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“Who authorized that?”

“Now, Guy—”

“Did I authorize that?”

“It was just a telephone call.”

He stood in the hallway, sipping at his mug, raising his eyebrows.

“There wasn’t any harm in it.”

“Did I say there was?”

“You implied it.”

“But you were just trying to help.”

“I was just trying to help.”

Guy opened the door to his office, and didn’t even switch on the light. He stepped back to the records room doorway and said, “What you could do to help, if you’ve got the time, would be to get around to typing up that report I left in the bin yesterday.”

Mildred picked up her glasses—they were on another chain around her neck—placed them on her nose, and looked at Guy through them. “Do you mean the one that’s right there on your desk?” she asked. “That report?”

He switched on the light and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess that’s the one.”

“Happy to help,” said Mildred.

“I appreciate it,” said Guy.

“You’re entirely welcome,” said Mildred.

*   *   *

The report wasn’t long.

It detailed how the sheriff and another individual—Luther Perkins, who owned Mountaintop Rentals and managed the place on Vista View, and had keys to all of the nicest places in town—had ridden out to the property on Luther’s snowmobile, knocked at all the doors and tried all the windows, then finally unlocked the front door and gone inside. The scene was exactly as the caller, one Brian Russell, up from Boston on business, had described it. The Hummer out front. No lights on. Tracks all over the place—footprints and snowmobile treads both—from Russell himself and from the guys who’d taken him out there, Dickie Burns he’d said and somebody else whose name was missing. There’d been two snowmobiles. Guy and Luther had had to circle around a good distance from the house in order to see that there were no prints or tracks either coming or going, other than their own and those that Brian and Dickie and the other guy had left.

It was kind of a mess, if you cared about it being a mess. If it mattered. Guy didn’t happen to think it did, but that wasn’t in the report. Unless he missed his guess, Stone hadn’t disappeared from the house the night before. Not at all. He hadn’t even been in the house the night before. He’d been somewhere else. He hadn’t come home, so he hadn’t wandered off. So none of this mattered, but Guy went through the motions anyhow. It was what you did. It was part of the job.

The report covered how Guy and Luther went inside to find the house a disaster area. Again, everything was just the way Brian Russell had described it—with the extra advantage of Russell’s having walked around contaminating it all, too. The beds were unmade, the kitchen was a wreck, the furniture and throw rugs and pillows in the various family rooms and public spaces were all tumbled as if somebody had tossed the place looking for something. Nobody had. He was pretty sure of that. So it was more as though the fanciest property in town, a house that rented by the week for more money than Guy took home in two or three months, had been lived in by a bunch of cannibals unaccustomed to the norms of human habitation. Go figure. The way people lived, you just never knew. It was all Guy could do not to square up the dining room chairs, fluff the pillows on the couches, and close the cabinet doors in the kitchen. He’d been raised that way and Megan had kept him on the straight and narrow at home. By now it was second nature, but he’d been careful to leave everything just the way he’d found it, including the picture frames gone cockeyed on the walls. Including the fireplace with that half-crushed pizza box jammed into it, and the glass-topped coffee table—with the dusting of white powder smeared around in the middle.

To tell the truth, though—and that’s what the report did; it told the whole truth and nothing but—he did mess with that last a little. He scraped a little bit of powder from the glass and swept it into a ziplock bag, sealed the bag shut, and stuck it into his pocket. Harper Stone would be back soon enough, he figured, and when the movie star showed up he’d want to ask him a few questions about that stuff. Guy was lots more interested in the cocaine on the coffee table than he was in Stone’s whereabouts, actually. One of them was a law enforcement problem; the other, so far anyhow, was merely an annoyance.

They had checked the bedrooms upstairs and the game room down by the garage—Guy had never had much interest in pool, but the table down there was enough to provoke envy even in the disinterested—then they moved on to the ski room before heading out. The report said this was where Brian Russell had entered the building, and sure enough there were deep tracks in the snow outside and the flagstone floor was wet in spots. The ski room was all heavy wood and indirect lighting and gleaming surfaces, like a locker room in some golf club nicer than any that Guy had ever had the opportunity to visit. Like a museum. Like a mausoleum, come to that. The lockers were all shut. Hung on the wall opposite the outside door was a collection of snowshoes that Guy couldn’t decide represented a supply or a display. Probably a little of both. All different sizes, all different types. Old wooden jobs with leather straps maintained just like new. New ones made of aluminum and plastic that looked like fat little aircraft carriers. One pair was missing. One of the new ones, to judge by the placement of it. A big pair, too, the size a grown man would need. Its absence from the orderly array on the wall looked like the gap left by a missing tooth. Guy didn’t think anything much of it, but he made a note of it anyhow and it ended up in the report. He was just built that way.

