Fade to White (26 page)

“When this cools off,” he said, motioning with a tilt of his head, “we’ve got the microwave.”

Stacey laughed. “Who’s going to give it a chance to cool off?”

They cleared a space on the coffee table and set their plates and glasses down. Chip had the movie in the player already. Stacey scooped up salsa on chips with one hand and located the DVD packaging with the other. “Fancy,” she said, putting the accent on the second syllable, talking through a mouthful of crunchy goodness.

“And not cheap, either.”

“Hey, it’s for your dad. He’s a fan, right?”

“He is. But somebody’s making a killing on this stuff. And Stone didn’t even leave any next of kin, did he?”

“That’s right. Or so they say.”

“Too bad. To see all this go to the government or whatever.” He bit into a chimichanga, making a reflexive kind of happy carnivore sound somewhere deep in his throat. “Then again,” he said, “I guess he’s not seeing much of anything anymore.”

“True,” she said. “Maybe he had a foundation set up or something. Something charitable.”

Chip wasn’t buying. “Did he look like a charitable type to you?”

“You never know.” But she knew that you do know. You always know. And what she knew was that Harper Stone was anything but Mother Theresa.

THIRTY-SEVEN

If either Stacey or Chip had had the idea that something might happen between the two of them that night—if either of them had thought that this “date” might amount to the beginning of something, or the turning of some page or other—Harper Stone and a Jeep Wrangler full of Mexican food had different ideas. By halfway through the movie, around the part where Stone’s character gets whacked over the head and dragged unconscious into a mental hospital only to wake up under the care of a suspiciously Teutonic doctor with a little black mustache, a white lab coat, a pocket full of scalpels, and a syringe full of God knows what, they had crawled off to different ends of the couch and lay there groaning. Every now and then their stocking feet touched, but that was the extent of the romance. Around them lay the wreckage of the Mexican food, bags and trays and plastic containers and a pile of those little waxed cardboard boxes that usually hold either chow mein or live goldfish, half emptied and shoved inside one another like Russian dolls. The wine bottle was empty and Chip kept promising to go to the kitchen and find another one, but he couldn’t exactly move. That was all right with Stacey. She was half asleep already, struggling to keep her eyes open, and they had another hour or so of the movie to get through.

She drew her knees up, shifted her weight, and put her feet down flat on the floor, hauling herself up straight with a great effort. Chip looked at her over his toes and groaned. “If I don’t sit up,” she said, “I’ll never make it through.”

“How about I go put up some coffee?”

“Go ahead,” she said, knowing that he’d never manage it.

The hall light was on, and in the kitchen there was another little lamp glowing beside the microwave, but otherwise the apartment was dark. Chip’s television was old and small, and in the dim light of the screen she had trouble finding the remote for the DVD player. There wasn’t a whole lot of light in
Lights Out.
Still, when Harper Stone/Harry Smith fought his way out of the sinister hospital and the scene shifted to an external shot, that big hospital towering white and the sky a vivid California blue that glowed even on that dinky little screen, she located the remote under a pile of greasy napkins. She leaned back and groaned and pointed it at the screen. “You mind if I skip ahead?”

“Be my guest.”

She zipped forward to the elevator scene: Harper Stone and Joseph Cotton going head-to-head and fist-to-fist in a space that seemed both claustrophobic and infinite.

“Does this thing have some kind of zoom on it?”

“I don’t know.”

She pressed the pause key and held the remote aloft, tilting it away from the television to catch what light there was, turning her head away from the screen, and squinting at it until she thought she had it figured out.

Chip lifted his head. “I could turn on a light,” he said, but she knew she had about as much chance of his doing that as she had of his making a pot of coffee, which was still roughly zero.

“That’s OK. I’ve got it.”

“Good.” He let his head fall back to the pillow with a thump.

On the screen, Stone and Cotton were locked in struggle. The camera veered and swiveled and swooped. Stacey leaned forward, one hand holding her stomach and the other aiming the remote. Bars of light and dark swept across the screen as Cotton’s character lost his footing—and the camera, keeping pace with his movement, plummeted alongside him for what felt like an eternity but couldn’t have been more than two seconds. Stacey clutched her stomach tighter and paused the DVD and waited, breathing slowly, until she got her equilibrium back. She looked over at Chip and saw that his eyes were shut. Lucky boy.

