Fade to White (13 page)

Everything, in other words, came together.

Stacey had taken great runs before.
Fantastic
runs. A handful of them here in Vermont, once or twice out in Utah, and maybe a time or two up in Quebec somewhere. She’d had her share, make no mistake about that, but those runs had had a different quality about them, a quality that if you could name it, it would have to be something like an awareness of the limits of their greatness. Midway through each of them, she’d begun not just looking forward to the next run down the same slope, but analyzing what she could do to make that next run even better.
Maybe the drifts will be a little softer over there near the trees. Maybe the fall line on the left side will be just a bit steeper.
The kind of thought process that indicates analysis over engagement.

On the other hand, this time she wasn’t thinking. She didn’t have to.

At least not until her skis hit something—hard—and stopped dead.

Her bindings released and she pitched forward, going briefly airborne before plummeting into the snow in a burst of white powder, then finally tumbling twenty or thirty feet down the mountain. Her skis were back where she’d left them; her poles came loose and flew free. In short, it was what the smart alecks call a yard sale: gear everywhere, wall to wall. By no means would every piece of it, given the light and the deep snow, be easy to find.

“Rats!” She righted herself, stood up, and shouted into the night, “Rats, rats, rats!” She felt as if she’d been awakened from a dream, and an outstanding dream, at that.

Chip was a few yards above her on a line of his own, but stopped short at the sight of her explosive plunge into the snow. He heard her shouting and figured that she was probably all right. He sidestepped toward the spot where her skis had gone under, and she started slogging up in his direction. “That’s OK,” he said. “You stay where you are, and I’ll bring the skis down.”

She stopped, grateful.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, I’m all right. You fall in this stuff it’s hard to get hurt.”

“What’d you hit, anyhow?”

“I don’t know. A log, maybe. A limb. Something.”

He was clicked out of his own skis now, and up almost to his waist in powder. He hadn’t expected it to be that deep, but he didn’t mention it. “I think I see where they went in,” he said. Then, a few seconds later said, “I
think.
”

“Don’t think. Just do.”

“Roger that one, Yoda.”

“And while you’re busy with that, I’ll look for my poles.”

Which was fine with Chip. He was moving slowly through the snow, jamming his own poles in, then lifting them out again and jamming them back in, probing for any sign of her skis. He’d already obliterated any trace of the path they’d taken into the snow, and in the moonlight he was afraid that he was getting a little bit turned around. He backed up and started again, unsure whether he was going over new ground or old. He started breathing hard.

“You all right up there?” Stacey asked.

“I’m fine. I’m just not getting anywhere. Not yet.” He looked up from the snow and was struck by how far she was below him, vertically speaking. From here, she was pretty much straight down. Damn, this right-of-way was steep. Steeper than he’d thought.

“Got the poles,” she said. There was a little triumph in her voice, and a little teasing, too.

He shook himself and concentrated on the snow before him, trying to rid himself of a twinge of vertigo. It was just a passing sensation, no question. A short-term freak-out that could have happened to anybody. “Great,” he said, “Good for you. I’ll just be a minute.”

Below him, Stacey turned to look out over the valley. She planted her poles and whistled appreciatively between her teeth, then she called up to him over his shoulder, “I sure wouldn’t want to walk down.”

“You won’t.” He said it, but he wasn’t feeling it.

“Good. Because I think it’d kill me.”

He looked up for himself and felt his stomach turn over and thought the same thing—that it would kill
him
—but at the same moment one of his poles stabbed something hard. He smiled, put the pole down, and started digging.

He threw snow like a madman, and didn’t stop … until he saw the corpse’s face. Then—breathless, vertiginous, sick to his stomach—he passed out.

Stacey saw him go. One second he was up and the next second he was down, vanished into the powder. She couldn’t believe her eyes. She called his name, thinking he’d stumbled somehow—maybe over the edge of whatever log or limb she’d hit in the first place—then she started up toward the spot where he’d disappeared.

NINETEEN

“That’s what I like about this job,” Guy said to Megan and the kids over the supper table. “I mean, it’s not every day you get a guided tour of Hollywood.”

