Fade to White by Wendy Clinch

people in this valley would make in a year? What this place needed was a doorbell, with buzzers in every room.
    He waited a few seconds and banged the knocker again. Nothing.
    He pounded on the door with both fists. Nothing.
    Nothing, that is, except some laughter from either Dickie or the other guy. The one who’d finally gotten a cigarette going. They were both so crusted over with snow that any means he might have had for differentiating them was long gone—and he didn’t much care.
    The guy with the cigarette hollered, “Try up there!” Brian looked to see him pointing toward a set of drifted-over stairs that led up to an enclosed porch. He slogged up them while the guy sat on his snowmobile, puffing away. The storm door to the porch was unlocked and he kicked away snow from the sill and muscled it open. He went in, stamping his feet on a metal grate that let snow fall to the ground below. This whole side of the house was glass—big floor-to-ceiling sliders—giving out onto the enclosed porch. Must have been nice in the summertime. What a panorama, all those mountains and valleys stretched out practically forever. No wonder the developers came up with a name like Vista View, as stupid as it sounded.
    The curtains were drawn but there was a gap or two, and from what he could see the place was a mess. A bachelor pad extraordinaire—and he ought to know—lived in for what looked like six or eight months without benefit of a vacuum cleaner or a dust rag. There were clothes strewn from wall to wall, the throw rugs and cushions were cockeyed, and the pictures were slanted on the walls. It looked like somebody’d been sleeping on the couch.
    He knocked on the glass, figuring that he’d get no answer, and he wasn’t disappointed. The place was like a tomb. He tried the sliding door. He tried all of them. Each was locked up tight. So even though it was pleasant in here out of the wind with the gorgeous view and all, he gave up and went out and half-slid, half-climbed back down the stairs.
    “No luck?” said the guy without the cigarette. Come to think of it, neither of them had a cigarette now.
    “No luck.”
    “We could try around back.”
    “Let’s not.”
    “Don’t be a sissy. We come all this way.”
    “I’m not walking.”
    “Climb on.”
    They repeated the procedure two more times—first at a set of sliders on an elevated deck around back, which Brian reached only by wading through chest-high snow; again at the door by the buttoned-up three-car garage—and they came up short again. Short and freezing and disappointed. Brian turned on his cell and tried to call Karen, but he couldn’t get a signal, so he climbed back on the snowmobile and gave the order to go on back to town. Now he owed these guys fifty bucks and he had nothing to show for it. He’d bury it somewhere in his expense report and nobody would be the wiser, but that wasn’t the point.
    There was one more door, though, and one of the snowmobile guys noticed it as they rounded the house and turned back toward the road. It was underneath the enclosed porch that Brian had checked before, tucked into a little bricked alcove, probably leading to a utility closet or something like that. A dead end even if it was open, but they stopped just in case, for one last try.

TEN
    Jackpot.
    Not only did Brian get in, but the space behind the door was anything but a dead-end utility closet. It was a ski room fit for a sheik, if sheiks indulged in downhill skiing—which they probably did, since they indulged in everything else. It was gorgeous. There must have been twenty lockers along the walls, each one custom built of what looked like solid cherry. Hand-built shelving units up to the ceiling, where soft indirect lighting bathed the whole place in a warm golden glow. Hardwood floors he was ashamed to be tracking snow all over. And in the far corner, a door that without question opened into the main house.
    He cracked the door and called Stone’s name