<P> The novel's title is taken from a quotation at the story's conclusion, when Susie ponders her friends' and family's newfound strength after her death: </P> <P> These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections--sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent--that happened after I was gone . And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it . The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future . The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life . </P> <P> On December 6, 1973, 14 - year - old Susie Salmon takes her usual shortcut home from her school through a cornfield in Norristown, Pennsylvania . George Harvey, her 36 - year - old neighbor who lives alone and builds doll houses for a living, persuades her to have a look at an underground den he has recently dug in the field . Once she enters, he rapes and murders her, then dismembers her body, putting her remains in a safe that he dumps in a sinkhole . Susie's spirit flees toward her personal heaven, and in doing so, rushes past one of her classmates, social outcast Ruth Connors . </P> <P> The Salmon family at first refuses to believe that Susie is dead, until a neighbor's dog finds Susie's elbow . The police talk to Harvey, finding him strange but seeing no reason to suspect him . Susie's father, Jack, begins to suspect Harvey, a sentiment his surviving daughter Lindsey comes to share . Jack takes an extended leave from work . Meanwhile, another of Susie's classmates, Ray Singh, who had a crush on Susie in school and had made plans to go out with her a few days before her murder, develops a relationship with Ruth, as they are drawn together by their connection with Susie . </P>

What did the killer do to susie in the lovely bones