Fade to White (5 page)

Nevertheless, Stone kept coming, and he took her hand and led her from Chip toward the nearest picnic table and asked the unfortunate guy sitting across from him—Evan, the assistant art director—if he would be so kind as to go get her a cup of coffee. Or would she prefer hot chocolate?

“No, thanks,” said Stacey, not in any hurry to sit. “Neither.”

“Tea?”

“No, thanks. Really. I’m fine.” She extricated her hand and gave Evan a look that told him to stay on the bench.
Please.
That was all right with him.

As long as there was free coffee, though, Chip was all over it. The mountain cafeterias sold you a small cup of thin and burnt-tasting stuff for two bucks and a large one for three, which meant that even with his patrol discount it wasn’t anywhere near worth it. Over the last couple of months he’d gotten into Stacey’s habit of bringing tea bags from home—hot water was free—but he didn’t really like tea all that much and this opportunity was too good to pass up. In a minute he had two cups balanced on a little cardboard tray, one of them doctored to his specs and the other to Stacey’s, and he was coming toward her with a huge grin on his face.

“Hey!” he called out. “Isn’t that the famous Harper Stone?”

Stone gave him a slow and patented smile.

“It is!” Chip handed the cardboard tray to Stacey and she sat down with it, taking a peek under one of the lids to see which cup—the one without cream—was hers. Chip edged around her with his hand stuck out, heading for the old Hollywood star. “I’ve seen all your movies, man! All of them!”

“Then you’re a glutton for punishment,” said Stone, clearly expecting to be contradicted.

Chip didn’t let him down. “No! No! They’re the best!”

Stone’s smile grew a little wider but no less crooked.

“I’m telling you,” Chip said, sitting down alongside him and reaching for his coffee, “my dad never missed a single one.”

“Your dad.”

“Oh, yeah. He took me to all your pictures. We didn’t go bowling or play ball or anything like that. He wasn’t a real active kind of dad. We bonded at the movies.”

“How nice.” Stone shifted on the bench.

“He’s always been your biggest fan.”

“Then give him my regards.”

“I will, I will.” He blew over his coffee and sipped a little of it. “He and my mom got Netflix a year or so back, and it’s great. You know about Netflix?”

“Who doesn’t?” Stone’s interest was fading fast.

“They’ve got everything. I mean
everything.”

“I suppose they do.”

“All the classics. Foreign language stuff. You name it.”

“I’ll bet.”

“They’ve got
Masterpiece Theatre
s from when I was about three.”

“I’m sure.”

“You remember
Afraid of the Dark
?”

Stone’s attention returned. “How could I forget? Some of my best work.”

“That’s the funny thing,” Chip said. “According to my dad, Netflix doesn’t have it.”

Stone looked for an instant like a man having a heart attack.

“You think it went out of print or something?”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know that.”

Chip drank a little coffee and reflected. “How about eBay?” he said after a minute. “Do you think somebody might be selling it on eBay?”

Stone began to rise. “If you’ll excuse me.”

“Don’t tell me you never checked.”

“I’m afraid I have no idea.”

“Maybe I could try that Half.com or someplace—”

“Excuse me.”

“Anyhow,” Chip said, “I sure would like to get it if I could find it. He’s got a birthday coming up. Wouldn’t that be something?”

“Yes. It would be very thoughtful.” He was on his feet now, heading for the Porta-Potty. “You’re a very thoughtful son.”

“One of these days,” Chip said, “it might even be a collector’s item!”

Stone didn’t answer, vanishing instead behind the fiberglass door.

“Nicely done,” said Stacey, as the privacy lever clicked over and the indicator showed up red. You could practically see steam rising from the roof of the big green outhouse. With Stone inside it, it reminded Stacey of that famous elevator cab in
Lights Out,
but dirtier.

Chip put down his coffee cup and looked at the people gathered around the table, each face turned his way looking at him as if he were some kind of hero. “What’d I say?”

