by Wendy Clinch
“Hey, Earl.”
“You need something? Can I—?”
“Nope. Mr. Seville, here, just thought he might like to grab a smoke.”
“Right. Gotcha.”
Manny fired up.
“You need anything, though—”
“Thanks. We’re covered.”
The sky was bright and blue and cloudless, and they stood in a line against the plate-glass window looking at it. They couldn’t see the runs from here, but every now and then a car passed and turned up the access road to the mountain.
Manny sucked on his cigarette and blew smoke from the corner of his mouth. “You got someplace else to be?” he asked Guy.
“It doesn’t look to me like a heavy crime day.”
“You never know.”
“How about you, Earl?” Guy turned to the counterman. “You seen any criminal activity this morning? Anybody suspicious lurking around the place?”
The counterman just laughed, blowing smoke.
Guy turned back to Manny. “I’ll have you know that Earl, here, is one of my top informants. So I guess I’ve got a little time on my hands after all.”
Earl laughed, then shouldered the door open and went back inside, saying he had to use the john.
When they were alone again, Guy cleared his throat against the cold and without turning his head to Manny said right out, “So he’s a schmuck, huh?”
“Earl?” said Manny. “That guy runs the place?”
“Not Earl, no. And Earl doesn’t run the place. He just runs the counter, five days a week. Kind of like you and the commercial.”
“Ah.”
“I’m talking about Harper Stone. You said he was a schmuck.”
“I did.”
“How would you mean that?”
“Hey,” Manny said, “is this an interrogation? It’s no crime not liking a person.”
“I know that,” said Guy. “I know that full well.”
“So is this an interrogation?”
“I don’t think so,” said Guy. “Does it seem like an interrogation to you? I’m just trying to learn everything I can about Harper Stone, and right now you’re the best source of information I’ve got.” He watched Manny grind out his cigarette on the concrete, and kept watching him until Manny got self-conscious and picked up the butt, making sure it was cold before putting it into the trash can. Some people needed law enforcement coverage all the time. “That’s kind of a shame, don’t you think?”
“What?”
“That you’re the best source I’ve got. A guy comes to a strange town where he has no friends or family or anything, and he disappears off the face of the earth. Leaving a guy like you—a business associate who knew him for what, maybe a long weekend?—the only one I can talk to about him.”
“There’s Brian.”
“There’s Brian. Right. Right you are.”
“Besides, everybody knows Harper Stone.”
“Not everybody,” said Guy, thinking of Stacey. “To tell you the truth, I’m afraid that the days when Harper Stone was on everybody’s radar are long gone.”
“You sound like his manager.”
“Do you mean that? You know his manager?”
“Sure.”
“So you two go back a ways. Or is that something else I don’t understand about your business? You all know each other.”
Manny said no, that was right. He’d known Stone for a lot longer than the weekend.
“No wonder you’re so confident about what kind of person he is.”
A spotless black Audi pulled up and two men in business suits got out. They came across the lot toward the coffee shop and greeted Guy, who swung the door open and pointed out that Earl might still be in the men’s room. They’d have to wait for a second. That seemed fine with them.
“Look,” Manny said, “I’m beginning to be sorry I ever said anything negative about the guy. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Don’t be. Other people—people who maybe just ran into him in town, is all—other people said he was kind of a queer guy, too.”
“Not like that. He wasn’t—”
“I don’t mean queer queer.”
“Right.”
“I mean the kind of guy who might look you in the eye and not even notice you.”
“Aha,” said Manny. “That’s him, all right.” He lit another cigarette. “That’s Harper Stone all over.”
“You think maybe it’s just ego?”
“Sure. If by ‘ego’ you mean cocaine.”
Guy looked shocked. “No,” he said. And then, “Really?”
“Really.”
“I’ll be. I thought that stuff appealed to a younger crowd.”
“There’s younger and there’s younger. You can be younger than Stone and still be in the nursing home.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Which is his whole problem.”
“Really?”
“Sure. The guy’s a has-been. Washed up. That’s got to be hard to take, after you’ve been on top.”
Guy bit the inside of his lip and nodded, watching a couple of cars turn up the access road to the mountain. When he’d processed everything, he said, “If you don’t mind my asking, tell me how far back you two guys go.”
SEVENTEEN
Manny Seville and the former movie star went almost all the way back to when Harper Stone’s name was neither Harper nor Stone. In fact, on the day they’d first sat down on the concrete steps in front of his seedy Hollywood apartment to watch the girls go by and share a couple of beers and a pack of cigarettes, the mailman had handed Stone a stack of junk and bills and said, “Nothing here from Otto Preminger, Mr. Schwartzmann. Better luck tomorrow.”
The incipient movie star flashed his teeth at the mailman and said, “Very funny, very funny.”
The mailman seemed to think it was, since he kept laughing all the way up the steps. He was still laughing as he opened the door and went in to distribute the mail, and was at it still when he came back out and walked down the street.
Once he was out of earshot, Manny tipped his bottle back and swallowed. “Mister Schwartzmann?”
