Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs

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
     
    H ARRY 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