Fade to White (16 page)

“Know
what?
” The suspense was about to drive Tina crazy.

“That I found him.” She slid the door to the bin shut with a practiced swipe of her rear end.

“Who?”

“Harper Stone. I’m the one who found him. In the snow. Underneath the power lines.”

“No.”
Tina was so aghast that her grip all but cracked her wineglass.

“Well, Chip helped. Hadn’t you heard?”

“I’ve been watching the news all day, and all they said was that a couple of skiers—”

“That would be us.”

“But they didn’t know who—”

“The state police didn’t want me telling anybody. So I spent most of the day on the hill, and then I drove to Rutland to answer some questions, and then I came back here.”

Jack stood marveling. “You, my dear, are on your way to becoming one of the great bartenders of the western world.”

“Really? I don’t know a Kahlua and Cream from a White Russian.”

“You know how to keep things to yourself,” said Jack. “That’s the main thing.”

“Don’t give me too much credit. I did let it leak to Brian—”

Both Jack and Tina cocked their heads.

“—to my old fiancé, Brian, just to kind of one-up him. He had this whole thing going on about how he was one of the last people to see Harper Stone alive. I figured being one of the first to see him dead would beat that by a mile.“

“Damn straight it does,” said Jack.

“Then again, you can tell Brian
anything.
As long as it doesn’t involve him personally—you know, as long as it isn’t about
him—
it just kind of bounces off.” She picked up the buckets and headed back into the kitchen. “So telling Brian doesn’t count.”

When she came back, Tina and Jack were dying for her to spill everything she knew. It turned out to be tougher than talking to the state troopers had been. The troopers already knew everything about the scene where she’d uncovered Stone, while here at the Broken Binding she had to reconstruct the whole deal from scratch. All kinds of details came up that the troopers hadn’t needed to ask about.

Was he out in the clear or back in the woods?
Out in the clear.

What was he wearing?
She wasn’t certain. It had been dark up there on the hillside in spite of their headlamps, and he’d been covered all over with snow. Crusted with it. He’d had on a wool hat, she was pretty sure about that much, with clumps of snow stuck to it. He’d been wearing gloves or mittens, probably. She could pretty much swear to that, but the more she thought about it the more she figured that she might have been just imagining it. He
should
have been wearing gloves or mittens, so maybe she pictured them. Her mind filled in what should have been there. Gee: It was a good thing the troopers knew what Stone had been wearing, since she’d have mistrusted her memory and gotten confused and made a mess of things. Probably incriminated herself. She did remember a dark jacket, though. It was dark for sure, maybe black or navy blue, unless it had just gotten wet from the heat of him as he lay dying in the snow and then frozen over. Yecch.
That
was a hideous thought.

Was he carrying anything?
She couldn’t remember. She didn’t recall that he was holding ski poles or anything like that in his hands, although her growing uncertainty about the gloves or mittens kind of threw some doubt into that equation anyhow.

The afternoon grew later and the crowd around the bar picked up. She kept on answering questions, remembering everything she could and criticizing herself for the gaps.

How about a backpack or something?
He’d been lying on his back, that much she knew. So if he’d had a backpack, she wouldn’t have been able to tell. Unless she’d seen the straps, which she couldn’t say one way or another.

Skis?
Wow. Skis. That was anybody’s guess, now that she thought about it. The way that they’d found him was she’d skied right over his face—

Eeeeewwwwwww.

Right. She knew. Horrible. Anyhow, she’d skied right over his head without even seeing it, assuming when she hit it that it was a log or a boulder or something, and she’d taken a great big yard sale of a fall, and Chip had recognized that it wasn’t a log or a boulder but an old movie star instead. She left out the part where Chip passed out in the snow. She’d even left that part out when she’d talked to the troopers. If Chip wanted to tell them about it, then that was his own business.

Anyhow, back to the question of skis. Chip had kind of started digging the body out, at least until it occurred to her that the troopers might want things left just the way they’d found them, so although in the end his torso was exposed pretty well and Chip had worked some on his arms and legs, they’d never gotten far enough to see if he was wearing ski boots. Or if there were skis stuck somewhere in the snow alongside him. So she couldn’t say.

Snowshoes? How about snowshoes?
She didn’t remember anything sticking up. But then again she couldn’t be sure about the depth of the snow.