“So I haven’t had a chance to get legal. Sue me.”
Manny grabbed an envelope. “Howard?”
“You never heard of a stage name?”
“Howard Schwartzmann?”
“You know what John Wayne’s real name is? Marion. Marion Morrison. And that Cary Grant? He used to be Archibald Leach, until he got wise.” He drained his beer. “Marion. Archibald. So don’t start making fun of your friend Howard.” He set the bottle down on the step beside him. “And never, ever, let on that you know.”
“Of course not.”
“Or you’re a dead man.”
“Of course not, Howie.” Manny made his eyebrows jump.
“My mother calls me Howie. Don’t you.”
“Fine. The whole thing’ll be our little secret.”
The two of them had known each other for six months or so. They worked together on the back lot at Warner’s, two chumps from nowhere trying to break into the movie business. In Manny’s case, “nowhere” was the Bronx. In Schwartzmann’s, it was some county in Nebraska where the grass grew high and the sun hung higher still, and there was nothing within a thousand miles to interest a big dreamer like him. How his parents had landed there he would never know. They would stay there forever, his mother calling once a week to beg him to come home, his father slipping a few bucks into an envelope every month and mailing it off to this apartment building either to keep him going or to keep him gone. It didn’t matter which. Even when he finally got legal with his new identity, Stone didn’t tell his father and the envelopes kept coming—addressed to his former self. How could you cut that off? So what if it meant the end of the noble Schwartzmann line? There was no reason for his old man to be the wiser.
The two of them were runners on the back lot, errand boys in the grand tradition. Manny wanted technical work and he was getti
ng closer to corralling some of it. He sucked up to every assistant director and lighting guy and cameraman he ran across, and a couple of them were starting to recognize him. It was a start. Stone had bigger ideas, of course. He wanted to be a movie star, and at the moment he figured the best way to do that was to stage a performance every day as the very best errand boy in the whole wide world. The smartest, the sharpest, the handsomest, the best-natured, and the most efficient. As a result he was getting a reputation as a real first-class errand boy, while Manny was on the verge of stepping up in the business.
* * *
“So what was it?” Guy asked. “You loan him money or what?”
“Worse than that,” Manny said. He pursed his lips around his cigarette and stood there looking as if he wanted to suck the whole thing right down into his lungs. Like that would put an end to something.
“Worse than money?”
Manny dragged on the cigarette, took it from between his lips, and scrubbed it out against the heel of his boot. He took a step forward and tossed the butt into the trash can, then stood there in the entryway breathing out smoke, letting it out so slowly and over such a long period that it seemed as if something inside of him might have caught fire. “Worse,” he said finally, not looking at Guy. “It wasn’t money. It was a girl.”
“A girl.”
“Only you don’t loan a girl. And a person like Harper Stone, he isn’t much on giving them back when he’s done.”
“I gather that his star was finally beginning to rise,” Guy said.
“Not with me it wasn’t,” said Manny, still rueful after all these years.
* * *
Stacey and Chip had ended up taking a late lunch—if you could call a cup of lukewarm tea and a squashed granola bar “lunch,” which she certainly did—after the crowds had returned to the slopes and the cafeteria had emptied out. That meant they could put off supper until after they’d skied the power lines. In the mountains the sun went down around quarter to four, and it would be fully dark by five. All they’d have would be the moon, plus a couple of headlamps that Chip kept in his backpack. But that would be all they’d need.
“Let’s see,” he said as he took off his boots in the Patrol shack at the bottom of the mountain. “We’ve got two choices. If you want to do it the hard way, we can skin all the way up and ski back down. Or else we can spot a car at the top and the bottom.”
“If we drive,” Stacey said, thinking, “do you think we could ski it more than once?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Then never mind the hard way.”
“I second that.”
“But how do we drive up there?”
“There’s an access road around the back side of the mountain. Goes to this cabin? All set up with a windmill and solar and everything? Real off-the-grid stuff, about three-quarters of the way up to the peak. Pioneers.”
“You sure it’s plowed?”
“I think the guy who lives there works over in Rutland someplace. I see him around. He comes and goes all the time. We’ll leave your car down where the power lines come into town, there by the park, and we’ll take mine up past the cabin as far as we can get. Climb up the rest of the way, and we’re in business.”
“Have you done this before?”
“I’ve thought about it plenty.”
“That’s good enough for me.”
* * *
They met in the park around seven, their cars loaded up with heavier and warmer gear than they’d have worn in the sunshine. Nothing on earth was much colder than night skiing, moonlit or otherwise. People around here didn’t do it much. None of the Vermont mountains offered it on a commercial basis. There was no market for it, at least not among the sane. You had to go south into New York if you wanted that kind of thing, down to the Catskills where the slopes were so crowded you felt like a sardine. Or all the way to the sorrowful Poconos of Pennsylvania.
