Fade to White (19 page)

Frank laughed out loud. “She ain’t never coming out as long as you’re here.” He pointed to a little hallway that ran past the bedroom door and led into the back of the house. “Bathroom’s back there. Until that woman gets the curlers out of her hair, she don’t think she’s fit for company.”

“I’m not exactly
company,
” said Guy, and he realized from the impatient look that was coming back to Frank’s face that it was true. “How about I leave you my card,” he said, knowing a dead end when he saw one, “and you folks give me a call if something comes up. If you remember anything. Anything at all.”

“Sure,” said Frank, taking the card and sliding it into his pocket. “Will do.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Stacey ran into the Long Islander again, not long after lunch. The one thirty lineup, where the instructors picked up a new batch of students, had come and gone—and now the old man with the icy mustache was back on the lift. This time he wasn’t riding with a little kid. This time he was saddled instead with something even worse: Brian Russell. Complete with his barf-yellow Columbia jacket and dinosaur hat.

“Hey, Stace,” Brian said, fumbling with the safety bar. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Everybody knows this little gal except me,” said the instructor. “Where’ve I gone wrong all my life?”

Brian turned to him. “Stacey and I have something remarkable in common,” he said.

Stacey swallowed hard, thinking that he was going to give away their history. She didn’t even know the old man from Long Island, but she sure as anything didn’t want him finding out she’d ever been engaged to this guy. A person could never live a thing like that down.

But Brian didn’t betray her after all. He wasn’t in the process of claiming her as his one-time fiancée. He was in the process of announcing that he, like Stacey, had a connection to the late Harper Stone. “She was the first person to see him dead,” he said, “and I was about the last person to see him alive.”

“Guess again, buddy boy,” said the instructor. “How I figure it, the last person who saw him alive is the same one who helped him end up dead. You interested in making that claim? Hmm?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m just saying.”

Stacey leaned toward Brian and cupped her mitten around his ear. “Tell him his attitude problem is going to cost him his tip.”

*   *   *

Brian bailed out on his lesson after half an hour or so—without giving the old man an extra nickel—in order to chase Stacey into the main lodge. He and the old-timer were just skidding into the lessons-only line when he saw her out of the corner of his eye, and he figured it was now or never.

By the time he’d dumped his skis and caught up with her she had her boots off, her bag packed up, and was ready to go. “Short day?” he said, clomping up in his rental boots like Herman Munster.

“That would depend on what time you got started,” she said. She barely looked at him. She was busy checking around for any sock or gaiter or glove liner that might have gone missing under the table—everything was black, which made things trickier—and squaring a ball cap on her head. “I’m always on the first chair,” she said, “if I can help it.”

“And you’re off to work now, I’ll bet.”

“Yep.”

“Too bad. I could use some pointers.”

She convinced herself that nothing was hiding under the table, and she looked up at him from beneath the brim of her cap. On the front of it was a logo he didn’t recognize. Something to do with skiing, no doubt. “Pointers?” she asked. “From me? What happened to your lesson?”

Brian shrugged. “He said he’d taught me everything he could.”

“Right.” What he meant, if it had any connection to reality whatsoever, was not that he’d exhausted the instructor’s knowledge of ski technique, but that he’d exhausted his patience. Stacey knew it, naturally. You couldn’t teach Brian anything, on account of he knew everything already. She’d blame it on that Harvard degree of his, but he’d been that way for as long as she’d known him. It just took her a while to see it.

“To tell the truth,” he said, “I only took a lesson on account of you.”

“Me?” She took off her ball cap and set it on the table.

“I thought it’d be nice if I tried to keep up with you. You know, you enjoy this stuff so much. I thought maybe if I—”

“I get it.”

“Honest! Being here in town made me want to spend all the time I can with you. And if this is what you enjoy the most, then so be it.”

She pushed her hat around on the table and looked him square in the eye, looking for something she used to think was there. Just in case. Just to understand it, the way a medical examiner might look for something during an autopsy. After a minute she picked up the hat and put it on again. “This is the whole reason you came here, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. To take a lesson. So I could keep up with you, maybe.”

“No. I mean the reason you came to Vermont in the first place.” It was about time she called him on it. “I’m talking about why you came on the shoot.”

