Fade to White (4 page)

It wasn’t until she actually went in a few days back to shop for a pair of skis—Heads, a brand nobody else in town carried, sad to say—that she figured it out. The guy who ran the place was a piece of work. Surly, arrogant, irritable, lazy, cantankerous, mean, distracted, ill-tempered—there weren’t enough adjectives in the English language to describe his attitude problem. But if she was going to get those skis she had her eye on, she hadn’t had much choice but to do business with him.

His nametag read
BUDDY FROMMER
, and she knew within ten seconds of trying to distract him from whatever he was looking at on his laptop screen that whoever had first called him that must have meant it as a joke.
Buddy.
Sure thing. He snarled at her, waved her in the general direction of the skis, and looked back down at the screen. She named the model she wanted and he snarled again without raising his eyes. She named the size she needed and he all but hissed.

Ultimately she found the skis herself and brought them back to the counter and explained somehow that she wanted to give him money in exchange for them. He sighed and growled and shook his head, generally acting as though this was the worst thing that had happened to him all day. Like having to sell a pair of skis was the one thing that he was afraid might occur when he opened the doors that morning, and now here it was. The worst possible outcome of his day at work.

He ran her credit card and said she could pick them up on Wednesday once they got the bindings adjusted. She asked Wednesday morning, and he said if she wanted to take her chances that was fine with him, but if she had any sense she’d wait until Thursday morning. He’d told her Wednesday, which meant Wednesday, not Wednesday morning, in which case he would have said Tuesday night. He wasn’t some kind of goddamned miracle worker who could afford to have technicians at her service day and night, was he?

So here she was on Thursday morning, pulling into the parking lot alongside a big white Hummer with out-of-state tags. Maryland. It was rare enough to see any car around here, but if there was going to be one it made sense that it should be a flatlander—from the farther away the better. One who definitely didn’t know the score. Good luck to him. Stacey got out of the Subaru, opened up the hatch, and pushed some stuff around to make room for her new skis. The old ones were still back there along with her boots and the rest of her gear, just in case her new best friend Buddy hadn’t felt like keeping his promise, but she sure did hope she wouldn’t have to use them. She closed the hatch again to keep the boots as warm as she could, and went on in.

Buddy was nowhere to be seen, and neither was the environmentalist from Maryland.

She walked back toward where they kept the skis. Nothing. She came back out front, and looked over among the jackets and ski pants. Nobody. She called “Hello?” and nobody answered. She thought about ringing the bell on the front counter but thought better of it at the last minute. She kept looking. No one was in the snowboard section either, but there was a stairway over in the corner under a sign that read
SERVICE DEPARTMENT
and she could hear voices from down there. Men. Two of them. Buddy and the guy from Maryland, no doubt about it.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

“I’m here to pick up some skis?”

Still no answer.

She went down. Not fast, just one step at a time, holding on to the railing, waiting for Buddy to yell out and stop her and tell her to go back up where she belonged and he’d get her the damn skis when he felt like it. She was thinking of how the lifts would start turning in forty-five minutes and she didn’t want to be late, blaming him already.

She reached the next to last step, ducked her head, and looked to see that there was nobody at the counter. The voices kept on, though, coming from somewhere in the back. She called again, “Hello?” and took a couple of tentative steps across the concrete floor. The place smelled of grease and hot wax and cigarette smoke. The first two she expected and the last was no surprise. If the guy was such a pain, he might as well be a health nut, too. She never understood it when she’d see people out on the slopes—or on the lifts, more likely—sucking away on cigarettes. Poisoning themselves in the great outdoors.

It wasn’t Buddy who was smoking, however. She found that out when she followed the voices and made her way back among stacked cartons and heaps of junk and piles of ruined equipment to find the two of them—Buddy and the guy from the Hummer—together at a wooden workbench, transacting some kind of business. Buddy had his back to her. She saw the other guy nearly in profile. Buddy was heavyset, and the other guy was taller than he was by two or three inches and weighed a little less. Solid but kind of rangy, with silver hair immaculately cut to skim the top of his shirt collar. His jacket was flung on a chair and his sleeves were rolled up. He had his weight on his forearms, one of which had the pale ghost of what looked like an old tattoo—not some hip Asian-inspired design, but something he might have picked up a long time ago in a seaport someplace. A heart and an anchor, with chains binding them together.

