Garden of Stones (2 page)

Now Patty understood his discomfort. “Characteristics...” Yes, people didn’t quickly forget her mother’s face. The pocked and shiny pink scars took up most of the right side of her face, extending from her right eye down to her jawline. They encroached upon her lower eyelid, pink and puffed and vertically clefted; the eye itself was milky and gave the impression of both blindness and acute vision, which was unsettling and put the observer in the uncomfortable position of having to find another place to focus his own eyes.

“The inspector talked to Dave Navarro,” Lucy said indignantly. “And the Cooks!”

The faint beginning of a headache stirred between Patty’s temples. Her mother had never had a great relationship with the neighbors—she could only imagine how those conversations went. “I’m sorry, but this is, well, I don’t get it,” Patty said. “I mean, you weren’t at the hotel yesterday morning, were you, Mom?”

“Of course not. And besides, Inspector Torre said it could also be a suicide,” Lucy said. “It probably was.”

“Why would you say that?” Torre asked.

“
You
said that. You said the stun gun or whatever it was—”

“Captive bolt pistol,” Inspector Torre said. “Often used with livestock, but it has other uses. What I meant was, was there something about Mr. Forrest that makes you think he might have been suicidal?”

“How would I know?” Mrs. Takeda asked. “Reginald Forrest is an old man now. I’m sure he had his reasons.”

“Was,” Torre interjected. “
Was
an old man.”

Lucy shrugged. She was in an odd mood, both irritable and nervous, Patty thought. “Wait,” she said. “Can you just back up a little for me, Inspector? I’m sorry... I haven’t had my coffee. I’m not sure I’m following what you’re saying.”

Lucy frowned, an expression that distorted her scars, and folded her arms over her chest.

“Sure.” Torre reached for a notebook in his breast pocket, licked his thumb and started turning pages. “Janitor was buffing the lobby floor at about seven, seven-fifteen yesterday morning,” he said. “He described you pretty accurately. Said you appeared flustered, that you were walking faster than normal.”

“He doesn’t know me,” Lucy said. “How does he know how fast I walk?”

“
Mother
. Please.”

“Your mother’s neighbors, Mr. David Navarro and Cindy and Tom Cook, did say that she takes frequent walks around the neighborhood.”

“How would they know where I walk? They’re not my friends,” Lucy said. “They’ve never liked me. Dave Navarro had a tree whose roots were choking the sewage pipes under my house, and we argued over it until he finally cut it down. And the Cooks have a daughter who spreads her legs for every boy who comes around.”

“Surely my mother isn’t the only person you’re interviewing,” Patty said hastily, painfully aware of how caustic Lucy could sound to someone who didn’t know her. She was a loner, but that certainly didn’t mean she’d killed anyone, a point Patty feared might be lost on Torre.

He shrugged. “Sure, we’ve got a few people we’re talking to. Forrest had a son from a first marriage—he’s disturbed or retarded or something, lives in a group home. There’s also a girlfriend. I don’t suppose you can tell me anything about either of them.”

“Of course not,” Lucy snapped. Patty tried to telegraph
be nice
. “I told you I haven’t talked to him in three decades.”

“All right.” Torre tucked the notebook back in his pocket. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you a chance to think about Forrest, see if you remember anything that might help us out.”

“From thirty years ago?” Damn, now she was doing it too—Patty instantly regretted snapping.

Torre turned his gaze on her. “So you live here with your mother, Patty?”

Patty resisted the urge to glare. “Only for a couple of weeks. I’m getting married. The wedding’s on the seventeenth.”

“Oh. Well, in that case, congratulations.”

He stood and adjusted his jacket, his eyes traveling up to the shelf that ran the length of the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room, and Patty cringed inwardly. This was the moment that marked every newcomer’s first visit to the house, the moment Patty had learned to dread so much that eventually she’d stopped bringing friends home at all.

Patty let her gaze follow Torre’s, and tried to see what he saw, from his perspective—the gruesome tableau was as familiar to her as her mother’s Corelle dish pattern or the fake-brick design of the kitchen linoleum.

