Fade to White (14 page)

For whatever lucky reason—it may have been the electrical towers or it may have been the elevation or it may have been the bad weather that was starting to move in—Guy had gotten a good cell signal right off and reached the barracks in Rutland with no trouble at all. So now the two of them waited as the moon sank and the night got darker. A cloud bank built in from the west. Come morning everything would be dreary and gray and oppressive, low clouds and a high overcast thick as soup; not the greatest day for skiing. Stacey was about to lose that brand-new pair of Heads anyway, and if she didn’t watch out the troopers would have her tied up all day tomorrow on top of that. So bring on the clouds, she thought. It couldn’t get much worse. Besides, whatever happened, she had a leg up on Harper Stone, the famous movie star. The dead famous movie star.

The troopers surprised them by roaring over the top of the mountain and down, instead of coming up from the park. It sounded like an aerial assault, a half dozen of them on the biggest and angriest machines imaginable. Somebody must have GPS’d the location and decided that the closest road was the one by the cabin where Chip had left his car, and before they knew it they’d obliterated any trace of Chip’s and Stacey’s tracks. No great loss, but still. Guy quit hugging himself and stuck out his arms to flag them down before they did any more damage.

The troopers tumbled off like Harper Stone and his dauntless SWAT team in
Big City Heat
, like Harper Stone and his brave cavalrymen in
Last Stand at Appomattox
, like Harper Stone and his tough-guy platoon in
The Ne’er-Do-Wells.
Chances were that at least half of them, the older guys anyway, had grown up studying the moves and attitudes that Stone had made famous. Too bad they’d come too late. Instinctively and against all ordinary practice they gathered around the white grave, bundled up like spacemen in their snowmobile suits
(Mission to Antares,
1969), lifting their clear goggles and bowing their heads. One or two of them may have shed a manly tear—not for Stone, but for some part of the innocent past that was now gone forever.

A trooper identifying himself as Thompson was in charge. He took Guy aside and after they’d talked for a little while Guy directed him to Stacey. There was something surreal about the whole thing as far as she was concerned. The swarm of serious men clambering over the mountain with their flashlights pointing at crazy angles; the clicking and flashing of cameras everywhere, like a swarm of lightning bugs on this black night; the flat and impersonal tone that Thompson adopted as he questioned her about what she’d found and how she’d found it (and yes, they were going to have to confiscate those brand-new Heads of hers for a while, if she didn’t mind); the two troopers apparently charged with cordoning off an appropriate chunk of real estate as a crime scene, running yellow tape from tree to tower to tree and back again. As if the place would be crawling with curiosity seekers by morning.

*   *   *

After a quick debriefing and a promise that they would get back with her tomorrow, one of the troopers took her home. As far as she could see there’d been some low-key dispute as to who would get the duty. Thompson seemed to have been voting for Guy, claiming authority over the case and wanting to brush him off as rapidly as possible, but in the end the sheriff stuck around. One of the men who’d been putting up that useless yellow tape, a tubby guy that Stacey had a tough time getting her arms all the way around on the snowmobile, took the job.

TWENTY-ONE

Come morning, Harper Stone was slowly defrosting on a steel table in the Rutland hospital—and the whole world seemed to know it.

A reporter from the little NBC affiliate in Burlington was right in the middle of his fifteen minutes of fame when Megan Ramsey turned on the tiny old black-and-white TV that hung over the microwave in the kitchen. The sound came on louder than she’d expected and it woke Stacey up. Megan apologized when her boarder opened the door to her bedroom and came out blinking. There was a disorienting moment when Stacey was pretty sure she was still dreaming, because on that little screen it looked for all the world as if the Burlington guy was talking with somebody from the
Today Show.
Then she realized that he was, at least via satellite. He was standing outside the hospital in Rutland, the skies behind him gray and a little bit of sleet whipping at him from on high, acting as though he knew something about the death of Harper Stone, when he probably hadn’t even known the old movie actor was even in the state. Or still alive, for that matter. Until just now.

