“Oh, Mom, not again,” Tate says.
“What?” I ask.
“She’s been guilt-tripping us,” Charlie says.
“No.” Mom shakes her head. “No guilt trip.”
“She’s mad,” he continues, “that we’ve stayed away for so long.”
“I’m not mad,” Mom insists. “I’ve just missed you, that’s all.”
Tate puts her arm around Mom’s shoulder. “Do I or do I not call you three times a week?” she asks. “And do I or do I not send you all the treats you can only get in Manhattan? You said you loved those chocolates from Moretti’s.”
“I did love those chocolates,” Mom agrees. “I just love you all more.”
“Aw. That’s sweet,” Charlie says, but there’s something tart in his tone. “But like we told you yesterday, which I’m sure Dahlia would agree with—” He looks at me meaningfully, urging me to mimic his nod. “We’ve had to make our way. And that requires distance. Time. I’ve been gone as long as I lived here, and I’m still adjusting to the world.”
Mom swivels to face Charlie, her jaw quivering. “I always meant,” she says, “to prepare you for that. For the outside world. That’s what everything was for.”
She extends her arm toward a photo on the wall, one where her parents laugh at some party, each with a cigarette between their fingers, and she caresses the frame slowly. It’s a haunted gesture, as if she’s trying to touch the past, trying to save her parents from their future.
“What Charlie means,” Tate says, cutting him a glance, “is just—there’s so much life out there, you know? I had no idea how much! The world is huge with it.”
Mom’s fingers drop from the frame. Her shoulders slump.
“And in a way,” Tate adds, squeezing Mom closer, “I appreciate it more, I think, because of everything you taught us. Don’t you agree, Dahlia?”
Tate’s eyes lock onto mine, and they’re so blue, so hypnotic, that I find myself nodding. But then I remember Mom’s response to Andy’s runaway note—Your brother’s chosen his own path—and I don’t know why I’m bothering to comfort her. She’s never cared before if we stayed away, and I still haven’t forgiven her for that, for giving Andy up so easily.
The fact is, we all had our reasons for never coming back. Charlie claimed he needed to stay close to the city, be ready at the drop of a hat for whatever new role might open up. And because Charlie didn’t return to Blackburn, Tate didn’t either. Codependent, Greta tsked when I told her how they’ve lived together in the same Manhattan walk-up ever since they both got their inheritance. And me, I lasted only three years in the house without Andy, done with dodging the shadows that piled up like dust bunnies in every corner. But what about him? He left without telling me why, without even saying goodbye, and I’ve had to live all these years in the not knowing, which is a lonely, comfortless place.
I know he was troubled by things I wasn’t. I know he took his ax to the trees in the woods—not to cut them down, but to wound them, scar them, to make them carry something on their bark he couldn’t hold inside him anymore. I know his emotions ran hot and hard; he was quick to anger, frustration. But what was it that made him run? I don’t believe—I’ve never believed—that our “unnatural” life was enough of a reason. I haven’t forgiven our family for letting him go, and I haven’t forgiven him, either, for going.
“I’m just glad you’re here now,” Mom says to us. “The circumstances are dreadful, of course, but I’m happy to have all my children back home.”
All?
Did she really just say all?
“Did you—”
But I’m cut off by a shout bursting through the back door.
“Mrs. Lighthouse! Mrs. Lighthouse!”
The urgency in Fritz’s voice prickles the hair on the back of my neck.
He limps into the foyer, quick as a man nearing eighty can. His right leg—the bad one—drags a little, and his long, milky hair is streaked with dirt.
Mom rushes down the stairs to meet him. “What is it?” she asks.
Charlie, Tate, and I clomp down as well, and when Fritz spots me, he does a double take. “You came,” he says, breathy from running, from shouting.
“Of course I came,” I say, for the second time. “What’s going on?”
“It’s… Outside, I…”
He trails off, prompting Charlie to roll his eyes. “What is it? Is everything o-kay?” And I remember this now—how Charlie used to speak to Fritz as if he were dumb.
“No. N-n-no,” Fritz stammers, his focus still on Mom. “I was in the woods out back, digging up Mr. Lighthouse’s plot, and—”
“We’re burying him here?” Charlie asks Mom.
“Of course. They’ll transport him when we’re ready.”
