Fade to White Read online

  “Hey,” he said to Stacey. “That guy.” Motioning with his thumb.

  She glanced up quickly, still working on the drinks.

  “What’s his deal?” he said. “You know him?”

  “How come?”

  “The look he was giving me.” He shook his head. “Sheesh.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Like he didn’t approve of you touching me or something. Kind of weird.”

  “Don’t give it another thought. It’s just Brian.”

  “Brian?”

  “Brian.”

  “Brian, Brian?”

  “Brian, Brian.”

  “Your Brian?”

  “I don’t have a Brian anymore.”

  “But—”

  “I know.”

  “It’s that Brian, though.”

  “That Brian. Yes.”

  “And you didn’t tell me? You didn’t mention he was here?”

  “I didn’t get a chance.” She finished arranging the drinks on a couple of round trays. “Besides, what difference does it make? What’s the big deal?”

  If she didn’t know, Chip didn’t think he ought to go telling her now. Because he’d probably be wrong, and what then?

  * * *

  The bar filled up and Stacey stayed busy. It figured. Everybody in town had been snowed in the night before, and now that the roads were clear they’d all been set free to enjoy a couple of brews and a bowl of Chex Mix and maybe some hot wings. They obviously intended to make the most of it.

  Chip ordered a Long Trail and he took his time drinking it. Every now and then he’d slide a look over toward Brian, and every time it turned out that Brian was looking back. There wasn’t anything special about the guy, at least as far as Chip could see. He was all right. He was a type that he’d seen a million times before, back in the offices of his father’s lobbying firm in Washington. Smooth, he’d say. Oily but not greasy. In control of things, at least within certain parameters. A guy like that could go his whole life and never know his own limitations, since he’d never attempt anything beyond them. A guy like that could actually believe that he had no limitations—that he was capable of anything he put his hand to. Chip figured a guy like that could stand to fail every now and then. It would improve him, and for that reason, among others, he was pleased that Brian had failed with Stacey.

  Maybe it had taught him a lesson. Probably not.

  Chip hadn’t wanted to go through life that way, believing that he was invulnerable and in charge. He could have done just that, easily, if he’d gone into the family business. He could have ended up like his father the oil lobbyist, thinking that he was in control of the whole world, or at least the big parts of it that mattered. The problem was, if you were an oil lobbyist and you really were in charge of the world, then things were starting to look as if you’d screwed the whole deal up pretty badly. Which is just one reason Chip had left behind the family business and a perfectly good trust fund, and come north to Vermont last year for a stint on the Ski Patrol. After one day in first-aid training, a person with any brains knew that he wasn’t in control of things. The world could throw almost anything at you.

  With that in mind he got another beer and left the stool alongside Tina’s and headed over to the table where the TV crew was sitting, to see what happened when the world threw something unexpected in Brian’s direction.

  The answer was not much, at least not right off.

  A few people remembered him from the mountain, from that morning when they’d all sat around the picnic tables drinking coffee. The blond actress in particular. She leaned forward—away from a conversation she’d been having with Brian, as if she were coming up for air—and asked Chip how things were on the mountain. As if everybody at the table hadn’t been there all day long. As if he had some kind of inside information. As if his opinion was superior to anybody else’s in the room.

  He just shrugged.

  Evan got up to use the men’s room, and she took advantage of his absence to slide over into the chair next to Chip, which also happened to be a notch farther away from Brian. Brian just sat there and watched her go, shaking his head, looking dazed. Hey, he asked the room without speaking a word, what am I, chopped liver?

  People laughed, almost sympathetically but not quite, and the girl smiled back from over her shoulder. Then she turned her full attention to Chip, who’d raised his palms and was giving Brian a bewildered look. Bewildered but definitely happy.

  * * *

  Stacey came back with another pitcher of beer and Brian watched her come. He pointed toward Chip and the blonde. “Looks like the outdoorsy types get all the girls around here,” he said. Although she looked over at Chip, Brian didn’t. Not for a few seconds, anyhow. He kept his eyes locked on Stacey instead, evaluating her expression. She had a thing for that guy Chip, all right. That was for sure. Although she didn’t seem to know what to do about it. Or whether she should be doing anything at all. She just looked at that blond-headed ski patroller and that blond-haired actress, put down the pitcher at the other end of the table, and stood there. Brian had never known her to be at a loss for words—except for that one night in Boston when she’d found him in bed with that friend of hers who hadn’t been able to keep her hands off him. Right then she hadn’t said a single word, she’d just gone all stony and thrown her stuff in the car and had never come back. It sure looked like she was at a loss for words now, too.

  Hmm.

  Chip, on the other hand, didn’t seem to notice a thing. Whatever subtleties were warring in Stacey’s brain were utterly lost on the guy. Mister Oblivious, that was Chip. Then again, Brian thought, who could blame him? It looked like he could have it pretty much any way he wanted it. Maybe what they said about those outdoorsy types was true, incredible as it seemed.

