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“So what’s the big deal? What can you tell the police that you can’t tell me?”

At the sound of the p-word a half dozen heads turned their way—including the dad’s, since it looked as if he was going to be stuck here for a good long time anyhow—so Stacey dropped her voice further. “I don’t know. It’s just—”

“Somebody told you to keep things quiet, right? And if a person can count on anything, he can count on you to be a good girl.” Brian said it as if there was something wrong with that. “Who was it, your landlord?”

Stacey wasn’t interested in answering. “So what’s wrong with being a good girl?” she said.

Brian shrugged. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Except where’s the fun?”

“There isn’t any fun. There’s no fun.”

“I thought that’s why you came here, babe.”

“Don’t call me
babe.
”

“Stace.”

“Don’t call me
Stace.
”

“Jeez. I thought that’s why you came here. To cut loose. Break out of the old routine.” He raised his complicated coffee in a toast. “To live a little.”

“Boy, did you miss the point. I should have slammed the door a little harder on my way out.”

The dad winced, and not entirely on account of the way his son was sucking on that chocolate chip.

“Never mind about that,” Brian said. “You can tell me: How’d you find him? What were you two doing up there in the woods, if that’s not too personal?” His eyebrows jumped.

“We were skiing. Which is what some people come here to do. It’s what
most
people come here to do.”

“But I thought Stone was somewhere off the mountain. Off the ski mountain, I mean.”

“He was.”

“I don’t get it. You can’t just ski
anywhere.
”

“Actually, you can,” Stacey said. “If you’ve got the skills, and if you want it enough, you can go for it. It’d be a mistake not to.”

Brian brightened. “Good for you! That’s the same way I look at things.”

“I know. Believe me.”

“If you want it, go for it.”

“Brian.”

“Go for the gusto.”

“Brian.”

“I mean it.”

“Look. Brian. You’re not helping your case.”

“Oh. Right. Well. You know what I mean. Good for you.” He gave her a little salute.

“Anyway,” she said, “how’d you know Stone was off-piste?”

“
Off-piste.
Is that like piste-off?”

“It’s French. It means out of bounds. Off the trail map. In the woods.”

“How’d I know? Word gets around.”

“The news report I saw just said he was on the mountain. Nothing more than that.”

“Stace.”

She grimaced.

“Stacey. Come on. I followed the blinking lights off the access road, is all. It’s kind of hard to miss. All those police cars, the snowmobiles all over the place, the camera crews.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Right. It’s not like it’s a big secret where they found him.”

“Where
I
found him.”

“Exactly. Anyhow, I pulled over and tried to tell a cop that I was up here on a shoot with the guy, but he just waved me past.”

“Poor Brian,” she said. “Your time will come.” Despite or perhaps because of the irony, she had a reflexive urge to reach out and touch the back of his hand—but she caught herself at the last minute, and tossed off the last of her espresso instead.

TWENTY-TWO

“I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” said the tall man, folded up into a chair in front of his TV, in that remote cabin on the backside of the mountain. He couldn’t have gotten out and gone to work if he’d wanted to, on account of the half dozen state police cars still strewn up and down his winding lane.

“What is it?” came the answer from the kitchen.

“The TV just said those two old Harper Stone pictures,
Murder Town
and
Lights Out,
are number one and two at Amazon.”

“Really?”

“Number one and number two. The DVDs, I’m talking about.”

“What’s number three?”

“They didn’t say. Probably some kind of Hannah Montana crap or something. Anyway, they’re freaking sold out. Unbelievable.”

*   *   *

It was going to be a while before the authorities came up with a cause of death. Manny Seville’s people had been in the refrigerated transport business back in the Bronx—some of them were probably in it still—and growing up he’d seen enough frozen meat to last a lifetime. With a day to kill before his rental arrived and no way out of town, he’d pushed up the pillows on the bed into a big pile and finished off the contents of the cereal carton and the milk carton and the orange juice carton, too, flipping from
Today
to
Good Morning America
to
The Early Show
to whatever it was they called that thing on Fox. Harper Stone was turning out to be big news on all of them. Everywhere he turned they were showing little snippets of action from his pictures, promotional photos and backlot stills whose colors had all bled out, and now and then an old head shot that went back to the days when they had been just a pair of innocent kids, scrambling around Warner’s, looking for a way to make something of themselves. Amazing. Nothing ever goes away entirely.

