Fade to White Read online

  When he was finished with the broom he signaled for the fat guy from Connecticut to come on through, which he did. At no point had the fat guy even rolled down his window to make a little small talk. Guy shook his head thinking about it. What got into people? Did they think everybody in the world was there only to wait on them? Probably. He leaned the broom against the wall and watched the fat guy leave the parking lot and turn hard onto the access road without even slowing down, tires squealing, gunning the engine to cut in front of a minivan full of kids from the mountain school. Just making up for the time he’d lost waiting for Guy to sweep up. The nerve. If Guy had been in his car instead of standing here flatfooted, he’d have given him a ticket fast enough to make his head spin—and the fat guy knew it, no question.

  Manny was still looking sore when Guy came back. He was leaning against the Jeep, getting his long leather coat dirty, hollering into his cell phone as if volume would improve the lousy connection. “I’m telling you I can’t drive this thing all the way back to New York the way it is,” he was saying, “and I can’t wait until the day after tomorrow for you to get me a replacement.” He pulled the phone away from his ear and glared at it. “Hey,” he began hollering at it again, “can you even hear me?”

  Guy took him by the elbow. Manny looked irritated and shook his hand off. Guy took him by the elbow again and walked him up toward the building and around the side, onto the little railed stoop that served as an entranceway. Nobody used it on account of the underground parking, and it was just barely shoveled, but cell reception was better up there. Guy had a detailed map of the whole county in his head, showing spots like this one. That was half of what law enforcement was about in Vermont—keeping track of where you could make a call.

  Manny begrudged him a sharp little smile, but he still didn’t stop hollering into the phone. “Where do you think I am, that you can’t get me a goddamn car? On the fucking moon?”

  A gust of wind blew up from out of the north, and Guy fastened the top button on his coat against it. He figured that for all the good that Manny’s shouting was going to do, they might as well be on the moon as here.

  “I don’t care that somebody has to drive one up from Albany. They can drive one up from Miami for all I care. As long as they get here by two o’clock this afternoon.” He stabbed the connection off and jammed the phone into his pocket, then stood looking out at the mountains. He wasn’t really looking at them, but he definitely wasn’t looking at Guy either.

  “Connection’s better over here, no?”

  He had to admit it. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “So when’s your car coming?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “My guess is tomorrow, maybe the next day.”

  “Damn,” said Manny. He waited a minute, then he said it three more times for good measure.

  “When’re you due home?”

  “I was due the day before yesterday, but the weather wasn’t cooperating and the shoot was going overtime so I moved some things around. Worked it so I didn’t have to be back until tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow early?”

  “Tomorrow first thing.”

  “Maybe you’d better move some more things around.”

  “I wish I could. I wish it was that easy.”

  Guy watched another car leave the underground garage. It was an old junker with Maine tags. “Maybe somebody else can give you a lift.”

  “They’re all gone. All but that Brian guy.”

  “So ride with him.”

  “He’s not going.”

  “Then I guess you’re going to have to enjoy our hospitality for a little while longer.”

  “Great,” said Manny. “That’ll be just great.”

  FIFTEEN

  Winds were always high on the backside of a storm, but that was yesterday. This morning conditions on the mountain were just about perfect—if you didn’t count the crowds up from the flatlands, or the extensive work that the groomers had done on their behalf the night before. Ninety percent of the mountain was groomed down into picture-perfect corduroy, smooth and skiable as anything in this world or the next. Which was fine with Stacey, as far as it went, but what made her happiest was finding a cache of untouched powder—either in the gladed runs like Blowdown and Hold Tight, or off-piste on the far side of the North Peak. She always felt a little guilty ducking under the fence and setting off beyond the official boundary of the ski area, and she knew that if she got in trouble over there she’d be by definition on her own, but a couple of runs couldn’t hurt. Especially once the crowds began to build up at 10:30, when even the bumps on Watch This! and Devil May Care began to get scoured clean.

  There would sure as heck be plenty of snow over there, though, and there wasn’t much chance she’d get lost. People said you could see town from most every angle as long as you got clear of the trees, and that there were lots of places from where you could see the lifts running up the face of the main mountain, so it wasn’t going to be that big a deal. Besides, she happened to be a pretty darned good skier.

  So she went.

  And holy cow, was there ever snow over there.

  Buckets of it. Mounds of it. Drifts and piles and waves and clouds and shoals and fields and mountains stacked upon mountains of it. Talk about first tracks. As often as Stacey had made sure to be among the first paying skiers down Spruce Peak in the morning, she’d never experienced anything quite like this. It was complex and clean and easy and difficult all at once. It set her legs on fire and it turned some animal part of her brain loose.

  This, she decided after no more than forty-five seconds of bliss, was skiing.

