Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

by Matthew Sullivan

  Moberg’s voice trailed off and he fiddled with his pen.

  “Anyway,” he added, “that’s all I got.”

  Lydia stared into her empty coffee cup.

  “If I give you a guy’s name,” she said, swallowing hard, “could you tell me if you ever had any dealings with him? Not necessarily with this case, but later. Maybe even years later.”

  “What guy?”

  “Joey, maybe Joseph. Last name Molina. Lanky kid in his early twenties with long black hair. He spent some time in prison for dropping cinder blocks onto moving cars. Petty crimes before that.”

  “I’m guessing this is the suicide who got you into the newspaper,” he said, a statement, not a question. “Even the sickos blur. But no, I don’t recall any Joe Molina.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Moberg seemed irritated by the possibility that he’d forget a name.

  “No Joseph Molina in any of my cases,” he said. “I could look into him for you if you’d like.” He turned to a blank page in his notebook and spun it until it was in front of Lydia, then he rolled a pen her way. “Spell out the kid’s full name and your phone number. If I find anything out, I’ll call.”

  After Lydia scrawled down the information, she stood and gestured toward the hallway.

  “I should go.”

  “Yes, you should.”

  She sat on the floor and fumbled to get her shoes on. As she stepped out to the snowy porch, Moberg became a bald silhouette on the far side of the screen.

  “Listen,” she said. “I appreciate your—”

  “Don’t,” he said. “I just ruined your fucking year.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  After leaving Moberg to fester in his lonely cabin, Lydia drove full speed, fuming and confused, in the direction of her father’s home in Rio Vista. She snapped off the radio and cranked the heater, oblivious to the blur of trees and rocky slopes around her. She felt terribly uneasy about what Moberg had told her, but also committed, after more than a decade, to finally facing her father. Because if Moberg was right—my god, she kept saying, my god—the time to see her father had finally come.

  Lydia stopped at a roadside gas station and plunged the pump nozzle into Plath’s Volvo. From her back pocket she retrieved Moberg’s folded postcard and turned it over in her hands. She listened to cars crunching over knobby ice and the wind flapping the gas station signs and finally began to recognize what she was doing to herself. She wasn’t going anywhere but home. Back to Denver and David and Bright Ideas.

  Out here in the world, watching the rolling digits of an outdated pump, she felt like a cult member who’d broken away from the compound. This was the land of potato chips and oil leaks and bathroom keys screwed to blocks of wood. Reality—that’s what this was—and back there, in Moberg’s cabin, was a bubble of delusion.

  Her dad was not the Hammerman. He may have been a misfit and a loser and an easy target—he may have even developed a shell of ice when she needed his warmth the most—but that didn’t make him a murderer. He wasn’t the Hammerman, she told herself as Plath’s car jostled back toward Denver—he simply was not.

  David was still at work when Lydia arrived home, so she was momentarily startled to hear a man’s voice speaking in their kitchen.

  Detective Moberg. On the answering machine.

  She’d driven away from Moberg’s cabin not four hours ago, returned Plath’s car to the bookstore, grabbed a quick bean burrito, and here she was already back in his contaminated world. She waited for him to hang up, then pressed Play on the machine.

  “. . . Is this Lydia I’m talking to? Well, okay, Lydia. I made a call for you on this guy Joseph Molina. Sounds like you already knew about his criminal record, mostly small stuff, teenage boy stuff, in and out of various juvenile institutions and programs for punks. But I did find something out that might be of interest to you. You already know he was charged with felony assault and criminal mischief for that whole highway stunt, but did you know he served his time at the state correctional facility in . . . you guessed it: Rio Vista, Colorado. Know anyone else who spent a lot of time at the prison there? I think you do. Something stinks here, I’m sorry to say. Be careful, even if he is your daddy.”

  Lydia sank against her living room wall. It made perfect sense now, how Joey had come upon her birthday photo: Joey was a felon, her dad was his guard, both at the prison in Rio Vista. She felt naive for missing the link yet was acutely aware that knowing about this connection was not the same thing as understanding it.

