Fade to White (2 page)

“People do.”

The creative director was an old pro named Karen Pruitt, who’d come up through the ranks with a T-square in one hand and a Sharpie in the other. Her assistant, Evan Babcock, was a bright-eyed recruit fresh out of the Rhode Island School of Design. He had a lot to learn, starting with the basic principle that you didn’t take any creative input from the sales side of the agency, not even if the sales guy in question had a high-toned title like Vice President/Account Supervisor.
Especially
if he had a high-toned title like Vice President/Account Supervisor.
Most
especially if he was an idiot like Brian Russell.

Brian didn’t like the actress that Karen and Evan had cast to sit beside the ex-movie star on the chairlift, and he’d been vocal about getting her fired. He’d begun by complaining that since she was a pale blonde she’d blend right in with the snow, which everybody knew was ridiculous. Then he’d switched tactics and said that the client didn’t like the idea of using a Nordic-looking girl in this setting—too clichéd—but that hadn’t held water either. In the end he’d tried claiming that there was a line somewhere in Harper Stone’s contract that gave him
approval
rights over any actor or actress who might appear in a shot with him and that Stone’s people didn’t like the girl, but even though there was plenty of strange stuff in the contract (dietary guidelines, SPF requirements for outdoor shoots, clauses regarding the use of his own personal stunt double, and a complete list of acceptable Pantone colors for use in clothing and props and other surfaces that might otherwise contrast poorly with his skin tone), there was nothing that gave Stone leverage over the hiring of any particular talent. Karen had figured that Brian was just bullshitting, testing the limits, throwing the weight of his title around, and she wasn’t having any of it. Vice President/Account Supervisor or not, he was still the new guy, and the sooner a new guy learned his place, the better.

THREE

Darkness came early in the valley, and the sky was too full of stars to offer any promise of snow. Whatever warmth there was had vanished with the light, leaving the little mountain town exposed to what for all intents and purposes was the naked blackness of outer space. Cartwheeling stars, utter cold, and down here on the earth a steady wind to make it even worse. Stacey cracked open the rear door at the Broken Binding and looked out into the darkness. Back at the bar the après-ski crowd had dwindled to nothing and the suppertime crowd hadn’t arrived yet, so the pressure was off for a little while. She shivered, shut the door, and went back down the hall to the walk-in cooler to grab a case of Magic Hat and warm up a little.

The restaurant was a long, low-slung place spread out along the main drag from Connecticut, just at the edge of town. Like every other ski-town eatery in the Green Mountain State, it had a past. It had gone up in the sixties with barnboard paneling everywhere and a moose head mounted over the fireplace, and it was called the Broken Binding until a group of German investors arrived and gutted it and jammed it with corny Bavarian décor and rechristened it the Edelweiss. That didn’t last, and when the deutschmark went into a slump against the dollar for just a little bit too long the bikers moved in to destroy whatever progress the Prussians had made. The bloom, in other words, was off the Edelweiss. Locals who knew what they were talking about shortened the place’s name to the ’Weiss and pronounced it with a V and stayed away, until one winter night when a snowplow finally took the sign down and nobody even noticed.

Now the old Binding was back, thanks to an infusion of cash and kindness from a retired investment banker named Pete Hardwick, the finest export that New York had sent to Vermont in a long time. The look of the place passed for retro these days although the barnboard paneling was new, and even the original moose head—discovered in an attic crawl space stinking of beer, cigarette smoke, and a pungent old hint of sauerbraten—had been restored to a place of honor above the mantel.

The Binding was Stacey’s home away from home away from home. She’d started out life in Boston, and she might have stayed there forever if Brian hadn’t cheated on her and either spoiled everything or just clarified it. She was beginning to think the latter. That was all right. She’d caught him in the act and headed for the mountains in her beat-up old Subaru, and that was the end of that. It was also the beginning.

