Fade to White (6 page)

She had to use the landline in her condo to roust Stone out of his mountain aerie. The damned thing had local service only—
how did anybody make long distance calls around here?
—but that was enough to reach the big house on Vista View. All the phone over there did, though, was ring and ring. She leaned up against the wall and looked out the window onto a day of utter perfection marred only by the passage of snowmobiles among the high pines, listening to the phone ring and wondering if that jerk would ever pick up. The house on Vista View was huge, so maybe it was a bit of a walk to the phone. Nah. Not possible. Palaces like that had phones in every bathroom—probably two, one by the john and the other by the Jacuzzi—never mind the bedrooms. So why wouldn’t he pick up? Damn him. She’d give him five minutes and try again. If he still played hard to get, she’d have to send Evan over. Or maybe Brian. Yeah. That was it. Brian. It’d serve him right. The two big egos could go head-to-head. Wrangling the alleged talent was a job for management anyhow.

*   *   *

Half an hour later, Brian couldn’t even begin to make it up the hill to Stone’s place. He didn’t even try—not in that shiny new BMW, even though he’d sprung for the four-wheel drive. The main roads were clear enough and they were even almost dry in places, but Vista View was private and nobody had touched it. The plows had piled snow three or four feet deep where it met Route 100, and the drifts beyond that went up into the woods as if into some kind of untracked wilderness. He found a place to turn around—it took a couple of miles until there was a spot wide enough, at an intersection where a front-end loader was working the drifts—and then he drove back into town as fast as he dared.

The crew was stoking up on coffee and lousy bagels at Judge Roy Beans, and they all looked quizzical and frustrated when Brian came in shaking his head.

Karen sighed. “No luck?”

“No luck.”

“I don’t get it. You mean he wasn’t there, or you mean he wouldn’t come?”

“Oh, he’s there, all right.” Brian tossed his hat and his leather gloves onto a chair but kept on walking, headed toward the counter. She pushed her chair back and followed him. “He’s there.”

“So he wouldn’t come. What’d he say?”

“I didn’t see him. But nobody’s come down that road of his for a while, I can tell you that. Not even in that big new Hummer he’s driving.” He ordered coffee and a corn muffin, sweet-talking the girl behind the counter while Karen stood alongside him, frustrated. Then he turned back to her. “It’s drifted full and plowed shut.”

She tilted her head toward the table full of talented and fairly well-paid individuals lingering over their coffee. “This is costing your client money, my friend.”

“I know it is.”

“A lot of money.”

“So?”

“So when something costs the client money, it’s been known to cost us the client. That’s how it works.”

“I know how it works.” He shrugged. “I understand. But it’s not my fault.”

“Of course it’s not. But that doesn’t make any difference.”

He picked up his coffee and muffin and flashed a smile at the counter girl. “So what do you expect me to do about it?”

“I expect you to get that tough guy out of bed and down the hill and on the job. How you do it makes no difference to me. I don’t care if you have to buy a shovel and a pair of mukluks and dig him out yourself.
Capiche
?”

Brian stood sipping his coffee, letting reality sink in for a change. He wrapped up his muffin in a paper napkin and pushed the door open and stepped out into the parking lot without his hat or gloves, craning his neck to see if there was a plow handy. God knows half of the locals in Judge Roy Beans looked as if they had ridden there in pickup trucks, but he came up short. No pickups, no plows. There were, however, a couple of snowmobiles parked alongside the building, and they gave him an idea.

*   *   *

“I get that Polaris up to speed with you dressed that way, you’ll be froze solid inside of five minutes. Ten at the most.” The man who barked these words in Brian’s direction was grizzled. There was no other word for it. He was grizzled and he smelled sour and he had a voice that sounded like it hurt, but he sure was getting a kick out of the thought of taking this city kid out for a spin on his snowmobile. He winked at Brian, picked some kind of seed out of his back teeth, and cackled, shaking his gray head.

“You’re right,” said Brian. “And you know what? I don’t think I even
need
to go out there with you. You can go by yourself. Heck, if I go, you won’t be able to bring him back.”

“Bring who back?”

