Garden of Stones - By Sophie Littlefield Page 0,86

dish and dropped the glass sphere into it; it made a tiny ping. A pleasant sound.

“Are you almost finished with your...squirrel?” It was a guess, based on what she could see of the creature taking shape on the fragile form.

Garvey turned on her, his fury unabated. “Does it look finished?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I just thought...”

He picked up the animal by the wooden base to which it was clamped, and thrust it at Lucy with the mouth facing up. The teeth were set into some sort of clay or modeling compound, and the rough outline of a tongue and the roof of the mouth had been sculpted inside the form. Over that assemblage, the creature’s lips were peeled back wider and farther than Lucy would have thought possible—a nightmare scream, with the snout bunched up under wrinkled flesh.

“There’s ten, twelve hours left on this, easy.”

Lucy felt nauseous, and wondered what would happen if she were to vomit here in this room. The odor would get into the floorboards. Garvey would hate her even more. She swallowed down hard.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, whispering.

“You don’t even know why she sent you over here, do you?” Garvey said, placing the thing gently on the worktable. “You have no idea what she means for you to do.”

Lucy stared at the floor, the distance between her shoes and his chair. She felt her pulse in her throat. Her fingers touched the key in her pocket.

“My sister...”

More time passed. The smell in the room held a very faint, odd note, mostly unpleasant, the smell of meat left out in the sun. But Lucy’s stomach had settled back down and her breath came more easily.

“Look at me.”

She did, briefly. Garvey’s expression was hard, but Lucy couldn’t help noticing that his hair was soft and silky, his face smooth from his shave.

“Look at me, I said.”

Lucy forced herself to keep her gaze on him. She focused on the space between his nose and mouth.

“Do you think any woman could want this? Could want me?” Garvey demanded. “Do you?”

Lucy ground her teeth against each other, hard enough to make her head pound. What was she supposed to say? Did he not see her standing in front of him, wrecked and ravaged?

“You want to know about what happened to me? How I ended up like this? There isn’t much to tell, unfortunately. Boom. A shell blew up, they fired on us. I didn’t feel anything. I just knew I couldn’t move. I figured I was dead or almost dead. Guy next to me, he went down with his guts hanging out of his stomach. I watched him trying to stuff them back in. He was two feet away, his hands covered with blood, he kept pushing at himself, trying to talk. After a while it was just me and him, everyone else was dead or went on ahead. It was so...quiet.”

“Did he die?”

Garvey shook his head slowly. “What—what the hell kind of question is that? A shell took out half his guts. The rest were—it was like at the butcher. Picture a string of sausages. Can you do that? Lucy? He. Died. With. His. Hands. In. His. Own. Bowels.”

“I’m sorry,” Lucy whispered again, but she wasn’t sorry. She was angry. Did he think she had never seen anything horrifying? “But you lived.”

Garvey’s eyes narrowed and his lips thinned. “You’re done here. Get out—I’m not asking again.”

“Or what?” She was trembling, her insides hot with shame and anger and emotions she couldn’t name.

He snatched something from his workbench, metal glinting, and brandished it at her. A knife—curved, wicked, at home in his hand. Lucy jumped, more from surprise than from any real threat. And then she backed away. Two paces, three, all the way to the door. Her hand groped for the knob behind her; she never took her eyes off Garvey.

He would never cut her, she was sure of it. But something dangerous had showed itself nonetheless, and its energy arced between them like lightning on a lake.

31

It was Lucy’s job to clean the downstairs bathroom in the big house every day, since nearly every guest used it when checking in, a practice made necessary by the long drive to Lone Pine from Fresno or Bakersfield. Lucy knew every inch of the room by heart. Each day she wiped down the mirror, faucet and sink. She placed the cake of soap on the windowsill while she cleaned the porcelain soap dish that jutted from the wall. She swabbed