Garden of Stones - By Sophie Littlefield Page 0,47

his pants, and Lucy realized that he meant to relieve himself against the wall. There was nowhere to go to escape watching him urinate, so she caught the door just before it clicked shut and slipped into the room, jamming the letter into her coat pocket.

“Well, lookee what the cat dragged in,” a man said from a chair tipped back against the wall. Lucy smelled burning wax and the unpleasant aroma she remembered from her father’s glass of whiskey, and the faint scent of vomit, and realized everyone here was drunk. Off to the side was a table laden with liquor bottles and a bowl of pistachios; broken shells littered the table and the floor. “All the way from across town.”

Lucy took a second look at the man, too massive for the chair in which he sat, and belatedly recognized Deputy Assistant Director Van Dorn. For some reason the notion made her blush, even though her overwhelming emotion was fear—fear of being found out, fear of being trapped here with these older girls, fear of things she couldn’t name. She turned around, thinking she might retreat before anyone else noticed she was there, but one of the young men had stepped between her and the door.

“Not so fast,” said a tall man standing at the table, pouring from a bottle into a short, squat glass held by a slight Japanese girl. The girl had her hand on his arm, her face tilted up to his. She stood with one foot, clad in a frayed silk pump that had seen better days, insinuated between his, her thighs rubbing against his legs.

The man pushed the girl away as though she were a low-hanging branch, and Lucy saw that it was George Rickenbocker. She would have known it was the man she’d seen with her mother in the storage room from his expression alone: he had the handsome, broad face and slicked-back dark hair of the characters in superhero comics—Superman or The Flash—but his smile was both amused and hungry, his eyes narrowed and appraising. “You’re Miyako’s girl, aren’t you? Fellas, look here, we got another little apple didn’t fall far from her mama’s tree.”

The girl plucked at his sleeve and said something breathy and high-pitched, and he batted her hand away. “Go on home,” he snapped, not bothering to look at her.

“But I don’t—” She got out only a few syllables before Rickenbocker seized her wrist and twisted it. She shrieked when he yanked it up behind her back, and he gave her a little shove toward the door when he let her go.

“I said go on home.” His voice was deadly cold. “Get your coat, now, and go.”

One of the girls on the couch leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, which were parted in a way that Lucy knew would horrify her mother. She whispered something to her friend, who closed her eyes and laughed. The slight girl stared at them beseechingly, but they refused to look at her. One of the MPs wordlessly fetched a green cloth coat from a pile on the coatrack and tossed it to her. She fumbled and it fell on the floor, and she had to bend down to pick it up. When she stood, there were tears in her eyes, but no one—the man, the girls, the MP—looked at her. Only Lucy watched her struggle to get her arms in the sleeves, and when their eyes met, the girl’s face contorted into an expression of fury. Then she was gone, the din of the party resuming before the door had closed all the way.

“Do you know who I am, little girl?” Rickenbocker demanded. Lucy looked more closely, at his thick, dark hair tinged with silver, the hard line of his jaw. “Your mother and I are good friends. George Rickenbocker, at your service.”

Lucy could manage only a small nod. The frayed edges of her composure ripped the rest of the way, and pure fear rushed in. This was the man who owned her mother’s evenings, who bruised her thin arms and could crush both her hands in one of his, who ran his hard, bristly jaw along her vulnerable, pale neck.

Rickenbocker went back to pouring his drink. He set down the glass and picked up a second, poured an inch into that one. He lifted the glass to his nose and sniffed, swirling the golden liquid inside. Van Dorn was watching, along with the others. Two, three, four of them, young men who