Fade to White Read online

  She guessed it was kind of silly for everybody to be so obsessed, but winter didn’t last forever. The ski season was short. She’d gotten in more days this year than ever before, thanks to having set aside just about everything else in her life, but if you’d come up here for a long weekend from New York or Connecticut or Massachusetts or wherever, you just didn’t have that luxury.

  Plus if you’d come up to shoot a mouthwash commercial with a nice New England snowfall happening in the background, your clock was seriously running. Nobody from the commercial crew had been into the Binding yet, not that she knew of, but there was plenty of talk about them just the same. A Hollywood presence like Harper Stone didn’t pass through a little town like this without making an impression, even if he was a little too old to register all that much with Stacey.

  * * *

  Tina Montero—as much a fixture of the Broken Binding as that smelly moose head and every bit as hard to impress—blushed like a schoolgirl at the mention of the actor’s name.

  “Let’s just say I’ve always carried a torch for that one,” she said, raising her chardonnay. It was her second or third, and she was pretty much the only customer left in the bar after the après-ski rush had faded, but who was counting?

  Jack the bartender was counting, that’s who—but only for commercial reasons. “Harper Stone,” he said, leaning back and crossing his arms and softly chuckling. “In his day, that guy was the best.”

  “In his day,” Tina scoffed.

  “Hey,” said Jack, smoothing back his gray pompadour, “his day and my day pretty much coincided.”

  Tina puffed herself up like a chicken. “I, for one, think he’s still got it.”

  “Oh,” said Jack. “Like I don’t. Like I don’t still have it.”

  “All right, Jack. You win.” She sniffed and drank.

  He smiled, thinking. “You remember Lights Out? That elevator scene? With the cables?”

  “I do.”

  “How they did that stuff I’ll never know. That guy must have been made of iron. Incredible.”

  “And how about Murder Town?”

  Stacey pushed open the kitchen door with her butt, and backed in carrying the case of Magic Hat.

  “Murder Town?” Jack marveled. “Oh, my God. I must have seen that one a million times.”

  “Did Murder Town come before Afraid of the Dark, or after?”

  Stacey slid the case onto the back bar.

  “Before,” said Jack. “I’m pretty sure it was before.”

  “That’s right.” Tina tapped her glass with a fingertip. “He was still married to Melissa Marlow then. What a mistake that was. Like oil and water, those two.”

  Stacey looked at Jack and Tina as if she’d just stumbled into a debate between a couple of half-nutty geriatrics in the rest home.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “Have you no respect for Hollywood royalty?”

  “Ahh,” said Stacey. “I get it now. That Rock What’s-His-Name guy.”

  “Stone.”

  “No. It’s not Rock Stone. That’d be sillier than the name he’s got.”

  Tina didn’t even look over to see that Stacey was just kidding. She hung her head in frustration, and Jack filled up her glass again.

  FOUR

  Brian came in later on, wearing something other than that yellow coat—but even without the coat he was still Brian. There was no getting around that. He was always going to be Brian.

  He and a handful of other people from the TV crew stamped their feet off in the doorway, hung their coats on the pegs in the foyer, and stepped down into the bar. Brian had the air of a person evaluating something that wasn’t quite living up to his expectations. That was him all over. Stacey polished a couple of wineglasses and watched him, trying not to draw attention to herself. Wondering if he’d seen her car out front. Wondering if he’d come all this way just to see her. Wondering how on earth he’d gone from getting that law degree to working for an ad agency or a film crew or whatever this was. Wondering if she could play sick and ask for the night off and get out of there, pronto, before they got settled in.

  Unfortunately, nobody was on tonight except Jack, and Pete Hardwick wouldn’t be in to count the money and make up a deposit until closing time, so she was pretty well stuck. Besides, the TV crew had already slid three tables together and were craning their necks around looking for her. It was altogether too late. At least Brian had his back to her. That was some consolation.

  She got a pad and went over. During the last couple of months she’d come to pride herself on being able to handle any party’s order from memory, no matter how big and complicated it was, but she wasn’t about to show off that little trick in front of her old fiancé. It might have been kind of silly, but she didn’t want him getting the idea that she’d thrown herself all that completely into the business of being a waitress. At the last second, though, when she’d stopped behind Brian but a couple of chairs to one side, when she’d cleared her throat over the sound of the jukebox and announced that her name was Stacey, when Brian turned around in his seat with a look of surprise on his face that she couldn’t say was fake or otherwise, at the very last second she decided to hell with him and whatever he might think of her current career choice. She slid the pad into the back pocket of her jeans, smiled broadly, and asked what everybody would have.

  * * *

  “Your mother told me where you were,” said Brian, leaning over the bar as she filled the order.

  “My own mother.” Stacey pulled at the Long Trail tap as if she meant to do it some serious harm.

  “The thing you’ve got to remember,” said Brian, “is that she still loves me.”

  “That’s only because I never told her what you did to her daughter.”

  Brian leaned in. “And that’s because you still love me, too.”