She poured herself a cup of coffee and watched while they switched over from live coverage to a taped overview of Stone’s life and work. The segment began and ended with the rousing trumpet theme from
Last Stand at Appomattox,
and it covered everything from the early black and white adventures he’d shot for Warner’s to his disastrously failed comeback in the long-forgotten
Cannonball Run IV.
Titles flew past like birds. Stills of Stone through the years, playing golf and riding horses and just monkeying around with the people who had once made up his usual crowd—Joey Bishop, Richard Nixon, Bette Davis, Billy Graham—flickered by in sepia tones, grainy and sad and vanquished. As if the world had been less colorful in those bygone days. At one point a sour-looking Burt Reynolds, his hairdo visibly newer than the rest of him by a decade or two, reminisced about learning his trade at the great man’s inspirational knee—which was either a false memory or an exaggeration meant to suggest something about their relative ages. Then it was back to the studio in New York, back for a quick bobble-headed nod from the reporter in Rutland (who was still getting sleeted on), and finally on to the actual news of the day.

Stacey walked back toward her room with her coffee, and found a note from Guy taped to the door.

“He didn’t make it home until a couple of hours ago,” Megan said. “And even then he just came and went.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. He’s going to have a long day, is all.”

The note said he’d brought her car back from Chip’s. It said he wasn’t trying to be a good Samaritan or anything, it was just that the state troopers had wanted to get their hands on those skis she’d told them about, and he figured while they were at it he might as well. It also suggested that she might want to keep a lid on what she’d seen until she’d talked with the boys from Rutland again.

*   *   *

“Wherever I go,” said Brian, “that’s where the action is.” He had a look of bland arrogance on his face that made it seem as if he actually believed it, and he probably did.

He was standing ahead of Stacey in the long line at Judge Roy Beans, and there was nothing in the room to prove him wrong. Just the opposite, in fact. It was only quarter of eight in the morning, on a weekday, and the place was a beehive. Camera crews down from Burlington and up from Boston; print reporters from every little tabloid in every little mountain town; rubbernecking skiers who’d left their condos and their kids and their coffeemakers early just this once. Somebody had come in with a rumor that Meredith Vieira was flying up from New York at this very minute, but nobody believed it and it died down fast. Meredith wouldn’t be coming all this way for Harper Stone.

Would she?

Still, there was something festive about the whole thing, with the smell of the hot coffee and the bright morning sky through the windows and the buzzing crowd and all. Something so contagious that even Stacey got caught up in it—forgetting for a moment both the physicality of the dead thing she’d seen the night before and the misery of being this close to her old fiancé. Lifted up by the cheerful atmosphere and empowered by the freedom she’d created for herself by coming to the mountains in the first place—and still a little bit psyched and sleepless from her adventure with Chip and Guy and the state troopers—she shouldered Brian like a football player and said, “So it’s all about you, is it?” She was feeling tough, resilient. Like the kind of person who could discover a dead body in a snowbank and not be fazed by it in the least. Like the kind of person who could be cheated on by a loser like Brian and just let it slide right off. She felt good.

“I’ve gotten used to it,” he said. “You, on the other hand, might forget what it’s like hanging out with me.”

“I’m trying to,” she said, taking a step forward and pushing him ahead into an empty space he’d been too self-absorbed to notice.

“Very funny.”

“I had it down pretty well, until just now. The forgetting.”

“Too bad.”

The door blew open and a half dozen more people came in from the parking lot. It was going to be a good day for Judge Roy Beans. The way it looked, Earl wasn’t even going to get a smoke break. If business kept up like this for a week or so, they might even make rent.

Brian scanned the chalkboard. “Once folks find out I’m pretty much the only guy in town with a connection to Harper Stone”—he said it a little bit louder than was strictly necessary—“I’ve got a feeling I’m going to keep right on being the center of attention.”

The couple in line behind them lowered their voices to a whisper and cocked their heads forward. One of those old E. F. Hutton commercials from when Stacey was a kid, come to life by the power of morbid curiosity.

