over the basket she could sense Garvey watching her.
She pictured his face, how it contorted with anger, and wondered what had happened to him. A bullet to the spine seemed most likely. Was it a stroke of luck to return from the war with an injury like that? Or would it be better to be dead? Lucy was quite sure that it would have been better for her to have died than survive her burns. Even better would have been if she and her mother had both died on the same day as her father. A car accident, perhaps—something quick and tragic.
Lucy imagined her father in his grave in the cemetery behind Christ Community Church back in Los Angeles. The Presbyterians preached that the immortal soul would spend eternity in heaven, and that all of life was a journey to that end. Sister Jeanne had assured Lucy that her own beliefs were pretty much in line with the Presbyterians on the matter. Lucy had her doubts.
When Lucy had pinned the final sheet to the line, shaking out the fabric to minimize the wrinkles, Mrs. Sloat materialized at her side. Perhaps it was her gaze, not Garvey’s, that Lucy had sensed while she worked.
“These are too close together,” Mrs. Sloat said, unpinning several towels. “They’ll drag down the line.” Lucy didn’t point out that when they were repinned, the line sagged just as much.
“I suppose that will have to do for now,” Mrs. Sloat said, her hands at her hips. “Now come with me. There is one more thing to see.”
Lucy followed Mrs. Sloat to the wheelchair ramp leading up to the addition. Up close she could see that the boards were neatly swept and the glass panes set into the door were sparkling clean—except for the top row, which was thick with grime. The slope gave Mrs. Sloat some trouble: she had to hold the rail for balance, and the dragging of her right foot seemed worse. She opened the unlocked door without knocking and called her brother’s name.
Once through the door, Lucy stopped in surprise. The addition seemed larger from the inside, with private quarters in between the spacious outer room and the main house. The walls of the large room were lined with shelves, and a long workbench took up much of the wall separating the addition from the main house. It had been built low, to accommodate Garvey’s wheelchair. Hutches on either side of the desk held orderly rows of instruments and knives, clamps and jars, curious wooden forms in strange shapes, ranging from the size of a child’s fist to several feet long.
But all of these details barely registered, because on the remaining shelves, dozens of animals stared out at Lucy with shining eyes.
Lucy gasped. There were just so many of them. Squirrels—a lot of squirrels—but also mice, raccoons, possums, coyotes. A fox occupied a double-height shelf, his plumed and brushed tail arcing out into the room. Birds were suspended from the ceiling, ranging from a red-tailed hawk with an astonishing wingspan, to tiny white birds, smaller than the palm of her hand. Above the shelves, near the ceiling, were fish mounted on boards, with pert fins and gaping mouths and eyes that seemed to look inward.
In Los Angeles, Lucy never had any pets. Other than Aiko’s cats, she’d observed animals only from afar at the zoo. But these animals were different. They seemed intelligent, their poses cunning, their artificial eyes crafty. They were not arranged to appear as they were in their natural habitat, like the stuffed beasts that Lucy had seen in the Natural History Museum on a third-grade field trip. These animals were arranged in practically human poses.
Many, if not most, stood on their hind legs. Some reached beseechingly toward the viewer, paws outstretched. A beaver crossed his paws over his chest and sat back on his tail, looking for all the world like a businessman in a boardroom. An owl with a tiny vole hanging from its beak raised a claw in the air as though pumping a jubilant fist. A rat mounted on a stand kicked up its tiny feet, dancing several inches above the shelf.
“This is how my brother spends his time,” Mrs. Sloat said triumphantly.
As if on cue, Garvey appeared in the doorway of his bedroom, glowering at his sister. If anything, his expression became even more hostile when he saw Lucy. He wheeled himself over to his worktable, where the skin of an animal was stretched over some