Had it bled, where she cut his face with the skis?
No. She didn’t think so. She thought he was (A) pretty thoroughly dead by then, and (B) pretty much frozen solid. It was more like whacking a brick of frozen hot dogs with the tip of a knife, and the tip goes in through the plastic but instead of separating two of the dogs it kind of slides into one of them. Just opens it up a little bit. That’s all. Or like trying to cut through a frozen pork chop or something like that. He always was a ham actor.

That’s not nice. Don’t speak ill of the dead.

*   *   *

Manny Seville didn’t look like a man who was in any special hurry to leave town. He looked, on the contrary, as though he was enjoying himself all to heck.

Guy was crawling the streets in his patrol car, watching the sun go down over the mountain and waiting for the valley to fill up with darkness. That was when he saw Manny walking between the Slippery Slope and the Broken Binding. Manny and Buddy Frommer, strolling along the sidewalk like a couple of jolly pirates. Guy had never seen Buddy walking there before. As far as he knew, these days Buddy only existed behind the desk at the Slope and behind the wheel of his SUV. Maybe down in that house he and his wife had somewhere in Londonderry or wherever. But not out on the sidewalk. And certainly not out on the sidewalk practically arm in arm with another human being, their heads tipped together as if they were engaged in some kind of conspiracy.

On top of everything else, he was pretty sure that Buddy was actually smiling—although he’d never swear to it on a witness stand. It might have just been a new variation on his usual grimace.

Guy watched them come and he nodded in their direction just in case they had taken note of him through the tinted glass—they hadn’t—and then he turned the car into the lot opposite and backed it around and faced it toward the street. He switched the headlights on against the lowering dark. Just keeping an eye on things, as far as anybody could tell. Just keeping an eye on Manny and Buddy, to tell the truth.

It was only a short distance between the ski shop and the restaurant, maybe a quarter of a mile, but the two of them looked as if they might not ever make it. Every eight or ten steps one of them would stop, pulled up short by something he’d spotted on the ground or in the field alongside the road, or else by some idea that had popped into his brain. He’d point or pontificate or both. They looked like a pair of old philosophers or lunatics, one or the other. There was no distinguishing between the two.

So maybe, Guy was thinking, it was true after all—what people said about Buddy Frommer and how he made his money. How he kept the place going in spite of having no customers and not seeming to want any. Guy had always figured maybe he was a day trader or something along those lines, watching his stocks on the computer he had set up behind the counter. But maybe not. Maybe he was selling some kind of dope after all. It made sense, given what Stacey had said about seeing Stone in the basement of the shop with him, huddled over the workbench. And now this. Manny Seville had mentioned cocaine. Leave it to him to sniff out a supply of it—maybe through that Stone, whom neither one of them seemed exactly overwhelmed about missing. That was worth thinking about, wasn’t it?

He sat with his hands on the wheel and watched their stumbling silhouettes merge with the long shadows creeping down from the mountains. He kept on watching until they turned together into the parking lot at the Broken Binding.

TWENTY-FOUR

The gray-haired early dinner crowd was paying their checks and drifting toward the door, the après-ski scene in the bar was starting to get fueled up and raucous, and Stacey’s former fiancé was nursing a drink at the table by the jukebox, talking up a local girl who looked like she had a lot to learn about guys like Brian Russell. The kind of girl who’d gone to college up in Burlington or maybe over in Manchester, New Hampshire, some town not too far from home in whose bars she’d picked up the famous freshman fifteen and a handful of other unfortunate habits, all of which she figured she could shake through the magic of a couple of years back home living in this little nowhere burg with Mom and Dad—what with the clean living and the fresh air and all that. The kind of girl who hadn’t run into Brian’s type before and no wonder: Even Brian hadn’t been entirely Brian yet when he’d gone off to college. It had taken more than an accident of genetics and a privileged childhood in his parents’ fabulous house to make him into the creature who sat before her now. It had taken patience and time and a whole lot of practice. But he was pretty sure it had been worth it.

“That’s right,” he was saying with a disdainful little smile, raising a finger to signal Jack behind the bar that they were ready for another round. “Harper was in my employ when it happened.”