All those eyes: wide and shiny, staring into every corner of the room at once. It probably seemed like there were dozens of them, but in reality there were only six or eight animals—squirrels and chipmunks and a pale little desert mouse, all of them stuffed and mounted so that they seemed to perch at the edge of the shelf, tiny claws curled around the edges of the painted board, hunching and crouching and tensed to jump, mouths open and leering, like so many gargoyles about to come to life.

3

Los Angeles
December 1941

Every day when the noon bell rang, it was the lunch monitor’s job to stand at the front of the class and choose rows of students to line up, the quietest and most attentive first.

The teacher, for whom the ritual had lost some of its appeal over time—understandably, because she was at least a hundred years old—attended to her own tasks: gathering her purse and her lunch in its wicker pail, removing her glasses and placing them in the desk drawer, straightening stacks of papers. Unless the lunch monitor was utterly devoid of any sense of drama, she would drag out the selection, taking her time surveying the rows of eighth graders, and only after building sufficient suspense would she announce her choice.

Row three, you may line up.

And then the process would be repeated until everyone had lined up for lunch.

Each Monday morning, new recess and lunch monitors took up the yoke of duty, the schedule having been posted the first day of school. Lucy had waited more than three months for her turn. She had asked her mother to press her best blouse, the one with the tiny pleated ruffles around the Peter Pan collar. She had worn her favorite headband, the navy velvet with the small folded bow, and new snow-white socks. Lucy looked her best this Monday morning, and because she was Lucy Takeda, that meant she looked splendid indeed.

All through the morning she waited impatiently, forcing herself not to slouch in her seat. At last it was nearly noon. The teacher glanced up at the clock, and then looked thoughtfully at Lucy. She did not smile. Instead she closed her eyes and pinched the flabby skin between her eyebrows, frowning as though she had a headache. Then she opened her planner and ran her finger down the page. “The new hall monitor this week shall be Samuel McGinnis,” she said without inflection. “The new lunch monitor shall be Nancy Marks.”

For a second, Lucy was sure that she had heard wrong, that the teacher had made a mistake. Lucy had certainly not made a mistake—the date had been circled on the calendar at home for months.

Nancy Marks turned in her seat and gawped at Lucy, but she scrambled to her feet when the teacher snapped that she didn’t have all day. It seemed that Nancy’s voice held a note of apology as she chose Lucy’s row to go first, but as the students filed to the front of the room, Nancy did not look at her.

* * *

“It’s because you’re a Jap,” Yvonne Graziano said, not without sympathy. Yvonne and Lucy had been best friends since second grade. They huddled in the corner of the playground under an arbor covered with the canes of climbing roses gone dormant for the winter. Lucy had learned not to stand too close, or her angora coat would get stuck on the thorns.

Yvonne spoke with authority, since her eldest brother was in the Army Air Corps. He was stationed at March Field, but Yvonne’s mother was worried that he would be sent to the front lines as soon as the United States entered the war.

“My dad says if there was ever a war with Japan, he’d sign up if they let him,” Lucy said, fighting back tears. She’d managed to stay proud and aloof all through lunch, though she had little appetite for the boiled egg and apple her mother had packed. “He says he’d go fight if he could.”

Yvonne nodded sympathetically. “My dad says your dad is one of the good ones. But he’s too old.”

It was true—Lucy’s father was astonishingly old. His teeth were long and yellow, and his mustache was more silver than black. Behind his shiny round spectacles his eyes—though kind, always kind—were nested in wrinkles.

“But still, he’s as American as anyone else.” On this point Lucy was less certain, because her father still spoke Japanese occasionally. He read the
Rafu Shimpo,
a newspaper printed only in Japanese, and conducted much of his personal business in the shops along First Street in Little Tokyo. On their anniversary, her father took her mother to dinner at the Empire Hotel; he often brought her flowers wrapped in white paper from Uyehara Florist. Even their church, Christ Community Presbyterian, was mostly filled with Japanese families on Sundays.

Still, Lucy had no doubts about her father’s patriotism. On the Fourth of July he studded the yard with tiny American flags, and he stood proudly for the national anthem at Gilmore Field when he took Lucy to see the Stars play.

Yvonne looked at her sympathetically. “That’s good. But my dad says it’s not going to matter much longer, if Japan keeps invading. He says things are bound to change.”