“You mean
old
Hollywood,” Jim said. He was fifteen years old, and anything that predated
The Dark Knight
was old.
Star Wars
was an antique.
Murder Town
was positively prehistoric.

“Granted,” said his father. “Although
old
is a relative term, sonny. My point is, you never know what stories people are going to tell. This guy Seville, he was there when it all happened. When they shot all the great stuff from when I was growing up. He was what they call the technical director on
Lights Out.
Can you believe it? That elevator scene? With the cables?”

“They’d CGI that these days and it’d be better. You’d think it was real.”

“It
was
real.”

“
Dad.
You know what I mean.”

“I do, but I don’t understand it.”

*   *   *

Chip didn’t think he’d exactly passed out. At least not for long. He was sitting up, wiping snow from his goggles with the thumb of his mitten, when Stacey worked her way up to the spot where he’d fallen. “Sorry,” he said, before she could ask. “I’m fine.”

“You’re fine.”

“Really. I’m fine.” He pointed toward the spot where he’d been digging. “That guy, on the other hand…”

She looked over and saw nothing.

“He’s definitely not so good.” He drew himself to his feet and leaned on her shoulder, putting more weight on her than he meant to.

She stiffened and pushed back against him. “Huh?”

“That guy. In the snow. He’s the thing you hit, I’m pretty sure.”

“There’s no guy in the snow.”

“There sure is. He’s a
dead
guy, but he’s there, all right.”

They pushed together toward the spot, and bent to clear away the snow. Stacey switched on her headlamp and Chip did, too, but soon enough they both wished they hadn’t. “It’s Stone,” she said, aghast and a little out of breath. “It’s Harper Stone. Oh. My. God.”

His face was blue in the blue LED light, pale as the snow that covered him. She thought it looked as though one of her skis had slid across the skin just above his eyebrows, the sharp metal edge cutting flesh that was too bloodless and too frozen to bleed.

She stopped but Chip kept on digging around Stone’s body, pushing snow away from his arms and legs, clearing out a margin around his torso. He was working fast, almost a little frantically, and Stacey reached out a hand to make him stop. “Leave him,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t do anything for him now, and they’re not going to want us to disturb anything.” By “they” she meant Guy Ramsey, the state troopers, whoever else might want things left the way they’d found them. At the edge of the cleared area in the snow she saw the tip of one ski, and went after it. The other was right alongside it, and she dragged them both from the loose snow.

Chip stood up straight, panting. “The good news, I guess, is that he’s not a missing person anymore.”

*   *   *

“We found him,
” said Stacey, bursting in through the kitchen door, red-faced and blowing steam. “We found Harper Stone.”

Guy had a mug of coffee and a piece of yellow cake on a little plate, and he was heading toward the front room to watch the news. He shot a quick look over his shoulder when he heard Stacey’s voice, then he vanished through the door into the foyer, saying, “Hey there, Chip,” as he disappeared. Raising his voice as he went farther on, “Where’d he turn up? Where’s he been?”

They heard the low electronic burp and hum of the television coming on.

“It’s not like that,” Stacey said.

The television came roaring on at whatever volume Jim had been using to play some video game after school, and Guy cut it back with the remote. He walked back into the foyer and stuck his head around the door frame, chewing cake. “What does
that
mean?”

*   *   *

“We can’t just leave him up there till daylight.” Guy had pulled on his snowmobile gear and was standing by the kitchen door, scratching the stubble on his chin. He wished he’d had a chance to finish that yellow cake.

His wife, Megan, sat at the table in front of her coffee, shaking her head.

“Some animal’d find him for sure. The bears might be sleeping, but those woods are full of foxes and fisher cats and God knows what else. All of them starving this time of year. Hungry as bears.”

“Just be careful,” she said.

“I will.” He took a step toward the door and looked over at Chip. “You ready?”

“Why him?” said Stacey. “I’m the one who found the body.”

Chip didn’t dispute that. He started to, but before he got very far Stacey saw something pass across his face that looked like relief. The realization that he might not have to see that dead body again after all, which seemed to suit him fine.

