Garden of Stones - By Sophie Littlefield Page 0,81

she was with him when they had the accident. He drove his car right off Tuttle Creek Road, it spun twice and landed upside down and he was killed instantly. Mrs. Sloat’s leg was crushed. She was in the hospital for ages, over in Independence. I mean, I was just a kid then, but it was all anyone talked about.”

“Is that why she limps?”

“Yes, and she’s lucky for that. She couldn’t walk at all for a long time. Well, after that, her parents built the motel so she’d be set up for when they were gone.” Ruby dropped her voice and added, “Lots of folks say that’s why Mr. Sloat married her. Just to get his hands on the place.”

Lucy thought about that possibility. She’d never noticed any affection between the two. They barely spoke, Leo spending his time puttering around doing chores or smoking his cigars and listening to the radio; he spent every morning in town at the diner with a handful of retired men.

In fact, the entire family seemed to try to avoid each other: Mrs. Sloat at her desk checking people in and going through the mail and reading her magazines, Leo as absent as he could manage to be, Garvey locked away in his apartment, working on his creatures. “Was Garvey supposed to work in the motel too?”

“Oh my, no, Garvey was supposed to marry this little trust fund girl he met at school. Here, look.” She flipped a couple of pages and pointed to a photograph of a young man throwing a football on the lawn. “He’d just graduated from Cal. He came home before he started his new job up in Sacramento. He was going to be an engineer.”

Lucy gawked. The man in the photo was beautiful, fair-haired and well built in a white shirt that set off a summer tan, laughing as he reached for the ball spiraling toward him. The features were Garvey’s, the fair hair the same, but the moment caught in the snapshot was infused with joy, with the energy of youth and optimism.

“Of course he got called up not too long after that,” Ruby continued wistfully. “There’s the car his parents bought him. He barely ever drove it.”

The same young man leaned against the door of a convertible, hamming it up for the camera. Sitting in the passenger seat was a beautiful girl with a spill of blond curls. Even in the black-and-white photo, Lucy could tell that her lipstick was bright and her teeth perfectly straight and white.

“That’s the same car Ford showed at the world’s fair that year,” Ruby said. “Garvey’s father saw it in a picture and ordered it the same day. Oh, he was crazy about Garvey. Everyone in this town was....” She tapped the girl in the picture with her finger. “’Course, she broke up with him after he came home crippled.”

“You know a lot about him,” Lucy said.

Ruby blushed. “All the girls liked him so much. My cousins, they’re all heartbroken, ’specially because he hardly ever goes into town anymore. He’s still handsome, don’t you think?”

What Lucy thought was that Ruby had spent a lot of time with the scrapbook. She wondered if Sharon knew. Or if Garvey knew, for that matter. Yes, he was still handsome, but he burned with such anger, it was hard to imagine him being the object of girls’ crushes.

“I guess it’s nice he has a place to live here.”

“Oh, yes, his mother took care of that. Mr. Hasty’s been gone, oh, it’s been three or four years now. And by the time Garvey came home, Mrs. Hasty had the cancer. But she did the best she could before she died. She had the apartment added onto the house so Garvey would have a place to live. They had to widen some doors for his chair and so forth—My dad and Hal helped out on the construction. They said...”

Her voice trailed away and she peeked up at Lucy from under her long, pale eyelashes. “Oh, I don’t know if I should be talking this way. Listen to me, it’s not my business,” she said, but then she turned another page in the book and continued.

“They said the day the will was read, Mrs. Sloat had a fit, came home and took an ax to the addition. It was all framed out and all—she didn’t do much damage, but she was so angry. See, Mrs. Hasty didn’t tell nobody before she died that she changed the will and