Fade to White

by Wendy Clinch

  She checked the remote again, found the correct button, and zoomed the picture in a notch, panned it side to side. So far so good. She pulled back out and pressed PLAY.

  The camera righted itself and looked up from Cotton’s perspective to find Stone’s face peering over the black edge of the elevator roof. His eyes lit up with panic and potential. Then he thrust a hand over the edge to help the bad guy. The hand was blackened in streaks, greasy, and it thrust over the edge and down the side like some kind of purposeful snake. Even as she watched, Stacey realized that the geometry of the scene didn’t quite make sense, that there surely wasn’t enough room between the side of the cab and the wall of the shaft to let a person of Joseph Cotton’s size—a person of any size, come to that—slide down between them. Yet there it was, and in the heat of the moment it was convincing. It had been convincing audiences for years and years, no questions asked.

  The camera—another camera, she realized, or probably an entirely different setup taken later or earlier or God knew when—shifted to an alternate perspective where it caught the fingertips of one of Cotton’s hands gripping a metal bar on the side of the cab. Gasping overwhelmed the sound track. Another set of fingertips came into view from below and they gripped the metal bar, too. Cotton exhaled (somebody exhaled, anyhow; she realized that the audio didn’t necessarily originate with the shot), and then the shoulder of Cotton’s gray pin-striped suit blocked the angle as he lifted himself up.

  The shot switched again, this time to a position from somewhere above Stone’s spot on top of the cab, the back of his head to the camera. He was flattened on the greasy panel, his sportcoat split up the back and torn mostly free, his left hand seeking purchase on a rigid cable, his right arm reaching down for Cotton, whose own hand shot up to take it.

  Freeze.

  There it was, on the back of the rescuing arm.

  The tattoo.

  Stacey zoomed in to make sure that it wasn’t just a grease smear, and it most definitely was anything but. The details of it were a little vague in the dim light of the elevator shaft, but it was definitely the tattoo she’d been expecting. A heart and an anchor and chains.

  The tattoo that Manny Seville didn’t remember Stone ever having.

  The tattoo that she’d seen with her own eyes, both on Buddy Frommer and on somebody who looked an awful lot like Harper Stone.

  “There it is,” she said, whacking Chip’s stocking foot with the remote.

  He roused up, but only a little. “You’ve got a good eye.”

  “I told you.”

  “But what do you make of it?”

  She didn’t answer. She just pressed the play button and let the movie continue. The shot changed again—who thought there’d be so many? Watching it this way was an education—taking Cotton’s perspective once more and watching while Stone inched over the edge of the cab to extend his reach. That face. That movie-star face. It was exactly as she remembered seeing it in the basement of the Slippery Slope. Then Stone’s hand came down, the camera moved in, and she saw his face and his forearm in one shot and knew what was wrong. She knew what it was that had been bothering her from the beginning.

  Click. She froze the shot.

  Click. She zoomed in.

  Whack. She gave Chip’s foot a slap. “See that?” she said.

  “See what? I don’t see anything.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “So?”

  “So a stuntman would be younger than the guy he doubles for, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe. What stuntman?”

  “Never mind that,” said Stacey. “Let’s go for a drive.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  They took the Subaru. Her skis were still in the back and she’d need them for what she had in mind. She’d need boots, too, but hers were home drying out in a corner of Megan Ramsey’s kitchen. That fact alone was a huge improvement from the old days when she’d lived out of the car behind the pizza joint next to Bud’s Suds, and Stacey appreciated it every day. If she’d had to put her finger on it, the act of sleeping curled around her ski boots in order to keep them from turning into complete icicles by morning was probably the worst part of the hard-core ski bum lifestyle. That and how that awful Danny Bowman had tormented her night after night, scraping little lines in her frozen windows with a stick or a bottle or God knew what, making her think that she was being hunted by the Claw or something. Even now that she knew it had been just Danny, she still shivered to think about it.

  Anyhow, there was no way they were going back to the Ramseys’ to pick up her boots now. She’d need a pair if she was going to pull off the lost skier act, though, but it occurred to her that there was no reason they needed to fit. They didn’t even have to fit her skis. So they grabbed Chip’s from the hall and tossed them in the back of the Subie.

  “You cold?” said Chip from the passenger seat as Stacey backed out of the driveway. “I am.”

  “Me, too.” She turned up the heat and jacked the fan up all the way even though the engine was cold, as if just getting a little more air moving might help things.

  Chip bent forward, groaning again over his bellyful of Mexican, and poked at a dial on the console. “You lucky dog,” he said. “I only wish my car had heated seats.”

  Stacey didn’t even look over. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  When the dial spun and the light behind it didn’t come on, Chip slumped back in the seat and shivered. “So where’re we going, anyhow?” he said from somewhere down inside his coat.

  “The cabin. The one with the tall guy?”

  “How come?”

  “Because I’m a lost skier, and I’m going to be knocking at his door.”

  “Oh. That explains everything.” The words emerged from his coat on a pale cloud.

  “It’ll be a start.”