It took a while to get ready. Guy and Chip had to gas up Guy’s snowmobile, load it onto a trailer, and back the patrol car up to hitch it on. They agreed that Chip would take Stacey’s car home; they’d work out getting his car from the other side of the mountain tomorrow sometime. The state troopers would want to talk with him, but since there were only two seats on the snowmobile, they’d have to wait.

“Did I miss something?” Stacey asked as they got into the patrol car. “Did you call it in?”

Guy had the engine running all this time. It was hot in the car and he turned down the fan. “I’m not going to call it in until I’ve seen it for myself.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Oh, I believe you all right.” He waved to Chip and waited for him to pull down the lane, then he followed him out onto the main road.

“So?”

“So, about half an hour after I make that call, this whole thing is going to turn into a circus. It won’t be just a handful of staties from Rutland. It’ll be the coroner’s office, the VBI, you name it.”

“The VBI?”

“Vermont Bureau of Criminal Investigation.”

“I get it,” said Stacey. “Like the FBI.”

“Kind of.”

“The VBI. That’s funny.”

“Not to them.”

“I guess not.”

Ahead of them by a half dozen car lengths, Chip neared an empty intersection. He switched on his turn signal and came to a careful stop, and Guy blasted his horn at him and kept moving, slowing down only enough to keep Stacey from grabbing the door handle for support. “For crying out loud,” he muttered, “this is police business. Come on!” Then he turned and grinned at her to show that he was at least half kidding. “Anyway,” he said when they’d gotten up to speed again, “add Harper Stone’s celebrity into the mix, and you’ve got something pretty irresistible to law enforcement.”

Stacey thought for a minute, then she finally went ahead and asked it. “That wouldn’t be why you want the first shot all to yourself, would it?”

TWENTY

Chip stopped by the park to help them get the snowmobile off the trailer, but Stacey shooed him away and they did just fine without him. She’d never ridden a snowmobile before, and was astonished at how inhospitable the thing was. It was like riding a motorcycle in a meat locker. Why anybody wanted to own one for anything other than emergency purposes was beyond her.

They found the tracks that she and Chip had left and followed them up the hill under the power lines; in no time they were at the place where she’d fallen. The place where the body lay in its snowy grave, bathed in moonlight and the gleam of the snowmobile’s single yellowish headlight. Guy switched on a flashlight. They both climbed off and went wading on over through the deep snow.

He passed the flashlight’s beam over Stone’s body. “I’m glad you guys didn’t dig him out any more than you did,” he said. He stopped when the beam lit on Stone’s forehead, focusing in on the long thin bloodless gash. “
That’s
interesting.”

“I think I did that. With my ski. When I, you know, when I
hit
him.”

He poked around with the light, following the tracks down the mountain and figuring. “Could be,” he said. “Could very well be.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“I mean, I’m not sure what I’m sorry for. But it’s just—”

“Your skis are in your car?”

“Yeah.”

“The staties are going to want a look at them.”

“I guess. But isn’t that just my luck? I save up for a new pair of skis, use them for one day, and the next morning they’re ‘evidence.’ ”

Guy grimaced. “Don’t worry. You’ll get ’em back in a year or so. Don’t give it another thought.” He put the flashlight beam back on the corpse and bent over, looking down hard and making a study of the details. “I guess that’s Harper Stone, all right.”

“Told you.”

“He still looks pretty good, considering.”

“Guy!”

“I know, I know. Thing is, how’d he get up here? What was he doing?”

“How’d he end up dead?”

“Right,” said Guy. “That’s the main thing. How’d he end up dead?”

*   *   *

Stacey just about froze to death herself before the troopers arrived, she and Guy stamping their feet in the snow down past the body, more or less in the spot where she’d landed after striking Harper Stone. No sense contaminating the tracks higher up, however much that was worth. Guy was adamant that anything you could do to keep from pissing off the state troopers was worth the trouble. Not that the original tracks that she and Chip had made were going to mean squat, seeing that they were in three or four feet of snow that had fallen since the time when Stone went down. The condition of the snow wasn’t going to tell anybody a whole lot.