Until You Are Dead Read Free Page A

to take a shine to him. "I take it Maybelle is Bandy McCane's girlfriend," he said cautiously.
    The sheriff raised his expansive chin and smiled faintly. "You might say she's the girlfriend of all of 'em, from time to time. Thass how it is sometimes here away from the city, Mr. Benton."
    Wilson swallowed and nodded, imagining despite himself Maybelle's pale languid arms and luminous blue eyes. Sheriff Haynes was staring hard at him.
    Wilson thanked the sheriff and walked toward the screen door to the street.
    "Things'll sure be quieter when them boys is gone to the Army," the sheriff remarked behind him.
    "Thass a fact," Deputy Krebs said.
    From the sheriff's office, Wilson walked directly across the street to Holfer's Service Center and General Store, a small frame structure with two gas pumps in front and a flat-roofed addition that stocked groceries and hardware. He noticed that the sheriff's '38 Dodge was at Holfer's being worked on by a lanky grease-stained young boy. The car was dusty-black with large gold replicas of a sheriff's badge emblazoned on its doors. When Wilson entered the store he saw Zach Wheelright slouching at the counter paying for a package of chewing tobacco.
    Zach turned, spotted Wilson, and grinned guiltily as he scratched at his sparse blond beard. He unwrapped the tobacco and slowly bit off a large plug. Then, chewing laboriously behind his wide grin, he walked past Wilson and out the door. Wilson saw that he had a slender broken paintbrush tucked behind his left ear.
    For a moment Wilson wanted to return to the sheriff's office and inform Haynes of what he'd just seen. Then he decided against it. There was no point in further stirring up things if, as Haynes had predicted, the matter was over.
    Wilson bought five dollars' worth of groceries to last him the week, loaded them in the trunk of the Chevy, and returned to the cabin.
    Â 
    T hat Friday, when he was working indoors near the cabin's north window, Wilson heard a scuffling sound on the front porch and felt his heart double-pump, then grow heavy with fear. He put down his brush and palette and walked softly to the door.
    When he opened the door he found Maybelle standing on the porch alone.
    "Tol' you I wanted to see your pictures," she said, smiling. She was wearing a low-cut gray blouse and a long skirt of material so thin that the outline of her compact body showed through. She was barefoot, and Wilson found himself involuntarily staring at the dusty neat squareness of her pale toes. "Ain't you gonna ask me in?" she said.
    He raised his gaze to her eyes. The girlfriend of all of 'em from time to time . "Sure," he said brokenly. He gave her smile back to her, amplified. "Come on in."
    She seemed to be genuinely enthralled by his work, giving awed girlish exclamations as she examined the pastel landscapes, crying that she recognized most of the views before her on the canvas. Wilson brought up the subject of the vandalism that had occurred two days before and Maybelle seemed horrified. But she didn't deny the probable identity of the culprits. "Zach, Josh, and Bandy, I 'spect," she said, shaking her head in disdain.
    She offered then to show Wilson a spot he might want to paint, and they left the cabin. Maybelle led him up the hill on the other side of the road, then down along a path to a clearing dotted with wildflowers in the tall wind-stirred grass. It was an exceptionally pastoral spot, though too flat and indistinctive to paint. Wilson didn't tell Maybelle this. She teased him, moving up against him as if by accident as they walked, letting the backs of her fingers barely brush his hand.
    "The view from between those big pines is sure pretty," she said, pointing with Michel angeles que grace toward a patch of cloud-marbled blue framed by green branches.
    Wilson trudged up the slight rise to the high point between the pines, studied the unspectacular view, then turned to ask Maybelle where, specifically, she meant for him to