To tell the truth, although she’d rented a decent room from Sheriff Guy Ramsey and his wife, Megan, and it was comfortable enough, it came with kitchen and laundry privileges and all that, right now she pretty much considered the mountain itself her home. Good old Spruce Peak. She spent every minute there that she could. Spruce was a nice family place that still had some size and challenge to it, nestled up against a little Green Mountain town that fit about halfway along the scale between picturesque and bedraggled. A few too many gas stations for its own good, and no place decent to buy groceries, but under a blanket of snow it looked like a regular winter wonderland.

Which was the problem right now. There wasn’t any snow. At least there wasn’t anything fresh.

It was only the last week of February, and the thermometer was stuck at the bottom of the deep freeze, so the season was anything but over. Yet the snowbanks were retreating inch by inch and the roads were filthy and the whole town just looked sad. Even the trails on the mountain were showing signs of having endured a couple of weeks without anything fresh. The snow guns and the groomers could do only so much. In the distance, beyond the town and up on the mountain that jutted black against the starry sky, Stacey could see the groomers churning their way over the ski runs. She wondered how closely their pattern tonight matched their patterns from the night before and the night before that—in other words, if they just went over and over the same ground in the same pattern, the way obsessives scoured the same mental territory without ever getting anywhere. The way that everybody in the bar for après-ski had chewed over the need for a good snowfall, and the way that the supper crowd would do the same thing.

She guessed it was kind of silly for everybody to be so obsessed, but winter didn’t last forever. The ski season was short. She’d gotten in more days this year than ever before, thanks to having set aside just about everything else in her life, but if you’d come up here for a long weekend from New York or Connecticut or Massachusetts or wherever, you just didn’t have that luxury.

Plus if you’d come up to shoot a mouthwash commercial with a nice New England snowfall happening in the background, your clock was seriously running. Nobody from the commercial crew had been into the Binding yet, not that she knew of, but there was plenty of talk about them just the same. A Hollywood presence like Harper Stone didn’t pass through a little town like this without making an impression, even if he was a little too old to register all that much with Stacey.

*   *   *

Tina Montero—as much a fixture of the Broken Binding as that smelly moose head and every bit as hard to impress—blushed like a schoolgirl at the mention of the actor’s name.

“Let’s just say I’ve always carried a torch for that one,” she said, raising her chardonnay. It was her second or third, and she was pretty much the only customer left in the bar after the après-ski rush had faded, but who was counting?

Jack the bartender was counting, that’s who—but only for commercial reasons. “Harper Stone,” he said, leaning back and crossing his arms and softly chuckling. “In his day, that guy was the best.”

“In his day,”
Tina scoffed.

“Hey,” said Jack, smoothing back his gray pompadour, “his day and my day pretty much coincided.”

Tina puffed herself up like a chicken. “I, for one, think he’s still got it.”

“Oh,” said Jack. “Like I don’t. Like I don’t still have it.”

“All right, Jack. You win.” She sniffed and drank.

He smiled, thinking. “You remember
Lights Out
? That elevator scene? With the cables?”

“I do.”

“How they did that stuff I’ll never know. That guy must have been made of iron. Incredible.”

“And how about
Murder Town
?”

Stacey pushed open the kitchen door with her butt, and backed in carrying the case of Magic Hat.

“
Murder Town
?” Jack marveled.
“
Oh, my God. I must have seen that one a million times.”

“Did
Murder Town
come before
Afraid of the Dark,
or after?”

Stacey slid the case onto the back bar.

“Before,” said Jack. “I’m pretty sure it was before.”

“That’s right.” Tina tapped her glass with a fingertip. “He was still married to Melissa Marlow then. What a mistake
that
was. Like oil and water, those two.”

Stacey looked at Jack and Tina as if she’d just stumbled into a debate between a couple of half-nutty geriatrics in the rest home.

“What’s the matter?” he said. “Have you no respect for Hollywood royalty?”

“Ahh,” said Stacey. “I get it now. That Rock What’s-His-Name guy.”

“Stone.”

“No. It’s not Rock Stone. That’d be sillier than the name he’s got.”

Tina didn’t even look over to see that Stacey was just kidding. She hung her head in frustration, and Jack filled up her glass again.