SEVEN

Snow arrived in the afternoon. It blew in from the northwest unexpected and unannounced, riding in on a mass of Canadian air that the weathermen had said would stay well to the north for another few days. One bad call, and Spruce Peak found itself under a foot of new snow by the time the lifts closed at three thirty. The TV crew made all the progress they could make while the going was good—the skies went gray around noon and the snow that blew in wasn’t all that impenetrable until one thirty or two, so they had a couple of hours to grab the shots they’d been waiting for—and they were about half done when the weather closed in tight and they had to fold up for the day.

The gray-haired and black-clad director—a hired gun from New York named Manny Seville, whom Karen Pruitt had worked with before on a chewing gum commercial that never aired—invited everybody over to his Trail’s End condo later on to look at what they’d gotten. The technical guys from Rutland said no, they were heading home and they weren’t going to come back or stick around just so he could show movies in his condo. Besides, they said, the video gear stayed in the truck; it wasn’t going into any hotel room. He said hadn’t they ever heard of burning a DVD and they acted like he was pushing his luck, but after some back and forth they relented.

As for Harper Stone, he just squinted at the sky and said, “I never look at dailies. Bad luck.” But everybody figured that he was just chicken to drive himself all the way over to Trail’s End from the fancy house that the ad agency had rented for him. Some action hero he was turning out to be.

*   *   *

Dinner was delivery from Cinco de Taco. Brian sent young Evan to the grocery store for beer—“Dos Equis if they’ve got it, but Corona’ll do in a pinch”—and lamented that since there wasn’t a proper liquor store in town they’d have to do without mojitos. Karen said mojitos were a sissy drink anyway and Brian said he knew that but he was only thinking of the ladies. Karen said fine, be that way, but she knew the truth. He was definitely the mojito type.

The food was actually pretty good. Better than the raw footage on the DVD, as it turned out, although the more they watched it and the more beer they drank the better it looked. The snow had built up pretty quickly on Stone’s eyelashes and it made him look like Andy Rooney or some kind of nutty professor, but there were a couple of takes where that wasn’t too big a problem. He’d muffed his lines enough to wear everybody out, including the blond actress, who looked frustrated and annoyed in at least half of the takes. Plus she was clearly young enough to be his granddaughter, which everybody thought was creepy and nobody bothered downplaying since Stone wasn’t around anyway. Manny Seville pronounced that there was probably a total of fifteen good seconds in there that they could patch together into something usable, but he wouldn’t mind picking up a few more shots in the morning if the weather cleared.

Evan, over by the picture window, pulled back the curtains, cocked his head, and looked out into the night to assess their chances. The snow was still pelting down, great windblown gusts of it that washed across the parking lot and obscured the overhead lamps and had already drifted the cars in pretty well. “I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t look promising.”

Manny poured himself another beer, shaking his head and giving the television an incredulous look. Stone’s face was frozen on it, his snowy eyebrows jutting out every which way. “Damn that guy to hell,” he said. “We get half a day’s worth of shooting, and this is all he gives us. It never fails.”

Brian got another beer, too. “It never fails?”

“Never,” Manny said. “We go back, Stone and me. I knew him when.”

“When what?”

“Just when,” Manny said.

Evan let go of the curtains. “If we can’t shoot,” he said, “maybe we’ll ski.”

Brian didn’t think that sounded like such a swell idea, but he raised his glass to it anyway.

EIGHT

Thank God for the mighty Subaru.
It had gotten Stacey home when her shift was over last night, and it would get her to the mountain this morning, and you couldn’t ask for more. Well, maybe you could ask for a little help shoveling away the snow that had drifted around it overnight. But Guy was already gone, called out to oversee a fender bender out on Route 100, the schoolkids had a rare snow day to look forward to, and she was on her own. She didn’t mind too much. She got an early start and let the work warm her up for what was going to be a sensational day on the mountain. Probably the best of the season.

Between the shoveling and the slow drive through the snow that was still coming down, she got to the mountain half an hour later than usual, and the Northside chair was running when she drew near. She could see sections of it from the access road, emerging from the tree line in places, and though she couldn’t tell if there were any people on it, it was definitely in motion.
Nah,
she decided.
That doesn’t mean anything.
It sure didn’t mean they were running it for skiing. They were probably just getting it ready for the TV crew.