  The trees were far enough apart to be fun, not treacherous, and the underbrush was buried beneath so many feet of snow that she didn’t even have to consider it. She swooped through the long curves and whooped through the short ones. She skied where the mountain wanted her to, not where some team of engineers and lumberjacks had decided that she should. It was, in short, heaven. It couldn’t last forever, but she sure did wish it would.

  * * *

  The line at the bottom of the North Peak lift, when she dropped out of the trees above it and found herself legal again, was longer than she’d have liked. There was even a wait for the Porta-Potty, which was never a good sign. And the singles line, which generally went faster than the main line even though it looked longer, didn’t seem to be moving at all. So she skated around to what seemed like the lighter of the two sides and settled in for the duration. The sun was bright and she had worked up a sweat in the deep snow off the trails. Standing still cooled her off. The break was nice, but she could have used a little less of it.

  Between the two main lines was a gap, marked by orange plastic cones, where patrollers and people taking lessons could get to the lift without waiting in line. She saw Chip zoom into it. He pulled up short behind an instructor doing his best to manage what looked like a pair of twin girls, probably four or five years old, all bundled up in pink and purple. Stacey saw him offer to help wrangle them onto the lift and watched them climb on together, the lift operator slowing down the chair to make it easier. Chip got the girls settled and then looked back over his shoulder, and Stacey was pretty sure he’d caught sight of her. It turned out she was right, because when she finally got to the top of the mountain—it seemed like half an hour later, but it was probably fifteen minutes—he was waiting for her.

  “Here comes trouble,” he said when she skied over.

  “What do you mean, trouble?”

  “I mean as in skiing out-of-bounds can cost you your ticket.” He raised his goggles and squinted at her, trying his best to look serious.

  “Come on. It was just a little bit out of bounds. And hey, you wouldn’t pull my ticket.”

  “You never know.”

  “I do know.” She grinned, settled her goggles on her face, and adjusted the straps of her poles. “Anyway,” she said, “what makes you so sure I was out of bounds to begin with?”<
br />
  “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist. You see a person coming back in bounds, you figure that person’s been out of bounds.”

  “Well, I had to get to the lift.”

  “I could see that.”

  “I sure wasn’t going to hike up.”

  “I guess not.” He pulled his goggles back down, too.

  “So there you go.”

  “There you go.” One after another, he clapped his skis on the hardpack to knock the snow loose. “So tell me,” he said just as he was looking about ready to take off. “How was it over there?”

  “It was gorgeous,” she said. “And there was nobody. That was the main thing.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “About what?”

  “About there being no people?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “Because ticket-pulling isn’t the worst that could happen.”

  “I know.”

  “A person goes over there, he could ski into a tree and knock himself out and nobody’d ever find him.”

  Stacey grinned at Chip. “Maybe you’d better go check, huh?”

  Chip permitted himself a tiny smile.

  “Maybe you’d better go see if somebody’s in trouble over there,” she said.

  “You know,” said Chip, “I think maybe I’d better.”

  “Just to be on the safe side.”

  “Right.”

  “I mean, what if?”

  “What if indeed.”

  “You need some help?”

  “I’d hate to involve a nonprofessional,” he said, “but the buddy system is always the safe way to go. Come to think of it, you’d be doing the Patrol a great service.”

  “Am I invited?”

  “Would you mind?”

  “It’d be my pleasure.”

  “When we get near the bottom,” he said as they pushed off, “I can show you a much less conspicuous way out of the trees and back to the lift.”

  * * *

  Manny and Guy were in a booth at Judge Roy Beans. The place was empty except for the two of them. Even the counterman was gone, having slipped outside to grab a smoke while the crowd was light.

  “So anyway,” said Guy, “since you’re still here and all, I was wondering.”

  “What?”

  “You heard anything from that guy Stone?”

  “Nah.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No call?”

  “I’m the last person he’d call.” Manny took a sip of his coffee and winced. He put it down in front of him and looked at it as if it were poison.

  “I guess,” said Guy. “Why call the director, huh?” He was giving Manny a look that Manny wasn’t going to like much.

  “You don’t understand. The director isn’t in charge of anything, except on the set. He doesn’t run the project. Not by a million miles.”

  “Is that so?” Guy looked surprised and a little bit impressed. The world was full of arcane knowledge.

  “Absolutely. The director’s a hired hand, just like everybody else.”

  “Just like Stone.”

  “Try telling that to him.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Manny sat without saying anything for a minute. His gaze flicked over to the window and back again. He looked like a man who wanted something and couldn’t have it.

  Finally it occurred to Guy that that’s just what he was, and that what he wanted was a cigarette. Manny clearly envied the counterman, outside in the cold wind in just his shirtsleeves, enjoying a smoke. Guy could have invited him to go on out and satisfy the urge—he could have gone out with him—but he didn’t. He just kept thinking about Stone and Manny and the relationship between them, and he waited a beat or two. “You don’t seem to like the fellow very much,” he said at last, when Manny didn’t seem to feel like telling him anything more. Like that might jog him a little.

