Raj waved the photo. “Maybe this is why.”
Lydia took it from his hands. Raj pulled up his socks and strapped on his sandals.
“I should probably go,” he said.
He walked to the door and opened it but stopped with his hand on the knob. “You know,” he said, facing the empty hallway, “the police came to see me after you guys left town. Back in fourth grade.”
“Makes sense they would.”
“Two detectives. The one in charge and one other guy. This was a month or two after you’d moved, maybe longer. We met in a booth at the doughnut shop after school. It was kind of a big deal. My dad even closed the shop early so there wouldn’t be any distractions.”
“Why are you telling me this, Raj?”
“I thought the cops were there to ask about Carol, so I was all ready with a bunch of Carol stories and Carol gossip, but they didn’t seem interested in her at all. All they cared about was your dad. They wanted to know everything about him. Like, everything.”
Lydia planted her palm on the textured wall.
“About my dad?”
“The questions they were asking me, Lydia— It was like he wasn’t even the guy that I knew. Like they were asking about some other guy altogether.”
“Sounds just like him,” she said, slowly closing the door, bidding Raj good-bye.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lydia found Plath at the base of the bookshop’s wide staircase, leaning against one of the building’s scratched wooden columns like a gumshoe on a lamppost. At first Lydia thought her friend was smoking but soon realized she was just gnawing on a Tootsie Pop. Otherwise she didn’t appear to be doing anything.
“Very professional,” Lydia said, pointing at her lollipop.
Plath smiled and brown drool dripped down her chin. A passing customer covered her mouth with her hand.
“What are you doing, anyway?” Lydia said.
“Lollipop. Ing.” Then she dragged her fingers along a stream of spines and sighed. “Remind me never to quit this place.”
“Because you can eat lollipops at work?”
“Lydia, you just named the one thing we have in common with strippers. But no, I just love it here. That’s all.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Lydia was glad to have found Plath. Plath always made her happy, and today of all days she really needed the boost. After Raj had left her apartment, she decided with uncommon certainty that, for the first time in twenty years, she needed to go see Detective Moberg—to ask about the message on his postcard, if ever you want more, but also to ask why he’d been interrogating ten-year-old Raj about her father, and who else he’d cornered in search of information. This felt too huge to hide in her sock drawer.
“Can I borrow your car?” she said. “I need to go to the mountains—”
“Say no more,” Plath said, and, lollipop between her teeth, retrieved a jangle of keys from her back pocket and slid one off. Plath had recently shortened her silver hair to just above a crew cut and was wearing big silver hoops that jangled like an optical illusion. “Need a passenger?”
“Not today,” she said.
“You sure? How about a shoulder?”
“I’m good.”
“How about a drink?”
“About twelve hours too early.”
Plath was holding a stack of paper, covertly rolled into a tube. A book cart was parked nearby.
“Is that a returns list?” Lydia said.
“Don’t you have mountains to conquer? Go away.”
“Let me see.”
“Go. Away.”
One of the duties shared by Lydia’s comrades was to periodically run a returns report through the inventory system and use it to unshelve books that hadn’t sold in months and return them to the publisher. The idea was to cut out whatever titles might be bogging down business, but Lydia would play no part in such a cruel practice. In fact, after many failed attempts at rehabilitation, she was no longer allowed to participate in the returns process at all because each time she’d done so she’d been caught intentionally losing pages from her lists or misshelving favored books in order to spare them from the gallows. She just couldn’t avoid taking it personally: sending a choice title back to the publisher was like sending a perfectly good pooch to the pound, knowing it would be euthanized.
“This is a business,” Plath said, pointing at Lydia with her soggy white stick, “not a library. Sometimes we have to get our hands dirty.”
The floor held bits of rock salt and smudged boot prints, but Lydia still knelt next to the cart and bent her head into her spine-reading pose. Her hair crawled into her mouth as she slid out a collection of Grace Paley’s stories.
“Put it back,” Plath said.
“One copy of Grace Paley will not break the bank.”
“The bank? The fucking bank gave up on us years ago. But never mind them, and for that matter, never mind us. Think instead about where your BookFrogs will be if we become a Niketown.”
“They’re my BookFrogs now?”
“They’ve always been.”
Lydia groaned and continued to browse through the cart.
“What are you looking for anyway?” Plath said.
Lydia hesitated for a moment, then pulled from her back pocket the small sunflower notebook where she’d written lists of Joey’s labels.
“These.”
Over the past few days, she’d managed to cross six or seven off the list and enter their corresponding messages but was still having difficulty finding the remaining titles. Lydia explained to Plath that most of the books on the list were still in the inventory, yet they hadn’t been on the shelves when she’d looked.
“And they may be missing labels,” she added. “There’s that.”
Plath glared. “What’re you up to, you little snake?”
For a moment Lydia considered telling Plath about the cut-up books that Joey had bequeathed her, but she was hoping to make it to Moberg’s cabin in the mountains by the afternoon so she wouldn’t have to drive back to Denver in the dark. She bit her thumbnail until it tore right off, then she stuck it into the corner pocket of her jeans. Plath was staring at her when she looked up. “I don’t even want to know.”
“Can I ask you something?” Lydia said. “Joey never said anything about being married, did he? I’m trying to figure out if there was a girl, you know, in his life. In his past.”
“Besides you, you mean?”
“I’m serious.”
“Listen up, heartbreaker. Joey was absolutely not married,” Plath said. “He was pretty adorable, sure, in a cuckoo’s-nest kind of way, but he didn’t wear a wedding ring, and you could tell by the lone-wolf look on his face that he wasn’t entangled.”
“Well,” Lydia said, “someone sure broke his heart.”
Plath gestured at the notebook in Lydia’s hands. “Check backstage for your list of books,” she said. “If they’ve come through without labels, they’re probably sitting on a shelf back there, waiting to be processed. And enjoy your trip today. You know what they say: the answer is in the mountains.”
“Not to this question,” Lydia said, waving her notebook as she walked toward the swinging doors that led to the bookstore’s warehouse.