“Oh, that,” he said, with an airy look. “It’s my job.”

“Don’t give me that. You’ve never done a thing in your life that you didn’t want to do. You’ve never done anything that wasn’t your own idea.”

“All right.” He sat down, finally. “Guilty as charged.”

“No big surprise. But at least you’ve come clean. That’s more than—”

“Guilty as charged,” he repeated, interrupting her. “But it’s only because I missed you.”

“Brian.”

“I did, Stacey. I missed you. I
miss
you. Present tense.”

She could tell he was really giving it his best, because he’d had the presence of mind to call her “Stacey” instead of “Stace.” It didn’t mean he was sincere, though. Not by a million miles. What it meant was that he was
selling
. The realization hit Stacey hard. Six months ago—actually, at any time in their relationship prior to the big breakup, when she’d found him in their shared Back Bay bed with that stealth slut she’d thought of as a friend—she would have registered his navigating the Stacey/Stace distinction as a sign that he cared about her. Now, she saw it for what it was: a sign that he cared about himself. There was a small part of her that wished, as Bob Seger used to sing, that she didn’t know now what she didn’t know then.

“If you
do
miss me,” she said, “you’d better get used to it. Because that’s the way it’s going to be.”

“I’ve changed, Stacey. Really.”

“No. You haven’t. It’s not possible.”

“I think you might be mistaken.”

“People don’t change. Not that much, anyhow. Not enough. Not you.”

“They do. I did.” He pushed away from the table a little. “Look at me, out here taking skiing lessons just so—”

“It’s not a change, Brian. Following me out here, renting the gear, taking the lesson—it’s not a change. It’s just a strategy.”

“Ow.” He clutched at his heart. “That’s cold.”

“I’m not being cold. I’m being realistic. I have to be.”

Brian brightened. “Because there’s still something there, isn’t there?”

“No.” She turned her head away from Brian and his awful yellow coat to watch a little kid at the next table, six or eight years old and beginning to work on a huge chocolate chip cookie.

“Come on. You can feel it, can’t you? That little something.”

She just kept watching the kid.

“It’s still there, isn’t it?”

Stacey made no response at all. She just looked at the kid. How could a guy with a dinosaur hat be saying these things to her now? How could she have ever listened to him?

“I sure can feel it,” Brian said. He slid his hand toward hers, there on the table. “I never stopped feeling it.”

Blame it on peripheral vision or whatever, she drew her hand back as his came nearer, and dropped it into her lap as she turned away from the cookie-eating kid and fixed Brian with a hard stare. “Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.”

Taking that as a good sign, he changed the subject and asked if she’d mind keeping him company for a minute while he had a snack. That cookie looked pretty good.

As long as Brian was buying, she went for one, too. White chocolate macadamia, although she could never quite tell which bit was a chunk of white chocolate and which bit was a macadamia nut. Who cared? It was all good, and she never splurged on this kind of thing for herself. She couldn’t afford it. Three bucks for a cookie. It was robbery.

Brian snarfed down two of them and a large hot chocolate. “So,” he said between bites, “has your friend the sheriff got any suspects lined up yet?”

“He doesn’t tell me,” she said, “and I don’t think he knows too much about it anyhow. The state troopers are on the case. It’s kind of out of his hands.”

“Too bad. It’d be nice to have an inside track, don’t you think?”

“I guess.”

“Me, there’s one guy I’ve got a funny feeling about. That guy Manny? The director? Up from New York?”

“I don’t know him.”

“He came up with the rest of us, but when the crew went home he stuck around.”

“Maybe he likes it here.”

“Maybe it’s one of those scene-of-the-crime things.”

“Brian.”

“Really,” he said.

“A lot of people like the mountains.”

“Not Manny. He doesn’t like anything. I can tell. He’s that kind of guy.”

“It takes one to know one,” she said, watching him finish the first cookie.

“Hey, I like plenty of things.” He looked for a minute as if he were about to throw caution to the winds and mention that one of those things was Stacey Curtis, but in the end he didn’t. He just repeated himself, meaningfully:
“Plenty of things.”

“Right. And those things all cost a fortune.”

