Garden of Stones

by Sophie Littlefield

  Miyako Takeda and Internal Security Officer George

  Rickenbocker. August 1942.

  Miyako Takeda was her grandmother.

  Patty allowed herself to absorb the image for a moment. Her grandmother was beautiful. Head-turning, drop-dead gorgeous. But what was her picture doing in an album that had belonged to the dead man? Who was the officer who held her against him in an uneasy embrace? And most importantly—had Lucy lied about her relationship with Reginald Forrest?

  Even if Miyako’s presence in the album was a chance coincidence, Patty still found it suddenly far more difficult to believe her mother’s denials about going to see Forrest. And the possibility that Lucy was lying filled Patty with dread.

  Patty stared at her grandmother’s perfect, heart-shaped face, trying to find any resemblance among her, Lucy and herself. But there was none. Miyako possessed an elegance that seemed all the more striking given the vulnerability of her pose in the photo. Patty would give anything to be able to pull that off, the way the angle of her calves lengthened and accentuated her legs without calling attention. Lucy was plain, even before you took into account her disfigurement: her body was thick and shapeless, her hair chopped straight in a wash-and-wear style, the good side of her face fleshy. Patty had always struggled with weight herself, and for the most part kept the extra pounds at bay, and she was conscientious about her hair and makeup. She figured she was a seven on a good day, a solid five when she didn’t try. Average. Jay called her beautiful, but Jay was kind.

  Turning the pages of the album, she found Miyako in half a dozen other photos, all of them from a series of gatherings in 1942 and early 1943. Patty couldn’t deny the likelihood that her grandmother and the dead man had known each other. Her heart raced as she flipped page after page. When she reached the end of the album, she took a long sip of her wine before turning back to the start.

  In the first photo, Miyako’s face was pensive; she seemed to be staring at someone outside the photograph to the right, and her lips were slightly parted as though she were whispering a confidence. Meanwhile, Rickenbocker’s head was thrown back in what appeared to be raucous laughter.

  In other photos, she posed with several other Japanese women, all of them young, all of them pretty. They wore bright lipstick smiles and cheap beads at their necks, their hair twisted and curled. The final photograph in the album was labeled Valentine’s Day 1943, and it showed a man identified as Benny Van Dorn with his arm slung around a short, plump girl’s shoulders, looking drunk and leering at the camera.

  Benny Van Dorn. Something clicked in Patty’s mind, a stirring of familiarity, and then it came to her: Benny Van Dorn was a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. She was pretty sure he represented her mother’s district, in fact. Could it be the same man? The age was about right. She remembered the election because Van Dorn had narrowly beaten a candidate who was enmeshed in a high-profile bribery scandal.

  Lucy had never mentioned the election, or Van Dorn, for that matter, but then again her mother had no interest in politics. Still, if it really was him, that was two people from Manzanar who lived nearby in San Francisco, and her mother had never spoken about either of them. Patty’s stomach twisted with anxiety. There was something here, some connection between all these people and Forrest’s death.

  The background of many of the photos was a cramped office, the most arresting feature of which was the snow-topped mountain rising far in the distance outside the window. Young men, all of them white, and half a dozen pretty, young Japanese girls crowded onto a sofa and chairs. A Japanese boy of twelve or thirteen appeared in a couple of the photographs. Only he and Rickenbocker wore civilian clothes; the other men wore military-style uniforms.

  Reginald Forrest was in only a couple of the photos, and Patty didn’t even spot his name among the captions until her second pass through the album. He was a pleasant-looking young man with a handsome if bland face. In one of the shots, he was caught in profile, almost as though he had been turning away from the photographer at the time of the snap. In the other, he posed between two other men holding bottles of beer.

  The album seemed to chronicle a series of parties and get-togethers that had taken place over six months at Manzanar. Patty doubted that fraternizing between the staff and internees was sanctioned or even allowed, and she wondered who arranged and hosted these events. Most of the girls looked as though they were there by choice, their pouty smiles and provocative poses suggesting they enjoyed their role. Miyako was the exception. Compared to the younger girls, she seemed far more sophisticated; her clothes were elegant and fit her well. She eschewed their cheap baubles and low-cut blouses, but in every photograph of Rickenbocker, he had eyes only for her.

  After going through the pages twice, Patty set the album aside and picked up the other one. It chronicled Forrest’s life leading up to the war. The last pages held his official War Relocation Authority staff portrait and a group photo, thirty or so men and a few women posing in front of half-built rows of barracks, with the spectacular mountains in the distance. The rest of the pages were filled with publicity photos and magazine clippings from before the war. Forrest had appeared as “Boy #2” in a film called Frontier Stagecoach, and what appeared to be a slightly bigger role—“Officer Timmons”—in The Last Princess. Small parts, evidence of a film career that never got off the ground before the war and didn’t continue afterward. Whatever Reg had done since 1943, it had ended here, with his gym, his small life, his shitty apartment. His volatile girlfriend and crabby landlady.