It never occurred to him to get dressed and walk into town to check things out for himself. Televised was better. What did the hicks around here know about anything? By later on in the morning, though—when Regis Philbin and that blond girl had come on, taking up the story and adding embellishments of their own (Philbin claimed to have run into an inebriated Harper Stone at Cannes many years back, and who could deny it?) he was starting to get a little stir-crazy. Hungry, too. So he got dressed, pulled on his coat, and made his way down the mountain road. The day was brightening up and getting a little warmer. Car traffic on the blacktop had cleared patches in the newly fallen sleet or snow or freezing rain or whatever it was they called it. The road was gray and sloppy and his feet got wet through his boots, but at least he wasn’t watching Regis Philbin anymore. There were limits to what a man needed to endure, even on behalf of an old compadre like Harper Stone.

There were plenty of places to grab a bite in town, but not a single one appealed to him. Through the hazy plate-glass windows at Mahoney’s Luncheonette, every surface looked mired in some kind of greasy yellow film. Vinnie’s Steak-Out didn’t look half bad, but it wasn’t open yet and although the early bird special they had posted in the window sounded all right, he sure couldn’t wait until four o’clock. He’d already had enough Cinco de Taco to last him a lifetime, and the Whippi Dip was buttoned up tight for the season. He didn’t want ice cream anyway and kept walking.

There was one decent-looking restaurant up a side street, a phony French place called Maison Maurice, but that was closed, too. He almost hit the pizza joint out of desperation. He came even closer to stopping at the grocery store for some cold cuts and a loaf of bread, but by the time he figured out that he could make his own lunch he was past the entrance to the parking lot. He thought maybe he ought to give it another ten minutes or so, get all the way to the edge of town in case there was some kind of fast food or something out that way. Something with a name brand on it anyhow. Something you could trust as a known quantity.

He was scuffing along the sidewalk, dreaming pathetic dreams of a lowly Burger King, when a gigantic Japanese SUV cut in front of him and zoomed down a driveway, hitting a pothole and splashing him from head to toe with a muddy mixture of half-melted snow, road grit, and rock salt. He did what any good New Yorker would have done. He didn’t hesitate, and he didn’t get angry, he just stood his ground and nailed the rear bumper of the SUV with the hard heel of his boot. It left a mark—not just a mark, really, but a boot-sized impression in what turned out to be a plastic panel—and he capped it off with a picturesque profanity and a one-fingered salute. God, he was hungry—and now he was wet and cold, too. What was wrong with people?

The SUV belonged to Buddy Frommer, and the driveway led to the Slippery Slope, and that’s what was wrong with people. Frommer skidded the thing to a stop in the best space in the unplowed parking lot, right in front of the entrance (What was the point of owning the place if you had to save the good parking spots for customers? And there weren’t usually many customers anyhow.), and he opened the door and climbed down, his face twisted into an ugly knot. He shot a quick look at the rear bumper, and then plunged toward Manny with his index finger jutting out like a knife. “I guess you ain’t from around here, are you?”

“I get it,” said Manny. “If I
were
from around here, I’d know to watch out for the big Nissan with the asshole behind the wheel.”

Buddy’s face got even redder than usual. “You’d know to look out, let’s leave it at that.” He drew near to Manny, following the trajectory of his pointing finger, and came within an inch of reaching out and taking him by the collar but stopped at the last second. He turned, still pointing, and directed Manny’s attention to the rear of the SUV. “And you wouldn’t pull
that
kind of stunt, that’s for sure.”

A car with Massachusetts plates pulled into the lot and a woman got out and tried the front door, only to find it locked. She studied the hours posted behind the plate glass, pushed back her sleeve, and checked her watch. She tunneled her hands and held them against the door and peered inside. Then, frustrated, she looked over at the two men arguing on the sidewalk and shrugged by way of asking if they knew what was up.

Buddy, distracted for a minute from his fury over the damage to his car, hollered at her, “This town is full of ski shops, if you’re in such a goddamned hurry.”

