Burnt Mountain Read Online Free PDF

swimsuits with half-filled glasses of something lime garnished; two tall, bronzed young men with crew
     cuts, also in tartan and madras swimsuits; and four girls with perfect white smiles, glowing tans, and little makeup, in swimsuits
     or sundresses. Every foot in the group was bare or sandaled. Most hair was wet and slicked simply back.
    Every inch of Crystal felt as though she had had hot, shining black tar poured over her. The silk shoes seemed to have been
     suddenly magnified to Clydesdale proportions. She was able to furtively toss the flossy clutch into a potted ficus tree beside
     the back door, but otherwise there was no salvation at all for Crystal Thayer, come to be presented to the world of Habersham
     Road and the Piedmont Driving Club looking, as Bermuda would have said, like a mule dressed up in buggy harness.
    “
Why didn’t you tell me?
” she hissed at Finch, who had taken her arm preparatory to leading her down into the fatal garden.
    “Tell you what?” he asked, mystified.
    But his friends were streaming up the stairs to meet them and she did not reply. She herself did not know quite what she meant,
     only that her otherness was bone-deep and ineradicable, and always would be no matter what she wore.
    They were wonderful to her. Never by so much as a raised eyebrow or the faltering of a smile did they let their condescension
     show. But Crystal heard it in every drawled syllable, saw it in every attentively cocked head. Perhaps it was not even there,
     but by the time the evening was over it did not matter. Hatred and a determination of a degree she had never known had been
     born in her breast. It did not truly die for as long as she lived.
    “You’re just as pretty as Finch told us,” Caroline Wentworth said, hugging her lightly. Caroline’s skin against Crystal’s
     cheek was sun warmed and satiny, and she smelled of sun oil and tuberoses, and her amber eyes swallowed you whole. Her body,
     in a faded copper racing suit, was small and curved and neatly muscled. Crystal had never seen a muscular woman in her life.
     If a Lytton girl was so unfortunate as to have chiseled shoulders, she covered them no matter where she was. There was a vivid
     white scar like a lightning bolt that ran down Caroline’s polished calf; she did not seem to notice it.
    The imperial-faced, frog-bodied man who was indeed Finch’s father hugged Crystal, too, a trifle too long and hard,and said, “No wonder that boy didn’t let you wear a bathing suit. You’d cause a riot.”
    Crystal went hot all over, at both his frank appraisal of her body and what she wore on it. The lack of respect was like a
     pinch on a buttock. She could not imagine her father saying it to anyone, most certainly the person his child was in love
     with. She could not imagine anyone saying it, for that matter, except maybe Sonny Prichard and his crowd in Lytton, who hung
     around Buddy Slattery’s gas station and only dated girls from other towns, and only certain kinds of girls at that.
    She darted a look at Finch, to see if he was going to defend her honor, but he only laughed, and the rest of the crowd did,
     too.
    “Don’t mind Finch’s horrible father,” Caroline Wentworth said, raising her beautiful coppery eyebrows and flicking her husband
     lightly with the corner of a towel. “His testosterone level is sky-high. He’s been on the road too long.”
    Everyone laughed again, so Crystal did, too. The dialogue might have come straight from a Cary Grant movie. No, not Cary Grant.
     Steve McQueen, maybe. Nobody in Lytton…
    They ate at a long table under two vast umbrellas beside the pool. It was laid with a vividly colored runner Caroline Wentworth
     said was a tribal scarf from Morocco. Tiny white lights fringing the umbrella sparkled off heavy, square crystal tumblers
     and the heaviest and most ornate silver Crystal had ever seen. Japanese lanterns glowed from the low branches of the nearest
     trees, and the candles were set