“He thought you were guilty.”
“He was making me guilty,” he said. “He was making me a murderer, Lydia. The police had no suspects, none, and as the days went by I could tell that I was fitting that role rather adeptly. They even brought in this bureaucratic crone to talk to me about moving you into foster care. It might be in your daughter’s best interest, she told me. Children were their mother’s job, right? Not the domain of some psychopathic single father. They even brought the hammer into the room, sealed in an evidence bag, and wanted to know why my prints were all over it. I told them I’d run through the house with it—”
“Searching for me. I remember.”
“It was the first thing I saw that morning so I grabbed it. Moberg asked me why I didn’t grab a kitchen knife or a rolling pin and I told him because there was a goddamned hammer in the sink that was obviously up to the job. He didn’t like that one bit, but then Moberg wasn’t ever interested in the truth. He’d concocted this elaborate web around the murders and placed me at the center of it. All he wanted was an answer to the unthinkable. You still want to know why I had to get that ring? Just imagine if he’d known how hard I’d fallen for Dottie. Just imagine what would’ve happened to me, with her dead like that. Just imagine what would’ve happened to you.”
Lydia resisted the urge to push off the floor and escape down the snowy slope to Plath’s car. But she forced herself to calm down, and to remember that she’d come here for a reason.
“You lied to the police.”
“And?”
“And you don’t get to do that,” she said, raising her voice.
“Listen, for a split second in that house, I was lucky enough to have seen myself as others would’ve seen me. A detective like Moberg or a jury of my peers. To them I would’ve been the jilted lover, standing over Dottie’s body with blood on my hands and brain on my shirt. I would’ve been the loser who two days before had proposed running away with her, then tried to electrocute her in her bathtub when she rejected me. I punched a goddamned hole in her wall. They would’ve had close-up photographs of my knuckles on a tripod in the courtroom. And here’s that beautiful Dottie in the hallway with her head bashed in, wearing your mother’s wedding ring. So please don’t talk to me about the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. I’m just lucky I had the foresight to do it.”
His voice echoed in the workshop before recoiling to silence. Lydia felt her shoulders bowing in.
“The Hammerman got away.”
“Yes he did. But that had nothing to do with me. One ring wouldn’t have mattered.”
“It might have.”
“It would’ve mattered in all the wrong ways.”
“It mattered, Dad. Moberg wasted years focusing on you, decades, when he could’ve been finding the Hammerman. All of it mattered.”
“That’s been Moberg’s problem all along,” he said. “He’s been searching all these years for this. For motive. For a reason to pin those murders on me. If he found that ring, he would’ve had his reason—don’t you see that?”
Tomas took off his glasses and wiped his forehead and eyes with his shirttail. His face contorted wildly and Lydia saw that even with all the time in the world to distance himself from that period of his life, it still carried the potency to wreck him.
“You want to tell Moberg what happened, you go right ahead,” he said, slapping the air, finished with her. “I’ve got goddamned work to do.”
Tomas started moving scrap wood from a pile beneath his workbench and stacking it near his table saw, readying his next batch of shelves. His pants were slipping and he tugged them up. His beard held speckles of sawdust.
“What’d you come here for, anyway?” he said, lifting boards and setting them back down with no clear purpose. He huffed and inhaled slowly. “I mean I’m glad to see you, but—”
“I came here about Raj, actually.”
“About Raj?”
“About his parents.”
“What about them?”
“I don’t know exactly. There was something going on back then that we can’t quite figure out. Between them.”
He turned around and crossed his arms and leaned against the workbench.
“We meaning you and Raj? You two are in touch?”
“We are.”
“Raj,” he said. “Well. I like Raj. How’s he doing? I like that guy.”
“Honestly? Not great,” she said. “He wanted me to ask you—we wanted to know, I guess, if you ever noticed anything going on with them. With his parents. In their relationship. Back then.”
“You mean when—”
“I mean before we disappeared to Rio Vista.”
Tomas rubbed his hands together, a sound like swishing sandpaper. “They were a miserable couple, I’ll tell you that. But that’s nothing new. And they were all Raj, all the time, which isn’t the worst thing. You saw that firsthand, of course.”
“I remember them fighting a lot.”
“You remember correctly,” he said, and his sight panned from the floor to Lydia and back, “but it was more like Mr. Patel fighting and Mrs. Patel shrinking. She was lovely and friendly, and he was an asshole and a pig, and I think that pretty much says it all. I vaguely recall some fight about her wearing jeans, or maybe her jeans were too tight. The word Jordache comes to mind. She should’ve left him, anyway, but I’m guessing that wasn’t an option for her.”
“Because of their families?”
“Maybe that,” he said, “or maybe just their dynamic. The only thing Mr. Patel controlled as much as his wife was his perfect little boy. He was so overbearing he’d never have let her out of the marriage.”
“So you never heard of them having any other kids?”
Her father’s head visibly jerked.