Stacey pulled up behind Chip’s Wrangler, checking the clock on her dashboard and hoping she hadn’t made him wait too long. The Wrangler was an old army-green wreck with a sagging canvas top that was no use against the wind and the cold. He wasn’t in the car, though. He was on a bench in the park, sitting there in the darkness and admiring the mountain through the moonlit trees. She went over and sat beside him, shivering a little bit already. On the mountain the groomers swarmed from trail to trail, little points of light moving against pale snow and black woods.
“It’s cold,” Stacey said.
“Yeah.”
She thought he might take advantage of the opportunity to put an arm around her—boy and girl, park bench, freezing cold, darkness—but he didn’t. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
He pointed toward the groomers on the mountain. “Those guys aren’t cold, I can tell you that. They’re riding in the lap of luxury.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I’m not kidding. Leather seats, cup holders, big honking stereos—the works. I’ve never been in one, but Andy Paxton’s told me all about it.”
“I forgot. You two are like this.” She held up a mittened hand. Chip had to take it on faith that she had two fingers crossed inside of it.
“We are. Andy and me.”
“I know.”
Andy Paxton was the patriarch of the family that owned Spruce Peak. It had been in his family for generations. He’d raised two sons on the mountain, both of them as different from their father as people could be and still be walking around upright. One of them, in fact—David, the younger of the two—wasn’t actually walking around upright anymore. He’d died earlier in the winter, a month or so back. And the other—Richie, the older one, the philanderer and egomaniac—had had more to do with the reasons for it than anyone could ever be entirely comfortable with. No wonder that as Chip’s path had crossed with Andy’s they’d recognized each other as kindred spirits. The father and the son that life had denied each of them, delivered better late than never.
“Andy’s my other night-skiing buddy.”
She knew all about how Andy and Chip liked to skin up the mountain after the groomers were through and sail back down on the freshest of corduroy. So now she was Chip’s buddy, just like old man Paxton. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that, either. “Right,” was all she said.
“How about we get going?” Chip said. So they stood up and walked to the curb and swapped her stuff into his car.
EIGHTEEN
A light in the woods. It was the cabin Chip had mentioned, yellow windows glowing through the leafless trees. Stacey saw it as they rounded a switchback on the road that led up the back of the mountain. She was amazed at how empty and dark it was back there. Compared to the front side, which had been civilized with trails and lift towers and lodge buildings and condos galore, the back side was pretty much a wilderness, except for this narrow and barely plowed road, and that light in the trees up above.
“What is it, a couple of miles up here?”
“Seems like it,” Chip said. “The odometer’s busted, so it’s hard to say.”
“There are some hiking trails back here someplace, aren’t there?”
Chip said there were, although he’d never given any of them a try. He was more the biking and kayaking type.
“We’ll have to check them out in the summer,” she said. Kind of trying that out.
“We will,” he said. “We’ll bring a picnic.”
A picnic. That put her a step ahead of Andy Paxton. All right, then.
Stacey’s instinct was to expect a road like this to get narrower as they went up, but that was pretty much impossible. The road was basically a tunnel through three feet of packed snow, precisely the width of two passes of a pickup-mounted snowplow—one going up and one coming down. It didn’t get any wider than that and it didn’t get any narrower, either. They rounded a few more bends, the lights of the cabin flickering into view and out of it again, and then the road straightened out and made directly for the cabin. Just a hundred yard
s or so, and they’d be stopping.
The Wrangler’s headlights, dim as they were with age and a crusting of ice, must have cast some illumination on the inside of the cabin, because before they’d gone so much as fifty feet past the curve a black silhouette appeared in the front picture window.
“Uh-oh,” said Stacey. She crouched down instinctively in her seat.
“What?”
“I don’t know. It’s just—is this private property, or what?”
“Who knows?” He didn’t slow the car. “Everything’s fine, though. Trust me. We’re not causing any trouble.”
The cabin was on Brian’s side of the car, the uphill side. In the window where the first shadow had appeared there was now another, this second one materializing slowly from the dimness on the other side of the room. Perhaps from down a dark hallway, or from out of an ill-lit kitchen or someplace. There was a sheer curtain across the window that shifted and swayed a little with the movement of the two figures, growing dense in places and airy in other places. It gave the whole prospect a ghostly look.
“I guess he’s got somebody there with him,” Chip said.
“Probably he’s married.”
“Could be. Probably. I don’t know.”
The second figure was at least a head shorter than the first, and broader in every dimension. Stacey studied the two of them, man and woman, and imagined the painting American Gothic. She saw her as a farm wife living a hard existence here on the mountain. It was better than picturing her as second in command to an ax murderer, or some kind of Mother Bates, ready to work mischief.
While she was persuading herself, the first figure ducked out of sight. The farm wife stayed put as the Jeep drew nearer, standing stoically behind the curtain, not moving a muscle that Stacey could see. Chip flashed his lights, trusting that it would be taken for a friendly greeting. A little tip of the hat, a neighborly wave. Hoping further that the figure in the window might raise a kindly hand in return.
Nothing.
“Why would you live all the way up here, anyhow?” said Stacey.
“I guess because you wanted your privacy.”
“Great,” she said, leaning forward to peer through the windshield and wondering if the figure in the window could make her out past the headlights. “That’s great.”