Fade to White (20 page)

“Yeah,” said Stacey. “According to Chip, you couldn’t even get them on Netflix a week or so ago. Now he’s everywhere.”

Jack began drawing a beer for somebody, saying, “Turns out it’s a good career move, I guess. Dying, I mean. Who would have thought?”

*   *   *

Stacey hoped that Guy would still be up when she got home, but it wasn’t likely. Their two businesses—bartending and law enforcement—tended to run on vastly different schedules, at least out here in the woods. Back in Boston, the police were on duty twenty-four/seven and an awful lot of the trouble occurred around places where people were drinking into the wee hours. Here, though, it was different. Unless some drunk ran his car off the road in the middle of the night, there wasn’t any reason for Guy to be up and about. Even if somebody did run his car off the road, it would be a long wait until somebody else found him and reported it. There was just so little traffic.

So the Ramsey place was shut up and dark when Stacey pulled into her parking spot beneath the kitchen windows. Just a little green gleam from the microwave, that was all. She let herself into the back porch and took off her boots before going on through to the kitchen. Nothing was locked. Nothing ever was. Not out here. What would be the purpose of a lock? To keep out bears? To discourage a hungry moose?

Still, there was somebody at large out there who had something to do with the unfortunate death of Harper Stone, so after she had washed up and brushed her teeth in the tiny hall bathroom, she went straight into her own room and shut and latched the door with the tiny hook and eye. It wasn’t anything close to secure, but it was all she had. Only then, with the window shades pulled down tight against the enormous blackness outdoors, did she slip into her pajamas and jump into bed. After a few minutes she stuck one arm out from under the covers and into the cold to set the alarm. She usually didn’t have any problem waking up in time to make it to the mountain for one of the first chairs, but she didn’t want to risk missing Guy in the morning again.

*   *   *

“I think there’s a drug connection,” she said over a cup of Megan’s coffee.

“You’re talking about Stone.”

“Yeah.” She sat at the table and watched him stir his oatmeal over a low flame. “Stone.”

“What makes you think drugs?” He said it without looking up, and he said it as if he hadn’t been thinking the same thing for a while now. Just as casually as you please.

“Remember what I said about the Slippery Slope? That guy Buddy, and how I saw them downstairs?”

“I remember.”

“The two of them? Looking at something? Like something on the table was changing hands?”

“The Slippery Slope’s a retail store. Things change hands.” He put the lid back on the pot and put the sticky spoon down on a little ceramic holder.

“It looked suspicious.”

“Buddy always looks suspicious. It’s part of his charm.”

“You don’t mean that.”

He stuck his hands in the pockets of his bathrobe and said, “No. No, I really don’t. Buddy has zero charm. He’s the least charming man on the face of the earth, but that doesn’t mean he’s dealing drugs—or killing people.”

“You haven’t given any thought to what I said, then? To what I saw?” She looked disgusted.

Guy lifted the lid, peeked inside, and put it down again. He was thinking about something, and he wasn’t in any hurry to give Stacey an answer. Satisfied with the oatmeal’s progress, he put his hands back in his pockets and leaned against the stove, like Jack against the back bar. “I’ve thought about it hard, Stacey,” he said. “I’ve taken it very seriously.”

“You have?” She was still heated up, thinking that maybe this was worse. That he hadn’t rejected her idea out of hand, but had thought about it for a little while and
then
rejected it. That was worse, wasn’t it? Maybe. Maybe not. She didn’t exactly know, but she stayed heated up over it anyhow.

“I did,” he said. “In fact I took it so seriously that even though it’s none of your business, I went and checked out the guy. He tells me he’s never met Harper Stone.”

“He’s lying.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think he was lying. He was pretty persuasive.”

“
He’s lying to you, Guy.
I saw them. Together.”

“I don’t know.” Guy remembered the starstruck look that had slid across Buddy’s ordinarily impassive face at the mention of Harper Stone’s name. He remembered how Buddy had said he would have remembered making Stone’s acquaintance, sure as hell. “I just don’t know.”

“But I do know.”
Stacey said. “I know what I saw.”

