The front door was locked, but within seconds Tomas had run around the house and found the back door slightly open, with a dusting of snow blown across the kitchen floor. He crossed the kitchen and lunged through the hallway and found Carol and Bart and Dottie O’Toole dog-piled on the soggy carpet just inside the master bedroom doorway. To say he’d never seen so much blood in all his life would imply that he’d seen blood before, when he hadn’t—not blood in the way that this was blood. A gag creaked out of him. The family looked inside out. Pulverized. He pulled on their shoulders and flopped their limbs, searching in a panic for his daughter. He would do anything if—
Lydia wasn’t among them, and soon he stood in the kitchen spitting into the sink and tried not to look at the hammer, sticky red, poking up from the disposal like a broken bone. Without thinking he grabbed a damp rag folded on the sink side and wiped his lips and put it back. He wanted to scream for Lydia but remembered that no footprints marked the outside snow, meaning no one had left recently, meaning whoever did this could still be in the house. So he gripped the hammer and stormed through the hall and into the rooms, leaping over the body pile. There was urine in the toilet and a small squat of floating tissue just like Lydia’s when she forgot to flush at home. He felt sick and charged through the kitchen and even lunged down the steps to the unfinished basement. Crashing doors. Spinning circles. And finally screaming.
—Lydia!
No one answered.
Back in the kitchen he punched 911 and noticed a few stalks of red hair sprouting from the V of the hammer’s claw. The dispatcher on the phone enraged him with her patronizing calm and he was just about to throw the hammer through the window when he saw his own bloody boot prints spread over the floor like steps for some diabolical dance. He noticed the drips here and there, the drizzles, the smears. He paused. The dispatcher said he had ten minutes max before the cops arrived and to sir please make sure you’re safe. But with the snow piled in the streets the way it was Tomas thought twenty minutes would be optimistic.
He slammed down the phone even as the dispatcher was still speaking and held his hand over his mouth and looked down the length of the hallway where Dottie’s arm flopped out from the pile, stiff and darkening, her hand bent into a claw. He quickly turned back to the kitchen and didn’t know why but opened the refrigerator and saw hot-dog casserole and sticky ketchup and crusty buttermilk and god help him, he thought, these were the fragments of Lydia’s last meal.
Then from the sink came a sound.
He spun on his heel with the fridge door open and its jars and bottles rattled like church bells. He shushed them with his fingers. The sound of a bird. The faintest of whimpers. Bent in half, nose as close to the floor as he could get without falling over, he followed the whimpers like they were fairy-tale bread crumbs until they stopped beneath the sink and just as he extended his arm to rip open the cabinet door the cabinet door opened on its own. He raised the hammer instinctively, but then Lydia climbed out—her shirtfront soggy from all-night sucking, her face and forehead masked with blood—and she scampered right up his chest and into a desperate hug.
CHAPTER NINE
Lydia scratched the faint scar on her forehead as she walked, head down, toward the Children’s section of Bright Ideas. Her beaten leather satchel was slung over her shoulder and Joey’s copy of A Universal History of the Destruction of Books was tucked under her arm. Today was Lydia’s day off, but she arrived at the store twenty minutes before it opened. She loved roaming the stacks when it was early and empty like this, feeling the quiet hopeful promise of all those waiting books—but today she stayed on task: Joey.
When Lydia arrived in Kids, her comrade Wilma, a sharp-tongued and warmhearted eighty-year-old, was standing in the center of the picture book alcove, wearing her usual navy slacks, crocheted turtleneck, and pearlescent glasses. The alcove was still ripped apart from last night’s cocktail crowd and Wilma stood at its center, holding a two-foot-tall board book with googly eyes, furry arms, lights, buzzers, bells, and rubber tentacles that bounced toward her shoes like Slinkies.
“Wilma?”
“In what world is this a book?” she said, and her mouth was puckered as if she had cat hair on her tongue. “How are you supposed to read this to a child?”
“I think it reads itself,” Lydia said.
“There goes humanity,” Wilma said, then she turned to a shelf of stuffed animals and slapped a sock monkey off his perch, just because.
“Do you know anything about this?” she said, handing Wilma the copy of A Universal History of the Destruction of Books but pointing to the label on the back.
Wilma lifted her glasses and squinted at the label, then turned the book over and looked at the cover.
“It’s obviously been mislabeled,” she said. “Everything okay?” Before becoming a bookseller, Wilma had spent decades working as a grade school librarian, and something in the way she lowered her voice and turned her head made Lydia feel like a wounded child.
“I don’t know, to be honest,” Lydia said.
Wilma nodded and led Lydia by the forearm into the quadrant of parenting books, then slid out a book with a photograph of a disheveled bed on its cover. In serious font, it read, The Bed-Wetter’s Almanac: Folklore, Wives’ Tales, and Cures from Around the Globe. It was indeed missing its label, but none of its pages had been cut up and it was in perfect condition. In fact, other than its font being slightly larger than usual, nothing seemed to stand out about it at all.
“Is that boyfriend of yours a bed-wetter?” Wilma said, gesturing to the book.
“Only when he’s drunk.”
Wilma smiled, then grew serious. “This is about Joey, isn’t it?”
Lydia nodded, and Wilma gently guided her to the rocking chair near the pop-up books. Joey’s favorite seat.
“I didn’t like that Joey kid at first,” Wilma said, stroking her papery fingers over the nearby shelf of fairy tales, “coming down here and hogging the rocking chair while moms nursed their babies standing up. I thought he was clueless, maybe a bit sinister. I can’t tell you how many times I came through here and caught him sitting in that very seat, tilting back and forth, staring at little kids over the top of his book. Creepy, right?”
“I guess,” Lydia said. “Joey wasn’t really the creepy type, though—”
“But then I realized something,” Wilma continued, hushing Lydia with the slightest lifted finger. “You know what you see when you’re sitting in that chair? Everything. At least everything in the Kids section. And you know when Joey sat there the most? On Saturday mornings. You know what this place is like on Saturday morning?”
“A zoo.”
“The busiest time of the week.” Wilma pointed to the pair of books in Lydia’s lap. “The time he was least likely to get any reading done.”
“I don’t get it.”
“He wasn’t here to watch the kids, Lydia, and he wasn’t here to read. He was here to watch the families. For whatever reason, he liked watching the moms and dads and kids interacting. It’s a beautiful thing to behold, really. It’s enough to keep you young. Most people don’t even see it until they themselves are prunes like me.”
“That sounds like Joey.”
“Once I realized that,” Wilma said, “I felt bad for misjudging him. That kid had a giant hole in his heart. And he sat right there to try to fill it.”