“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Out here in the world, watching the rolling digits of an outdated pump, she felt like a cult member who’d broken away from the compound.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.”