“The guy who’s stuck out there. He’s a movie actor. Play your cards right and he might give you an autograph.”

“The only actor I got any time for is that Paul Newman.”

“It’s not Paul Newman.”

The grizzled man looked crestfallen.

“It’s Harper Stone. Remember him?”

The grizzled man ran his tongue around his teeth and swallowed.

“Remember
Last Stand at Appomattox
?”

The grizzled man smiled as the light dawned. “I know that one,” he said. “Shit. A tough guy like that, getting stuck in a little bit of snow. Imagine that.”

“Yeah,” said Brian. “Can you believe it?”

“Not hardly,” said the grizzled man. He drained his coffee and looked at the guy across the table from him, likewise grizzled and grimy and very much his match from head to toe. “How about we all take a run out there?” he said. “Stop at the firehouse and borrow us a snowsuit for the city boy, here. Take both machines. I get dibs on bringing the movie star back, though.”

The other guy just nodded. He looked like he did a lot of that.

“Imagine me, little Dickie Burnes, rescuing a big-shot Hollywood hero. Imagine that.”

The other guy nodded again.

“I guess that would make me the leading man.”

The other guy nodded again, and the three of them left.

*   *   *

The Hummer was there in the driveway, standing like a rampart against the wind, snow drifted nearly to its roof on one side and blown just about clear on the other. So he hadn’t gone anywhere.

They pulled the snowmobiles under the portcullis and stopped them over by the stairs, or where the stairs must have been. Even under here the snow was deep and drifted, completely untracked. Nobody had been out the front door, that was for sure.

Dickie and the other guy stayed on their snowmobiles like a couple of cowpokes sitting their horses. One of them tried firing up a cigarette but the wind blew his lighter out on the first five or six attempts. Brian slogged up toward the front door, his borrowed boots filling up with snow. He reached the top step—a more or less snow-free semicircle of some kind of handsome fieldstone fitted together at no small expense—and gave his feet a couple of futile stamps. He reached for one of the door knockers and lifted it. It made a hard bright clanking sound out there in the silent day. He felt like an idiot. How on earth was a house this big supposed to be served by a useless thing like that, even if it
was
roughly the size of a third-grader, forged to resemble a cone-laden pine branch, and worth more than most people in this valley would make in a year? What this place needed was a doorbell, with buzzers in every room.

He waited a few seconds and banged the knocker again. Nothing.

He pounded on the door with both fists. Nothing.

Nothing, that is, except some laughter from either Dickie or the other guy. The one who’d finally gotten a cigarette going. They were both so crusted over with snow that any means he might have had for differentiating them was long gone—and he didn’t much care.

The guy with the cigarette hollered, “Try up there!” Brian looked to see him pointing toward a set of drifted-over stairs that led up to an enclosed porch. He slogged up them while the guy sat on his snowmobile, puffing away. The storm door to the porch was unlocked and he kicked away snow from the sill and muscled it open. He went in, stamping his feet on a metal grate that let snow fall to the ground below. This whole side of the house was glass—big floor-to-ceiling sliders—giving out onto the enclosed porch. Must have been nice in the summertime. What a panorama, all those mountains and valleys stretched out practically forever. No wonder the developers came up with a name like Vista View, as stupid as it sounded.

The curtains were drawn but there was a gap or two, and from what he could see the place was a mess. A bachelor pad extraordinaire—and he ought to know—lived in for what looked like six or eight months without benefit of a vacuum cleaner or a dust rag. There were clothes strewn from wall to wall, the throw rugs and cushions were cockeyed, and the pictures were slanted on the walls. It looked like somebody’d been sleeping on the couch.

He knocked on the glass, figuring that he’d get no answer, and he wasn’t disappointed. The place was like a tomb. He tried the sliding door. He tried all of them. Each was locked up tight. So even though it was pleasant in here out of the wind with the gorgeous view and all, he gave up and went out and half-slid, half-climbed back down the stairs.

“No luck?” said the guy without the cigarette. Come to think of it, neither of them had a cigarette now.

“No luck.”

“We could try around back.”

“Let’s not.”

“Don’t be a sissy. We come all this way.”

“I’m not walking.”