“Kids?” he said. “Besides Raj? Definitely not. She wouldn’t put another kid through that, I don’t think. No, that would be a deal-breaker. Why are you asking me all this?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and she could feel herself curling around Raj’s secret, as if to protect him.
“I’m just glad we got out of there in one piece,” he said.
Lydia sighed. She’d come here to find a path into Raj’s past, but that path had dropped into oblivion. She felt light-headed and tired to the bone.
“I should go home,” she said, lifting herself from the floor.
“It’s too late to drive to Denver,” he said, and began to ramble about snow tires and highway salt and plowing trucks in the manner of someone whose conversational skills had been so neglected that all that remained was a feral kind of monologue. She had the impression that he was glad to veer away from all this talk of the past.
He pointed at the mattress on the floor in the corner. “You can sleep right there next to the woodstove. It’s the warmest spot I’ve got at the moment.”
“That’ll be great.”
“I’d offer you your bedroom but it’s been taken over by reference books.”
“This is fine.”
“I’ll run up and get an extra blanket. Plus there’s a few greeting cards you never got.”
“Greeting cards?”
“One’s from your eighteenth birthday. One’s from Valentine’s. I think I stopped writing them after that. Should still be ten bucks in the birthday card.”
“Should I come with you?”
He paused as he was walking out the shop door. “Sure. I suppose. Only if you want.” Then he ducked into the night.
Because of her father’s hesitation, Lydia walked slowly up the pitted path he’d tracked in the snow, keeping a distance between them. A partial moon had emerged over the mountains and its faint light made the snow glow, exposing fat pines and gnarled clumps of brush. The night was freezing but it felt good to move.
No lights were on, inside or out, so his A-frame appeared crystalline in the moonlight. Alongside the cabin’s small porch were stacks of cardboard boxes half-covered with a tarp, presumably packed wi
th books awaiting shelves.
“Just be a minute,” her dad said when he opened the front door. “Wait out here. Don’t need you getting hurt.”
She didn’t quite understand what he’d meant until a light inside came on and she could see, through the open front door and the two windows that flanked it, that the cabin had been . . . remodeled. It looked for a moment as if he’d enclosed part of the entryway, and maybe even added a narrow hallway down the center of the main room. Then she realized that she wasn’t seeing walls or halls, but aisles.
Let’s just say it got a little tight in there, he’d said earlier, and now she understood. The main room was cross-sectioned by bookshelves that ran the length of the cabin, high enough to meet the ceiling and just narrow enough for a person to walk between. When she ducked her head to look down one of the aisles, she saw that the walls of the hallway and kitchen beyond were also covered in books, just as his workshop had been. She could only imagine what the bedrooms and bathroom looked like.
In her absence, he’d turned the cabin into a library where nothing was ever read, nothing ever checked out. More graveyard than library, he’d said.
The floorboards creaked and groaned under the weight of all those titles as he marched around somewhere inside.
When he appeared again in the doorway he wouldn’t look at her, and she could tell he was embarrassed by their home’s transformation. She realized she might very well have been the first person to ever see it like this. He handed out a folded wool blanket and a wad of brown paper towel.
“You know what that is, don’t you?” he said, gesturing to the wadded paper. “Your mom’s ring.”
“I don’t want it.”
“I should never have given it to Dottie. I was keeping it for you.”
“I really don’t want it.”
“You can give it away or pawn it. Just please take it. Please.”
She tucked it into her satchel. He crammed his hands in his pockets and looked at the glowing sky. A thought occurred to her.
“Is it possible,” she said, standing next to him in the cold, “that Dottie actually loved you? Because I was thinking she kept the ring, didn’t she? She was wearing it when she died. So maybe she put it on because—”
“Romantic,” he said, “I know. Except she only kept it because it was worth something. Another flashy ring for her flashy fingers. Had nothing to do with love, Lydia, believe me.” He may have winked at her in the dark. “Not that I’m bitter.”
Before leading her back toward the workshop, he stepped into the cabin to shut off the lights. Through the icy window she took one last look at the tight warren of shelves he’d created, at the mass of books that had pushed him out of his home, and finally understood what he’d been doing all these years: trying to return to a time in his life that was forever out of reach.
Not unlike Joey, she thought.
In the morning, Lydia awakened on the concrete next to the woodstove, covered by a blanket and snarled inside a sleeping bag. A soft blue light brightened the workshop windows; a crisp Mount Princeton loomed against the panes. Last night her father had set up the space and fluffed her dirty pillow as carefully as a parent at a slumber party. When she finally drifted off he’d been fiddling around at the workbench, tinkering under a dim single light. She didn’t know where he’d slept, if he’d slept.
“Wakey-wakey,” he said. He was perched on his stool in the middle of the room, hooded against the chill.
Lydia blinked into her palms and stretched the arches of her feet. Her father was holding something in his hand, and she realized it was the birthday party photo she’d packed in her satchel on the way out of Denver.
