If it was Turner, I’d have to kill him.

Maybe it wasn’t. I couldn’t see the guy all that well, through the circle I made by rubbing my fist against the frosted-over window pane. He was having gas put in his car, or rather was putting it in himself, at the self-service pump. A lanky, narrow-shouldered man with dark glasses and dark shaggy hair, wearing a green and brown plaid hunting jacket. Bending over, putting in gas… if he turns and I get a better look…

Only now the window was frosting up again. It was cold out there.

But warm enough in here, particularly if you’d had several bowls of Wilma’s chili, which I had. Wilma was an enormously fat woman who liked her own cooking even better than those who made regular pilgrimages to her rambling two-story establishment, an oddball affair left over from some other decade, filling station, restaurant, grocery store and hotel all sharing the same slightly ramshackle roof.

Wilma came over and sat across from me in the booth, and I turned away from the window and marveled at her ability to squeeze her three or four hundred pounds in like that. She had curly brown hair and wore a red tent with yellow flowers on it. She was extraordinarily pretty, for a lady with half a dozen chins. She had the bluest eyes I ever saw on anybody who wasn’t Paul Newman, including Robert Redford.

Business was good, for a couple weeks into April, with skiing season over and warm weather still a month away, easy. I took a lot of meals here, living only a quarter mile down the road, in an A-frame cottage on Paradise Lake; and during this past week I’d had Wilma’s cooking pretty much to myself. But this was Friday and the weekend, and people drove over from Lake Geneva and everywhere else in the area to have a bowl of Wilma’s chili, or some of her beer batter shrimp, or barbeque ribs, or any one of a dozen other items that were specialties of hers.