Lydia sat cross-legged on the floor of her father’s workshop, stunned by the weight of his words. The concrete beneath her was icy cold, and her back pressed against a low shelf of paperbacks. She wanted to stand—wanted to walk out of her father’s life once and for all—but thought her legs would crumple beneath her if she tried.
He pulled a stool out from under his workbench and offered it to her, and when she shook her head he settled atop it and nervously patted his kneecaps.
“Did you love her?” she said.
“I gave her your mother’s ring, if that’s any indication.”
“How long were you two—?”
“It wasn’t anything like that,” he said. “She was an unhappy person in an unhappy marriage. I thought I could make her happy. To be honest I think she was just lonely, trying to entertain herself. Like dragging yarn before a cat.”
“So you did.”
“Love her?” He tried to continue but his words got stuck and he had to cough. Somewhere inside of him a bone cracked. “It’s embarrassing to admit, but yeah. I did. I really think I did. Clearly the feeling wasn’t mutual.”
Lydia glanced around his book-lined workshop and felt herself beginning to understand.
“Is that why you did it?”
Tomas didn’t answer.
“Is that why you left me alone in the mudroom? So you could take the ring off her finger?”
“It made sense,” he said.
“It made sense? Are you kidding me?”
“At the time,” he said, breathing loudly. “Look. You might not remember this, but when we arrived at the hospital, within minutes of getting you situated in Pediatrics, Moberg steered me to an empty room on a quiet wing a few floors up. He took away my clothes and boots and had me wear a pair of scrubs. I still had your mom’s ring turned around on my pinkie, but when I realized they were about to photograph my hands right there I asked to use the bathroom and slid it into my teeth. They took my fingerprints and took photos of the scabs on my knuckles and the cut on my palm. They drew my blood.”
“Which was all over Dottie’s skin.”
“You’re starting to sound like Moberg,” he said, holding up a finger with warning. “When it was all over I went back into the bathroom and crumpled the ring into some paper towels and hid it away with my keys and wallet and haven’t uncrumpled it since. But you’ve got to understand why I had to get it. For days I slept in a chair by your hospital bed, and every time I woke up he was standing there, Moberg, ready to start in on me again. I just wanted to take you out of Denver, to get us going on a new life, but that was the last thing he was going to allow.”
“He thought you were guilty.”
“He was making me guilty,” he said. “He was making me a murderer, Lydia. The police had no suspects, none, and as the days went by I could tell that I was fitting that role rather adeptly. They even brought in this bureaucratic crone to talk to me about moving you into foster care. It might be in your daughter’s best interest, she told me. Children were their mother’s job, right? Not the domain of some psychopathic single father. They even brought the hammer into the room, sealed in an evidence bag, and wanted to know why my prints were all over it. I told them I’d run through the house with it—”
“Searching for me. I remember.”
“It was the first thing I saw that morning so I grabbed it. Moberg asked me why I didn’t grab a kitchen knife or a rolling pin and I told him because there was a goddamned hammer in the sink that was obviously up to the job. He didn’t like that one bit, but then Moberg wasn’t ever interested in the truth. He’d concocted this elaborate web around the murders and placed me at the center of it. All he wanted was an answer to the unthinkable. You still want to know why I had to get that ring? Just imagine if he’d known how hard I’d fallen for Dottie. Just imagine what would’ve happened to me, with her dead like that. Just imagine what would’ve happened to you.”
Lydia resisted the urge to push off the floor and escape down the snowy slope to Plath’s car. But she forced herself to calm down, and to remember that she’d come here for a reason.
“You lied to the police.”
“And?”
“And you don’t get to do that,” she said, raising her voice.
“Listen, for a split second in that house, I was lucky enough to have seen myself as others would’ve seen me. A detective like Moberg or a jury of my peers. To them I would’ve been the jilted lover, standing over Dottie’s body with blood on my hands and brain on my shirt. I would’ve been the loser who two days before had proposed running away with her, then tried to electrocute her in her bathtub when she rejected me. I punched a goddamned hole in her wall. They would’ve had close-up photographs of my knuckles on a tripod in the courtroom. And here’s that beautiful Dottie in the hallway with her head bashed in, wearing your mother’s wedding ring. So please don’t talk to me about the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. I’m just lucky I had the foresight to do it.”
His voice echoed in the workshop before recoiling to silence. Lydia felt her shoulders bowing in.
“The Hammerman got away.”
“Yes he did. But that had nothing to do with me. One ring wouldn’t have mattered.”
“It might have.”
“It would’ve mattered in all the wrong ways.”
“It mattered, Dad. Moberg wasted years focusing on you, decades, when he could’ve been finding the Hammerman. All of it mattered.”
“That’s been Moberg’s problem all along,” he said. “He’s been searching all these years for this. For motive. For a reason to pin those murders on me. If he found that ring, he would’ve had his reason—don’t you see that?”
Tomas took off his glasses and wiped his forehead and eyes with his shirttail. His face contorted wildly and Lydia saw that even with all the time in the world to distance himself from that period of his life, it still carried the potency to wreck him.
“You want to tell Moberg what happened, you go right ahead,” he said, slapping the air, finished with her. “I’ve got goddamned work to do.”
Tomas started moving scrap wood from a pile beneath his workbench and stacking it near his table saw, readying his next batch of shelves. His pants were slipping and he tugged them up. His beard held speckles of sawdust.
“What’d you come here for, anyway?” he said, lifting boards and setting them back down with no clear purpose. He huffed and inhaled slowly. “I mean I’m glad to see you, but—”
“I came here about Raj, actually.”
“About Raj?”
“About his parents.”
“What about them?”
“I don’t know exactly. There was something going on back then that we can’t quite figure out. Between them.”
He turned around and crossed his arms and leaned against the workbench.
“We meaning you and Raj? You two are in touch?”
“We are.”
“Raj,” he said. “Well. I like Raj. How’s he doing? I like that guy.”
“Honestly? Not great,” she said. “He wanted me to ask you—we wanted to know, I guess, if you ever noticed anything going on with them. With his parents. In their relationship. Back then.”
“You mean when—”