Until Dark

Chapter One The old man took two steps back, then two more, until he was close to the middle of the one-lane dirt road. There he stood, hands on his hips and a scowl on his face, watching the painters tuck the last of their scaffolding into the rusty bed of an old pickup truck of indeterminable color. The only vehicle in a twenty-mile radius that might have been older than the painters' was his own. "So, what do you think?" The young woman stood on the bottom step of the front porch, the smile on her face a sure sign that she had a pretty good idea of what her elderly neighbor was thinking. "Your grandfather be spinning in his grave, right at this very minute, that's what I think." He wagged a gnarled finger at her. "Old Jonathan be spinning out of control right down there where we laid him. Surely he is." "Now, Mr. Webb"Kendra Smith bit back a grin and forced her most earnest expression"what is it that you think my grandfather might object to?" "Well, since you ask, let's start right there with that purple door." The cigar that Oliver Webb held jabbed at the air in the general direction of the house that was the object under discussion. "It's called aubergine. It means eggplant." She came down off the step to stand next to him. "Fancy word for purple." He all but spit out the word. "What in the name of the Jersey Devil were you thinking? Painting the house green and the door purple!" "I was thinking that the house has spent all of its two-hundred-plus years painted white." She tucked an arm through his. "I was thinking it was time for a change." "Houses supposed to be white, maybe," Oliver Webb said, perhaps with a little less bluster. "If in fact they need to be painted at all." "I like it, Mr. Webb." Kendra tilted her head as if to study the paint job that had just about all of the 147 residents of Smith's Forge, at the fringe of New Jersey's Pine Barrens, lingering at the counter in MacNamara's General Store for an extra ten or fifteen minutes just to talk about. "I like it a lot." "Be suiting you, then," he grunted, and she knew he was softening, just as she'd known he would. "Suits me just fine." She smiled, disarming him. "Hmmph." Mr. Webb took a puff or two on his cigar. "Well, anyone come looking for you, you won't be hard to find, that's for sure." He knocked the ash off his cigar and climbed into the cab of his 1976 Chevy pickup. The passenger door no longer opened, and the flatbed was riddled with cancer, but it ran, and as far as seventy-eight-year-old Oliver Webb was concerned, running was all a pickup really had to do. Still shaking his head, Webb made a U-turn and headed back toward the main road, which lay a mile or two through the pine trees. On his way, no doubt, to MacNamara's, where he'd tell one and all that yes, indeed, Kendra Smith had painted the old Smith house two shades of green and he'd seen with his own eyes that the front door was purple and that was a fact. Kendra shoved her hands into the pockets of her worn jeans and watched the painters clear the last of the paint cans from the foot of the drive, then waved as they crowded into their truck and drove off in a cloud of dust. She took one last leisurely stroll around the side of the house, admiring the way the darker shade of green set off the windows from the pale sage of the clapboard. The afternoon sun sStewart, Mariah is the author of 'Until Dark', published 2003 under ISBN 9780345447401 and ISBN 0345447409.