The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed Read Online Free PDF Page B

tell her that I’d wondered about Frankie’s guilt—even doubted it—but that I was neither detective nor lawyer … and no matter what happened Anne would remain in her grave …
    But I said nothing, and she turned and walked away. I started to call that she’d left her groceries when I saw her speak to a man who’d been leaning against the building. He came in and I saw that it was Guilford Sisk, about six-feet-four of good-natured male with bony wrists hanging from the sleeves of a red and black Mackinaw. He wore his woolen cap pushed off his forehead so the earflaps rested on his ears. He grinned at me self-consciously and jerked his head toward the groceries.
    “Those belong to Missus Friedland?”
    I nodded. “Are you working for her, Gil?”
    “That wouldn’t be work,” he said with a wink. “No, working for Curt, helping him fix up the old house. It’s pretty shot.”
    That puzzled me, because Gil wasn’t one of the men who generally hired out his labor. On the contrary, Gil was one of the biggest landowners in the county. His great-grandfather had come out from Ohio with a Union Army land grant for most of the choice bottomland around Sherman. Gil’s grandfather had gradually acquired the rest of it, and there was nothing for their descendants to do but enjoy themselves while the land increased in value. Gil was the last remaining member of the family He hadn’t married; he told me once that he was only interested in one woman and that was me. Yet he’d never proposed in a way that I could take seriously. I enjoyed talking to him because he was intelligent and well-educated; now and then he’d bring up something I’d never heard of, then he’d explain it—not with exasperated patience, as though he were instructing a child, as Lou often did—but with enthusiasm, as though he was as interested in it as I was. I sometimes got the feeling that Gil and I were expatriates in a foreign land, forced together because we could talk only among ourselves. Lou was intelligent too, but he didn’t get along with Gil. Our home place was surrounded by Gil’s land; Lou wanted to branch out and Gil wouldn’t sell. That could have been the reason for the coolness between them, or it could have been me. Gil had never made a pass at me which I could definitely identify, and I had never given him any openings. (I don’t think a woman ever gets an offer she doesn’t invite, unless it’s from a boob, a stranger, a nut who’s showing off for friends, or a drunk. No reasonably intelligent man is going to approach a woman without encouragement, and I’d never given it to Gil.) It’s true that he had a bad reputation … he’d grown up with fast cars and girls who never said no. Even now he had no respect for the institution of marriage. “A married man’s got to uphold the sacred bond of matrimony,” he told me once. “He doesn’t want someone plowing his own field while he’s plowing another’s. Me, what have I got to lose?” But if there’d been a spark waiting to flame up we’d both have known it by now. Nothing could sneak up and surprise us; we’d talked too long and too frankly. He didn’t need me, anyway; when he wanted that kind of amusement he’d go down to Kaycee or up to Chicago and bring back a girl to stay a few weeks in his huge three-story brick mansion. He didn’t live there, he merely camped in one or the other of its thirty-eight rooms. When he got tired of the woman he sent her home, then plunged into an orgy of work. You’d see him out working on his land, digging post holes, pitching hay and cutting wood, no different than any of his farm hands. He was a strange and rootless man, and despite all our profound conversations, I had the feeling I’d only skated on the surface of his character.
    I watched him shoulder the box and I asked: “What’s your game now, Gil?”
    “With her?” He shook his head soberly. “No game. The kid doesn’t know how to play.” He stuck a