Fade to White (28 page)

The knock—three businesslike raps as hard and rhythmic as gunshots—came as Stone reached the door. He opened it up to reveal Guy standing foursquare on the porch with Chip just behind him, silhouetted against the spinning lights. Stone turned on his patented smile, letting it gleam in the light bursting from the roof of the patrol car. “The cavalry!” he said. “To the rescue! Thank God!”

Inside, Stacey stood and moved over toward the television, where they could see her.

“The cavalry,” Guy said. “Right. May we come in?”

“Of course!” Then, without wasting a second, said, “Enzo DiNapoli, at your service.” He bowed and swept the door open.

Guy smiled and stepped forward. Once he had his boots over the threshold Stacey spoke up. “He’s not DiNapoli,” she said. “He’s Harper Stone.”

Stone tut-tutted.
Poor, deluded child.

“Any money says DiNapoli’s dead,” she went on. “He’s the one that Chip and I found, not Stone.”

“This is ridiculous,” Stone said. “How can I be dead?”

“He figured nobody’d look too closely. No next of kin, right?”

Chip pulled the door shut behind him and Guy stood ramrod-stiff, withholding judgment.

Stacey showed no sign of slowing down. “And the second that Harper Stone ‘died,’ ”—she made little quotation marks in the air that Stone himself seemed not to appreciate in the least—“his career went crazy again. Off the charts.”

“I can vouch for that,” Chip put in. “I bought my dad a reissued DVD. The commemorative edition of
Lights Out
? Forty-five bucks on Amazon.”

Guy did not seem to be impressed.

Neither did Stone. “Perhaps the cold has gotten to her brain,” he suggested to the sheriff, reaching out to take her arm. She shook him off. “In the morning,” he went on, flustered but persistent, “things will look very different.”

“You’ve seen it yourself,” Stacey said. “The tributes on television. The film festivals. The re-releases.”

Stone could barely suppress his delight, but he did his best.

“I’ve seen a whole lot,” Guy confessed. Then he smiled and pointed toward the television. “If you’d watch something other than your own old movies,” he said to Stone, “you might have seen it, too.”

Frank Schmidt peeled himself from the wall. “Hey,” he said, “I wasn’t watching that old crap. I was watching the Food Network.”

“Try the news,” said Guy. He bent for the remote, took a second to figure it out, and then found CNN. He killed the sound. Larry King was on with some politician, sitting there with his giant misshapen head and his famous suspenders and his weirdly vampiric look, but the crawl at the bottom of the screen was all about Harper Stone. How the Vermont State Police had revealed that the body in their custody was not his at all. How Stone himself was at the moment not merely a missing person but a person of interest in the death of one Enzo DiNapoli, formerly his personal assistant and stunt double.

“Oh, shit,” said Harper Stone.

“That would pretty well cover it,” said Guy Ramsey.

Guy turned to Stacey. “I took you seriously about those tattoos,” he said. “They showed up on the medical examiner’s report, all right. But when it came to identifying the body, nobody even thought they might be important. I mean, it was Harper Stone, right? Anyhow, I gave the staties a buzz and they did some snooping around. Talked with their FBI contacts. Got some questions asked in California.” He pointed toward the screen. “You see how it worked out.”

Suddenly, Harper Stone looked every bit his age. He slumped onto the couch, his head in his hands.

Stacey, on the other hand, was grinning like mad—at Guy, at Chip, at Larry King, at the whole wide world. “So the guy I saw in the basement at the Slippery Slope—that was DiNapoli.”

“No question.”

She kicked Stone’s foot. “He was younger than you, right? Your stunt double?”

Stone just nodded. He was either sobbing or pretending to sob, although whether it was for what he’d done or for what was about to be done to him was anybody’s guess.

Guy picked up the thread. “Ten, fifteen years younger for sure. DiNapoli and Buddy Frommer were in the Merchant Marine together.”

“I knew it,” said Stacey.

“Buddy came clean about that, at least.”

“I think he’s got a lot to come clean about.”

“Me, too. We’ll get there, don’t worry.” He looked at Stone. “That coke in the rental house—it belonged to DiNapoli, right?”

Nothing from Stone.

“So he had a little too much, is all. Went for a walk. Got himself in trouble.”

Stone brightened.

“Only problem is, his snowshoes never turned up.”

“What did he know from snowshoes?”

“I can’t say for sure,” Guy said. “But somebody knew enough to take a pair down from the wall in the rental when he headed out into that blizzard.” He let the idea hang there in the air for a minute, to see if Stone would respond.

He didn’t.

“The boys from Rutland cleared the snow around the body right down to the grass for twenty-five feet in every direction. The closest anybody came to finding those snowshoes is that nice new pair right on the porch out front.” Guy put down the remote and stepped toward Stone, one hand behind his back in case he needed to grab his cuffs. “Do I need to restrain you, Mr. Stone, or will you come right along?”

Stone nodded, rose, and took his coat from the peg by the door, where it hung alongside Schmidt’s orange storm gear and hard hat.

“You too, Mr. Schmidt. You’ll need to make a statement.”

The tall man shrank back into the hallway. “I didn’t know the first thing about this. I thought he was Enzo. He told me his name was Enzo.”

“Sure.” He reached beneath his jacket and unclipped the cuffs. “There are some fellows in Rutland who’ll like that story as much as I do.”

“Let me get my shoes at least,” Schmidt said, and Guy let him.

Stone shrugged into his coat and frowned at the television, where Larry King had given way to a scene outside the Los Angeles County Courthouse. Stone’s manager, identified in big red and white text, stood before a bobbing crowd of handheld microphones. He seemed to be making a statement. There were cops around.

“I’ll bet he’s turned on me, too,” said Stone.

Guy just shook his head, turning to watch Schmidt emerge from the bedroom with his shoes in his hand. “Somebody had to handle all that brand-new money, right? That was the point, wasn’t it?”

“New money,”
Stone spat. “It’ll be years before some of those checks get cut. You have no idea.”

“How much does your manager get? Ten percent? Fifteen?”

“Fifteen. And that’s fifteen percent too much.”

“It wasn’t enough to keep him quiet.”

Stone just growled, glared at the television screen, and zipped up his coat.

FORTY-TWO

Guy walked them one by one to the patrol car, and when he had them secured in the back he went into the cabin again, turned off the lights, lowered the thermostat, and pulled the door shut behind him. He put his gloves on, lifted the snowshoes from the pile of junk on the porch, and knocked the snow off of them before walking them over to the car. Stacey and Chip stood to the side and watched.

“Hey,” Guy said when he’d popped open the trunk and the light inside came on, “I almost forgot.”

The trunks of those big Lincolns are huge, and he bent over into it to remove Stacey’s brand-new, barely used Heads. “The guys in Rutland thought you might like to have these back.”

She shrieked and ran over, grabbed them and hoisted them over her shoulder, thinking that this was the best development of the whole day. Or maybe the second-best. Then, her with those brand-new Heads and Chip with her old skis, they walked down the hill behind the patrol car.

Also by Wendy Clinch

Double Black

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

FADE TO WHITE
. Copyright © 2010 by Wendy Clinch. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clinch, Wendy.

       Fade to white / Wendy Clinch.—1st ed.

           p. cm.

       ISBN 978-0-312-59327-8

       1.  Women skiers—Fiction.   2.  Murder—Investigation—Fiction.   3.  Vermont—Fiction.   I.  Title.

    PS3603.L545F33 2011

    813'.6—dc22

2010037496

First Edition: January 2011

eISBN 978-1-4299-7521-6

First Minotaur Books eBook Edition: January 2011