Kathy Reichs - Bones to Ashes

My Montreal condo is small. Kitchen, bedroom, den, two baths. Only the main living area is spacious. French doors open from opposite sides, the north set to a central courtyard, the south to a Lilliputian-sized patch of grass.

Stone fireplace. Glass dining table. Yellow and blue Provençal sofa and loveseat. Cherry-wood moldings, window trim, and mantel.

As we talked, Ryan’s eyes roved from object to object. Pictures of Katy. My younger sister, Harry. My nephew, Kit. A ceramic plate gifted from an old woman in Guatemala. A giraffe carving purchased in Rwanda. Rarely did his gaze meet mine.

Inevitably, we drifted into shop talk. Safe, neutral ground.

Ryan had been working special assignments since the death of his partner several years earlier. He described his current investigation.

Three girls missing. Two others found in or near water. And now there was the Lac des Deux Montagnes floater. Six in all.

I told Ryan about the burn victim, the Doucets, and the Rimouski skeleton en route to my lab. He asked who was responsible for the latter. I described my meeting with Hippo Gallant.

Ryan said Hippo was inputting on his missing persons and DOA’s. Thus, we drifted into the inevitable Hippo stories. The time he left his gun behind in a gas station men’s room. The time he pulled a suspect from a culvert and ripped his pants up the ass. The time a collar took a dump in the back of his cruiser.

Conversation was genial and friendly. And brotherly as hell. No mention of the past or future. No body contact. The only references to sex were those made by Charlie.

At ten-thirty Ryan rose. I walked him to the door, every cell in my brain screaming that what I was debating was a lousy idea . Men hate being asked what they’re feeling. I hate it, too.

Not for the first time, I ignored the advice of my instincts.

“Talk to me, Ryan.” I laid a hand on his arm.

“Right now Lily—”

“No,” I blurted. “It’s more than Lily.”

The cornflower blues refused to meet mine. A beat passed. Then, “I don’t think you’re over your husband.”

“Pete and I have been separated for years.”

Ryan’s eyes finally locked home. I felt something hot coil in my belly.

“Operative word,” he said, “‘separated.’”

“I hate lawyers and paperwork.”

“You were a different person when you were with him.”

“The man had been shot.”

Ryan didn’t reply.

“My marital status never mattered in the past.”

“No. It didn’t.”

“Why now?”

“I hadn’t seen you together.”

“And now that you have?”

“I realize how much you care.” Before I could speak Ryan added, “And how much I care.”

That stunned me. For a moment I could think of nothing to say.

“Now what?”

“I’m trying to get by it.”

“How’s it going?”

“Not well.”

With that he was gone.

As I lay in bed, emotions battled inside me. Resentment at the feeling that Ryan had suckered me in. All the asking. Then the striving to keep things light.

Annoyance at Ryan’s cowboy-done-wrong act.

But Ryan had one valid point. Why didn’t I divorce Pete?

I take offense slowly, store insult until the end of time. Ryan is the opposite, affronted quickly, but quickly forgiving. Each of us reads the other well.

Ryan was light-years beyond feeling slighted or piqued. His signals were unmistakable.

So, mostly, I felt sadness. Ryan was pulling away.

A tear slid from the corner of one eye.

“OK, wrangler.” Spoken aloud in my party-of-one bed. “Adios.”

7

HARRY HAS LIVED IN TEXAS SINCE DROPPING OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL her senior year. Long story. Short marriage. Her concept of phone etiquette goes something like this. I’m up. I want to talk. Dial.

The window shade was oozing toward gray when my cell phone sounded.

“You awake?”

I squinted at the clock. Six-fifteen. Like a pilot whale, Harry needs approximately five hours of sleep nightly.

“I am now.”

My sister once had this motto printed on a T-shirt: Never complain, never explain. While she’s lax on the front end, she’s crackerjack on the back, following her whims and offering no apologies for the outcome.

She offered none now.

“I’m going to Canyon Ranch.” Harry is blond, leggy, and trying hard to look thirty. Though that checkpoint was cleared a decade ago, in kind light, in the right clothes, she succeeds.

“That makes how many spas this year?”

“Rump’s dragging, tits are starting to look like thirty-eight longs. Gotta eat sprouts and pump iron. Come with me.”

“I can’t.”

“I’m selling the house.”

The abrupt shift left me off balance. “Oh?”

“Butt-pie was an egregious error.”

I assumed Butt-pie was husband number five. Or was it six? I dug for a name. Donald? Harold? Gave up.

“I think I hinted the man wasn’t a girl’s dream come true.”

“You hinted he was stupid, Tempe. Arnoldo isn’t stupid. Problem is he’s got just one string on his fiddle.”

Harry loves sex. Harry is also easily bored. I didn’t want to hear about Arnoldo’s violin.

“Why sell the house?”

“It’s too big.”

“It was too big when you bought it.”

Husband number something was an oil man. I never quite learned what that meant, but their brief nuptials left my sister well oiled, indeed.

“I need a change. Come help me look at real estate.”

“I really can’t.”

“Working on a juicy one?”

I considered, decided against mentioning the Rimouski skeleton. Once ignited, Harry is nonextinguishable. Besides, there was no evidence of an Évangéline Landry connection.

“It’s my busy season.”

“Need sisterly support?”

Please, God. “You know I love your visits, but right now I’m so slammed we wouldn’t be able to spend time together.”

Silence hummed across the line. Then, “What I said about Arnoldo’s not really true. Fact is, I caught the bastard coyoting around.”

“I’m sorry, Harry.” I was. Though I wasn’t surprised.

“Yeah. Me, too.”

After slipping into jeans and a polo, I fed Birdie and filled Charlie’s seed and water dishes. The bird whistled and asked me to shake my booty. I moved his cage to the den and popped in a cockatiel-training CD.

At the lab, there was nothing in my mailbox. No flashing light on the phone. A mini-avalanche had taken place on my desk. No pink message slip lay among the wreckage.

I called down to the morgue. No bones had arrived from Rimouski.

OK, buster. You’ve got until noon.

At the morning meeting I was assigned one new case.

The purchasers of a funeral home had discovered an embalmed and fully clothed body in a coffin in a basement cooler. The previous operators had closed their doors nine months earlier. The pathologist, Jean Pelletier, wanted my input on X-rays. On the request form he’d written: All dressed up and nowhere to go.

Returning to my office, I phoned a biology professor at McGill University. She didn’t do diatoms, but a colleague did. I could deliver the Lac des Deux Montagnes specimens late the next afternoon.

After packaging the sock and bone plug, and preparing the paperwork, I turned to Pelletier’s lingering corpse case.

Antemortem-postmortem X-ray comparisons showed the deceased was a childless bachelor whose only living brother had moved to Greece. The man’s funeral had been paid for by money order two years earlier. Our ID chucked the ball into the coroner’s court.

Back at my lab, Geneviève Doucet’s bones had finally come out of the cooker. I spent the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon examining each with my new Leica stereomicroscope with magnified digital display. After years of bending over a dinosaur that I’d had to herniate myself to position, I was now equipped with state of the art. I loved this scope.