  “Guess again, buddy.” Stacey let go of the tap and set the glass on one of the round trays she’d set out on the bar. Thanks to him she’d almost lost track of the order, and she wasn’t about to let that happen. She ticked through it on her fingers, shooting looks over at the three merged tables to jog her memory.

  Brian put his hand on the tray, which made her jump. “How about I carry this back for you?”

  “Don’t do me any favors.” She kept counting, stopped short, began all over again. “I can take care of myself.”

  “So I see.” He seemed to say it without any irony, but it was hard to be sure. He’d never given her credit for anything during their whole time together, and if he was starting now she thought she could get along just fine without it.

  Over at the big table, people were glancing her way and cocking their heads and whispering among themselves. She could practically hear them. Brian the ladies’ man. Brian the operator. Brian the guy who thinks he’s irresistible, and who by sheer force of his insistence and nerve quite often turns out to be. What she didn’t guess was that it was more like Brian the creep; let’s hope she shoots him down big-time and we all get to watch the aftermath.

  They walked back side by side, and Brian insisted on carrying one of the little round trays. Such chivalry, especially from a guy who under normal circumstances couldn’t keep his business in his pants. One of the younger guys at the table—a kid who looked barely drinking age, the assistant art director Evan Babcock—spoke up first. “Good job, man. Nice to see an account guy who knows how to make himself useful.”

  The matronly woman alongside the kid smiled as if she’d taught him well. Karen Pruitt—his mentor in all things, as Brian had explained to Stacey. He looked so young next to her. It occurred to Stacey that she might have set him up with the line. The truth, on the other hand, was that poor judgment and childish humor came naturally to Evan. Agency life brought out that kind of thing in some people, especially the younger ones. Most particularly the younger ones with a creative bent, who half-figured they’d be in this stifling line of work only until their artistic ship came in.

  Brian took
the kid’s joke as if he had an ounce of good nature in his body. He grinned and tilted his head toward Stacey and said, “Right. Then why don’t you tell her I’m good for something. I’ve been trying to get that message across for years.” He started distributing the drinks, getting every one of them wrong except his own.

  “For years?” The words came from someone somewhere around the table. It was hard to say who.

  Brian unbent himself from swapping the drinks around and said, “Friends, I’d like to introduce you to Stacey Curtis—my fiancée.”

  There they were: two boldfaced lies in one sentence. The friend part, followed by the fiancée part. That was probably some kind of a record, even for an account guy like Brian. Even for one who used to be a lawyer. Although what he’d said explained things well enough, it smelled wrong to everybody—so Stacey, having the most to lose, was the first to speak up.

  “Former fiancée,” she said. Then, clarifying that and providing a little additional distance, “In a former life.”

  “That’s OK,” the wiseguy Evan said. “We’re not his friends, either. Not even former friends.”

  Karen Pruitt gave an approving nod. “Former fiancée? Then you’ve got both looks and brains. Not a bad combination.”

  Brian looked a little hurt, but let it go.

  Stacey was making her way around the table, sliding coasters under the glasses that Brian had already put down and that the crew was still busy swapping around. She decided she liked these people well enough. She tended to like pretty much everybody well enough; everybody except Brian, but he was a special case. He’d shown his true colors a long time ago. For the most part, though, Stacey was the kind who tended to give people the benefit of the doubt. It made things go easier.

  Her father had always been exactly that same way, and she’d seen how liking people from the start—actually liking them, and expecting them to like him in return—had smoothed plenty of roads for him. Her mother, not so much. Stacey was glad that she’d gotten this trait from the genetic stew that had brought her into this world. It certainly helped her make the transition when she’d thrown aside life in Boston and gone the way of the ski bum in this little mountain town. It also kind of explained why she was so at ease tending bar here at the Binding, in spite of the BA in Classics from Amherst (and the MA in Art History from Williams) that had cost her parents a fortune. Some things just come naturally to a person, whether or not she thinks she’s going to have any use for them.

  “Friends of yours?” Tina Montero asked when Stacey got back behind the bar.

  “One friend,” Stacey said, thinking numbers, not specifics. “Sort of.”

  Tina sipped her chardonnay and studied Brian over the rim. “He’s pretty cute.”

  “You can have him.”

  Tina lifted an eyebrow.

  “It’s Brian. You know. Brian.”

  Tina nodded sagely and put down her glass and folded her hands around the base of it. “I still say he’s cute.”

  “And I still say you can have him.”

  * * *

  Brian was there when Stacey announced last call; and he was there when Jack closed out the cash register; and he was there when Pete Hardwick showed up bleary-eyed and yawning to make up the night’s deposit. He was sitting at a little table over past the silent jukebox, as though he was waiting for somebody and didn’t care if everyone in the whole world knew.

  “Hey,” Pete said, sizing up the tape. “You had a good night.”

  “One good table is what we had,” said Jack. He took the tape, ran it through his fingers, and found one transaction, twenty or thirty times the usual.

  “That’s all it takes.”

  “Definitely an expense account situation.”

  Pete looped the tape around itself and pressed it flat. “Nice.”

