Fade to White Read online

  For Jon and Emily

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So many people have helped me along the way that it’s hard to single out a handful. All the same, this book wouldn’t be complete without a million thanks to those without whom it wouldn’t even be here.

  To my wonderful husband, Jon Clinch, whose unfailing support and love I depend on every minute of every day.

  To the fantastic women of TheSkiDiva.com, whose enthusiasm and joy make my own love for the sport seem almost halfhearted.

  To the great team at Minotaur, who have brought both of the Ski Diva mysteries to fruition.

  And to the lovely people of my little Vermont ski town, who have made this flatlander feel almost like a native.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Also by Wendy Clinch

  Copyright

  ONE

  Harper Stone was a whole lot smaller than he looked in the movies, but his ego made up for it. He was a whole lot older, too, but then again he’d made his best pictures a long while back. His trademark combination of lounge-lizard panache and offhand gunplay had gone pretty well out of fashion, or else he wouldn’t have been freezing his butt on this chairlift, praying for snow, showing off his famous square white teeth for a pickup camera crew out of Albany. Slumming on a Vermont ski slope in a lousy mouthwash commercial.

  * * *

  What a morning!

  The sky was lake blue and well deep, without a cloud anywhere. New England didn’t get these gorgeous bluebird days very often, and Stacey Curtis didn’t want to waste a second of it. She didn’t even stop at Judge Roy Beans for coffee, but went straight to the mountain to make sure she got on the very first chair.

  A hand-lettered sign in the base lodge threw a monkey wrench into things, though. The sign said that the Northside chair, the one that accessed the very best trails at Spruce Peak, was closed until further notice. Just that. No explanation. It wasn’t a short-term wind hold, that was for sure. Not with this glorious, calm, blue weather. So she figured it must be something mechanical. She shook her head and told herself that if Richie Paxton would take better care of the place these things wouldn’t happen. With his wife locked up for murdering his brother, however, Richie was too busy chasing every woman in town to take care of the mountain his family owned. So much for preventive maintenance.

  There was an upside, though. If nobody could ride the Northside chair, that meant nobody could ski the Northside—except whatever hardy souls felt like trekking a half-mile through the woods from the top of the main lift. A group that Stacey figured would probably include nobody but herself.

  She booted up, stashed her bag under a table, and headed out the door. She’d left her skis over by the lift so as not to have to walk forever in her boots, and as she clomped toward them she lifted her goggles, threw her head back, and took in that bright cloudless sky. Yep: It was the color of a bluebird all right—if they had bluebirds around here, which she didn’t know. Underneath that sky she felt small and happy and dizzy and just a little bit cold, but she knew she’d warm up once she got to the top of the lift and began skating through the woods and along the fire trails over to the Northside.

  She caught the first chair and kept an eye out for Chip Walsh as she rode up. Still, she saw only one red Ski Patrol jacket, and that was on a boarder. Not one of the younger guys, by the look of him, but some older dude who’d probably shifted from skiing to riding later in life. Good for him. She caught sight of him at the top of the Blowdown glades, slipping under the rope to check out the run before they let in the paying customers. Now that right there, Stacey told herself, is the only reason in the whole world to be on the Patrol. All the first-aid drills and all the practice with the rescue toboggans and all the other nonsense that Chip complained about—including the reckless, smart-ass college kids up from Connecticut, only five or six years younger than Stacey and Chip themselves but a world apart—all of that might just be worth the chance to put down first tracks anywhere you wanted. And call it work.

  She slid off the lift, put her mittens through the straps on her poles, and took off into the woods. She was puffing pretty hard before she’d made it halfway to the Northside, but it was all good. She had let Chip buy her dinner last night at Maison Maurice, the nicest place in town—or at least the one with the highest aspirations—and she figured that this was as good a way as any to work off a dessert that she hadn’t entirely needed. She emerged from the tree line into an open slope and skidded down below the stopped lift to catch her breath for a minute. The sky looked even bluer up here, where there was nothing but white snow and green trees for contrast. An absolutely perfect day, no question about it. Until she got about halfway down, and discovered why the lift was stopped.

  * * *

  It was bad enough that all these people were shooting some kind of video on a run she’d claimed as her own personal territory, right in the middle of the most brilliant morning on record. It was worse that that horrible Richie Paxton was glad-handing around the periphery of the crowd with that redheaded girlfriend of his, acting like he owned the place when the better part of it still belonged to his father. It was worse yet that they had all kinds of lights and reflectors and God knew what else set up on poles and standards and booms as if this glorious morning needed any help. And it was even worse that some old gray-haired guy in a long black leather coat far too urban for this Vermont morning was stalking around hollering at everybody through a bullhorn like some kind of Hollywood big shot.