“Hello?”

They both turned, Buddy with a hard snap of his neck and the silver-haired guy slow as molasses, looking up reluctantly from whatever it was they were studying on the workbench.

“Get lost,” said Buddy, looking like he meant it.

She said she was just here to pick up her new pair of Heads. The fat ones. He remembered, right? He’d promised them for yesterday? She didn’t mean to interrupt anything.

“I’m kind of occupied,” he said. “In case you haven’t noticed.”

“They’re all paid for,” she said, as if that made any difference, and she looked from Buddy to the silver-haired guy, thinking maybe he would take her side. He didn’t have to, because the sight of him distracted Stacey enough to change the subject entirely.

“Oh, my, God,” she said. “It’s you.”

He didn’t deny it. He didn’t actually say anything. He just smiled a smile that was a good bit more crooked than Stacey expected it to be, tilted his head a little, and reached up to touch his fingers to his brow in a little pantomime of graciousness. Stacey thought he looked pretty good for his age, but then again it was probably the result of a small fortune spent on plastic surgery. Before she could decide, he swiveled his gaze away from her and gave Buddy Frommer a hard look that got him moving.

“All right.” Buddy stepped away from the worktable and kind of bulled Stacey ahead of him, toward the stairs. “Let’s get you out of here.”

He pushed her on up the stairs, and that was the end of her brush with stardom. Or her near-miss. Or whatever you’d call it.

SIX

Thanks to the delay at the Slippery Slope she didn’t make the first chair, but she still came pretty close.

It was a day almost as good as yesterday—a high curved blue dome of sky with just a few puffy clouds, and no wind to speak of. From the top of the main lift the valley spread out below like a diorama in a natural history museum, so pristine and clear and sharp that the distance of it might have been a trick. At the edge of her vision, about as far away as sight would allow, she could see the high white peak of Mount Washington all the way over in New Hampshire. The winds up there were probably a hundred miles an hour or more, but it looked completely lovely from where she stood, putting her gloved hands through the straps on her poles.

“Hey.” A shout came from over her shoulder. She turned to see Chip Walsh barreling in her direction from a little distance uphill, out from the spillway of a run from the Northside, which the paying customers hadn’t had time to reach yet. She was thrilled to see him but a little jealous, as usual, of the early start that patrollers got. Maybe she ought to give up tending bar and see about a job with the Ski Patrol. She thought she might be almost good enough. Then again she didn’t care for the idea of contaminating her ski day with actual work. Where was the fun in that?

Chip pulled up short, his skis sending up a controlled spray of snow. “Don’t even think about skiing the Northside,” he said. “That movie crew is still over there.”

“It’s just a commercial.”

“Whatever. They’ve still got the lift all to themselves.”

“Dang.”

“And a more unhappy-looking crowd you’ve never seen. On a day like this.” He shook his head and pointed to the sky with a pole. “They must be the only twenty people in the state who don’t have big stupid grins on their faces.”

“Oh,” said Stacey as she took off, “I can think of one more.” She made him wait until they were on the lift again before he found out she was talking about Buddy Frommer at the Slippery Slope.

*   *   *

“That
guy,” said Chip, shaking his head. “What the heck were you doing in there anyway? Nobody goes in there.”

She lifted one of her new skis to an angle at which he could admire it properly.

“Oooh. nice. I didn’t know you could get Heads in town.”

“You need to go into the Slippery Slope more often.”

“No, thanks.”

“They’re the only place that sells them.”

“They’re going to have to sell them to somebody else. That Buddy Frommer’s too big a pain in the ass for me. I don’t care
what
he sells.”

She tilted her head, still admiring the new skis. “How does he stay in business, do you suppose?”