She checked the remote again, found the correct button, and zoomed the picture in a notch, panned it side to side. So far so good. She pulled back out and pressed
PLAY
.

The camera righted itself and looked up from Cotton’s perspective to find Stone’s face peering over the black edge of the elevator roof. His eyes lit up with panic and potential. Then he thrust a hand over the edge to help the bad guy. The hand was blackened in streaks, greasy, and it thrust over the edge and down the side like some kind of purposeful snake. Even as she watched, Stacey realized that the geometry of the scene didn’t quite make sense, that there surely wasn’t enough room between the side of the cab and the wall of the shaft to let a person of Joseph Cotton’s size—a person of any size, come to that—slide down between them. Yet there it was, and in the heat of the moment it was convincing. It had been convincing audiences for years and years, no questions asked.

The camera—another camera, she realized, or probably an entirely different setup taken later or earlier or God knew when—shifted to an alternate perspective where it caught the fingertips of one of Cotton’s hands gripping a metal bar on the side of the cab. Gasping overwhelmed the sound track. Another set of fingertips came into view from below and they gripped the metal bar, too. Cotton exhaled (somebody exhaled, anyhow; she realized that the audio didn’t necessarily originate with the shot), and then the shoulder of Cotton’s gray pin-striped suit blocked the angle as he lifted himself up.

The shot switched again, this time to a position from somewhere above Stone’s spot on top of the cab, the back of his head to the camera. He was flattened on the greasy panel, his sportcoat split up the back and torn mostly free, his left hand seeking purchase on a rigid cable, his right arm reaching down for Cotton, whose own hand shot up to take it.

Freeze.

There it was, on the back of the rescuing arm.

The tattoo.

Stacey zoomed in to make sure that it wasn’t just a grease smear, and it most definitely was anything but. The details of it were a little vague in the dim light of the elevator shaft, but it was definitely the tattoo she’d been expecting. A heart and an anchor and chains.

The tattoo that Manny Seville didn’t remember Stone ever having.

The tattoo that she’d seen with her own eyes, both on Buddy Frommer and on somebody who looked an awful lot like Harper Stone.

“There it is,” she said, whacking Chip’s stocking foot with the remote.

He roused up, but only a little. “You’ve got a good eye.”

“I told you.”

“But what do you make of it?”

She didn’t answer. She just pressed the play button and let the movie continue. The shot changed again—who thought there’d be so many? Watching it this way was an education—taking Cotton’s perspective once more and watching while Stone inched over the edge of the cab to extend his reach. That face. That movie-star face. It was exactly as she remembered seeing it in the basement of the Slippery Slope. Then Stone’s hand came down, the camera moved in, and she saw his face and his forearm in one shot and knew what was wrong. She knew what it was that had been bothering her from the beginning.

Click. She froze the shot.

Click. She zoomed in.

Whack. She gave Chip’s foot a slap. “See that?” she said.

“See what? I don’t see anything.”

“Exactly,” she said.

“So?”

“So a stuntman would be younger than the guy he doubles for, don’t you think?”

“Maybe. What stuntman?”

“Never mind that,” said Stacey. “Let’s go for a drive.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

They took the Subaru. Her skis were still in the back and she’d need them for what she had in mind. She’d need boots, too, but hers were home drying out in a corner of Megan Ramsey’s kitchen. That fact alone was a huge improvement from the old days when she’d lived out of the car behind the pizza joint next to Bud’s Suds, and Stacey appreciated it every day. If she’d had to put her finger on it, the act of sleeping curled around her ski boots in order to keep them from turning into complete icicles by morning was probably the worst part of the hard-core ski bum lifestyle. That and how that awful Danny Bowman had tormented her night after night, scraping little lines in her frozen windows with a stick or a bottle or God knew what, making her think that she was being hunted by the Claw or something. Even now that she knew it had been just Danny, she still shivered to think about it.