He didn’t take the bait. He just lifted his eyebrows as if the two of them shared a secret, and then he started in on his second cookie. Through a crumbly mouthful, he returned to the subject of Manny Seville and Harper Stone. “Thing is,” he said, “they went back.”

She leaned forward. This was interesting. “They went back where?”

“Not to a place. No. Sorry.” He mopped cookie crumbs from his lower lip. “They went back in
time.
They had a history.”

“What kind of a history?”

“I don’t know exactly. They worked together a long time ago.”

“A lot of people work together. That doesn’t mean anything.”

“There was friction.”

“Friction? Oh, boy. Wait until I tell Guy.
There was friction.
”

“It’s something. Otherwise all we’ve got is this old has-been movie actor in a town where nobody knows him—”

“Everybody knows him.”

“Nobody knows him
personally,
I mean. And he ends up dead a mile or two out in the woods in the middle of a blizzard with no reason to be there in the first place, so who did it?”

“Maybe nobody. Maybe he was just out there and he died.”

“Not that guy. Not Stone.”

“How come?”

“He wasn’t the type.”

“So now you know all about what type he was.”

“I know what I know. He wasn’t exactly outdoorsy.”

She laughed. “Right. There was friction, and he wasn’t the outdoorsy type. I hope you shared these insights with the state troopers.”

“I did.”

“Then they must have the case pretty well solved by now.”

Brian dunked the last of his cookie into his hot chocolate and popped it into his mouth. Then he drank off the rest and put the paper cup down on the table. It made a little hollow sound. “I wouldn’t know,” he said.

TWENTY-EIGHT

That night at the Binding, Stacey was simply going through the motions. She made a sweep of her tables and saw that nobody needed another drink, then she went back toward the bar, thinking of Harper Stone and Manny Seville and Buddy Frommer—three men that the world would have been better off without. And Brian Russell, too, while she was eliminating people. Just for good measure. Tina was leaning back in her stool to get a better look at the silent television that hung over the bar, shaking her head and clucking away. “My God,” she said as Stacey came past. “I guess I missed my chance.”

“What chance would that be?” She lifted the gate and let herself back behind the bar and leaned against the cash register.

“The chance to have married a movie star and come out of it a millionaire. Better than that, a
millionaire widow.
”

Stacey stood on her tiptoes, leaned over the bar, and craned her neck, but she couldn’t see what Tina was talking about.

“All I had to do was follow my dream, go out to Hollywood, hunt up Harper Stone, and be the last one to marry him. I’d be worth a fortune right now. I wouldn’t be breaking my back in the spa, that’s for sure.”

Stacey let herself back down. “That seems like kind of a long shot, Tina.”

“A gal can dream, can’t she?”

Jack looked up from washing out some glasses. “Wasn’t he still married to what’s-her-name? That Estelle Whatever? The one from
Afraid of the Dark
? With the low-cut dresses?”

“I thought so, but it turns out I was wrong. Seems they had a quiet divorce a long time ago.”

“What was her name, anyhow?”

“Estelle.”

“I know that. I know Estelle.” He stood staring straight ahead, dumbfounded, scratching his little potbelly with one finger. “Estelle
What,
though?”

“Estelle Gardner.”

“That’s it. Estelle Gardner. Good for you.” He resumed washing out glasses, bending over and looking up at Tina from over his glasses. “They have any kids?”

“Apparently not,” Tina said. She pointed to the screen. “They’re saying he left no next of kin whatsoever. Now, isn’t that sad?”

“Very,” said Jack. “And it’s a shame, too—when he could have had you.”

Tina finished her chardonnay, set the glass down, and sighed. “He never knew what he was missing,” she said. “And it’s too late now.”

“Poor guy.”

“Poor him,” said Tina. Then, looking at some numbers flashing past on the silent screen, she added, “Poor me, too. I’d have made quite the merry widow.”

Because according to the numbers, Harper Stone’s movies were the top five bestsellers at Amazon.
Lights Out, Murder Town, The Ne’er-Do-Wells, Night Train,
and
Last Stand at Appomattox,
in that order. The latest DVD from Pixar was in position six, followed by
Mission to Antares
and
Big City Heat.
She read them off as they scrolled past, marveling at poor old Harper Stone’s reversal of fortune.