But it didn’t turn out that way. When she got into the lodge, the signs warning skiers away from the Northside were down. She asked the guy behind the Mountain Services desk what was up with that and he said the TV crew had called in and canceled today on account of the snow, so she could get in all the Northside action she wanted.

She fairly bounced in her boots.

*   *   *

The snow kept up all day, and the bad roads between Connecticut and the Green Mountain State kept the dilettante flatlanders at home. That’s the way it always went, early season or late. Until there were snowdrifts in the backyards of southern New England, nobody got it into his head to drive up here and bother the Vermonters. And once the snow got too deep down there—particularly on a day like this, when the highway patrol was almost as busy as the plowing crews—people just didn’t have the nerve to make the trip. All of which was fine with Stacey, who took advantage of the opportunity to ski herself into a stupor.

She saw most of Brian’s crew at lunch, but not Brian himself. She didn’t ask. Somebody volunteered that he’d stayed back in his condo. Somebody else said something about how he’d forgotten a decent pair of winter gloves and was too cheap to buy new—a story that Stacey believed exactly half of. The first half. Either way, it was good to see that even an opportunity for team-building with the folks from the office wasn’t enough to get him on the slopes. Never mind the presence of that blond actress, who was looking kind of forlorn and lonely without Harper Stone around to keep up his constant round of lecherous flattery. Stacey looked around and expected to see him emerging from the men’s room or the cafeteria line at any second, but no dice.

“Where’s the movie star?” she asked anybody listening as she fished in her jacket for a tea bag and a couple of energy bars.

“Taking advantage of his luxury accommodations, no doubt,” said Evan. “Did you get a load of that place?”

“What place?”

“It’s the size of a hotel, to begin with.”

“What place?”

“The place where they’re putting him up. It’s this private house on the north side of the ski mountain.” Evan folded a slice of pizza in half and began to work on it. “Unbelievable.”

“You go in?”

“Nobody went that I know of.”

Nods all around the table.

“Why would he invite peons like us over?” Evan said. The pizza looked terrible to Stacey, but he didn’t seem to mind. Young guys were like that. They’d Hoover up anything. “Karen and I drove over and checked it out, though. Wow. Incredible.”

“You remember where it is?”

Evan didn’t know the road but Karen named it. Vista View, one of those narrow winding lanes that vanished quickly into the woods around there, climbing uphill fast and twisting into the trees, promising a kind of housing that ordinary folks weren’t even supposed to
see,
much less witness close up.

Stacey thought she remembered the place but figured she’d check it out later. See how the other half lived—the half that didn’t even include Brian “Moneybags” Russell. But first she had some more skiing to do.

*   *   *

She finished her lunch and called Pete at the Broken Binding from the pay phone to see if she could start her shift a little late, there being extenuating circumstances and all. Like three feet of snow that desperately needed her attention.

A late start was fine with Pete, since the roads were pretty treacherous. The snow was still coming down, and the driving was probably going to keep the crowds away anyhow. So she kept skiing until the light began to die, then she dug out the car from where the plows had buried it halfway up the hatch and drove back to her rented room for a shower.

The roads definitely weren’t good. Pete had been right about that. By keeping the Subaru in the tracks of the cars that had gone before, though, she managed to get back to the house in one piece. She was concentrating hard on her driving when she went by the cutoff for Vista View, squinting through the windshield and wishing she had a better set of wiper blades, but from the quick look she got of it she thought there weren’t any tracks on the road or signs of plows coming and going up into the woods there at all. Today would be a bad day to go sightseeing anyhow. She meant to take a closer look on her way back to the Broken Binding, but by then the light was completely gone and she couldn’t see a thing.
Next time,
she thought.
Tomorrow.

NINE

The next morning Karen Pruitt felt like a Girl Scout leader or something, and she didn’t like it. Traipsing up and down the halls of the Trail’s End condo complex, master list in hand, hammering on doors to make sure that the crew was up and moving around. She’d have called them all if her cell phone was any use—but not only couldn’t it hold a decent connection, it kept running out of juice from being on an old-fashioned analog network out here in the woods and hunting for a signal most of the time.