“They all are,” Lydia said, and walked toward the wide window with red casing that cut through the store’s brick back wall. There they were, already populating the store and not yet noon—an entire world of unidentified men: the BookFrogs.
During her first weeks of working at Bright Ideas, Lydia had noticed that not all the customers were actually customers, and a whole category of lost men began to formulate in her mind. They were mostly unemployed, mostly solitary, and they—like Joey—spent as much time in the aisles as the booksellers who worked there. They napped in armchairs and whispered in nooks and played chess with themselves in the coffee shop. Even those who didn’t read always had books piled around their feet, as if fortressing themselves against invading hordes of ignoramuses, and when Lydia saw them folded into the corners for hours at a time, looking monastic and vulnerable, she thought of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, Beatrix Potter’s dapper frog who was often portrayed reading a newspaper with his lanky legs in the air. They were like plump and beautiful frogs scattered across the branches of the store, nibbling a diet of poems and crackers.
“What are we going to do with you?” Plath said, gently putting her arm around Lydia.
Lydia leaned into her. “I wish I knew.”
In other lives many of the BookFrogs may have been professors or novelists, but now their days were spent obsessing over bar codes on toothpaste and J. D. Salinger conspiracies. Early each morning when the store opened, a handful of them always shuffled in to grab the day-old pastries and fill their fast-food cups with milk from the coffee counter. To the inexperienced, many BookFrogs appeared as derelict or homeless, but to the seasoned eye it was clear that they’d shed themselves of the world, rejecting its costumes and rules in favor of paper and words. For her part, Lydia gravitated toward them with a tenderness that bordered on gullibility, especially those loquacious few who could guide interesting conversations (though, in truth, as was always the case with Lydia, these conversations were heavily one-sided). A few of the BookFrogs were so erudite that their rambling lessons in literature seemed easily as insightful as those that had come from her professors years ago in San Francisco, where she’d cobbled together an English degree. A few others—like the man who made a habit of leaping out of stalls in the bathroom with a plunger above his head—were banned for months at a time, but most were quiet and benevolent, thankful for the chance to read and stare and, most importantly, leave their solitude at the door.
Lydia sometimes wondered if she’d stick around without them.
“Have you seen Lyle yet today?” Plath said, cupping her hands and peering into the window. “He’s got to be taking this hard. How was he last night?”
Lydia pulled the newspaper from under Plath’s arm and looked more closely at the photo: Joey’s body, zippered into darkness, rolling out of the store, his gurney surrounded by gawkers and cops. She could see herself and a few of her comrades, but Lyle wasn’t anywhere in sight.
“Lyle wasn’t here,” she said.
“Lyle’s always here.”
“Not last night he wasn’t.”
Lyle and Joey, Joey and Lyle: the two BookFrogs were as attached as a couple of matryoshka dolls. Though Lyle was easily in his sixties, he’d taken Joey under his wing years ago, first playing the role of a BookFrog philanthropist, a moneyed patron who supported Joey’s bibliophilia, and later as his genuine friend. It was Lyle who made sure that Joey ate every day, fulfilled his group-home duties, and showed up for his piss tests and parole meetings, but more importantly, Lyle was responsible for steering the kid into that leapfrog of new authors that expanded his inner life. They were an odd pair: Joey was jumpy and battered like a sad, scared puppy; Lyle was tall and prissy like a sloppy British schoolboy. Seeing the pair slouch daily through the store, Lydia often thought of their many iconic predecessors: Ernie and Bert, Laurel and Hardy, Steinbeck’s George and Lennie. Watching them opening books before each other’s eyes, brushing each other’s elbows as they browsed, nodding cerebrally over cups of cooling tea, Lydia had witnessed an affection that she rarely saw in grown men. As far as she could tell, Lyle was the only person—besides perhaps herself—whom Joey opened up to, whom Joey maybe loved. Without Joey, it only now occurred to her, Lyle would be destroyed.
Plath slammed her cigarette into a coffee can and popped a mint.
“Stop it,” she said.
“Stop what?” Lydia said.
“Wigging out over Lyle. His absence is not your problem.”
“Says you.”
“Listen, Lydia, I’ve got to get inside, but promise me you’ll stay away from sad men today. Just this once. Just the sad ones. Just stay the hell away.”
“Promise.”
Plath swiped a smoky hand through Lydia’s waifish bangs, then joined the dozen or so booksellers who buzzed through the store with pens behind their ears. Lydia watched them rush between ringing phones and computer pods and tried, without success, to shift her mind away from the specter of unidentified men.
CHAPTER THREE
In the Bright Ideas break room after work, Lydia gathered her jacket and satchel, then reached into her cubby and found, tucked alongside her sad little paycheck in its sad little envelope, a scalloped postcard of Pikes Peak. Howdy from Colorful Colorado! was printed in a red banner above the massive gray mountain, and below it a caption read, The Most Visited Mountain in North America!
The postcard was addressed to her—Lydia, no last name, c/o Bright Ideas Bookstore—and in fat black ballpoint it read:
moberg here.
just if ever you want more.
That was all, except for the flag stamp and the inky red postmark that, despite its smear, offered a legible origin: it had been mailed from the town of Murphy, Colorado. Mailed to her by Moberg himself. Detective Harry Moberg. Retired. Homicide.
Apparently Moberg had recognized her image in the newspaper last week, which meant that her worst fears were coming true: without her permission, the publication of that photo had opened a portal for travelers from her past. Her arms braced the cubby shelves. She wasn’t ready to allow them in.
There was something terrifying about the postcard’s arrival, in its verification that Detective Moberg was still alive, still secluded in the same snowy cabin where she’d last visited him twenty years before. And that he was probably still attempting to track down the Hammerman.
—We’re going to find him, but we need your help. Understand? So tell me again exactly what you heard. Every sound you can remember, from the moment you crawled beneath that sink until the moment your daddy finally arrived. Lydia, can you do that for me? Think: beneath the sink.
if ever you want more.
She unbuckled her satchel and crammed the postcard inside.
She didn’t want more of that night. She wanted a lot, lot less.