  They drove through the silent town, past the dark barracks of the library with its one searing arc light out front, through the single blinking traffic light, past the last few stragglers leaving Vinnie’s Steak-Out and Maison Maurice and firing up their engines and setting off for home. They passed the access road to the ski mountain and kept on going until they left the town limits behind and entered the truly dark Vermont night. Not a star in the sky and no visible moonlight through the low clouds, this was the hour when the Green Mountains turned solid black. The turnoff to the lane up the backside of the mountain nearly slipped past in the shadows, but Stacey caught sight of it just in time and swung the Subaru off the open road into even greater darkness.

  That’s when she switched off the lights.

  “Are you crazy?” Chip asked.

  “I’ll go slow. If I’m going to knock on their door like a lost skier, I can’t show up with the headlights on.”

  “And what do you hope to gain by this, anyhow?” Chip pressed his face to the glass and watched the drifts creep by. “The state troopers have already talked with the guy. The sheriff has already talked with him. Heck, we’ve talked to him a little.”

  “Correction: You’ve talked to him a little. I don’t think he’ll recognize me.”

  “So what?”

  “So I think he’s been keeping a big secret up there. And I don’t think he can keep it forever.”

  “How big a secret?”

  “About six feet.”

  “Whoa.” Chip sat up straighter. “You think whoever got Stone is up there with him?”

  “Sort of. Remember what that little Anthony said about an old guy?”

  Chip’s window was beginning to fog so he rolled it down. The cold night air blew in on them as he asked, “So how come you think you can get at this big secret, when Guy and the state troopers couldn’t?”

  “That’s easy,” she said. “I’m a girl.”

  * * *

  All the lights were on in Frank Schmidt’s cabin. Between the windmill and the solar panels and an emergency generator back by the storage shed, he was apparently self-sufficient beyond all reason. Chip saw the glo
w in the cabin windows first, since Stacey was too busy concentrating on the twists and turns of the road ahead. They came around a curve and he looked right to watch something sweep past the window—a branch or an owl—and there it was, that yellow gleaming in the black distance, flickering through the dense forest.

  “Land ho,” he said, pointing, and Stacey pumped the brakes. The car came to a stop right in the middle of the lane, and she tapped the gas again to slide it over to the right side, hard up against the drifts. “Hey,” said Chip, “How’m I supposed to get out?”

  “My side,” she said, yanking the key and tugging at the door handle. She gasped when the dome light came on, fearing that its dim glow might give their presence away, but Chip reached up fast and switched it off. She climbed out and he followed, complaining his way over the gearshift. She already had the rear liftgate open by the time he got one foot down on the snow, and she whispered fiercely to him that he should go easy closing the car door. He did.

  Stacey had her helmet on and her skis leaning up against the car when he caught up with her. She sat on the tailgate and swapped her snow boots for his ski boots and buckled them as tight as they’d go. Close enough. They’d do. She stood up and had him shut the hatch lid, easy does it. Then she dug in her pocket for her cell phone, switched it on, and handed it over before it was even done starting up. It sang its little startup song and she snatched it back and set it to vibrate, then handed it to Chip again. “Wait ten minutes,” she said, “and then call Guy. His number’s in there.”

  He flipped it open. “No signal.”

  “Walk down till you get one. Ten minutes.”

  “This doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

  She hoisted the skis over her shoulder and fixed him with a hard look. “Go.”

  Chip started uphill but she grabbed him by the shoulder and said no, she was going that way and kind of needed to be alone, and he turned around and started back down, his face lit just the slightest by the phone’s screen. She hissed at him to keep that little bit of light pointed downhill and he did.

  She hurried up the hill and was winded when she reached the cabin, which was fine. The whole idea was that she’d been slogging through the woods half the night. She tromped trough some loose snow to get plenty of the white stuff on Chip’s boots, just in case anybody looked down and chanced to see how oversized they were. As if anybody would notice. As if anybody would care. She didn’t have proper pants on, but the kind of person who’d get lost on the backside of Spruce Peak might wear anything. So be it.

  The cabin made its own bright spot in the woods, its windows glowing yellow and lighting the underside of the trees and painting the snowdrifts like some kind of supernatural thing. She squinted as she looked at it from the cover of a snowdrift. Then she adjusted the skis on her shoulder, walked on past the cabin, and ducked into the drifts separating it from the shed behind. The snow was cold on her legs and she pushed through it and out the other side, onto a shoveled path between the cabin and the shed. She stamped her feet a little to shake the snow from her jeans without making any appreciable noise. There was light back here, too, but not as much as in front. The only windows were a small dark one that she took for a bathroom, a single broad pane with curtains behind it that was probably the kitchen, and a pair side by side that must have been the bedroom. She crouched down and moved closer to the house. In the bedroom a television was going, and there was a dim lamp switched on at the head of the bed. The television was showing the Food Network, a bunch of people baking cakes that looked like Muppets or something. The tall man was sitting on the bed with his back to her, beneath the light of the lamp, bent over, taking off his shoes. The bedroom door was shut.