Anyhow, there was no way they were going back to the Ramseys’ to pick up her boots now. She’d need a pair if she was going to pull off the lost skier act, though, but it occurred to her that there was no reason they needed to fit. They didn’t even have to fit her skis. So they grabbed Chip’s from the hall and tossed them in the back of the Subie.

“You cold?” said Chip from the passenger seat as Stacey backed out of the driveway. “I am.”

“Me, too.” She turned up the heat and jacked the fan up all the way even though the engine was cold, as if just getting a little more air moving might help things.

Chip bent forward, groaning again over his bellyful of Mexican, and poked at a dial on the console. “You lucky dog,” he said. “I only wish
my
car had heated seats.”

Stacey didn’t even look over. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

When the dial spun and the light behind it didn’t come on, Chip slumped back in the seat and shivered. “So where’re we going, anyhow?” he said from somewhere down inside his coat.

“The cabin. The one with the tall guy?”

“How come?”

“Because I’m a lost skier, and I’m going to be knocking at his door.”

“Oh. That explains everything.” The words emerged from his coat on a pale cloud.

“It’ll be a start.”

They drove through the silent town, past the dark barracks of the library with its one searing arc light out front, through the single blinking traffic light, past the last few stragglers leaving Vinnie’s Steak-Out and Maison Maurice and firing up their engines and setting off for home. They passed the access road to the ski mountain and kept on going until they left the town limits behind and entered the truly dark Vermont night. Not a star in the sky and no visible moonlight through the low clouds, this was the hour when the Green Mountains turned solid black. The turnoff to the lane up the backside of the mountain nearly slipped past in the shadows, but Stacey caught sight of it just in time and swung the Subaru off the open road into even greater darkness.

That’s when she switched off the lights.

“Are you crazy?” Chip asked.

“I’ll go slow. If I’m going to knock on their door like a lost skier, I can’t show up with the headlights on.”

“And what do you hope to gain by this, anyhow?” Chip pressed his face to the glass and watched the drifts creep by. “The state troopers have already talked with the guy. The sheriff has already talked with him. Heck,
we’ve
talked to him a little.”

“Correction:
You’ve
talked to him a little. I don’t think he’ll recognize me.”

“So what?”

“So I think he’s been keeping a big secret up there. And I don’t think he can keep it forever.”

“How big a secret?”

“About six feet.”

“Whoa.” Chip sat up straighter. “You think whoever got Stone is up there with him?”

“Sort of. Remember what that little Anthony said about an old guy?”

Chip’s window was beginning to fog so he rolled it down. The cold night air blew in on them as he asked, “So how come you think you can get at this big secret, when Guy and the state troopers couldn’t?”

“That’s easy,” she said. “I’m a girl.”

*   *   *

All the lights were on in Frank Schmidt’s cabin. Between the windmill and the solar panels and an emergency generator back by the storage shed, he was apparently self-sufficient beyond all reason. Chip saw the glow in the cabin windows first, since Stacey was too busy concentrating on the twists and turns of the road ahead. They came around a curve and he looked right to watch something sweep past the window—a branch or an owl—and there it was, that yellow gleaming in the black distance, flickering through the dense forest.

“Land ho,” he said, pointing, and Stacey pumped the brakes. The car came to a stop right in the middle of the lane, and she tapped the gas again to slide it over to the right side, hard up against the drifts. “Hey,” said Chip, “How’m I supposed to get out?”

“My side,” she said, yanking the key and tugging at the door handle. She gasped when the dome light came on, fearing that its dim glow might give their presence away, but Chip reached up fast and switched it off. She climbed out and he followed, complaining his way over the gearshift. She already had the rear liftgate open by the time he got one foot down on the snow, and she whispered fiercely to him that he should go easy closing the car door. He did.

Stacey had her helmet on and her skis leaning up against the car when he caught up with her. She sat on the tailgate and swapped her snow boots for his ski boots and buckled them as tight as they’d go. Close enough. They’d do. She stood up and had him shut the hatch lid,
easy does it.
Then she dug in her pocket for her cell phone, switched it on, and handed it over before it was even done starting up. It sang its little startup song and she snatched it back and set it to vibrate, then handed it to Chip again. “Wait ten minutes,” she said, “and then call Guy. His number’s in there.”