  Patty went back to the first album, to the one photo where Reg posed with two other men, their arms slung casually around each other’s shoulders. The caption read, “Reg Forrest, George Rickenbocker, Benny Van Dorn and Jessie Kadonada.”

  There he was, barely visible in the background, the young boy who appeared in some of the other photos, sitting at the edge of the couch, head down, prying the top off a bottle. Patty wondered what he was doing in the midst of these gatherings, like a mascot of sorts.

  Patty closed the album and slid it to the center of the kitchen table. Her grandmother had apparently known Forrest quite well at the camp, though if these parties were illicit, maybe it wasn’t surprising that Lucy didn’t know about them. Or maybe Lucy was ashamed of her mother’s behavior. Was it possible her mother had a boyfriend? Patty’s grandfather had died before the war; she didn’t remember ever seeing a picture of him.

  Tomorrow, when her mother got home from work, Patty would show her the photos and ask her some questions. But first, she would need to find out a little more. What had happened to her mother during the war? How had she met Patty’s father? What happened to him?

  Patty stood up and had to grab the counter as dizziness unsteadied her. She got the pad of paper that her mother kept by the phone, and a pen, and as she sat down, she poured the last of the wine into her glass. Then she started to make a list.

  * * *

  In the morning, Patty looked at the piece of paper from the night before, her handwriting more florid and loopy than usual. Certainly messier than when she was sober. She pushed the hair out of her eyes, feeling the beginnings of a headache, and drank a glass of water before studying the list.

  George Rickenbocker—Miyako?

  Reginald Forrest (Dead!!)

  Benny Van Dorn—Same one?

  Jessie???

  Girls?

  Miyako Takeda. Pretty. Shoes. Thin.

  Mom? Did s
he?

  Patty sucked in her breath, staring at her handwriting. She remembered writing the list the night before, sounding out the name Rickenbocker and drawing the line to signify the relationship with Miyako. She did not remember the rest, especially that last line.

  Did she?

  Her drunk self wondered if her mother had killed a man. What did her sober self think?

  * * *

  An hour later, teeth brushed and her hair pulled back in a tight bun, Patty sat with the phone cord threaded through her fingers, drinking the remains of her coffee over ice. She had been on hold long enough for her heart to stop pounding, long enough to doodle a series of cubes on a notepad, carefully shaded, their sides tapered in vanishing-point perspective, just as she had learned in high school art class. She was so absorbed in the drawing that when the man came back on the line, his throat clearing startled her.

  “Miss Stapleton?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sorry about that, it took me a while to find the right reel. So. That’s Van Dorn, V-A-N space D-O-R-N. Benjamin.”

  “Yes. I mean, I can’t be positive, but Benny’s not short for anything else, is it?”

  “No—no, I don’t think so,” the man said. He really was very nice; in fact, Patty thought they might be having a little phone flirtation. She forgot for a minute the very serious nature of what she was doing, that she was betraying her mother and possibly committing a crime. “Benjamin Van Dorn. And George Rickenbocker. And you need this by when?”

  “Well—the article is supposed to run this Sunday.” Really, Patty had no idea how long it took to write a newspaper feature, or what happened once it was written. “And I need to turn it in by tomorrow. If I can.”

  “That should be no problem. I can probably call you in about an hour.”

  “That’s really nice of you. Seriously.”

  “Well, your taxpayer dollars at work, right?” He laughed. He seemed remarkably jolly for a government employee.

  Patty thanked him and settled the phone back in its cradle, surprised her ploy had worked. She had said she was fact-checking for an article, but it didn’t seem like citizen records should be that easy to consult. And it was true that all she was trying to confirm was that it was the same Van Dorn, because that was about as far as she had gotten. And she’d asked about Rickenbocker too, with the vague idea that if she got more information on him, she might be able to look him up somehow. Her grandmother’s lover. He could easily still be alive. Odds were slim that he was local, but still...

  Patty’s thoughts tumbled and churned, her hangover making them difficult to organize. Finding Rickenbocker, even asking her mother about him—it wouldn’t help them build a stronger case to convince Inspector Torre that Lucy had nothing to do with Forrest’s death. Patty’s curiosity might even uncover information she didn’t really want to know, dark truths about her grandmother and the war years. Still, she had a vague idea that the other men in the album might have the key to the connection between Reg and her mother...if there was one.

  While she waited for him to call back with the information, Patty made a halfhearted effort on the wedding favors. She gathered the edges of an organza circle with a running stitch, stuffed it with birdseed and tied a ribbon to hold it shut. Each favor took way longer than it should and was mind-numbingly boring. By the time the phone rang, she’d only finished three.