“Is that why you came over here? To make yourself available to the waiting world?” She couldn’t believe it. She felt her blood pressure climbing, just the way it had when she’d found him in bed with what’s-her-name, the Boston blonde.

“You underestimate me, Stace.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “I came here in hopes of running into
you.
”

She didn’t believe it for a second, but she let it go.

“Also because I was out of coffee in the condo.”

“Now
that
makes sense.”

The couple behind them had given up on Brian, the woman no doubt having decided that he was a jerk and the man having decided that she was right.

They were almost at the counter now, and Stacey lowered her voice to drop the bomb that Brian had coming. “I’ll tell you what, Mister Authority on the late Harper Stone: I’ll do you one better.”

“One better? How’s that?”

Earl saw her coming and gave her a wink and got busy with her usual double espresso—boiling hot, overwhelmingly caffeinated, and easy to get down in a couple of fast swallows so that she could get to the mountain and begin her day. “You may have been one of the last people to see him alive,” she said, raising a finger to her lips to make sure that he knew this was a secret, “but I was pretty much the first to see him dead.”
Take that, Mister Center of Attention.

“What?”

“You heard me.” Looking away from Brian. Smiling across the counter at Earl.

“You were—”

“That’s right. Well, it was either me or Chip, depending on how you want to look at it. I guess technically he was the first one to see him, but I was definitely the one who found him.”

As usual, Brian went straight for the important stuff—that is, the stuff that was immediately relevant to his personal life. That was perfectly fine with Stacey. She didn’t plan on telling him much more about Stone anyway. She just wanted to let it be known, between the two of them, that he wasn’t the top dog. “What is it,” he said, “with this guy Chip?”

“He’s a friend.”

“
I
used to be a friend.”

“Yeah. Once upon a time. But you lost that privilege.”

“It’s not the only privilege I lost.”

“You’re telling me.” She put her knuckles on the counter and waited for her double shot.

Earl asked Brian what he’d like, and Brian launched into a specification so detailed and multilingual that it left the counterman blinking like an ox that’d been hit over the head with a two-by-four. Earl pointed to the list on the chalkboard and asked Brian if what he had in mind was anywhere close to something they had up there in plain sight and Brian said no, and Earl said then maybe the line would move along faster if he could adjust his expectations a little bit to match what was available. Rather than endure the disdain of half of the people in town—including another dozen camera-toting individuals in big-city black who’d just blown in through the open door—Brian settled for a cappuccino. Half-caf. Skim milk. One packet of Equal and one of Splenda. With a little fresh cinnamon ground over the top. And maybe some shaved chocolate if they had any. Extra dark. Just a touch of it. If that wasn’t too much trouble. And oh, yeah, he’d pay for Stacey’s double shot while he was at it. By then he was too late and she’d already put enough money down on the counter to cover both of them—her own and whatever his finally turned out to be. It put a big dent in her budget, but he didn’t need to know that.

One of the booths was emptying out—four gray-haired retirees on their way to the mountain, looking silly in Spyder jackets, all angular red panels and creepy black arachnids—and Stacey and Brian took their places. They were almost instantly joined by a father and son from somewhere out of town, the man eager to get to the mountain and the boy—a five or six-year-old bound for a day of glorified babysitting in the Ski School—beginning to pick at a chocolate chip muffin the size of his head. It was going to be a long morning for those two. Anybody could see that.

Stacey and Brian hunched their shoulders against the newcomers and angled their faces toward the wall by a few degrees. “So what’s the deal?” he sad, sniffing at his coffee cup. “You said you
found
him?”

“Yep.”

“How was
that?
”

“It was … sudden.”

“I guess.” He looked at her the way he’d have looked at a stubborn faucet. “But there’s got to be more to it than that.”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to be talking about it a lot. Not right now. Not until—”

“What’re you? A person of interest?”

“Don’t be silly.”

The dad next to Brian was well into his coffee already, while the kid opposite him was busy inspecting his first chocolate chip as if it were some kind of gemstone. The dad was audibly grinding his teeth.