  Draped across the back of the chair at her kitchen table was her beaten leather satchel, holding the latest assortment of books she’d gathered from the store. She pulled them out and placed each title on the table in the kitchen, one at a time in a small grid, as if setting up mah-jongg tiles or a game of solitaire. Then she dragged over Joey’s milk crate of butchered books and started pairing and decoding, wondering all the while whether her father was hidden in here too, peering out from Joey’s paper windows, somehow spying on her life.

  “There’s nothing here for me,” Lyle said, barely looking up at Lydia from his slump in the chapel’s single pew. The chapel wasn’t really a chapel but a secluded alcove in the back of the bookstore’s second floor that contained the Religion and Spirituality section. Little baskets of sheet music and pocket-sized devotional books were spread around the floor, and an old wooden church pew with Celtic carvings split the alcove’s axis. “These shelves might as well be empty,” he added, dragging his sight over the books, as lifeless as a tub of ice. “None of it brings him back, you know?”

  “I know, Lyle.”

  With his greasy hair thinning by the month and his schoolboy pants thinning at the knees, Lydia couldn’t help but notice how sad Lyle looked in that pew, and how utterly alone. As she slid in next to him, he began lifting the pile of books in his lap, one at a time, as if they were cue cards: The Jew in the Lotus, Hindu Proverbs, Care of the Soul, Signs & Symbols in Christian Art, The Madonna of 115th Street, God: A Biography. “All this Supreme Being stuff is so intimidating,” he said.

  “Maybe this will help,” she said, unstrapping her satchel and retrieving the pile of books she’d spent the morning decoding. She handed over Joey’s cut-up biography of J. D. Salinger, plus a novel called Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? that matched the label on its back cover. If anyone could help her find some clarity about Joey’s messages, she reasoned, it was Lyle. Besides, it might do him some good to involve him in—in whatever she was involving herself in.

  Lyle took a deep breath and sat up straight. He lined up the pages with admirable expertise.

  Tw

  . I

  ces

  , he

  sto

  Le M

  y hear

  t. The

  firs

  Tim

  eis

  pen

  t, my

  lie

  felo

  “Ok

  ing    for

  it    when f

  In a    al

  fo

  und its

  . He, too,

  kit

  way a

  again

  and

  with

  it

  , too m

  yl

  . If

  fe

  . . .

  Lyle read Joey’s message aloud with a lot of stuttering backtracks. “Twice she stole my heart . . . the first time I spent my life looking for it . . . when I finally found it she took it away again . . . and with it took my life . . .” He placed his palm dramatically on his chest. “I feel better already. It’s like a goddamned elixir.”

  Lydia didn’t know if Lyle was talking about feeling cured by this distraction or hearing Joey’s voice again between the pages, but she was glad to see him perking up.

  “At first I thought Joey may have been married,” she said, thinking of the Vital Records office with its menu of marriage a
nd divorce documents. “Especially with the new suit in his closet and so much focus on this woman in the messages. Like that one about being saved by his only Her.”

  “Joey the romantic,” Lyle said, then lifted his head toward the ceiling as if the idea were a balloon he’d just released into the air. “Brokenhearted Joey, killing himself over a girl. Twice she stole my heart. I buy it, but I don’t quite buy it.” He read the message again, flipping back and forth through the pages to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. “That’s not to say it isn’t genuine. It’s just not the Joey I knew.”

  “But then I came across this,” she said, and pulled from her satchel a cut-up copy of Wise Blood followed by a recent reissue of The Crying of Lot 49.

  Seeing the novels side by side, Lyle raised his brow.

  “A deadly combination. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  It took some effort but Lydia opened the books to the cutouts and handed them over, and Lyle slid the novels together and began to read aloud:

  Dr

  op

  Me

  from the

  Ask

  y. Dr

  op

  ,” Me

  on      th

  , eh?”

  igh

  away

  , so

  1.