  TWELVE

  “So where are you staying these days?” Brian. Leaning on the bar with his head tilted to one side in that look of phony sincerity that Stacey had learned, in retrospect, to hate.

  “I’ve got a room.”

  “Oh. A room. Sounds nice.”

  “It is.”

  “A room of one’s own,” he said, as if he knew the first thing about Virginia Woolf. As if he ever might.

  “It’s nice enough.”

  “Are you subletting from some old spinster?” He might have meant it as a means of suggesting that she was on her way toward becoming an old spinster herself, now that she’d blown him off; or he might have meant it as a way of discovering if she was shacking up with nature boy over there. Or he might have meant nothing by it at all.

  Either way, she didn’t bite. All she said was, “When are you going home, anyway?” She was leaning against the back bar with her elbows behind her.

  Brian was quick, however, she had to give him that. He turned the question right back on her, making it into an invitation. “When are you coming home?” he asked, with that soulful look he could pull out of his back pocket on a moment’s notice. She hated that look, too.

  “I moved out of my folks’ place a long time ago,” she said. “This is home right now.”

  “Just you and the spinster.”

  “More like just me and the sheriff.”

  “The sheriff?” That kind of changed everything. What about Chip? What about him?

  “Yeah, the sheriff. The sheriff and his wife and kids. That’s where I rent. They’ve got this spare room.”

  “Sheriff Ramsey?”

  “That’s right.” She took note of a couple of snowmobile guys in those big yellow snowsuits, trying to get her attention from a table in the back. She gave them a sign to suggest that she’d be right there, and one of them upended his empty glass to show that she didn’t need to come all the way over to find out what it was they wanted. Just another round of that Long Trail whenever she got around to it. “You met Guy? What was it, another speeding ticket?”

  “No. He came by the condo when we couldn’t find Harper Stone.”


  “I guess he still hasn’t turned up, huh?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Think he will?” Stepping forward to the tap and pulling a couple of Long Trails.

  “I don’t know why not,” he said.

  “So, what did Guy think it’s all about? He give you any indication?”

  “I don’t know. He was more interested in finding out what I thought it was all about.”

  “And?”

  “Who knows?” He shrugged, wanting another beer but not wanting to ask her for it. If he’d been in their old apartment back in Boston, sitting with his feet up watching football or surfing the Web, he’d have had no trouble asking her to bring him something. He wouldn’t have given it a second thought, but now that there was a commercial relationship involved, it just felt weird. Or it felt as if she might think it felt weird. Which was kind of the same thing, wasn’t it? He could do without that beer, no problem. He’d have to.

  She made a note on her pad and brought the two glasses over to the snowmobile guys. Then she took a stroll around the room to make sure that her tables were happy before returning to her spot behind the bar.

  “When do you get off?”

  That Brian. He never gave up.

  “Past your bedtime.”

  “You’d know.”

  “I guess I would,” she said. “Lucky me.”

  “You off this weekend?”

  “I ski during the day, and I’m here nights. The weekends are the busiest.”

  “Right.” He stood for a minute thinking, looking down at the bar, and then he looked up. “I thought I might stick around for a few more days,” he said. “Since you and I have a few things we never exactly finished talking about.”

  “I finished,” she said. “But suit yourself.”

  * * *

  Guy was still awake when she got home. That was unusual. It was probably the first time ever, come to think of it.

  The house was off the main road on its own private lane, past a green street sign that read RAMSEY ROAD, PVT. That was the way things were around here. Half the roads were private, which didn’t mean that there was anything special about them. All it meant was that it was up to you to keep them plowed in the winter, to cope with the ruts and gullies that would turn them into treacherous swamps come spring, as well as to fill those ruts and gullies with gravel and fresh dirt come summer. Stacey located the turnoff by means of a pair of red reflectors that Guy had put out there a long time ago, nailed five or six feet up on the trunks of birch trees on either side. In the summer they’d be ridiculously high in the air, but in the winter—on account of the snow that the plows threw in all directions—they were just right.

  The woods were thick here, dark and deep, and Ramsey Road had a couple of bends in it that hid the house from the road even though it wasn’t actually set too far back—no more than fifty yards, as the crow files. However, this was the first time Stacey could remember seeing a light between the trees as she turned in. Sure enough, the floor lamp in the living room was switched on, and she could see it through the blinds as she rounded the last turn and pulled up alongside the house and parked. The blinds were down and tilted shut, even though there was nobody for miles around, and the light leaked out in thin stripes. She went in through the back porch to the kitchen, left her boots in the boot tray, dropped her things in her bedroom back there—it was in a little square extension, a mother-in-law suite almost, wrapped in raw Tyvek that fluttered in the wind and kept her awake at night—and padded out to the living room to see what was up.

