
backing
the whole way down.” He got the window open—the night air was frigid even compared to the inside of the Wrangler, thanks to the constant blast of the heater—and he stuck his arm out. “Howdy!”

“You’re either lost or crazy,” said the tall man. “Which one is it?” He stood on the porch in a T-shirt and an orange down vest, grinning like a sphinx at Chip, both hands jammed deep into his pockets.

That’s a step in the right direction,
Stacey thought.
At least he doesn’t have a gun.

“I don’t believe I’m crazy,” Chip said, “but I’m hoping like anything to get a little bit lost.”

“There’s only one way down. You turn right around and go back where you come from.” He circled his finger around, making the universal symbol for U-turn. Stacey decided that he seemed reassuringly ordinary, now that she was getting a good look at him. Well, maybe not
reassuringly
ordinary, but at least ordinary. Which covered a lot of ground.

“I think I’ll do it the hard way,” Chip said. He pointed with his thumb back over his shoulder. “We’ve got skis.”

“Oh, for the love of Mike.” The tall man sighed. “Another one.”

“Another one?”

“This ain’t no rescue mission,” the tall man said. He came down off the porch and walked toward the car and leaned forward, almost but not quite sticking his head in the window. He tilted it and bobbed it this way and that, sizing up Chip and squinting at Stacey in the dark, trying to get a look at the gear they carried. His breath emerged sour and strong, even from the other side of the car, and Stacey realized he’d been drinking. “If I’d known how many morons’d be wandering around these woods, knocking on the door at all hours, I don’t think I’d ever built this place. There’s times I’ve got half a mind to shut off the lights and let ’em freeze.” He drew one hand from his pocket and put it on the door to steady himself.

“Lost skiers. You’re talking about lost skiers.”

“Damn straight, I’m talking about lost skiers. They go out of bounds and get a little bit mixed up, and the next thing you know they’re banging on my door. It’s like I’m running a ranger station up here.”

Chip offered the tall man a big smile, grinning right into the gusts of his whiskey breath. “See,” he said, “we mean to do just the opposite. We’re going to hike
up
to the peak, and ski
down
under the power lines. We left a car down there. In town.”

The man took his hand off the car door and ran his palm over his buzz cut. “There’s a new kind of idiot born every day of the week.”

“Really. It’s OK. I’m on the Ski Patrol.”

The man raised his eyebrows. “Oh,” he said. “
A professional.
That makes all the difference, now, don’t it?” He rapped his knuckles on the doorsill and moved away, backing off toward the porch. “Suit yourselves,” he said. “I guess it’s a free country. Ten thirty is lights-out, though, so don’t come knocking after that or I might have to run you the hell off.”

“Understood,” said Chip. He rolled up the window, started the Jeep, and pulled it past the cabin and next to the shack, just as far up the hill as it would go until the plowing ran out and the snowdrifts set in.

*   *   *

The groomers were just finishing as Stacey and Chip crested the peak, a dozen pairs of taillights in a long line far below, snaking across the lower slopes toward the maintenance shed. They winked on and off through the trees, one last intrusion of civilization against the wilderness, going black two by two.

There was a lot of snow up here, but it wasn’t consistent. Whole swaths of the mountainside were blown bare over broad expanses of naked rock, and the base of the fire tower with its jumble of boulders was almost entirely clear. In other places, it was God knew how deep. And everywhere the wind was a killer—brutal and biting and without mercy, even at this hour.

They slogged over to the fire tower and perched on the rocks to sip a little water, eat a couple of energy bars, and get set for the trip down. They unholstered their skis from their packs and clicked in. They swapped their knit caps for helmets, and stashed the caps in their packs. There was no need for headlamps up here, not with the moon as bright as it was. They’d needed them under the tree cover on the way up from the cabin, no question. And soon enough they would need them again, as they struck out beneath the trees toward the power lines.

It was a straight shot across the ridgeline, and on skis it didn’t take long. The trees and underbrush didn’t exactly thin out as they neared the edge of the clearing; it all just stopped dead, leaving Stacey and Chip to break out into a bright and moonlit right-of-way marked by dark woods on either side and a long march of electrical towers down the middle. They could see what looked like the whole world—make that
worlds,
since you had to include the infinite space that spun over their heads, blue space full of more stars than Stacey had ever seen in all her years in Boston. Not to mention the mighty Milky Way itself, a phenomenon which, prior to coming to the Green Mountain State, she had considered nothing more then a lovely rumor.

The town and the valley were spread out below them. There were great dark patches that were forests and small darker spots that were houses, and there were great swaths of gleaming white that were pastures and fields and open spaces, fresh and untracked still. Scattered all around were tiny yellow lights like gemstones, some of them moving and some of them fixed, and all of them heartbreakingly beautiful and faraway.

“Wow,” said Chip.

“Yeah,” said Stacey. “If I weren’t freezing my butt off, I could stay here forever.”

“You’re right,” he said. “You want first tracks?”

By way of answer, she clicked off her headlamp and pointed her skis downhill.

*   *   *

The snow was magnificent—light as air, deep as a well, smooth as butter. It practically skied itself, choosing Stacey’s line and modulating her speed, making her turns with no intervention at all on her part. All she had to do was keep her weight centered over the skis and lean a little bit to the right or the left. She wasn’t even sure she had to do that much. It was as if the mountain wanted her there. As if it understood what she was after. As if the line between the woman and the run, between the athlete and the trail, between the skier and the skied, no longer existed. Or at the very least as if it was of no consequence.