*   *   *

“So what are we going to do about Mr. Stone?” Mildred asked. She was a broad woman, nearly as wide as the doorway she blocked. Guy had the impression that she’d been waiting somewhere for him to turn the last page of the report before materializing there with her question.

“What are
we
going to do?” He put a lot of emphasis on that
we.
“Not much. Not today.”

“But—”

“No buts, Mildred. Just because it involves Harper Stone, it’s not like we’re playing in some Hollywood movie here.”

Mildred, just slightly overwhelmed at the mention of Stone’s proximity, rolled her eyes and fanned herself the way she used to do when she was having hot flashes. Guy didn’t remember how long ago that had been, but it was a while. The two of them sure had a history.
“Harper Stone,”
she said.

“That’s how all the sweet young things like you say it.” He tapped the sheets of the report on edge to line them up, and slid them into a file folder. “He’ll turn up when he’s ready.”

“But Guy,” she said, “what if it’s like in
Night Train,
and he’s gone off to rescue somebody who’s in trouble with the mob and ended up getting in worse trouble himself? What then? He could be in over his head.”

“I don’t think there’s a whole lot of mob activity around here, Mildred.”

“You know what I mean. It doesn’t have to be the mob, just because it was the mob in
Night Train.”

“And there isn’t any passenger rail service up here anyhow. Just freight. Two trains a day. Unless you go all the way to Rutland.”

“It doesn’t have to involve a train.”

“Or you could go to Albany, I guess.”

“Guy.”

“People do.”

“Guy, really.”

“Really, Mildred. I’m not going to get all worked up over a fellow going missing from his condo. He’s a grown-up. He’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.” He slid his top drawer open and rummaged around in it as he talked. “My read on things is that he’s just dropped out of sight for a little while.” He found what he was after in the drawer—a pair of black sunglasses—and he put them on. “Maybe to evade the paparazzi,” he said, looking at Mildred through their dark lenses. “Your hero’s just gone incommunicado for a couple of days.”

“There aren’t any paparazzi around here.”

“You’ve got a camera, don’t you?”

“No. Walter used to have a Polaroid but they stopped making film.”

“You’ve got a cell phone.”

“I don’t know how to use it. I mostly leave it at home.”

“It’s got a camera in it.”

“If you say so.”

“See?” said Guy. “The paparazzi are everywhere.” He reached for his coffee mug and pretty much drained it in one gulp. “I’m telling you, Mildred: You’re the reason he’s gone underground.”

FOURTEEN

Guy tried Stone’s phone number a couple of times as the next hour went by, but no dice. It wasn’t like he didn’t have anything else to do. A farmer out on the west side of town had reported his new snowmobile missing, and Guy had a pretty strong feeling that the fellow’s brother-in-law, a known troublemaker from way back, might have been involved. He ought to get on that. Then Bud Wellman from over at Bud’s Suds—the Laundromat in town, right next to the pizza joint—called to complain about a couple of Jamaican guest workers from the mountain who he thought had been jimmying his change machine. This was a complaint that Bud filed about once a month, and Guy knew that it had less to do with the change machine than with a problem Bud had with seeing faces around the Laundromat that weren’t quite as pale as his own. He needed to swing by the Laundromat and go through the motions and explain to Bud one more time how all men are created equal. If anybody was jimmying the change machine it was that Danny Bowman, the more or less homeless Vietnam vet who spent more hours a day in Bud’s place than Bud did himself. Besides, they’d grown up together, Bud and Danny, right here in the valley where they both still made their way through whatever nonsense life threw at them, which made things different. Bud wouldn’t go calling the sheriff on Danny Bowman.

He also needed to drop in on a couple of the TV guys up from Boston, see if they’d heard anything about Stone. Checkout time in the condos was 10:30, so he figured he ought to get on that. The snowmobile and the change machine would have to wait.