“Is that . . . ?” she said.
“I took the liberty. I wasn’t snooping.”
“You couldn’t wait?”
“You still sleep like a hedgehog, like you’re trying to disappear into your own belly. I didn’t want to wake you.”
She crawled from the sleeping bag and pulled her satchel protectively into her lap. Her first thought was to catalog its contents to see what else her father had unearthed, and she wondered about the sunflower notebook that held Joey’s messages, and whether he’d—
“I didn’t look at anything else,” he said, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”
She set her satchel down. Her father squinted at the image, pale faced.
“This is definitely the photo. God, I remember helping you pick out your birthday outfit and decorating the cake and everything. Ten years old. We had no idea what was coming.”
His eyes crinkled and he coughed into his chapped fist. Lydia tried to swallow but couldn’t.
“Is Joey really dead?” he said.
“He is.”
“And Joey really had this on him when he died?”
“He did.”
“He was one of the few, you know? In all my time walking those corridors, Joey was one of the few.” And then he went on to explain to her the way he’d met the juvenile Joey in that isolated cell on that isolated block of the isolated level three, and how Joey must have cribbed the photograph from his desk on that quiet Christmas Eve.
“He was so promising,” her father continued, “and then to finally finish his prison sentence and instead of getting his life together he goes after you? I just don’t get it. It makes no sense whatsoever.”
Lydia resisted her desire to point at Joey’s maybe-brother Raj admiring her in the photo. She wasn’t ready to get into all of that, not with her father.
“The only explanation I can come up with,” he said, “is that after all those nights of me and him talking, maybe Joey felt like he knew you. And he knew that you’d treat him right, which I’m sure you did.”
“You talked a lot about me?”
“You could say that,” he said, clearly understating the point. “I even told him that once he got out he could look me up, that I might be able to give him shelter until he got on his feet, but he said he was going straight back to Denver. He seemed happy to be getting out, I have to say, more hopeful than I’d ever seen him, so I felt okay about him heading into the world all alone.” He tapped the photo against the back of his knuckles. “Can I keep this?”
“All yours.”
“I’ll take good care of it,” he said. Then he stood and dug around for a roll of tape on his bench and taped the photo to the edge of a shelf. “What the hell happened to Billy Pilgrim?” he said contemplatively, under his voice, like a person who’d had a lot of practice talking to himself. “What the hell happened to Billy Pilgrim?”
For the first time since she’d arrived in Rio Vista, Lydia felt herself smile. He almost sounded like her dad.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
For nearly an hour Lydia had been driving away from Rio Vista, grateful for the isolation of Plath’s car. The highway near Fairplay rolled between mountains, over a snowy basin peppered with pines. She found herself so enervated by the visit to her father that more than once the car drifted over the center line until she snapped alert. She wanted to focus on the connection she and her father had finally made, yet she couldn’t stop thinking about Dottie O’Toole and the ring he’d tugged from her finger. The act was impulsive and had taken only seconds, yet it had rippled through the decades like a shock wave.
Lydia was scheduled to work at noon, so when she caught a glimpse of a gas station she pulled over to call Bright Ideas and let them know she was running late. As soon as she hung up she realized she should probably also call David to let him know she was safe.
No one answered at home, and when David’s extension at work went straight to voice mail she set the receiver down without leaving him a message. Of course she loved him and knew that for years he’d been doing all he possibly could to create a home with her, yet she also felt that this—being here, in this desolate mountain gas station, after spending the night on the floor of her father’s shop—felt separate from David, different from the life they shared. Instead of calling ba
ck she found herself retrieving Raj’s number from her little notebook and dialing it.
“So how was it, seeing your dad?” Raj asked as soon as he answered. “You two are okay?”
“I’m not sure yet,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“He had a thing for Mrs. O’Toole, apparently.”
“Every dad had a thing for Mrs. O’Toole.”
“Where was I during all of this?”
“Being ten,” Raj said matter-of-factly.
Lydia looked around the gas station. For the first time she noticed the woman working at the register, wearing a down parka, chewing on a meat stick, reading a romance novel on a stool.
“Did you learn anything else?” he said.
“He didn’t have much to say about your parents, Raj. No gossip about a love child. Sorry.”
“Worth a shot, anyway.”
“Yeah.” She could hear his breathing begin to slow, his hope deflating. Her attention drifted back to the woman at the register. She was perched in front of a wall of colorful cigarette packs and for a second Lydia imagined the packs were books, wordless and deadly, and she imagined herself standing before them, working a rural roadside job, as if this would be the trade-off were she to disappear into the mountains and leave all of this messy personal history behind. She couldn’t help but think about the years of nights her father had spent roaming the halls of the prison—empty nights, it seemed, except perhaps for his time with Joey—and the price he’d paid for escape.
“What about you, Raj?” she said. “Anything happen on your end?”
“Quite a lot, actually,” he said. “More than quite a lot.”
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 22
