The Art of Death by Margarite St. John Read Free Book Online Page B

to try to talk to him, so I don’t. Nettie says Chester doesn’t want to see people any more because he’s so ashamed of being -- what’s the word she used? Diminished. Yeah, that’s what she said. He doesn’t want anybody to know how diminished he is.”
    “I guess I can understand that,” Steve said. “Let’s keep going with the walk-around.”

Chapter 10
Appledorn Exploratorium
Friday, May 10, 2013

    Madeleine Harrod was in her element. She loved being in Indianapolis, where the action was. A bustling city was more to her liking than the farm she’d returned to. She enjoyed brainstorming with her highly skilled designers, technicians, and managers to produce a new facial reconstruction kit for the scientific toy market. Most of all, she relished her authority to bring all discussions to a close with a decision that could not be appealed.
    Appledorn Exploratorium’s offices in the OneAmerica Tower resembled pictures she’d seen of Silicon Valley’s open-plan offices where wunderkind from many disciplines generated innovative ideas amidst a welter of computer stations, cozy reading corners, high-tech electronics, whimsical playground equipment for relaxation, coffee bars, and a tatami alcove, dominated by a bust of Buddha, for meditation. In other words, the office was a confounding hash of scientific laboratory, yoga studio, nondenominational chapel, and atelier.
    ApEx, as the company was commonly known, was staffed mostly by people in the 30 - 55 age range. For older Baby Boomers, the place was disorienting, too unstructured and unprofessional, redolent of New Age nonsense. For Generation Y twenty-somethings, the place offered too much freedom and possessed too few boundaries. But the place suited Generation X, the cohort born between the mid-60s and mid-80s. Perhaps because it was also Madeleine’s cohort, Generation X was the only one she believed possessed the free-thinking creativity and finely-honed talent needed to design an original product as well as the work ethic to get it manufactured to specifications on time at a reasonable cost.
    ApEx produced many successful lines of facial reconstruction kits. The Seven Vixens of the Ancient World had been launched several years earlier. Cleopatra had led the way, followed by her murdered half-sister, Arsinoe IV, whose remains excited the world of professional and amateur archaeologists when they were found in Ephesus in 1926. They’d been lost for years, then rediscovered, and only recently subjected to scientific tests. The two kits appealed to a global market because Cleopatra, a Ptolemy, was thought to be pure Greek, whereas Arsinoe was thought to have had an African mother. “Expert” forensic reconstructions of the sisters’ faces had been performed around the world, but there was no authoritative look, so amateurs had scope for their imaginations. Besides the usual skulls, pegs, clay, ears, and eyeballs, the kits had been juiced up with wigs, serpentine hair adornments, theatrical eye makeup, biographical booklets explaining why Cleopatra had Arsinoe murdered, and in Cleopatra’s case an asp and a basket, although that version of her death was now heavily disputed. The presentations were a bit gimmicky but they sold well.
    As a companion line, The Seven Villains of the Ancient World started with Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. For some reason, kits about men did not typically sell as well as kits about women.
    Nevertheless, today’s subject was once again a man, Richard III, who was crowned King of England on July 6, 1483. He would launch a new line called Infamous Kings and Queens. His skeleton, missing its feet, had only recently been discovered under a parking lot in England. A variety of scientific tests confirmed that the remains were indeed those of the king who had been vilified by his Tudor successors and even Shakespeare. And they confirmed that though he didn’t have a withered arm, as Shakespeare claimed, he indeed had a curved spine