Guy shrugged just the slightest, noncommittal, and shifted his balance as if he were about to head toward the front hall. He was usually up in the bathroom right now, brushing his teeth. He was a creature of very regular habits, and veering away from his usual routine made him uncomfortable. Plus all four members of the Ramsey family had to get ready for the day in that one little bathroom, each in turn, before the school bus arrived.

Frustrated, Stacey tried another angle. “Did they find any drugs? In his body, I mean? Because that would mean—”

“I don’t know what they’ve found. I don’t guess they’ve even gotten that far yet. I don’t have any idea how long it takes to thaw out a body, but I’m thinking a pound of hamburger meat takes the better part of a day.”

“Ewwww.”

“Yeah. Ewwww.” He pushed himself away from the stove entirely.

“But if there were drugs in his system, then he might have gotten them from Buddy. Which would give Buddy a reason for lying about having met him. Right?”

“Are you fingering Buddy for a dope dealer, or a murderer?”

“I don’t know. Couldn’t he be both?”

Guy grinned. “You just don’t like him.”

Now it was Stacey’s turn to shrug.

“Join the club,” Guy said. “Unfortunately, being unlikable isn’t a crime. Not that I know of.”

“But what if Stone died from an overdose?”

“We’ll see. You’ve got to wonder, though: Would that be Buddy’s fault, even if he was the one who sold to him?”

“You’re the lawman,” she said. “Not me.”

“True.”

“But there’s been a crime committed either way,” she said. “Whichever.”

“You’ve got a point.” The pot of oatmeal behind Guy burped and its lid chattered a little bit, jumping. He reached over to turn the heat way down. Upstairs, somebody else got into the bathroom and started the shower running. Guy checked his watch and frowned and opened the cupboard over the sink to take out a cereal bowl. Everything was entirely out of whack now, and all he could do was go with it. He got some maple syrup from the fridge and a spoon from the drawer, and stood watching the oatmeal pot.

Stacey drained her coffee. “So now you think he might be a dealer, after all?”

Guy set the syrup and the spoon on the table. “Stacey,” he said, tightening the belt of his bathrobe and sitting down opposite her, “the truth—just between you and me—is that I’ve been considering that as a real possibility. That’s why I went over and talked with him.”

She straightened up. “All right,” she said. “All right, then. Good.”

“Yeah. What you said helped.”

“I appreciate it.”

“I’ve been living right alongside that guy ever since I was a kid, and seeing only the same thing over and over: a rich kid living high on his dad’s money. It never occurred to me that he might have had other sources of income all along. There’ve been rumors for years, but I’ve always believed in looking for the most obvious and reasonable answer.”

Stacey finished her coffee and sat opposite him, looking awfully pleased with herself.

Guy clacked his spoon on the table, chewing his lip and thinking. After a moment he confessed. “There’s one more thing,” he said. “It wasn’t just what you said about him and Stone in the basement.”

“No?”

“No. That helped jog my mind loose. But it wasn’t all of it.”

“What else was there?” She leaned forward.

“There was another guy. You might have seen him in the Binding with your friend Buddy.”

“Who?”

“You tell me. Did you see Buddy in there a couple of nights back? With a guy from out of town? A flatlander?”

Stacey remembered. She remembered what Brian had said about the guy on the crew who didn’t go home. The director. “Wait a minute,” she said. “It was Manny Something. That’s it. Manny.”

“Exactly. Manny Seville. Another big shot with a Hollywood story.”

“He and Stone knew each other.” The way she said it, it could have been either a question or not.

“They did know each other. And they might have some shared habits that aren’t exactly wholesome.”

“The two of them had a history, I know that.”

“A history,” said Guy. “How did you know?”

“My old fiancé told me. Brian.”

“Brian.”
Guy got up, turned off the heat under the oatmeal, and scraped it into his bowl. “Did he tell you I talked to him?”

“Yes.”

“He’s a good argument for a long engagement.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I think you did the right thing. You know—” He sat down with the bowl, poured some maple syrup over the oatmeal, and stirred it in.

“I know.” She didn’t need him to tell her that.

“Is he still in town?”

“He sure is. He won’t go away.”

Guy ate a couple of spoonfuls, tipped in a little more maple syrup, and stirred. “I wonder why that is.”

“You know why.”

“I guess I do.”