He’d begun the day telling anybody who’d listen that he and Stone had been working together, which he’d thought would give him a kind of Hollywoodish sheen. Around lunchtime he’d upgraded the story to their having been what he called
business associates,
which he figured could mean anything from the movie business to investments to God knew what. But just now he realized that if he was going to get anywhere with little Susie ChapStick he was going to have to do better than that, so he’d fallen back on the oldest trick in his book and the most automatic: the power of being in upper management. Nothing in the world beats a corner office, and the idea that he got there by climbing on the back of old-time Hollywood royalty like Harper Stone was just icing on the cake.

“Really? He was working for you?”

“Oh, yeah. I’d hired him for a project we were shooting—over on the mountain.”

“What kind of project?”

Jeez. How stupid can you get? Who doesn’t know that when a person in the business says “project,” that’s as specific as he has any intention of getting? A
project
could be anything. If it usually turns out to be something considerably less impressive than it sounds, then so be it. That’s why God invented words like
project.
Brian took a sip and gave it some thought. “Well,” he said after a second or two, “it wasn’t a science project, that’s for sure. Unless you consider whatever technology that old guy used to preserve himself as something worth looking into.”

“Hey,” she said with a grin, completely distracted, “I guess he’s even better preserved now. Freeze-dried and all.”

“Yeah, right.” It sent a chill up his spine. “Freeze-dried.”

*   *   *

At a table way in the back, in a dim corner lit only by a sputtering votive candle, Manny Seville and Buddy Frommer had gone from goofy to morose. Right now they found themselves at a decision point, trying to figure whether they ought to stay in the bar and continue on toward flat-out drunk, or head into the dining room to cut the booze in their stomachs with a little prime rib. Manny was angling for the prime rib, since he hadn’t had lunch and a person could go only so far on Chex Mix and complimentary hot wings. Buddy was undecided.

Stacey came by to see if she could freshen their drinks, and they looked up at her like a couple of weary owls. “I think we’re going to hit the dining room,” said Manny, and Buddy didn’t seem to be able to muster any argument. For a change.

What he did was point at Stacey and say, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

“Yeah.” She brightened professionally. “I bought a pair of skis from you.”

“That’s nothing to brag about,” he said. “The world is full of people who’ve bought skis from me. I don’t think I’d remember you on account of
that.
” He dropped his hand to the table and cupped his drink.

“It was only a couple of days ago.”

Buddy shrugged. “Sue me.” Then he lifted his glass and eyed its contents. He started pushing his chair back and turned a bloodshot eye to her and said, “I’m bringing this with me. And don’t worry, sweetheart. You’ll get your tip.”

Yet Stacey wasn’t worried about that, not in the least. What she
was
worried about, suddenly and severely, was her own mental health. Because as Buddy raised his glass, she saw on his forearm the tattoo that she was certain she’d seen before on Harper Stone. A heart. An anchor. Chains. Hadn’t she taken note of that down in the service department at the Slippery Slope? When Stone and Buddy had been swapping lies or dope or whatever? Hadn’t she seen it on Stone’s arm, not Buddy’s?

Answering everybody’s earlier questions about finding Stone had made her doubt her ability to remember anything, and this was the capper. “I trust you,” she said. Then, collecting herself as best she could and fearing the worst from this wobbly pair as they set out for the dining room with glasses in their hands, she added, “How about I carry those drinks for you?”

They refused, of course. Now that she had a couple of months at the Binding under her belt, Stacey was beginning to see that drunks
always
refuse help of any sort. Denial is their default mode. Pete Hardwick had a rule that the bar staff was supposed to deliver customers’ drinks from one room to another, but there was only so much a person could do. So she let them go, clearing the table behind them and making a mental note to replace that votive candle with a fresh one, then looking up at the television over the bar just in time to catch a closed-captioned announcement by Harper Stone’s beleaguered publicist: Apparently the dead man had left no will at all, at least none that anybody had been able to dig up yet. Add to that the fact that he had no known living relations, add the widely-held suspicion that he had a half dozen illegitimate children scattered all around the Western world, add the understanding that he had multimillion-dollar estates in exclusive communities from coast to coast, and top it off with the suspicion that his dwindling movie career and his expensive tastes had left him with about a zillion dollars in unsecured debt, and you had a world-class legal struggle in the making.