  Stacey could have tolerated all that. She could have waved at the crowd and skied right on by, found her way down to the bottom of the main lift, and kept doing it all morning long if not for one thing—a thing that happened to be wearing a garish yellow Columbia shell with black patches on the shoulders, topped by a long fleece hat with multicolored dinosaur spikes running the length of its spine. The kind of ski gear that went out of fashion with disco, but that certain individuals might still consider cool in a kind of retro way. The way that young men at exclusive golf clubs still wore the madras jackets and grass-green pants favored by the older crowd, either mocking them or fitting right in with them or more likely not knowing exactly which attitude they meant to adopt. Usually whichever one did them the most good at the time. That kind of young men.

  Brian Russell’s kind.
r />   Brian, her ex-fiancé.

  Brian, who’d cheated on her back in Boston.

  Brian, right here on her own personal ski slope, wearing that barf-yellow coat and that stupid dinosaur hat as though they were billboards advertising his crappy judgment.

  He’d worn the same stuff on the four or five days she’d gotten him on a mountain, before their relationship had fallen apart. She didn’t know where he’d gotten it. In his world, a garish yellow coat and a hat that made you look like Barney were probably the sort of thing you inherited from Father. Things you kept in mothballs in a trunk somewhere, along with the silver and the stock certificates and the keys to the Bentley.

  Just the sight of him spoiled her rhythm. It was as if she had been skiing with some kind of smooth and swoopy music playing in her head—an old Beach Boys song, maybe, or something cool and swinging like Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett—and the station had suddenly been switched not just to music she didn’t like but to something much worse. Rush Limbaugh. Howard Stern. Or maybe an all-news station, just in time for a forecast of some very bad weather.

  TWO

  The ex-movie star fished in his pocket for a cigarette. He found one and jammed it between his teeth and held a match to it, squinting from the corner of his eye at the pretty girl who occupied the other side of the chair. She was pressed into the farthest corner with her head down, hugging herself against the cold. She coughed at the smell of smoke but he didn’t care. He blew smoke, sniffed, and looked at the sky, then spoke to the cameraman, a little bearded guy who hovered at his elbow on a cherry picker stenciled with the words RUTLAND ELECTRIC. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Can’t they add a little goddamned snow in post production?”

  “Not on this budget they can’t.”

  “Come on.”

  “Honest. And you know what the problem is? I think the problem is they spent everything they had on you.” The cameraman rapped his knuckles on the big fiberglass bucket where he stood, making it echo. “You and this crane, maybe.”

  “That’s no crane. That’s a goddamned cherry picker on loan from the electric company.”

  “See what I mean?”

  “I know a crane when I see one.”

  “I’ll bet you do.”

  “I’ve worked around my share of cranes.”

  “I know.”

  “You should have seen the rig that Marty DeNovo used on Murder Town. For the rooftop scenes? Now that was a crane.” Stone paused and examined the cigarette. “He had it custom built by the Ferrari brothers. I kid you not.”

  “I’ll bet it was something.”

  The pretty girl stuck her nose farther into her jacket and squeezed her eyes shut.

  “It was something, all right.” Stone drew on the cigarette, gave it a disgusted look, and squashed it out on the safety bar.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” said the cameraman from his fiberglass bucket. “We’re going to have to clean that up before we shoot.”

  “We might see the Second Coming before we shoot.”

  “Still.” The cameraman looked through his eyepiece.

  “Is it in the shot?”

  “Of course it’s in the shot.”

  “Damn,” said Stone. He shifted his weight and rummaged around in the chair. “What happened to that mouthwash, anyhow?” He found the bottle stuck halfway under his leg, hoisted it like a prize, and said to anybody who was listening, “Who’s got a rag?”

  The cameraman produced one and Stone cracked open the mouthwash and soaked it. “There,” he said, rubbing at the safety bar. “I figure that crap ought to be good for something.” He tossed the rag into the fiberglass bucket—two points—and gave the cameraman a look that was supposed to pass for mischievous but was actually just kind of creepy. “Hey,” he said, “I’m not union. So don’t tell.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  * * *

  “If I’d known the new guy was coming,” said the creative director to her assistant, “I’d have skipped this junket altogether.” She kicked at the snow and dug her hands deeper into her pockets. “I can think of about a million ways to get a week in Vermont without spending the whole time with Brian.”

  “I’d pay good money for it,” said the assistant.

  “People do.”

  The creative director was an old pro named Karen Pruitt, who’d come up through the ranks with a T-square in one hand and a Sharpie in the other. Her assistant, Evan Babcock, was a bright-eyed recruit fresh out of the Rhode Island School of Design. He had a lot to learn, starting with the basic principle that you didn’t take any creative input from the sales side of the agency, not even if the sales guy in question had a high-toned title like Vice President/Account Supervisor. Especially if he had a high-toned title like Vice President/Account Supervisor. Most especially if he was an idiot like Brian Russell.

