Lydia frantically read the article. She learned that after dropping his deposit bag into the after-hours slot at the bank, Mr. Patel had returned to Gas ’n Donuts to pick up his wife and finish locking up. When he stepped out of his Monte Carlo, someone emerged from the darkness behind the dumpsters and shot him multiple times in the back, then in the head. The police were speculating that the shooter wanted the deposits and panicked when it was discovered that Mr. Patel had already been to the bank. A passing driver may have seen someone walking away on foot, but no further information was known about the assailant.
—Maybe you should go over to the doughnut shop, Plath said, pay your respects.
—I don’t have any respects.
The Hammerman was dead, and Lydia’s immediate reaction had been to rush to a phone and try calling Raj again to find out if he knew, what he knew, and to see if there was anything she could do to help. All afternoon his phone rang and his answering machine didn’t pick up, and even when she stopped by his apartment on the way home from work no one answered the door. She considered calling Gas ’n Donuts or his parents’ house but couldn’t bring herself to punch the digits.
Early the following morning, as a few yawning BookFrogs lined up at Bright Ideas for their day’s wordy intake, Lydia stood at the newsstand, combing through the paper for any updates. She’d barely dented the Metro section when Raj came rushing across the floor and landed smack in the center of her embrace.
—Raj, my god, your dad.
—I know.
—How’s your mom—?
—They got her, he said.
—What?
—The police. They got her.
Then he collapsed into sobs and had to plant his hand against the magazine racks in order to stop himself from falling sideways.
—They took her, Lydia. They took my mom.
Raj didn’t tip over, but he did end up with one arm around Lydia’s shoulder as they hobbled to a table in the coffee shop.
Raj had been at his mom’s side nonstop during the thirty-two hours since the shooting, but it wasn’t until the two of them had been called into the station near City Park for yet another informational session that one of the detectives, a young guy with big ears who seemed embarrassed to be there, came into the room and asked Mrs. Patel if she wanted to enlist a lawyer. Then he presented the old Montgomery Ward .22 rifle that Mr. Patel had kept under the Gas ’n Donuts counter for years. The rookie had barely even placed it on the table before asking Mrs. Patel if she had any idea how it had ended up in the dumpster behind the shop.
She did, she told him. And yes, she would very much like that lawyer now.
Years ago, it was Mr. Patel who’d advised her that in the event of a life-threatening situation, she should yank back the slide, aim the rusty rifle, and pull the trigger until the tube was empty. Spray and pray, he’d called it, and that’s exactly what she had done behind the dumpsters that night, just after Lydia left the shop: waited for her husband to step out of his car, then fired. Three bullets hit his back, two hit his head, and five hit the car—though not in that order. Then she ditched the gun and called the police.
—They let me stay with her for a while as we waited for the lawyer, Raj said, and she told me everything.
—Everything?
Raj wouldn’t look Lydia in the eye.
—Enough, anyway. It won’t be long before she tells the police everything, too. It’s like she wanted to get caught.
Lydia considered asking Raj what he’d meant by enough, but he seemed so distraught that she knew this wasn’t the time. She thought about the last words Mrs. Patel had said to her, on the slushy night of the shooting as she exited the doughnut shop: I will make it up to him. To Joey. Her lost son. She’d tried.
There at the coffee shop, Lydia bought Raj a pastry and a bottle of juice. They sat together for a long time, mostly in silence, and when he left the store that afternoon, he put on a pair of sunglasses and gave her a clumsy kiss on the cheek. On the way out he bumped into a table of books.
For Lydia, Mr. Patel’s murder had reaffirmed something that she’d been gradually facing up to her entire life: the Hammerman would always be with her. He occupied an immeasurable space inside her that would never be altered by the outside world—not by rifle shots or a therapist’s couch or a child’s tiny grip on her finger—and, paradoxical though it was, the reliability of this had always offered her some strange semblance of identity. Even if Mr. Patel was forever gone, the Hammerman would always be out there, and Lydia would always be that girl beneath the sink.
Always Little Lydia.
Which was why what happened to her on the night before Thanksgiving felt so unexpected. She’d been in the kitchen, drinking a glass of the wine that Raj had brought, plunging her hand into the turkey and trying to pry out a bag of giblets that were still frozen to its cavity, when Raj abruptly stopped changing channels.
“Are you seeing this?” he said, his voice eager and unsteady. “Lydia? Quick—come in here!”
Lydia was up to her elbow in the turkey but when she looked at the television she could see a static image of the O’Tooles’ small, familiar house. Without washing her hands she stepped toward the couch. She felt her skin tighten and everything but the screen faded away. A buried phrase crackled from the television: Little Lydia, the voice said—only it had been sifted through an accent and surrounded by rolling Spanish: Leetil Leedyah.
“What is this?” Raj said, turning to look at her. “Should we turn it off?”
“Turn it up.”
“It’s in Spanish,” he said, looking at the remote. “Some kind of ghost-hunting show. Do you even get this channel?”
“No idea.”
Most of what appeared on the screen was filmed through an obnoxious green night-vision camera that tracked through the O’Tooles’ house in the dark. In the center of the green, a flashlight halo dragged over the carpet and the walls and the pictures and the doors. The production values were painfully low, yet she could see that the O’Tooles’ orange shag carpet had been replaced by a speckled brown Berber and that all the fixtures had been updated. Otherwise the layout of the home was almost exactly the same, as if the new family were working from the blueprints of the old.
Raj covered his mouth with his hand.
“Oh my god,” he said. “That’s inside Carol’s house?”
Lydia could only nod.
The host of the program was a histrionic thirtysomething with slick black hair and a black leather jacket. As he walked through the house, he whispered into the camera, periodically raising a finger and allowing his eyes to roam from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. He opened closet doors and peeled back the shower curtain, and occasionally the screen would cut to a close-up of the Ghostometer, a ridiculous contraption that looked like a mix between an old-fashioned radio and a pasta colander. An outdated oscilloscope screen attached to the device showed a glowing flat line of inactivity, at least until he carried it into the hallway, just near the master bedroom doorway. The host looked at the camera with wide eyes when the beeps grew frantic and the display showed a flurry of green waves.