When he pulled into the little lot at Trail’s End—most of the parking was underground, but there were still a few spaces outside for visitors—the automatic door was just beginning to rise and a car was waiting behind it. New York plates. Could have been anybody. Guy put on his flat-brimmed hat, got out of the car, and approached the door, his feet crunching over hard snow. The door kept rising and the car behind it was revealed inch by inch to be a late-model Jeep Grand Cherokee, filthy as anything, with automatic headlights that clicked off when the door got high enough. Guy couldn’t see into it; the sun was bouncing off the windshield and the angle was wrong. So he stepped out of the way and pressed the brim of his hat between his thumb and forefinger and waited, squinting through the driver’s-side window as the big SUV pulled forward.

It was Manny Seville, the director. When he’d come by the day before to chat with everybody on the job, Guy hadn’t realized that Manny was a New Yorker. He’d figured he was up from Boston like the rest of them, but it made sense now that he thought about it. Why not? Everybody figured that the best of everything in the whole world came from New York … unless, on the other hand, the car was a rental, which it probably was—like that Maryland-tagged Hummer parked on Vista View. Manny Seville didn’t look like a Grand Cherokee kind of individual, not even this newish one with the leather everything and that big colorful GPS screen glowing away on the dashboard. Guy could see it through the dried mud on the windows. It looked like a movie screen.

Guy lifted the brim of his hat just the slightest and Manny stopped the SUV. He stuck an unlit cigarette between his lips and fumbled with his left hand for the switch to lower the window, then fumbled further with his right to put the car in park. It was definitely a rental, no doubt about it.

As the window began to crawl down Guy said, “Why don’t you pull on ahead a little bit, just get her out of the way of the door?” But Manny was busy horsing around with the lighter now, and before he got his cigarette lit and returned his focus to the shifter the door had started to groan back down its track. Guy put up both arms to see if he could stop it but the thing didn’t slow down in the least. It just kept coming, like a guillotine in slow motion. That was a safety violation right there, no doubt about it. He’d have to tell the fire marshal, have him look into it. It was always something.

Since he couldn’t stop the door he stepped aside, out of its path and into the lot, and watched while Manny threw the Jeep into drive and hit the gas. It was all too little, too late. The Jeep almost cleared the lowering door but not quite, and the point of impact was the sloped rear window. The frame bent and the glass exploded, showering a million pieces everywhere.

“Aww, shit,” said Manny.

Guy didn’t say anything. He just wondered why people insisted on driving big monsters like this one. If it’d been a regular car, closer to the ground by a foot maybe, Manny would have had time to slip it out of the garage without a scratch.

*   *   *

“For Christ’s sake,” said Manny, “if you hadn’t stopped me, this never would have happened.”

“I believe I actually told you to pull forward,” said Guy.

“Still.” He’d moved the Jeep out into the parking lot and stood behind it, puffing furiously on his cigarette, scowling at the damage. “Of all the shitty luck.”

With a heavy groaning of cables the door began to rise again, and Guy walked over toward it. “Let me see if I can find a broom,” he said.

“Fat lot of good that’ll do me.”

“To clean up the concrete. We don’t want any flat tires. Even with that safety glass, you never know.”

“Oh,” said Manny. As if the idea that there were other people in the world who might be worth caring about was a news bulletin.

Once the door was up high enough Guy raised a hand and got the car behind it to stop. Behind the wheel was a fat, middle-aged guy from Connecticut, ski racks loaded up and a mad-bomber hat screwed down on his head, heading out of town for a day over at Killington or someplace. These people paid extra for ski-in/ski-out, and then they went looking for greener pastures. Go figure. The fat guy looked alarmed at the sight of the sheriff in his flat-brimmed hat. Guy smiled and the fat guy cocked his head. Guy pointed to the glass all around and the fat guy settled back in his seat. There was a broom against the wall that Guy used to push the glass and various bits of metal and hard red plastic out of the way. There was always so much more of it than you’d expect after a crash. Things fell apart and in the process they somehow got more complicated. The good news was that the garage door looked as if it had made it through pretty much unscathed—or at least no more damaged than it had been to start with. That was a plus. He’d mention it to the fellow who managed Trail’s End—it was Luther Perkins’s brother-in-law, and they shared office space in town—when he got the chance.