FOUR

Brian came in later on, wearing something other than that yellow coat—but even without the coat he was still Brian. There was no getting around that. He was always going to be Brian.

He and a handful of other people from the TV crew stamped their feet off in the doorway, hung their coats on the pegs in the foyer, and stepped down into the bar. Brian had the air of a person evaluating something that wasn’t quite living up to his expectations. That was him all over. Stacey polished a couple of wineglasses and watched him, trying not to draw attention to herself. Wondering if he’d seen her car out front. Wondering if he’d come all this way just to see her. Wondering how on earth he’d gone from getting that law degree to working for an ad agency or a film crew or whatever this was. Wondering if she could play sick and ask for the night off and get out of there, pronto, before they got settled in.

Unfortunately, nobody was on tonight except Jack, and Pete Hardwick wouldn’t be in to count the money and make up a deposit until closing time, so she was pretty well stuck. Besides, the TV crew had already slid three tables together and were craning their necks around looking for her. It was altogether too late. At least Brian had his back to her. That was some consolation.

She got a pad and went over. During the last couple of months she’d come to pride herself on being able to handle any party’s order from memory, no matter how big and complicated it was, but she wasn’t about to show off that little trick in front of her old fiancé. It might have been kind of silly, but she didn’t want him getting the idea that she’d thrown herself all that completely into the business of being a waitress. At the last second, though, when she’d stopped behind Brian but a couple of chairs to one side, when she’d cleared her throat over the sound of the jukebox and announced that her name was Stacey, when Brian turned around in his seat with a look of surprise on his face that she couldn’t say was fake or otherwise, at the very last second she decided to hell with him and whatever he might think of her current career choice. She slid the pad into the back pocket of her jeans, smiled broadly, and asked what everybody would have.

*   *   *

“Your mother told me where you were,” said Brian, leaning over the bar as she filled the order.

“My own mother.”
Stacey pulled at the Long Trail tap as if she meant to do it some serious harm.

“The thing you’ve got to remember,” said Brian, “is that
she
still loves me.”

“That’s only because I never told her what you did to her daughter.”

Brian leaned in. “And that’s because
you
still love me, too.”

“Guess again, buddy.” Stacey let go of the tap and set the glass on one of the round trays she’d set out on the bar. Thanks to him she’d almost lost track of the order, and she wasn’t about to let that happen. She ticked through it on her fingers, shooting looks over at the three merged tables to jog her memory.

Brian put his hand on the tray, which made her jump. “How about I carry this back for you?”

“Don’t do me any favors.” She kept counting, stopped short, began all over again. “I can take care of myself.”

“So I see.” He seemed to say it without any irony, but it was hard to be sure. He’d never given her credit for anything during their whole time together, and if he was starting now she thought she could get along just fine without it.

Over at the big table, people were glancing her way and cocking their heads and whispering among themselves. She could practically hear them.
Brian the ladies’ man. Brian the operator. Brian the guy who thinks he’s irresistible, and who by sheer force of his insistence and nerve quite often turns out to be.
What she didn’t guess was that it was more like
Brian the creep; let’s hope she shoots him down big-time and we all get to watch the aftermath.

They walked back side by side, and Brian insisted on carrying one of the little round trays. Such chivalry, especially from a guy who under normal circumstances couldn’t keep his business in his pants. One of the younger guys at the table—a kid who looked barely drinking age, the assistant art director Evan Babcock—spoke up first. “Good job, man. Nice to see an account guy who knows how to make himself useful.”

The matronly woman alongside the kid smiled as if she’d taught him well. Karen Pruitt—his mentor in all things, as Brian had explained to Stacey. He looked so young next to her. It occurred to Stacey that she might have set him up with the line. The truth, on the other hand, was that poor judgment and childish humor came naturally to Evan. Agency life brought out that kind of thing in some people, especially the younger ones. Most particularly the younger ones with a creative bent, who half-figured they’d be in this stifling line of work only until their artistic ship came in.