  Jack picked up a spray bottle and worked on scrubbing the bar, moving in close to where Jack stood. He tilted his head ever so slightly in Brian’s direction. “That’s the last of them right there,” he said. “The TV people.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, the TV people. That commercial they’re making over at the mountain.”

  Pete forgot all about the money. “The one with Harper Stone?”

  “If they’re making more than the one commercial, that’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “Come on, man. Harper Stone was in here and you didn’t tell me? You didn’t call?”

  “You said no calls unless the place burns down.” He kept working the spray bottle, moving along the bar. The bottle quacked like a duck when he squeezed the trigger. He breathed in the sharp smell of disinfectant. “That’s your rule. No calls to your house, unless I call the fire department first.”

  Pete looked aghast. “I don’t believe it. You didn’t—”

  “Take it easy, boss. Take it easy. There weren’t any movie stars in here tonight.” He pointed with the spray bottle at Brian, who was distracted for the moment by the bottom of his empty glass. “That guy right there’s as close as we came. He’s the one signed the slip.”

  “My new best friend,” said Pete, his face softening. “Movie star or no.”

  “I thought you’d see it that way.”

  Stacey came out from the back where she’d been putting the vacuum in the storage closet. She stopped short to see Brian there still, then she turned around and went back for her coat.

  “Hey,” Brian called before she could disappear. “I could use a lift back to the condo, if you don’t mind.”

  Jack and Pete exchanged a look.

  FIVE

  They had to sit side by side in the freezing car for a while, their breath blowing thin clouds of smoke, until the engine warmed up and the windows cleared. Stacey pushed the gas pedal to hurry things up and the Subaru coughed and hesitated and steadied itself. Brian shivered and turned the thumbwheel to switch on the heated seat, but nothing happened.

  “Doesn’t the heater work,” he asked, “or is the light just broken?”

  “That heater hasn’t worked in five years,” Stacey said. “If you’d ever lowered yourself to ride in my car, you’d have known.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “I’ll try to do it more often from now on.”

  “Oh no, you won’t.” Stacey threw the transmission into gear and hit the gas. If there had been any snow on the ground it would have been a risky move, but even in the Binding’s ill-maintained parking lot there wasn’t much of anything on the ground but gravel and frozen dirt.

  They were quiet as they drove through town, and the streets were quiet, too. No lights anywhere except the big arc lamp on the front of the library and the yellowing overhead fluorescents at the gas station. Bud’s Suds was closed up tight, along with the pizza joint next door to it and the grocery store down the block. All of the other restaurants and bars were shuttered and dark, too.

  She asked him why he was here shooting a television commercial instead of doing research or whatever for the family law firm. He said that he’d been made an offer he couldn’t refuse by an old college classmate of his father’s who sat on the board of an international conglomerate that owned the consumer products company that owned the pharmaceutical company that owned the mouthwash company that employed the agency that was spending a fortune on this new campaign with the old defunct has-been of a former movie star. He was there to keep an eye on things. He said that last as if it were possible that he could keep an eye on anything. Loser.

  When they reached the far edge of town—it didn’t take long—Stacey turned up the access road. Brian hadn’t said exactly where he was staying, and there were quite a few possibilities, but most of the nicer condos were more or less together.

  “We’re all at the Trail’s End,” he said.

  “Nice place,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “It’s all right. They’ve got underground parking.”

  “That’d be an advantage, if you had a car.”r />
  “Oh, I’ve got my car,” Brian said. “I just didn’t feel like bringing it out. What if we got snow?”

  Pure Brian. Both eyes on his BMW, and none on the Weather Channel. She slammed on the brakes. “In that case,” she said, “you can walk from here.”

  “Stace.”

  “Don’t ‘Stace’ me.”

  “Come on.”

  She reached across him and pulled at the door latch. “Out.”

  “Come on.”

  “A little walk will do you good. Out of the car.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Try me.” She waited a beat, looking straight ahead, up the hill. Then she turned to give him a look that would have propelled any sane man out the door.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m going.” He opened the door and the light popped on. “But if I slip and fall in these loafers, it’s on your head.”

  Oh, God. There they were, in the glow of the dome light. A pair of useless Gucci loafers, tassels and all, in a pale and highly vulnerable color that Stacey could only describe as looking like undercooked veal. What on earth was he thinking?

  “Go on and shut the door,” she said, starting up the hill while he was still off balance. “I can’t leave a helpless creature to die out here.”

  * * *

  She didn’t sleep all that well. Between Brian’s arrival and the lack of snow, things were going downhill around here fast, and her dreams were oppressive. Nothing but misery and melt. Come morning she squeezed her eyes shut against the light and lay in bed listening while Megan Ramsey made coffee in the kitchen, and when everything was quiet again she pulled on her robe and went out to wait for the first cup. She leaned against the doorsill with her bare feet cold on the linoleum. Beyond the kitchen window the Rutland Herald lay in the gravel drive, wrapped in thin blue plastic. She thought about going out to get it just to check on the weather forecast, but decided that it probably wasn’t worth the trouble. When it felt like snowing again it would snow. Besides, the weather around here varied so dramatically from one valley to the next that the official forecast never counted for much.