  On

  gas

  I’l

  and

  inside

  a.m.

  . In

  , I

  Van

  “That does not really say that,” he said. “Drop me from the sky . . . drop me on the highway . . . so long as I land . . . inside a minivan? Sounds like something Neil Young would hum in a bathroom stall. Joey and his minivans, my god. If he was still alive I’d encourage him to open a dealership.” Then Lyle held up his hand and closed his eyes, gently humming, as if he were watching Joey’s methodology fall into place, window by window, on the inside of his lids. “It’s very self-destructive,” he said after a minute. “But a minivan? Maybe Joey just wanted a family.”

  “I think so,” Lydia said, unable to stop a small bounce of celebration. “It’s like he was obsessed. Remember the one about him eating spiders or glass or whatever just to be part? Maybe to be part of a family.”

  “Or to start a family,” Lyle said, “since there’s a woman involved?”

  “Sure.” Lydia flipped open her little notebook to a scribbled page and handed it to Lyle. “This pair I deciphered last night. Two novels. The Black Book and The Secret History.”

  Lyle cleared his throat, then read her writing aloud. “Drowning in blood I may never breathe again. Well, that’s a bit dramatic.” He wiggled his fingertips and grimaced. “Drowning in blood? Spooky too.”

  “Drowning in blood,” she said. “Again he seems to be pointing me toward family. Bloodlines.”

  “Pointing you?” Lyle said.

  “Pointing us.”

  Lyle seemed pleased by the inclusion. As he flipped through Lydia’s notebook, seeking the other messages she’d transcribed, Lydia’s thoughts looped back to what Wilma had observed about Joey, the way he’d spend his Saturday mornings sitting in the rocking chair, staring at the families in the Kids section. Lydia imagined Joey silently projecting himself into their lives. He must have believed that the best he could do was to observe them from the outside, to press his fingers on the far side of their glass. It occurred to Lydia that he may have hanged himself because he’d spent his whole life trying in vain to find a place that, for him, was never allowed to exist.

  “What’s that one there?” Lyle said, gesturing to the rolled-up copy of The Birds and the Beakers poking out of Lydia’s satchel.

  “This would be the gem,” she said, “our Rosetta stone, if only it had a label.” She flipped through it for him, displaying pages peppered with so many holes that they resembled a shotgun target. “It was in his apartment, too. It’s so cut up I’m surprised it hasn’t dissolved in my hands.”

  “So there’s no label on the back.”

  “Which means no book to pair it with,” she said, handing it over for him to examine. “So now it’s indecipherable, a lock without a key.”

  “Maybe try pairing it with Finnegans Wake or The Ursonate.”

  “It was on top of a pile of newspapers by his front door,” she said. “I thought they were for recycling, but I’m thinking now I should have grabbed them. Maybe the newspapers held the answer, you know?”

  “They wouldn’t have helped,” Lyle said. “This is what Joey used to practice with. Look at the first pages. They’re a real mess, rips and slices all over the place, not to mention little spots of blood where he’d cut his fingertips. Clearly impossible to decipher. But by the time he got to the end of the book, he was cutting out some pretty little windows. This was his practice round.”

  Lydia looked at Lyle with admiration. “I’m glad I found you,” she said.

  “Me, too,” he said. “All of this is pure Joey. It’s like he was attempting to become his books. His deepest self. His final act. Joey’s books were Joey’s solace, so doing this, inserting himself so personally into them, may have been the only way he could profess his burdens to the world. To you, Lydia. I mean the kid killed himself, and this was his way of—I don’t want to say justifying it, but maybe attempting to communicate the process that led him to such a hopeless state. Like windows into his soul. Pure Joey. Pure Joey.”

  As Lyle hummed, Lydia found herself thinking about the dark tattoo of a tree on Joey’s chest, and about trees becoming wood and wood becoming paper and paper becoming pages—

  “The question is,” Lyle added, leaning forward in the pew and peering over his spectacles, “what are we supposed to make of it all?”