“He can’t let things go.”

“I guess I understand that.” The oatmeal seemed more to his liking now. “Anyway,” he said, “next time you see him, have him tell you what he saw on the coffee table at Harper Stone’s rental house. You might find it interesting.”

Stacey thought for a half second. “It was cocaine, wasn’t it?”

“He already tell you that?”

“He didn’t have to.”

TWENTY-NINE

Stacey sat in the lodge, putting on her boots, checking out a copy of the Rutland
Herald
that somebody had left behind. It had a story about what the troopers found in Stone’s rental house. She figured the article was far from complete, and she was right. There was no mention of what Brian might have noted on the coffee table, for example, unless Guy was referring to empty Harpoon I.P.A. bottles and some magazines and some greasy napkins, which didn’t seem likely. What the troopers did tell the
Herald
’s reporter was that the house was in terrible disarray, as if it had been occupied by a bunch of irresponsible and high-spirited fraternity brothers on winter break.

*   *   *

Frank Schmidt didn’t get the paper delivered to his cabin in the woods, but he was getting basically the same information from CNN. They didn’t have a reporter on the scene anymore—there wasn’t exactly a scene for the reporter to be on, not up here in the Green Mountain State and not out west in Hollywood, where the absence of next of kin was combining with the absence of a body to yield pretty slim pickings in the way of newsworthiness—so CNN picked up network feeds of affiliate feeds of coverage of absolutely no consequence. Some reporter standing in the snow in front of the Rutland hospital, her breath blowing steam. Frank sighed, picked up the remote, and flipped around.

*   *   *

Manny Seville couldn’t believe it. The
Today Show
was back to reporting on elementary schoolkids stealing their parents’ cars and golfers being struck by lightning and some guy who’d managed to survive having a railroad spike rammed through the front of his skull and out the back. Their usual sensational garbage, in other words. The woman at the news desk did mention that Harper Stone the movie actor was still dead, over a colorful graphic that showed the resurgence of his Amazon and Blockbuster numbers, but that was it. Only when they cut to the local news, which in this case was an affiliate in Burlington with sputtering microphones and video production values that reminded Manny of something out of the early days of color television, was there anything like actual coverage. That should have been no surprise, really. The death of Harper Stone was the biggest thing to have happened around here since the Lake Placid Olympics, and that was thirty years ago.

*   *   *

Stacey finished buckling her boots, snugged a gaiter down over her neck, and strapped on her helmet. She zipped up her coat, lowered her goggles, and put her gloves on, then she took them off again so she could tear the story out of the
Herald
to take it with her. Just so she would remember to ask Brian about Stone’s rental house when she saw him. As if she could forget.

*   *   *

Frank Schmidt flipped right past the network morning shows and found himself at Turner Classic Movies, where a Harper Stone film festival was under way. The guy’s big mug filled the screen in a close-up from twenty years back at least. Maybe thirty. Frank figured it was better for people to remember him that way than as a frozen corpse, and he hollered something to that effect into the kitchen. No answer.

*   *   *

Manny Seville lay in bed until nine, reaching over to the bedside table now and then to run his finger into a little plastic bag and scrape some white powder out of it, then bringing it back and massaging it into his gums. Not even the powder could make Regis and What’s-Her-Name tolerable, so he found the remote and switched the television off. He licked his finger and guessed he might not mind staying around this hick town for a few days more. He kind of liked it here. It was restful. That whole mountain village thing. As hard as he’d been working, wasn’t it about time he took a vacation?

*   *   *

Stacey was on a chair all by herself, fiddling with her iPod to get the volume just right in the headphones built into her helmet—not so soft that she couldn’t make out the music, but not so loud that she couldn’t hear somebody coming up behind her—when she soared over a huddle of patrollers running some kind of first-aid drill. An older guy she recognized but didn’t know was strapped onto a toboggan, and Chip was gearing up to take him down the treacherous mogul field on Devil May Care. He saw her at the same instant she saw him, and judging by the way he waved and pointed she figured he was planning to meet her at the bottom. The guy strapped to the toboggan grinned at her and tried to wave, too, but it was hopeless. All he could do was wiggle his fingers, which in his big black gloves made his hands waggle like flippers.