The Art of Death Read Online Free PDF

just jealous of the attention I got back then. In the newspaper accounts, I was hailed as a hero and she was made to look like a fool, stepping on a nest of bees. And she’s jealous of what happened afterward. I’m now a rich woman -- self-made, I might add -- while she gives facials to women in a downscale salon. I don’t need therapy anymore, but she never got her act together. She’s still your patient, after all.”
    Anthony studied her face. “I thought you two were still friends.”
    “We are, but not the way we were. We aren’t equals anymore. I still pay her a premium to come to the house on Sundays when I’m in town so I don’t have to go to a salon, but we aren’t as chatty as we once were.”
    “You have to admit it was uncanny the way you reconstructed Nicole so exactly, right down to the mole beside her nose and the color of her eyes, the length of her hair, the cleft chin. How did you know about those things if you didn’t know it was Nicole all along?”
    “I didn’t. How could I? When I was hired to put a face on a skull, all I was told was that it was a very young person, which I could see for myself, a skull washed up on the Illinois side of Lake Michigan, not sure of where it became detached from the body or how long it had been missing. Even the sex of the victim wasn’t known. Fortunately, after art school, I trained at the FBI Academy in Quantico, so I know more than most coroners. And I also have a gift for seeing things. Once I begin putting flesh on a skull, I see a complete picture, a gestalt, the whole face. . . . Do you remember that skull found in the Everglades a few years ago? I hadn’t spent two days on it when suddenly I even saw the scar on his cheek, his bald spot, the crooked nose. I’d never seen the living man, but I was right, wasn’t I?”
    “Some people think you’re psychic, that these insights come out of the ether.”
    Madeleine flushed with exasperation. “They just don’t want to admit my insights, as you call them, come from training, experience, and dedication, that’s all. I’m an artist, I know anatomy, I never stop studying, and I’ve done dozens of reconstructions. Maybe I have second sight, maybe I don’t. So what? The fact is, I take my work very seriously. Put it all together and I’m one of a dozen really good forensic artists in the whole country.”
    Anthony chuckled. “Humility was never your problem.”
    “Whatever the case, it’s mean to pretend my talent is somehow outside my control. My detractors have no idea how earth-shaking it was to be given the skull of a girl who turned out to be my childhood friend. I almost fainted when I began to see the face come alive. I couldn’t believe it. I never expected to see Nicole again. And don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how upset I was because I practically lived in your office for a week after that. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I’d just gotten divorced from Ned. Daddy just had his first stroke. And then Nicole shows up in my studio like a ghost! I thought the world was coming apart.”
    “Not a scientific observation, I know, but somehow disasters always show up in threes. In your case, it was the divorce from Ned, your father’s stroke, and Nicole’s ghost.”
    “Like in a fairy tale?”
    “Like that,” he said. “Three seems to be some kind of universal number.”
    “I hope you’re wrong,” she said almost in a whisper.
    “Why?”
    “I’ve been married three times. I want to be married again.”
    “Who’s the lucky guy?”
    “Don’t be coy, Anthony.”
    “You want to marry me?”
    “That note of surprise doesn’t become you. Of course I want to marry you. I wanted to marry you when I was eighteen. When I told you I was cured and wouldn’t be your patient any more because I was moving to Chicago to go to school, I thought you’d stop me. I thought you’d propose.”
    “It never occurred to me that’s what you wanted. Why didn’t you say