“Climb on.”

They repeated the procedure two more times—first at a set of sliders on an elevated deck around back, which Brian reached only by wading through chest-high snow; again at the door by the buttoned-up three-car garage—and they came up short again. Short and freezing and disappointed. Brian turned on his cell and tried to call Karen, but he couldn’t get a signal, so he climbed back on the snowmobile and gave the order to go on back to town. Now he owed these guys fifty bucks and he had nothing to show for it. He’d bury it somewhere in his expense report and nobody would be the wiser, but that wasn’t the point.

There was one more door, though, and one of the snowmobile guys noticed it as they rounded the house and turned back toward the road. It was underneath the enclosed porch that Brian had checked before, tucked into a little bricked alcove, probably leading to a utility closet or something like that. A dead end even if it was open, but they stopped just in case, for one last try.

TEN

Jackpot.

Not only did Brian get in, but the space behind the door was anything but a dead-end utility closet. It was a ski room fit for a sheik, if sheiks indulged in downhill skiing—which they probably did, since they indulged in everything else. It was gorgeous. There must have been twenty lockers along the walls, each one custom built of what looked like solid cherry. Hand-built shelving units up to the ceiling, where soft indirect lighting bathed the whole place in a warm golden glow. Hardwood floors he was ashamed to be tracking snow all over. And in the far corner, a door that without question opened into the main house.

He cracked the door and called Stone’s name but didn’t get an answer. So he pushed it open and went down the dark hallway until he found the stairs to what he guessed was the main floor. No sign of recent human habitation down here whatsoever. He called up the stairs, waited for a minute and called again, then went up.

What he’d seen through the window was only half of it. This wasn’t a bachelor pad: It was a fraternity house at the close of a particularly brutal rush season. All the pillows and cushions off the couches. Plates and glasses and bottles everywhere, with crumbs of food tracked into the carpets and various beverages spilled all over. A decimated pizza box jammed into the fireplace. Picture frames knocked over. Chairs from the dining room upended in front of the dead TV. And at the center of everything, right smack in the middle of the glass coffee table, a smear of white powder that spoke volumes.

*   *   *

He didn’t think he ought to look any further, but he tentatively called Stone’s name a few times and went looking anyway. There were three bedrooms on this level, and every one of them had been slept in. He went upstairs and found two more—one of them the master suite, roughly as big as New Hampshire—and both of them had been used, too. Either Stone had company, which wasn’t likely, or he was fussy about clean sheets. Or maybe he was in the habit of getting himself so messed up on coke that he couldn’t remember where he’d slept the night before.

The main thing about all those rumpled beds was that Harper Stone wasn’t in any one of them. He wasn’t in the kitchen or the library or the formal dining room or the den or the game room or the home theater or any of the half-dozen marble bathrooms either, not as far as Brian could tell. He headed back toward the ski room and stopped at the last minute to pick up a phone and try calling Karen—just like at his condo back on the mountain, long-distance service was disabled. Didn’t anybody trust anybody? With his head boiling over with frustration he slammed the phone down and left. It wasn’t until he and Dickie and the other guy were halfway back to Judge Roy Beans that he realized he should have called 911 while he’d had the chance.

*   *   *

Sirens in the valley were never a good sign—not in a ski town.

Stacey ran things through her mind and guessed that she had it all figured out. The snow was deep but the roads were pretty well cleared, and the parking lot—when she could get a glimpse of it from the mountain—was filling up with cars. That meant that the traffic was still moving on the one main road into town, delivering a crowd of dilettantes and amateurs and reckless hooky-players sprung loose from desk jobs all over Connecticut and New York. It was only ten o’clock and the late-morning arrivals hadn’t pushed their way onto the lifts yet, but she could picture the cause of that siren pretty clearly. Some money manager with a torn ACL, taking a ride down the mountain on a Ski Patrol toboggan. She hoped that was all it was. However you cut it, the sight of the Patrol at work over a fallen skier could cast a real shadow over the day. She loved skiing and she loved the mountain, too, but along with that love went a certain respect. And a skier gone down was a sad reminder of the need for it—even if he
was
an overreaching yuppie flatlander.