  “Well, I have a little bad news for you, Miss Stapleton.” He sounded genuinely regretful, and Patty’s stomach tightened. “Benjamin Van Dorn’s middle name is Walter. But George Rickenbocker died while he was at the Manzanar Relocation Camp. It happened on March 2, 1943—I’m looking at the report right now.”

  Patty stilled, her fingers midtwist around the phone cord. “How did it happen?”

  “Well...I guess I can tell you, since it would have been in the papers—nothing you couldn’t find yourself with a little digging. He was killed with a pair of sewing shears—stabbed in the throat. The killer was a resident of the camp. She left a note confessing to the crime.”

  Patty swallowed, foreboding suddenly making it hard to breathe. “What was her name?”

  “Miyako Takeda. Says here she hanged herself the next day.”

  13

  Manzanar

  July 1942

  After a few weeks at her new job, something changed in Miyako. Lucy had gone to dinner alone one night after waiting through the first meal shift for her mother to return from work. She’d finally given up and gone to eat with the second shift, but when she returned, she found her mother sitting on her bed, still in her good clothes.

  “Where have you been?” Lucy asked, setting down the plate of food she had brought home for her mother.

  “Mr. Rickenbocker walked me home.” She rubbed her forearms as though she was cold, despite the fact that the temperature had climbed to almost a hundred degrees that day.

  “Why?”

  “Because it was getting dark.”

  “People walk in the dark all the time.”

  This was true; the path to the latrines was lit through the night, both by the bulbs wired to the buildings and by the searchlights that regularly swept the streets from the guard towers. But it wasn’t even dark yet. The last glow of twilight still came through the window.

  “I didn’t ask him to,” Miyako said tensely. “But he is our boss. I work for him, Lucy. I cannot refuse his offer to see me home.”

  Lucy remained silent as Miyako got up and began removing the pins from her hair, dropping them into a little dish on the dresser, her hands flitting with manic energy. Then she examined herself in the mirror, inspecting her flawless skin as though looking for a blemish only she could see. There was something unsettled about her appearance, but Lucy couldn’t put her finger on it. Her lipstick was faded but still in place; her stockings had no runs, a small triumph in this time of scarcity, and yet something seemed out of place.

  “Does he walk other ladies home too?” she asked in a small voice.

  “How would I know?” Miyako asked grimly. “I don’t have time to watch them all day.”

  “To watch who all day?”

  “Mr. Rickenbocker and the others.” Miyako glanced at Lucy. Her eyes were bright, her expression brittle. Her mood was shifting again, right before Lucy’s eyes. “The other men. His friends.”

  “What friends? You mean, in the dress shop?”

  Miyako tsked with annoyance. “No, suzume. Why would there be men in the dress shop? Mr. Rickenbocker has friends on the security staff, and they gather at the end of the day near our building. Sometimes, outside in the afternoon, to smoke.”

  Lucy thought of the men she and Jessie had spied on down by the creek, their drunken laughter carrying through the hot afternoon. She’d seen them a few other times after their shifts were over, playing cards in folding chairs pulled into the shade or driving around in the command truck, whistling at pretty girls. They’d never given her a second look, and Jessie’s words echoed in her head: We all look alike to them.

  “He spends a lot of time with that section-two supervisor. Tall man with a neckline like this, from fat.” Miyako drew her hand across the back of her neck and Lucy knew instantly who she was talking about. Supervisor Van Dorn, from the creek. He wasn’t fat so much as overdeveloped, with muscular arms and a massive chest. Lucy had seen him throw packets of Life Savers into the crowd of boys playing baseball, laughing when the candies fell to the dusty
ground.

  That night, the anxious flutter of her mother’s hands and the memory of the red-faced soldiers scrambling after Jessie kept Lucy awake long into the night, wondering how they would escape the notice of the camp staff until the war finally ended and everything went back to the way it was supposed to be. George Rickenbocker. Benny Van Dorn. Lucy had no way of knowing, at that moment, that someday those names would be seared into her memory.

  * * *

  Miyako started coming home late several nights a week, missing dinner and smelling like cigarettes and the whiskey Lucy’s father used to drink. On these nights she would say little and go straight to bed, pulling the covers up over her shoulders even though the room was stifling. By morning she would disappear entirely, hidden in a cocoon of sheets. She never went to the mess hall for breakfast anymore, saying that the ladies made tea at work.

  Lucy’s courier services were only required a couple times a week now that the deputy chief had hired a second assistant. Lucy took over all the household tasks—the washing and ironing and cleaning that her mother seemed too exhausted to do herself. Lucy didn’t mind the work; it kept her at home where she could keep an eye on Miyako and monitor her comings and goings. But she missed spending her free time with Jessie. She went to his baseball games whenever she could, and he came by early to walk her to school, but they hadn’t been able to be alone together since the afternoon they’d kissed behind the equipment shed. Lucy felt torn—her feelings for Jessie were stronger than ever. But so was her worry about her mother.