go over there.”
“This person said...” Inspector Torre seemed to be searching for the right words. “That is to say, he described certain characteristics.... We asked around the neighborhood and several people mentioned Mrs. Takeda.”
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
