Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Kathy Reichs
- Language: English
- Genre: Conspiracy Thrillers
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
B ABIES DIE. PEOPLE VANISH. PEOPLE DIE. BABIES VANISH.
I was hammered early by those truths. Sure, I had a kid’s
understanding that mortal life ends. At school, the nuns talked of heaven,
purgatory, limbo, and hell. I knew my elders would “pass.” That’s how my
family skirted the subject. People passed. Went to be with God. Rested in
peace. So I accepted, in some ill-formed way, that earthly life was
temporary. Nevertheless, the deaths of my father and baby brother slammed
me hard.
And Évangéline Landry’s disappearance simply had no
explanation.
But I jump ahead.
It happened like this.
As a little girl, I lived on Chicago’s South Side, in the less
fashionable outer spiral of a neighborhood called Beverly. Developed as a
country retreat for the city’s elite following the Great Fire of 1871, the hood
featured wide lawns and large elms, and Irish Catholic clans whose family
trees had more branches than the elms. A bit down-at-the-heels then,
Beverly would later be gentrified by boomers seeking greenery within
proximity of the Loop.
A farmhouse by birth, our home predated all its neighbors.
Green-shuttered white frame, it had a wraparound porch, an old pump in
back, and a garage that once housed horses and cows.
My memories of that time and place are happy. In cold weather,
neighborhood kids skated on a rink created with garden hoses on an empty
lot. Daddy would steady me on my double blades, clean slush from my
snowsuit when I took a header. In summer, we played kick ball, tag, or Red
Rover in the street. My sister, Harry, and I trapped fireflies in jars with holepunched lids.
During the endless Midwestern winters, countless Brennan
aunts and uncles gathered for cards in our eclectically shabby parlor. The
routine never varied. After supper, Mama would take small tables from the
hall closet, dust the tops, and unfold the legs. Harry would drape the white
linen cloths, and I would center the decks, napkins, and peanut bowls.
With the arrival of spring, card tables were abandoned for front
porch rockers, and conversation replaced canasta and bridge. I didn’t
understand much of it. Warren Commission. Gulf of Tonkin. Khrushchev.
Kosygin. I didn’t care. The banding together of those bearing my own
double helices assured me of well-being, like the rattle of coins in the
Beverly Hillbillies bank on my bedroom dresser. The world was
predictable, peopled with relatives, teachers, kids like me from households
similar to mine. Life was St. Margaret’s school, Brownie Scouts, Mass on
Sunday, day camp in summer.
Then Kevin died, and my six-year-old universe fragmented into
shards of doubt and uncertainty. In my sense of world order, death took the
old, great-aunts with gnarled blue veins and translucent skin. Not baby boys
with fat red cheeks.
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