  She backed away and moved toward the kitchen, which was lit only by a single bulb over the sink. The walls danced with other light, though, light and color and movement reflected from what was apparently a bigger television in the front room. She tried to see it through the door but the angle was wrong. She kept low and moved around the backside of the cabin to another set of windows, these shielded by a couple of big arbor vitae that spilled snow all over her, and tried again. Just as she imagined. A movie was showing on the big TV. Some outer space thing. Any money said it was Mission to Antares.

  There was a silver head watching the space movie. All she could see was the very top of it above the back of the recliner. She told herself it still could be the woman, the farm wife she’d imagined silhouetted in the front window when she and Chip had been up here on the night they’d found Harper Stone’s body. While her face was still flecked with snow from the arbor vitae, Stacey plunged through the drifts to the front of the cabin and stepped up onto the porch to find out for herself. Once and for all.

  THIRTY-NINE

  She had been greeted more warmly at other times in her life, that was for sure.

  Her innocent knock at the cabin door produced a torrent of profanity and recrimination and bile from one of the two individuals inside, some of it directed at whoever dared to knock at this time of night and the remainder directed at the other individual, who was apparently refusing to answer the goddamned door for a change why don’t you and tell ’em to get lost.

  A second voice arose, this one belonging no more to the farm wife than the first one did. This one was lower than the first, more measured, verging on musical. Mellifluous is the word Stacey would have used, if she hadn’t been standing all by herself in the middle of a snowy woods with Chip gone gone gone, wondering if her idea as to who was behind the door was correct, asking herself if ten minutes had passed and Sheriff Guy Ramsey might be on his way by now, provided Chip had found cell service at all.

  Mellifluous, that was it.

  Like the highly trained speaking voice of an old-time movie actor.

  Like the familiar and well-known voice of Harper Stone, whose face appeared now in the opened door. She was sure of it. When something behind his eyes responded reflexively to the sight of Stacey’s face—as if he’d seen her before and recognized her, as if he desired nothing more, right then, than to engage with her in long and intimate conversation, and above all as if he had been deprived of all proper feminine companionship for a week or more—she knew it all the more completely.

  “By golly,” she said to him, falling somehow into a vernacular that an old-timer like him could understand, “you must be Harper Stone’s double!”

  Delight burst across the old man’s craggy face, and he invited her in.

  FORTY

  “I am, you see,” is what he said. “I am Harper Stone’s double.”

  “What’re the odds of that?” said Stacey, hugging herself, stepping inside, hoping that Chip had found some cell service.

  The old silver-haired man went on. “I worked for that troublemaker ever since The Ne’er-Do-Wells. That scene where I charged the foxhole? Where he charged the foxhole?”

  Stacey was clueless but she nodded vaguely, shivering.

  “Jeez,” he said, “everybody remembers that scene. But it wasn’t Stone. It was me. Yours truly. From that moment on.”

  “Honest?”

  “Honest. Old Harper Stone was a sissy. A pretty boy, always afraid of messing his hair. I did all the heavy lifting.” He pushed back his sleeve and made a muscle. At his age it wasn’t pretty, but it actually wasn’t terrible, either. For Stacey, though, the main thing wasn’t what it revealed about his fitness, but what it revealed about his utter lack of any kind of heart-and-anchor tattoo. The man standing before her had the face—and the forearm—she’d just frozen in time on Chip’s television. It was Harper Stone in the flesh.

  As for who the body in the Rutland hospital morgue belonged to, she thought she knew how to find out.

  “So what’s your name, anyhow?” she asked.

  He stuck out his hand. “Enzo DiNapoli, at your service.”

  * * *

  Chip was almost back to the highway before he got a signal. How much time had passed, he couldn’t say. At least ten mi
nutes, right? More like fifteen. Maybe more. However long it had been, as soon as the bars lit up he called Guy’s number.

  “Stacey?” It was Megan’s voice on the other end, sounding sleepy.

  “Uh, no. Sorry. It’s Chip. Chip Walsh? I’m using her phone.”

  “Ah.” There was a little bit of suspicion in her voice, though, and a little worry. “So what’s up? Is Stacey all right?”

  “Oh, she’s fine,” said Chip, not entirely sure that he meant it. “But can I talk with Guy? Please? It’s kind of—” Before he could get it out, Megan had handed over the phone.

  * * *

  There were some glasses and a bottle of brandy on the table against the wall—not a table, really, but an industrial spool that served as one—and Harper Stone was fixing to pour a couple of drinks when the tall guy threw open the bedroom door and came charging out. He slid on his stocking feet, zipping up his trousers as he came, giving Stacey a look that would have killed somebody less determined. He paused, checked his fly, and then gave Stone a look that was at least twice as lethal. Although he gave the impression of not knowing which of them to assail first, in the end he settled on Stacey.

  “What is it with you people?” he said. “This ain’t a ranger station. It ain’t some goddamn rescue mission. I’m trying to live a peaceful life, and every time the snow falls around here my front porch turns into Grand Central.” He cocked an eye at her that made Stacey think he might actually have recognized her from the night they’d skied the power-line right-of-way, but she shook it off.