The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Ariel Lawhon
- Language: English
- Genre: Women’s Historical Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 4.3 MB
- Price: Free
WHAT’S PAST IS PROLOGUE
The body floats downstream. But it is late November, and the Kennebec
River is starting to freeze, large chunks of ice swirling and tumbling
through the water, collecting in mounds while clear, cold fingers of ice
stretch out from either bank, reaching into the current, grabbing hold of all
that passes by. Already weighted down by soaked clothing and heavy
leather boots, the dead man bobs in the ebbing current, unseeing eyes
staring at the waning crescent moon.
It is a miserable night with bitter wind and numbing frost, and the
slower the river moves, the quicker it freezes, trapping him in its sluggish
grip, as folds of his homespun linen shirt are thrown out like petals of a
wilted brown tulip. Just an hour ago his hair was combed and pulled back,
tied with a strip of lace. He’d taken the lace, of course, and it is possible—
fate is such a fragile thing, after all—that he might still be alive if not for
that choice. But it was insult on top of injury. Wars have been fought over
less.
The dead man was in a hurry to leave this place, was in too much
trouble already, and had he taken more care, been patient, he would have
heard his assailants in the forest. Heard. Hidden. Held his breath. And
waited for them to pass. But the dead man was reckless and impatient.
Panting. He’d left tracks in the snow and was not hard to find. His hair
came loose in the struggle, the bit of lace reclaimed and shoved in a pocket,
and now that hair, brown as a muddy riverbank, is a tangled mess, part of it
plastered to his forehead, part in his mouth, pulled there during a last
startled gasp before he was thrown into the river.
His tangled, broken body is dragged along by the current for another
quarter of a mile before the ice congeals and grinds to a halt with a tired
moan, trapping him fifteen feet from the shore, face an inch below the
surface, lips parted, eyes still widened in surprise.
The great freeze has come a month early to the town of Hallowell,
Maine, and—the dead man could not know this, nor could anyone who
lives here—the thaw will not arrive for many, many long months. They will
call this the Year of the Long Winter. It will become legend, and he, no
small part of it.
For now, however, they sleep safe and warm in their beds,
doors shut tight against an early, savage winter. But there—along the
riverbank, if you look closely—something dark and agile moves in the
moonlight. A fox. Tentative, she sets one paw onto the ice. Then another.
She hesitates, for she knows how fickle the river can be, how it longs to
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