Yvonne’s words were as chilling as they were vague.
Change
was unimaginable. Lucy had grown up in the same house her parents lived in before she was born, a white two-story on Clement Street with black shutters and a porch with flowers spilling out of baskets hanging from the eaves, a nicer house than most of her friends lived in. Lucy had always had the same bedroom, the same bathroom with its pink-and-black tile and ruffled curtains in the window. The same walk to school—down Clement to the corner, crossing Normandie, and then three blocks to 156th—since the first day of kindergarten. The only changes in her life were the coverlets her mother made for her bed, the dresses hanging in her closet and the height of the two little twisty-branched trees in the front, which her mother had planted when she and her father were first married. Each year, they grew a few more inches, and Lucy knew that someday the tallest branches would reach the eaves.

Lucy knew that her father was worried too, though he refused to speak of the war while Lucy was in the room; when her parents listened to the radio after dinner, she was sent to her room to study. Of course, she snuck out and listened, anyway. And there were the newspapers: she couldn’t read a single word of the
Rafu Shimpo,
but the headlines at the newsstand on the way to the market were impossible to miss. Hidden Tank Army Protects Moscow. Seven Vessels Sunk Off Italy.
Still, how could the events unfolding in these far-off places possibly affect Lucy and her family a million miles away in California, where even now, in the middle of winter, the air was scented with citrus blossoms?

Two boys kicked a ball past them, coattails flapping. When they saw Lucy and Yvonne, the shorter of the two skidded to a halt. “Thought you were supposed to be lunch monitor this week,” he said, sticking a finger into his ear and scratching vigorously.

Lucy couldn’t bear to look at him. Instead, she pretended to rub at a bit of dirt on the lid of her lunch pail.

“Thought
you
were supposed to be running home to your mama,” Yvonne snapped. “I heard her calling you. She said you wet the bed again.”

Lucy, buoyed by her friend’s loyalty, blinked and smiled shyly. But as the boy ran off and Yvonne linked an arm through hers, Lucy knew that the changes had already started, and nothing in her power could stop them.

4

That day after school, Lucy installed herself in the front parlor to wait for her father to come home.

She was tired of her parents trying to protect her from things they thought she was too young to understand. Lucy supposed that had been all right when her world was limited to the bright-colored illustrations in her picture books, the elaborate tea parties she held for her dolls and stuffed toys, the swings and the slide at the playground in Rosecrans Park.

But she was in the eighth grade now, and her world had been growing steadily for a long time. She’d read all the books in her classroom and begun on the ones on her parents’ shelves—the ones in English, anyway, most of which belonged to her mother. Some were a little melodramatic for her taste, but Lucy preferred to be bored and occasionally confused by Edna Ferber and Daphne du Maurier than by
Madeline
and
Caddie Woodlawn
.

Consulting her mother about the future was out of the question. Miyako Takeda wasn’t like other mothers: she was quieter, prone to spells and moods. Withdrawn much of the time. Easily upset. And, of course, far more beautiful, which only made her seem more delicate, somehow.

Renjiro Takeda, on the other hand, would know what to do. He was a businessman, well respected, important. Lucy pretended to read—a book called
The Rains Came
that had been made into a movie that she was too young to see, in which a lot of people appeared to be falling in love with each other. The book was so confusing that she didn’t intend to finish it, but it was as good as any, since she had too many things on her mind to pay attention to the words.

At last, when dark had fallen and Lucy could hear her mother moving about the kitchen getting dinner ready, the front door opened. Her father’s face lit up when he spotted Lucy reading in the wing chair, but his smile didn’t disguise his weariness. He had been looking tired much of the time lately.

“Hello, little one,” he said, removing his hat and placing it on a high peg of the coatrack. He was a natty dresser and his hat was made of fine wool, smooth to the touch, its edges turned up slightly. Next he hung his topcoat, brushing invisible specks off its tight-woven surface. Lucy liked to watch this ritual, and she waited patiently until he finished. Only then did he turn to her and hold his hands out. Lucy leapt off the chair and put her hands in his, and he swung her gently around, something she suspected she was too old for, but couldn’t bear to give up yet.