Chip raised his eyebrows behind his goggles. “You know what people say.”

“No, actually. I don’t.”

“I don’t want to spread rumors.”

“Sure you do. Everybody likes to spread rumors.”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “You wonder, is all. A big operation like that with no visible customers? Makes you think he might be selling something other than skis.”

Stacey’s jaw dropped open.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s possible.”

Stacey turned her head his way.

“It is.
It’s possible.”

She clapped her jaw shut. “I’m not saying it’s not possible. Just the opposite. I’m saying I think I might have just seen it happen.” She couldn’t believe she’d seen Buddy Frommer and Harper Stone huddled over a drug deal and not even known what she was looking at. Some sophisticated big-city transplant she was.

“You’re kidding.”

She shook her head and told him everything. The out-of-state Hummer, the empty store, the voices from down in the service department. Frommer and Stone himself at the workbench, up to God knows what. Wow.

“So it’s true what people say,” he said when she was done.

“Apparently.”

“It explains a lot.”

“I guess.”

“Now I’ll know where to go.”

“Chip.”

“Just kidding.” They both sat shaking their heads. A rumor was one thing, but this was something else. Leave it to those Hollywood types to find a source for dope even in an isolated little one-horse Green Mountain town like this one. As the top of the lift approached and they raised their skis to slide off, Chip got around to asking, “So how’d he look, anyway?”

“Who?”

“Harper Stone. You know: the mayor of
Murder Town.”

“Not too bad. Well preserved, I guess. Which I guess is what you’d expect, all things considered.”

Chip pointed with his pole toward the woods that separated them from the top of North Peak, where the shoot was in progress. “How about we go over there and take another look after all.”

Stacey didn’t know whether she followed him in order to see Stone or to let Brian see her having fun with Chip, but in the end it didn’t make much difference.

*   *   *

They were just standing around like a bunch of statues, all long faces and frustrated looks and contagious gloom. Waiting for snow under that bright blue sky. As she rounded the last couple of long curves and came zooming down the hill, Stacey felt sorry for them—but only a little.

They didn’t even have the cherry picker from the electric company fired up today. The whole crew was gathered around a couple of picnic tables set up in back of a catering truck parked near the lift station, drinking coffee and eating donuts and staring at the sky like they didn’t trust it. The lifties assigned to run the Northside chair—a couple of bearded old-timers in greasy Spruce Peak jackets and snowmobile pants—were lounging at the tables, too, glad for the easy day, chatting up a couple of cute young production assistants who wouldn’t have had a moment to spare for them under ordinary circumstances. Stacey and Chip skied up, stopping where they’d still have momentum for getting to the trail that led back down to the main face, and clicked out of their bindings. The crew brightened up to see them come stamping across the snow toward the picnic tables. A few waved their arms and welcomed them like royalty or visitors from another planet. They were a pleasant break from the routine, if nothing else. Brian didn’t seem to be anywhere around, but after a minute or two he stuck his head from the door of the big green fiberglass Porta-Potty.

Perfect,
Stacey figured.
Just perfect.

The crew remembered Stacey from last night at the Binding, and she introduced Chip as her friend. She half expected a few catcalls in Brian’s direction—
“I can see why you lost out, buddy boy,”
that kind of thing—but everybody was so depressed and frustrated by the lack of snow that nobody even rose to the bait. It wasn’t any great loss. She didn’t want Chip getting ideas anyhow. Maybe someday, but not just yet.

There were a few new faces that hadn’t been in the Binding last night: the blond actress, an angry-looking guy in a leather coat who sat smoking a cigarette and looking at the sky, and last but not least, the star of the operation, Harper Stone himself, who had just finished doctoring his coffee at the window of the catering truck and was sidling over toward Stacey as if he’d been invited.

“Hey,” she said, taking off her helmet. “Remember me?”

Behind dark glasses, Stone knitted his famous brow. “I meet so many lovely women,” he purred, “I’m afraid that you have me at a disadvantage.”

Stacey looked from him to Chip and back again, and let it drop. “Never mind.”