Lovely in Her Bones Read Online Free PDF

ecology-minded as the next person, but he was uneasy about committing himself to such a project on short notice. He sighed. “Perhaps we could discuss this a bit further,” he offered. “Milo, do you have time to sit in?”
    “Sure. Class is over. This sounds like a great ideato me!” He caught Lerche’s warning glance and subsided into polite interest.
    “It might be a good idea for you to make some notes as we go along,” Lerche told him.
    Milo tilted his chair back toward the door and reached in his lab coat for his pen. “Oh! I almost forgot what I came in here for,” he said, withdrawing a piece of paper from the pocket. “I found this in the hall and recognized your handwriting.”
    Lerche took the piece of paper with the words “Mary Clare” scribbled all over the margins. It was the data sheet he’d left at home on his desk with the notes for his journal article. “Where—”
    “I bet that lady dropped it,” said Stecoah. “She was waiting to see you, but she looked mighty upset.”
    Alex stared at the sheet of paper and let the calamity sink in.
    He knew that Tessa had found the paper. That was the only way it could have appeared in the hall outside his office. The fact that she had brought it must mean that she had decided to have a confrontation. He wondered if she would believe the truth, and even more if he could bring himself to admit it. He would have to talk to Tessa, though, before she did anything drastic. Women, he thought ruefully. At the skeletal level, the only difference between women and men was a piece of bone the size of his hand, but—he smiled to himself—the antemortem differences were vast. Tessa was going to be difficult about this, just when he needed all his energy to work on the discriminate function chart. That was what was really important. Couldn’t she see that? He wished he could just get away.
    Silence. Lerche became aware that the two people whose existence he had forgotten were staring at him expectantly.
    “Er—what?” he asked uneasily.
    “The dig!” Milo prompted him. “What do you think? It would give you more data for the chart.”
    “Not to mention helping out some
live
folks,” Stecoah grunted.
    Alex blinked at them. “Yes, all right. We’ll go.”
        Mary Clare Gitlin, graduate teaching assistant in anthropology, had discovered that she could grade multiple-choice tests to the beat of almost any song played on the local country radio station. “It wasn’t God” (mark one wrong) “who made honk-” (mark one wrong) “y-tonk angels” (no mistake). She didn’t care whether this was a coincidence or a revelation of some major truth about human behavior. It relieved the monotony of grading a hundred freshman quizzes. The rest of the graduate assistantship was proving most enjoyable, she thought. Alex Lerche was certainly a nice man to work with. She was lucky she hadn’t been assigned to Dr. Ziffel, an irritable pedant nearing retirement after a mediocre career, who resented every talented student in the department. The few times she had encountered him, he had made a point of imitating her East Tennessee accent, his derision masked as a social smile.
    Alex was a little too serious, but she preferred that to Ziffel’s bitter humor. Alex was dedicated. He had a trick of leaning forward when he talked to you, and of using his hands with the fluid grace of a mime, painting his meaning with an economy of perfect gestures. To Mary Clare’s way of thinking, he looked like a scientist, while the rest of the department looked like a bunch of bureaucrats. They went to class in suits and ties and pretended their first names were Doctor, but Alex seemed oblivious to the trappings of academia. He showed up for class in corduroy jeans and a white shirt rolled up to the elbows, with his white blond hair combed in a wave across his forehead. Every now and then he’d come in wearing a suit jacket and tie—and you knew that
she’d
picked out his