“I’m picking something up,” she called, looking helpless. “I can’t just—” Then, slowly, she tipped her head to one side, beginning to realize who it was she was talking to.

Frommer had turned his attention back to Manny by then. He put his red face right up to his and began saying he had half a mind to call the cops on account of the damage he’d done to the SUV with his boot, but stopped halfway through because he got distracted by the way Manny was studying his upper lip. He peeled off his glove and rubbed at the spot beneath his nose with his thumb and forefinger, pushing at it and squeezing his nose and sniffing.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Manny, brightening up and forgetting about lunch entirely. “How about
you
don’t call the cops, and
I
don’t call the cops either.”

Frommer, bullish and fuming, lowered his head by a few degrees and looked at the flatlander from underneath his eyebrows. He still didn’t get it. Not entirely. Or maybe he thought he could still brazen it out.

Manny reached up a gloved finger and swiped it along Buddy’s upper lip. The move couldn’t have shocked Buddy more if his hand were a cattle prod. Then he drew back a step to show off the little white smudge across the tip of his finger.

“You missed a spot,” he said.

TWENTY-THREE

Tina Montero was devastated. She’d watched the news reports in the morning before heading to work, and then contrary to every principle of relaxation and mindfulness she had kept the TV in the Green Mountain Massage waiting room tuned to CNN all day. As a result she and her customers—sophisticated ladies from New York and Connecticut in the morning, passing the time while their husbands went skiing and their kids pined away in ski school; then belligerent and foul-smelling men from the same places in the afternoon, all pulled muscles and regret—were wound up tight as watch springs from the nonstop barrage of bad news. Not just about Harper Stone but about everything else: the economy, the Middle East, you name it.

She was wired when she locked up after the last client and she was wired when she finally got her car to start and she was wired when she hung her coat on a peg at the Broken Binding and made for her usual stool. Jack, behind the bar, recognized her distress without looking twice, and he had her chardonnay all set before she even sat down.

He bent forward with his elbows on the bar and his hands folded, giving her a look of professional concern. “Aww, sweetie,” he said. “What is it?”

“It’s everything. It’s every damned thing.”

He nodded. “I know.”

She took a sip and gave him a ravaged look. “Have you had the television on?”

“No. But I heard. I heard.” He paused, took a deep breath. “No question: It’s the end of an era.”

“It’s not just Harper Stone,” she said, raising her glass in a toast to him anyhow. “It’s Afghanistan and Israel and the health care system and—”

“Whoa,” said Jack, holding up his hand like a traffic cop. “Somebody’s had herself a little too much MSNBC.”

“CNN.”

“Oh, my God. There isn’t enough chardonnay in the world to cure a CNN overdose.”

“You’re telling me.”

Jack smiled big. Tina had never noticed that he had a couple of gold teeth halfway back on one side, but she noticed them now. “We’re just going to have to talk you down,” he said. “Nice and easy. That’s all there is to it.”

Before long a tiny bit of the old sparkle returned to Tina’s eyes. Stacey saw it happen as she pushed through the swinging door from the kitchen, a bucket of ice in each hand. “What’s up with you two?” she asked.

“Tina’s feeling the weight of the world.”

“Tell me about it,” Stacey said. Jack slid the steel door open for her and she emptied the first bucket into the bin.

“You haven’t heard?”

“Oh, I’ve heard all right.” She tipped out the second bucket, and raised her voice over the crash of ice cubes. “Haven’t you heard?”

Tina looked puzzled. “Heard what?”

“I thought everybody knew by now. I mean, I wasn’t in any hurry to let it get out, but I spent the better part of the afternoon telling the state troopers and all—”

“Let what get out? Told the state troopers what? I haven’t heard
anything.
” Tina had a desperate look on her face that said
one more piece of bad news, and this woman will go straight back to the edge and over it.

Stacey slid one bucket inside the other and set them down on the perforated rubber mat that covered the floor behind the bar. By the end of the night that mat would be slippery with spilled beer and melted ice, slimy with stray bits of Chex Mix decomposing into a wet goo, but for now it was pretty dry and even relatively clean. “I figured everybody’d know by now.”