  Brian didn’t like the actress that Karen and Evan had cast to sit beside the ex-movie star on the chairlift, and he’d been vocal about getting her fired. He’d begun by complaining that since she was a pale blonde she’d blend right in with the snow, which everybody knew was ridiculous. Then he’d switched tactics and said that the client didn’t like the idea of using a Nordic-looking girl in this setting—too clichéd—but that hadn’t held water either. In the end he’d tried claiming that there was a line somewhere in Harper Stone’s contract that gave him approval rights over any actor or actress who might appear in a shot with him and that Stone’s people didn’t like the girl, but even though there was plenty of strange stuff in the contract (dietary guidelines, SPF requirements for outdoor shoots, clauses regarding the use of his own personal stunt double, and a complete list of acceptable Pantone colors for use in clothing and props and other surfaces that might otherwise contrast poorly with his skin tone), there was nothing that gave Stone leverage over the hiring of any particular talent. Karen had figured that Brian was just bullshitting, testing the limits, throwing the weight of his title around, and she wasn’t having any of it. Vice President/Account Supervisor or not, he was still the new guy, and the sooner a new guy learned his place, the better.

  THREE

  Darkness came early in the valley, and the sky was too full of stars to offer any promise of snow. Whatever warmth there was had vanished with the light, leaving the little mountain town exposed to what for all intents and purposes was the naked blackness of outer space. Cartwheeling stars, utter cold, and down here on the earth a steady wind to make it even worse. Stacey cracked open the rear door at the Broken Binding and looked out into the darkness. Back at the bar the après-ski crowd had dwindled to nothing and the suppertime crowd hadn’t arrived yet, so the pressure was off for a little while. She shivered, shut the door, and went back down the hall to the walk-in cooler to grab a case of Magic Hat and warm up a little.

  The restaurant was a long, low-slung place spread out along the main drag from Connecticut, just at the edge of town. Like every other ski-town eatery in the Green Mountain State, it had a past. It had gone up in the sixties with barnboard paneling everywhere and a moose head mounted over the fireplace, and it was called the Broken Binding until a group of German investors arrived and gutted it and jammed it with corny Bavarian décor and rechristened it the Edelweiss. That didn’t last, and when the deutschmark went into a slump against the dollar for just a little bit too long the bikers moved in to destroy whatever progress the Prussians had made. The bloom, in other words, was off the Edelweiss. Locals who knew what they were talking about shortened the place’s name to the ’Weiss and pronounced it with a V and stayed away, until one winter night when a snowplow finally took the sign down and nobody even noticed.

  Now the old Binding was back, thanks to an infusion of cash and kindness from a retired investment banker named Pete Hardwick, the finest export that New York had sent to Vermont in a long time. The look of the place passed for retro these days although the barnboard paneling was new, and even the original moose head—discovered in an attic crawl s
pace stinking of beer, cigarette smoke, and a pungent old hint of sauerbraten—had been restored to a place of honor above the mantel.

  The Binding was Stacey’s home away from home away from home. She’d started out life in Boston, and she might have stayed there forever if Brian hadn’t cheated on her and either spoiled everything or just clarified it. She was beginning to think the latter. That was all right. She’d caught him in the act and headed for the mountains in her beat-up old Subaru, and that was the end of that. It was also the beginning.

  To tell the truth, although she’d rented a decent room from Sheriff Guy Ramsey and his wife, Megan, and it was comfortable enough, it came with kitchen and laundry privileges and all that, right now she pretty much considered the mountain itself her home. Good old Spruce Peak. She spent every minute there that she could. Spruce was a nice family place that still had some size and challenge to it, nestled up against a little Green Mountain town that fit about halfway along the scale between picturesque and bedraggled. A few too many gas stations for its own good, and no place decent to buy groceries, but under a blanket of snow it looked like a regular winter wonderland.

  Which was the problem right now. There wasn’t any snow. At least there wasn’t anything fresh.

  It was only the last week of February, and the thermometer was stuck at the bottom of the deep freeze, so the season was anything but over. Yet the snowbanks were retreating inch by inch and the roads were filthy and the whole town just looked sad. Even the trails on the mountain were showing signs of having endured a couple of weeks without anything fresh. The snow guns and the groomers could do only so much. In the distance, beyond the town and up on the mountain that jutted black against the starry sky, Stacey could see the groomers churning their way over the ski runs. She wondered how closely their pattern tonight matched their patterns from the night before and the night before that—in other words, if they just went over and over the same ground in the same pattern, the way obsessives scoured the same mental territory without ever getting anywhere. The way that everybody in the bar for après-ski had chewed over the need for a good snowfall, and the way that the supper crowd would do the same thing.