“Because otherwise he would have found me?”
“Presumably. The rest of the place was a slaughterhouse. Bloody footprints up and down. Pools and spatters like I’d never seen. But none of the victims had been killed in the kitchen, so it’s just a bit far-fetched that he didn’t notice a trail of fresh blood leading directly under the sink where you were hidden. That’s all.”
Lydia felt her belly lurch as she attempted to process Moberg’s implication.
“Shall I continue?” Moberg said, then did so before she could respond.
Lydia listened to Moberg’s clinical voice, able to stomach all of it, until he began to share the autopsy notes about Carol: one solid blow to the frontal, two solid blows to the maxilla, one glancing blow to the left orbicular, two blows to the left temple— She heard eggs drop and said, “Stop. That’s enough.”
Carol O’Toole. Carol. Of all the images that peppered her head, Lydia had the hardest time with the single glimpse of Carol she’d caught when her father had led her out of the kitchen shortly after scooping her up.
—Don’t look, her father had said, squeezing her to his chest. God, don’t look.
But before they rounded the corner to cross the living room she’d peeked over his shoulder and there was Carol in an open doorway down the hall, hanging half out of her parents’ pile, her red hair and pale skin encrusted with blood, her skull opened so wide it didn’t register as her skull until many seconds later, when Lydia was in the O’Tooles’ mudroom, so cold she could hardly move, so scared she could not erase— “That’s enough. Please.”
Moberg closed the notebook with all the nonchalance of closing a menu. He sipped his coffee and frowned.
“What you’re really after isn’t in my notes,” he said.
“What am I really after?”
“The biggest cat in the doghouse was you. We could never figure you out.”
“Me what?”
“Why you,” Moberg said. “Why not you, more like. Why he didn’t kill you.”
“Because I was hiding.”
Moberg stared at her until she began to feel hot, as if under a glaring spotlight.
“You ever play hide-and-seek with kids?” he said. “You play hide-and-seek with kids, you know where they’re hiding but pretend you don’t.”
“You think he knew I was there.”
“Let’s just imagine for a minute that the Hammerman didn’t hear you climbing out from the blanket fort and crawling toward the kitchen, and didn’t hear you crash into the coffee table or open the sink cabinet and shove aside some cleaning products and squeeze yourself inside. You still managed to drip a trail of blood that led straight to your hiding place. Sounds to me like a dog not barking in the night.”
“Meaning?”
“Just that there is one fact in this case and one fact only: you were spared. I’m sure of it, little girl.”
“I was hiding,” she said.
“Someday when you’re not depressed you should read some eyewitness accounts of massacres,” he said, unflinching. “More times than not when someone survives it’s not out of their own cunning. The gunman firing into the facedown crowd doesn’t make six headshots and accidentally pass over the single survivor. He chooses the survivor and the game is to purposefully miss. There are few accidents with power like that.”
“What are you saying?”
“You can pretend you had some angel on your shoulder, but the fact is he walked into that kitchen covered in blood, holding a dripping goddamned hammer, and let you keep your life. Even left his flashlight burning on the kitchen floor, probably so you’d have a bit of light in your hiding place. You came here for truth? Well, that’s as close to truth as you’re gonna get.”
Lydia felt her hands grabbing at the back of her neck, as if something was crawling there, but something wasn’t. She felt her memories being rewired.
“Like it or not, Lydia, he helped you hide.”
Just thinking about being swallowed beneath the sink, she was immediately greeted by a musty smell, and in the dark of her mind she could feel the hulking disposal, the pipes coated with fuzz, the pair of webby shutoff valves. And she could hear the O’Toole family dying—their breaths going guttural, then silent; their flesh growing heavy; and their bones settling with a crack.
Ke-tick.
“You know I tried,” he said, and Lydia wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He avoided her eye and his voice hovered near a whisper, as if some unspeakable secret had gotten the better of him. “They wouldn’t let me go after him. But I tried.”
“Go after who?”
“This is the powers that be,” he said, “all the way up to the capitol’s golden dome. They thought it would be a PR nightmare for the department if I was wrong. And everyone thought I was wrong. I’m not saying I was right. But the man had more to hide than anyone.”
“Who?”
“Your daddy.”
“I should go,” Lydia said, but when she stood up a rush of fireflies pocked her sight and made her sit back down.
“You mean you’ve never considered this? What could that shy old librarian possibly have to hide? Turns out plenty, but I was discouraged from pursuing any of my discoveries. Threatened, more like. You don’t want to hear this, you’d best go. I don’t get to talk much.”
“I would know if it was him.”
“Or you’d convince yourself it wasn’t,” he said. “Remember the simple truth that you’re alive. Think about it: what madman would have no qualms about slaughtering a mommy and a daddy and a ten-year-old girl, but then grow a set of commandments when it came to killing the little friend sleeping over?”
“It wasn’t my dad,” Lydia said, picking a gray stain on the floor to stare at. “He’d never do something like that. Besides, the guy—the Hammerman? When Carol went scrambling down the hall he practically jumped through the ceiling. I heard the whole thing. That family portrait shattered and slid down the wall because he crashed into it when Carol surprised him. Because he wasn’t expecting her. Maybe he didn’t know there would be any kids there. My dad, on the other hand, knew Carol and I would be there. So it wasn’t fucking him, okay?”
Moberg lifted a ballpoint from the table and leaned into his notebook and scrawled for a minute. Then he set down his pen and spoke.
“That’s something,” he said, “but listen, murder is a sloppy business. Full of grunts and stumbles and bashing around. If he crashed into the wall it was probably due to adrenaline quivers or being on the cusp of killing your little friend. The worst kind of rush, you know? Or maybe he was expecting she’d hide and he wouldn’t have to kill her at all. Like she wasn’t part of his plans. Maybe he had to change those plans when suddenly she was screaming right at him.”
Lydia listened to herself breathing.
“You’re wrong.”
“Heard that before,” he said. “Tell me something once again. Did you see the Hammerman’s face? That night, did you?”