The Bones of Paradise Read Free

mouth was filled with it, as if her last screams had solidified, the lips drawn back snarling like a wounded bobcat. She’d fought to the end. Her open eyes clotted with sand. An apron of darkness cradled her tangled black hair that had come unbound from the traditional hide strips. He wondered how long she’d been dead. As soon as the tips of his fingers touched the stained sand, he knew. Still wet. The tears in the corners of her eyes. Not long. He swiftly tried to clear her mouth, her face. Warmth lingered on her skin. Her hands were like claws stretching up. He put his finger to her throat below her ear, and could detect nothing. Then he leaned his head against her chest, listened. When he sat back on his heels, he slowly scanned the silent hills. How had he not seen the person who did this? He stilled his breath and concentrated for any soundat all. Nothing except the occasional whine from the windmill. How long had she lain here?
    Then he heard it—the faint click of metal against metal and the grunting of a man in boots stumbling in the soft sand beyond the water tank. J.B. quickly looked toward his horse and the rifle in the scabbard before he stood to face the gun pointed at his chest.
    â€œOh, it’s you—” He held up a hand against the finger squeezing the trigger. Then a mere deep breath’s time before he felt a hot burning fist plow through his chest, opening his body to the light, first a red flare across the hills, then a whole bonfire of black sparks, then a white blanket pressing so abruptly that he fell to the side of the grave, grasping the scraper he had grabbed the moment he heard the metallic click. Cullen, he thought, reaching for the boy and his mother as darkness swallowed them all. Then the wind gathered itself and the windmill began to spin, clanking loudly enough to be heard for miles.

CHAPTER TWO
    R y Graver bent almost double into the rising wind, holding a gray, dilapidated hat on his head as the old horse plodded along the dirt road. Scrawny and ewe-necked with a rough brown coat shedding clots of hair, the horse had lost almost all its teeth and could only mouth cornmeal and pulped grass to stay alive these days—something the man took care to give it, though it often meant going hungry himself. Without the horse, he might never put this place behind him. So he cared for the horse, as hopeless as it was. If he had any money, he could anticipate a night’s lodging, food, and coffee laced with whiskey a man could get in the Cattleman’s Hotel in Hyannis or that place in North Platte, a beefsteak that filled a platter, hot fried potatoes, imagine; he sighed and stared at the empty road stretched ahead, last week’s snow already melted and dried and blown away.
    Ranchers complained it was too civilized outside the Sand Hills. So much land to the south in crops these days, Nebraska was becoming a regular settled state. Too many people coming now that they’d gotten rid of the last of the Indians, moved them up to the reservations in South Dakota, then found that these hills, full of rich grass and plentiful water, would support cattle and horses. Thefirst decade of the new century, and people poured in despite the drought the last ten years. You’d think this country couldn’t hold any more. Winter wheat, they’d sold the immigrants on the idea of planting in the fall, let winter do the work of keeping the young seeds warm and wet, then sit back and watch the field green up with the spring rain. A person didn’t have to lift a hand until harvest. Let dust be your mulch, the experts in Lincoln said. Unless it didn’t rain. Unless they made the mistake of coming into the hills with their plows. Ry Graver, the man on the failing horse, had made that mistake even though he’d known in his gut it was wrong.
    He’d set up two miles behind him and watched his young family slowly starve, growing exhausted, trying to eat the rats