The Women by Kristin Hannah EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Kristin Hannah
- Language: English
- Genre: Family Life Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 4.9 MB
- Price: Free
CORONADO ISLAND, CALIFORNIA
MAY 1966
The walled and gated McGrath estate was a world unto itself, protected and
private. On this twilit evening, the Tudor-style home’s mullioned windows
glowed jewel-like amid the lush, landscaped grounds. Palm fronds swayed
overhead; candles floated on the surface of the pool and golden lanterns
hung from the branches of a large California live oak. Black-clad servers
moved among the well-dressed crowd, carrying silver trays full of
champagne, while a jazz trio played softly in the corner.
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Twenty-year-old Frances Grace McGrath knew what was expected of
her tonight. She was to be the very portrait of a well-bred young lady,
smiling and serene; any untoward emotions were to be contained and
concealed, borne in silence. The lessons Frankie had been taught at home
and at church and at St. Bernadette’s Academy for Girls had instilled in her
a rigorous sense of propriety. The unrest going on across the country these
days, erupting on city streets and college campuses, was a distant and alien
world to her, as incomprehensible as the conflict in faraway Vietnam.
She circulated among the guests, sipping an ice-cold Coca-Cola, trying
to smile, stopping now and then to make small talk with her parents’
friends, hoping her worry didn’t show. All the while, her gaze searched the
crowd for her brother, who was late to his own party.
Frankie idolized her older brother, Finley. They’d always been
inseparable, a pair of black-haired, blue-eyed kids, less than two years apart
in age, who’d spent the long California summers unsupervised by adults,
riding their bikes from one end of sleepy Coronado Island to the other,
rarely coming home before nightfall.
But now he was going where she couldn’t follow.
The roar of a car engine disturbed the quiet party; car horns honked
loudly, in succession.
Frankie saw how her mother flinched at the noise. Bette McGrath hated
anything showy or vulgar, and she certainly didn’t believe in announcing
one’s presence by honking a horn.
Moments later, Finley banged through the back gate, his handsome face
flushed, a lock of curly black hair fallen across his forehead. His best
friend, Rye Walsh, had an arm around him, but neither looked too steady on
his feet. They laughed drunkenly, held each other up, as more of their
friends stumbled into the party behind them.
Dressed impeccably in a black sheath, with her hair in a regal updo,
Mom moved toward the group of laughing young men and women. She
wore the pearls her grandmother had bequeathed her, a subtle reminder that
Bette McGrath had once been Bette Alexander, of the Newport Beach
Alexanders. “Boys,” she said in her modulated charm-school voice. “How
nice that you are finally here.”
Finley stumbled away from Rye, tried to straighten.
Dad motioned to the band and the music stopped. Suddenly the sounds
of Coronado Island on a late spring night—the throaty purr of the ocean, the
whisper of the palm fronds overhead, a dog barking down the street or on
the beach—took over. Dad strode forward in his custom-made black suit,
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