  Guy sat in his recliner, wearing striped flannel pajamas underneath his white terry cloth bathrobe, an empty milk glass in one hand and the remote in the other. He wasn’t using either one of them, though. He was looking hard at the television, sighting across the room between his stocking feet as if along the barrel of a gun. The television was showing some educational travelogue of what looked like Italy or Greece, but Stacey could see right off that he wasn’t watching it. He had the sound turned all the way down and was chewing on his lower lip. The muscles in his jaw were working in the reflected multicolored light of some Mediterranean holiday scene.

  He’d hardly heard her come in, but when she said his name he shook off his concentration and turned toward her. “Hey, Stacey.”

  “You’re up late.”

  “I guess I am.” He lifted his left hand to look at his watch and discovered that he wasn’t wearing it. He’d probably left it on the nightstand up in the bedroom, where Megan had gone to sleep a long while past. “What time is it, anyhow?”

  “Two thirty.”

  “Wow. I had no idea.” He squeezed his eyelids shut and gave his head a little shake as if to clear it.

  “Something on your mind?”

  “That guy who disappeared. I assume it was the talk of the Broken Binding.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Him being a movie star and all.”

  Stacey sat down on the couch opposite him. “A movie star?” she said. “Maybe you’d better define your terms.”

  He poked at the remote without looking at it, and instead of going dark the television switched over to a movie. He’d have known it anywhere, inside of two seconds. Shane, with that Alan Ladd. Stacey probably didn’t consider Alan Ladd a movie star either. Then again he’d been dead since what, sometime in the sixties. That would be before she was born. At least Harper Stone’s career was a little more recent than that, however little there might be left of it these days. “I mean,” he said, “the guy did make some movies. A couple of pretty good ones, to tell the truth.”

  “I’d hope so. Given his attitude.”

  “You met him?”

  “I guess you could put it that way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was kind of detached, is all.”

  “Detached.” He studied the film of milk in his glass.

  “It was probably just the whole movie-star thing. Ego.”

  “Maybe.” He tilted his glass and watched a single drop of milk slide around the bottom of it, circling and thinning itself out. “Still,” he said, “tell me more.”

  “Starstruck, are we?”

  “Professionally curious.” He clicked the remote again, killing the television this time.

  “Right.” So she told him the whole thing. Pretty much, anyhow. She told him how she’d run into Stone in the service department at the Slippery Slope, and how when she’d seen him again later on—not more than an hour or so later, really—he’d acted like they’d never set eyes on each other. How he’d smoothed it over as a result of his meeting so many good-looking women in his life, which was both unctuous and egotistical. Real Stacey bait, ha ha ha. It hadn’t worked, as Guy could tell.

  But Guy wasn’t terribly interested in that part of the story. When she finished telling him everything, he went right back to the part about the basement of the Slippery Slope, to the workbench where she’d seen Stone huddled in conversation with Buddy Frommer. “You sure he saw you there in the first place?”

  “Absolutely. I looked him right in the eye.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “I know.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Nothing. Not that I remember.”

  “Buddy did all the talking?”

  “He didn’t exactly say a whole lot. He kind of hustled me out of there.”

  “That’s Buddy. That’s Buddy Frommer.”

  “Does he always act like that?”

  “Like what?” He put his milk glass down on the end table and brought the recliner forward.

  “Like he does.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Come on. You know how he is.”

  Guy clearly didn’t want to put words in her mouth, but this was getting ridiculous. “Irritable, you mean? Or do you mean secretive? Because—”

  She tilted her head. “I hadn’t thought about secretive, but yeah. That’s it. Secretive. And irritable. Secretive and i
rritable both. That would pretty much cover the Buddy Frommer Experience.”

  “No kidding,” said Guy, sitting and shaking his head. “My older brother went all the way through school with Buddy, and he hasn’t changed since the first grade.”

  “How does he stay in business?” Thinking that maybe Guy would mention the rumor Chip had suggested, how Buddy might have been selling drugs out of the Slippery Slope. She didn’t want to leap to any conclusions, but it sure did make sense, what with that transaction over the workbench and all.

  But Guy kept his own counsel on that issue. “He comes from money,” is what he said. “His parents bought him a brand-new Camaro when he and my brother were juniors in high school. Regular kids were driving around in third-hand VW Beetles and rusty Ford Falcons and God knows what else. Anything with wheels. Anything that moved. And Buddy got a Camaro for his birthday. I was maybe eight or ten years old, but I still remember it. You can bet my brother never forgave him.”

  Stacey could see that it still stung.

  Guy sat staring off into space, remembering. “It was red. Cherry red.”

  “Wow,” said Stacey.

  “Anyway,” said Guy, shaking loose that sour old memory and getting back to business, “the bottom line is Stone didn’t talk to you.”

  “No.”

  “So maybe he didn’t see you at all.”

  “Oh, he did. He saw me. He kind of acknowledged me a little as I was leaving.” She touched her brow and moved her hand away slowly. “You know, like that.”