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  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 h
ouse 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.

  Halfway down the Thunder Bowl, she ran into Chip. His skis were planted upright into a drift, and he was picking up a pine branch that the snowfall had brought down onto the margin of the trail. She slid over toward him and stopped, figuring to get the scoop on the sirens in the valley.

  “I thought you’d be occupied,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said, “I am.”

  “No, I mean the sirens and all. They didn’t need you? I guess they’ve got a lot of guys on today.”

  Chip shook his head. “No—no more than usual.” He tapped his walkie-talkie. “I didn’t get any calls, though. Whatever happened must have happened in town, not up here.”

  “That’s good news.”

  “If a siren’s ever good news.”

  “Right.”

  ELEVEN

  That evening, conversation was a little subdued in the Broken Binding. Even Tina Montero, who was a look-on-the-bright-side kind of individual capable of facing almost anything with a lipsticked smile and a glass of chardonnay, wasn’t her usual upbeat self.

  Word on the street was that Harper Stone had gone missing.

  Jack, the highly professional bartender who’d been here since the Germans and was more a fixture than the walnut bar itself, leaned up against the cash register, folded his arms across his chest, and chewed his lip. “I don’t know,” he said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  “People don’t just disappear that way,” said Tina.

  “Especially not a capable guy like him.” He shook his head. “I mean, come on. It’s Harper Stone.”

  “You don’t know,” said Tina.

  Jack raised an eyebrow. “I guess you’re right. The guy could be a pansy. Or maybe he just went soft.” He patted his little belly. “We all do, sooner or later.”

  “Going soft doesn’t have anything to do with disappearing into thin air.”

  “I’m just saying you’d think a guy like that would know how to take care of himself, whatever happened.”

  “Whatever happened. That’s the question.”

  “You’re right. There’s no telling.”

  “He was there one minute and gone the next.”

  “Maybe somebody kidnapped him.”

  Tina laughed and drained her glass. “Sure. That happens all the time around here.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “You’re right. Anything’s possible.” She was quiet for a minute, thinking. “Then there’s the drugs.”

  Jack wobbled his head from side to side, watching the light in the foyer change as the front door swung open and people came in stamping their feet. “I don’t know about that drug stuff. That’s just a rumor.”

  “It’s all just rumors.”

  “I’m saying don’t believe everything you hear, is all.”

  “I’ll believe anything.”

  He rubbed his jaw, rueful. “Not me. You don’t succeed in this world the way Harper Stone did without being a pretty square guy.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  He refilled her glass. “You sound like you’d know.”

  “Six degrees of separation and all that.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Jack asked, watching Stacey head out among the tables to take orders. It was the TV crew, and if the mood in the Binding was subdued they looked ready to bring it down a little more. “What do you mean ‘six degrees of separation’?”

  “You know. The Kevin Bacon thing.”

  “I know that. I’ve heard about six degrees of separation.” He put the bottle back in the fridge under the bar. “How do you suppose Kevin Bacon got mixed up in that, anyhow? He’s another one.”

  “Another one what?”

  “Another Hollywood guy. That’s all. How’d he get mixed up in it?”

  “In what?”

  “In that six-degrees business.”

  “I think because it rhymes, is all.”

  “Really?” He tilted his head, trying it out to himself. “As simple as that?”

  “As simple as that.”

  “You think he knows Harper Stone?”

  “Within six degrees,” she said, “there’s no question about it. That’s the whole point of the game, isn’t it? Nobody’s that much of a stranger to anybody else.”

  * * *

  The crew would be headed home in the morning, there was no way around that. With Stone gone wherever he’d gone, their work was finished. They all looked pretty glum. Not that anybody missed him in particular, but you didn’t expect things to end this way. It was all very dissatisfying.

  Manny Seville was at one end of the long table, waving his hands around and telling Karen and Brian that he’d had another look at the footage during the snowstorm and complaining that he wasn’t sure he had enough decent stuff to make the commercial work. Brian was giving him a disgusted look that said he’d damned well better, or else there’d be hell to pay. Karen was putting in her opinion that it didn’t really matter, since you’d have to be kind of ghoulish to go ahead and sell mouthwash with poor old Harper Stone’s last scenes, if it turned out that that was what they’d gotten on tape. Imagine it. The poor guy’s last moments on camera. The famous Harper Stone, looking irritable and old in a mouthwash commercial.

  “Don
’t worry about him,” said Manny. “He’ll turn up. They always do.”

  “Do we have insurance for this?” Brian asked.

  Karen frowned. “I guess. Maybe.” Then she thought a little more and shrugged. “How do I know?”

  Manny shrugged, too. “I don’t know if you can get insurance for this. I mean, the guy disappearing and all. That’s an act of God, isn’t it?”

  Brian gave him a hard look, as if he’d caught him at something. “I thought you said they always turn up. Like you’ve had experience with this kind of thing.”

  “Not directly. I mean, I read the newspapers, I watch Entertainment Tonight. Just like anybody.” He leaned back and swiveled his head, trying to get Stacey’s attention. She was at another table, and he’d have to wait. “Anyhow,” he said, “when he turns up, we’ll come back and get the shots we need.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” said Brian. Then, to somebody else at the table, a youngish woman with a pinched look: “That commercial airs … when?”

  “End of the month.”

  “The commercial airs at the end of the month, Manny.”

  “He’ll be back.”

  “We won’t.”

  “But the commercial—”

  “The commercial will be perfect.” Brian narrowed his eyes and pressed his lips into something that was not a smile. “You’ll see to it.”

  Manny set his jaw as if he had some kind of artistic integrity to defend, but before he figured out where he was going next, he realized that Stacey had come up behind him and was ready to take their orders.

  Brian looked past him to her. “In case you hadn’t figured it out already,” he said, “now you can see why they brought me into this job.”

  Manny shot a look over his shoulder and then slumped in his chair, visibly wondering if all of that had been about impressing the girl.

  * * *

  Stacey took their orders and was working on them at the bar with Jack when the front door slipped open on a little gust of wind. Chip Walsh came in. He stamped off his boots in the foyer, hung his coat on a peg, and came over to perch on the stool alongside Tina. He had his black knit cap tugged down to his eyebrows and it made him look stupid, so Stacey took a step away from the taps, yanked it off, and dropped it onto the bar, revealing a case of helmet-head that was pretty remarkable even for Chip. He reached up and pushed his blond hair around, but it didn’t do any good. She reached over and gave it a little more pushing, but that didn’t help either. He was sitting there with a grin on his face, running the band of his wool cap through his fingers and watching Stacey work, when he picked up the vibe that somebody at the tables was staring at him. It turned out to be Brian—who glanced away the second he made eye contact.