  “Who does? He’s a schmuck.”

  “Really.”

  “First class. Top shelf.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Absolutely,” said Manny. “He always has been.”

  Guy pulled at his lip and didn’t make any other response.

  If Manny thought he’d said too much with that last, he didn’t show it. Then again the sheriff didn’t look like he’d noticed it either. After a minute Guy even seemed to let him off the hook. “Always,” he said. “So that’s, like, a well-known thing, huh? Stone being a pain in the neck?”

  “It sure is.”

  “I’ll be. The stuff you people in the business know.”

  “Right.”

  “A guy like myself, I’d never get wind of that. It’s like how they said Rock Hudson was gay. I’d never have known that unless I read about it in the papers. And if a guy is just a pain in the neck or something—I mean just a regular pain in the neck, not a child abuser or a drunk driver or a dope fiend or something on that order—if a guy is just kind of irritating, I guess that wouldn’t make the newspapers.”

  “ ‘Kind of irritating.’ That’s putting it mildly.”

  “You said a ‘schmuck.’ That was the word you used.”

  “From the word ‘go,’ Sheriff. A Grade-A schmuck.” He drank a little bit more and twisted his mouth as if the taste of it actually hurt. “How about I go out and have a cigarette while you finish up your coffee?”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “You smoke?”

  “No,” said Guy. “I used to, but I gave it up a long time ago. I just like the fresh air.”

  SIXTEEN

  “You’re off tonight, right?”

  Chip and Stacey were riding the lift alone. It was lunchtime on the slopes—lunchtime lasted from eleven thirty until maybe quarter to two—and the crowds had all gone indoors to fill up on lousy clam chowder and cold chili dogs and rubbery hamburgers, all of it overpriced by a factor of three or four. If there was one thing any serious skier knew, it was that on a busy day you had your lunch either before everybody else or after. If you had lunch at all. The best skiing was first thing in the morning, before the flatlanders showed up. The second-best was over lunch, when they stormed the cafeterias and got out of your way.

  “Yeah,” Stacey said. “Tonight’s my night off.”

  “Got anything in mind?”

  “A proper dinner,” she said. “A girl can’t live on free hot wings alone. Not for long, anyhow.”

  “There’s always Chex Mix.”

  “Right. Chex Mix.”

  They rode in silence for a little while. Stacey thought he might be fixing to invite her to go out and get something for dinner, but then she changed her mind and decided he was waiting for her to invite him. Either way, neither of them spoke up. They rode on side by side, looking down at a few kids who were trying to kill themselves on the terrain park underneath the lift. Chip kept a professional eye on them, but Stacey just shook her head.

  Chip began. “How about later on we—”

  At last, Stacey thought, here it comes.

  But he cut himself off in mid-sentence, wincing at the sight of a kid dropping off the edge of a rail and cracking the back of his head on the hard edge of it. Thank God for helmets. Still, Chip kept watching—turning around almost 180 degrees in the chair—and he didn’t resume what he’d been saying until the kid had stood up and shaken himself off. And even then Stacey had to jog his memory.

  “You were saying? About later on?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Right.” He straightened himself in the chair. “How about we get together after supper and do some real off-piste skiing?”

  Hmm. So there was no dinner invitation after all. But that was fine, because the off-piste skiing invitation was plenty more interesting than mere food. She gave him a quizzical look. “Everything’s closed after supper, though. Everything closes at quarter of four.”

  “Not everything. There’s a whole world out there, Stace.”

  “Stacey.” Brian was the only one she
’d ever let call her Stace, and she wished she hadn’t.

  “There’s a whole world out there, Stacey. And there’s going to be a full moon to light it all up.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Not a cloud in the sky, either. Look at that. Not right now.”

  “Enough with the meteorology. What are you talking about doing?”

  The lift station was getting closer. They lifted the bar, tightened their grip on their poles, and raised the tips of their skis. “You’ve got to plan ahead for night skiing, is all. You’ve got to watch the weather. Especially if you’re going for those huge stashes of powder underneath the power lines.” He pointed with his poles as they slid down the ramp. Stacey followed their angle, past the abandoned fire tower, up over the trees, to the spot where a line of transmission towers stalked over the mountains like giant robots from another planet. She’d seen them from town a million times but had never noticed them from here. It had never occurred to her that you might reach them, much less get over there and use the bare swath of land under them as your own personal, untouched, pristine, virginal ski slope.

  “You’re on, pal,” she said. “Oh, you are so on.” She stood gazing up in wonder, and before she knew what she was saying she had asked him to have a quick bite to eat beforehand. Or maybe afterward. Whatever.

  How was he supposed to refuse? So now dinner was on, too.

  * * *

  “Hey, Sheriff.” The counterman, in shirtsleeves and a white apron, was working on his second or third cigarette. He turned to see Guy and Manny come out, both of them just as underdressed for the temperature as he was.