  “That he had a broken heart?” she said.

  “Broken beyond healing,” Lyle said. “And family?” He got up from the pew. He slid out a book on angels and another on chakras. Then he pressed his palm against a row of spines.

  “Family law,” Lydia said, nearly spontaneously.

  Without turning around, Lyle’s head lifted.

  “Family law,” he agreed.

  Lyle clearly knew what Lydia was referring to: the period, within the past year or so, when Joey had become obsessed with books on family law. Joey’s obsessions would sometimes border on rude, such as when he’d waltz up to her while she was scanning books at the counter, or making a recommendation to a customer, and accost her with whatever subject he was presently interested in.

  —Guatemalan textiles.

  —Vaudeville fiddlers.

  —Dominican plantations.

  —Knitting with dog hair.

  And Lydia would stop what she was doing and tell him where to go (“Second floor, Anthropology”) or, if she was free, join him in the hunt.

  —Family law.

  “What about this?” Lyle said, then he returned to the pew and crossed his legs and met Lydia’s eyes, as if he were greeting her at a church service. The limp gray yarn of his hair dangled against his glasses and a thumbprint blurred his left lens. “Joey’s only family gave him back to the state when he was just a toddler, right? So was Joey researching family law in order to learn about his rights as a kid whose adoption went belly-up?”

  “Because he was looking for the Molina family?” she said.

  “The Molina family,” Lyle said.

  Lydia recalled the story Lyle had told her about Joey’s earliest—and only—family: he’d been taken in as a baby by Mr. and Mrs. Molina, one of a cluster of children they’d adopted, and then, with Mr. Molina’s unexpected death—brain tumor? Aneurism? Gunshot?—Mrs. Molina found herself unable to afford the children they’d adopted, so Joey and his siblings had been turned over to the state: discards of the foster system, victims of broken adoption.

  “If Joey was trying to reconnect with Mrs. Molina,” Lydia said, “or maybe even with his siblings, he’d want to know what his rights were. If any.”

  “He was so young when he
was given back to the state,” Lyle said, “he probably wouldn’t remember any of their names or where they lived. He’d need help if he was going to find them.”

  “He’d need his adoption records,” she said. “Probably his foster records too, and maybe even Mr. Molina’s death certificate.”

  The realization hit Lydia hard enough to make her sink into the cool curve of the pew: she thought about the Vital Records office, with its labyrinth of documents—and its obnoxious flirting clerk—and realized that at least now she knew what to ask for.

  As she gathered her books to leave, Lyle returned to browsing the Religion and Spirituality shelves with widening eyes.

  “Maybe there’s something here for me after all,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Raj showed up at Bright Ideas late in the afternoon, just as Lydia was heading out to the Vital Records office. He was wearing jeans and a puffy down coat, rusty orange, and a black knit hat.

  “Walk with me?” she said.

  “Anywhere.”

  “Shut up,” she said, and fake-punched his gut.

  They walked up the Sixteenth Street pedestrian mall and hopped the shuttle bus through downtown. They stood close to each other in the crowded bus, comfortably quiet, their jackets brushing, their hands holding overhead rails, staring out the big windows at the souvenir shops and fast food, the theaters and clothing stores, the schoolkids and the kooks. Dusk was coming, and the tall, three-legged globe lights that lined the mall began to blink awake like pulp UFOs.

  She couldn’t help but wonder whether Mrs. Molina had known that Joey was searching for her, fishing in the wells of his past, and whether she’d want to know that the boy she’d adopted years ago had hanged himself.

  What mother would, and what mother wouldn’t?

  Her thoughts wandered to her father. The librarian, not the prison guard.

  By the time she and Raj hopped off the shuttle near the capitol, the sun was close to setting and the winter sky was bruised and black. Soon they could see the columned white scoop of the City and County Building, and the blankety mounds of the homeless gathering on its benches and walls. She filled Raj in on the basics of Joey’s messages as they walked. When Raj heard about the broken adoption, he scratched at his head.