“But— Isn’t that a bit… ghoulish?” Charlie asks. And it’s a strange question, given our lives.
Mom’s shoulders roll back as if he’s offended her. “Not at all. That’s where my parents are buried. It’s the family plot. We put in stones for your father and me.”
“Um, guys?” Tate says. She gestures to Fritz, whose eyes are wide, seemingly all pupil.
“I don’t know what…” our groundskeeper starts. “Or-or how, but somebody’s already…”
“Already what? Spit it out!” Charlie booms, plucking his bourbon off the credenza.
Fritz swallows then, throat bobbing in his neck like all those actors in the crime scene reenactments we saw, their fear looking hard and bulbous inside them. It makes me swallow, too, makes me rub at the hair still rising on the back of my neck. But when Fritz speaks again, his voice doesn’t waver.
“Somebody’s already buried in Mr. Lighthouse’s plot. And I think—” Fritz shifts his gaze to me. “I think it’s Andy.”
two
“When was the last time you spoke to your brother?”
A detective is here. He’s sitting across from me in the living room, and he’s got a notepad and a pen and a sympathetic smile I don’t need. Before this, people in white jumpsuits were shuffling back and forth between a van in the driveway and the woods in our backyard. They took samples from the bones, or something like that. Because it’s mostly just bones; it isn’t Andy.
“It’s not my brother in that grave,” I tell the detective.
“I hope you’re right,” he says. “And we’re working right now to identify the remains. Dental records, DNA. But in the meantime, your groundskeeper seemed sure it was Andy. Do you have any idea why that might be?”
“You questioned him, didn’t you?”
“I did. But I’d like to hear what you think.”
I squeeze my mug of hours-old tea. “It’s the ax. You talked to my siblings, so I’m sure they told you: Andy used to hack at the trees in our backyard.”
“He’d chop them down?”
“No, not chop. More like… chip. He’d chip away at them, when he was stressed or angry. It was a coping mechanism.”
He leans forward, repositions his pen. “Coping mechanism for what?”
“For… I don’t know. He’d get mad sometimes. But I guess—well, Fritz said—there was an ax in the… that that’s what…”
“The body was buried with an ax,” he finishes for me, “and the skull has fractures consistent with the blade of that ax, leading us to believe, at this point, that the person whose remains are in that grave was killed by the ax they were buried with. And the ax in question appears to belong to your brother. Apparently he carved his name into the handle?”
Andy had bitten his lip as he engraved it, slicing out the A, the N, struggling with the curve in the D. The skin around his eyes, which crinkled so easily, had crimped with concentration.
“That’s right,” I say. “But if the murder weapon was Andy’s ax, wouldn’t the assumption be that Andy was the killer—not the one killed?”
“You think your brother murdered someone?”
“Of course not. I’m just saying: it’s not my brother in that grave.
My family told you he ran away, right? Ten years ago. Anyone could have used the ax after that. But not on him. He was already gone.”
“So you’ve spoken to him in the last decade?”
“Yes, I— Well, no. Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
The curtain behind him sways, a tiny shiver of movement. And even though the living room doors are closed and the windows are locked, I know it’s just a draft. I don’t think for a moment that it might be Andy’s ghost.
“No,” I say. “I haven’t spoken to him.”
I’ve learned that outsiders don’t understand the link between Andy and me. I tried explaining it to Greta once, but even she just scrunched up her nose. You mean, like, telepathy? she asked. And I stopped right there, didn’t bother to describe the time I was lying in bed, something like two a.m., rereading a book on the Black Dahlia. I had a flashlight under the covers, hand over my mouth as I got to the part about the cuts across her face, and I heard my door squeak open. I popped my head out from under the blankets to find Andy, who’d felt my horror in his sleep and had been wakened by it like an alarm. He whispered at me then to put the book away, allow my namesake to rest for once.
We knew things about each other, Andy and I, without ever having to utter a word. So if my brother were dead, I would feel it. I would know.
“What makes you think he ran away?” the detective asks.
I tap my fingernail against the mug. “He left a note. My mom told you that already.”
He nods, flipping back a few pages in his notebook. “The only way out is to never come back,” he reads. “What did he mean by that?”
I tap some more, and he looks at my finger, which instantly stops me.
“What did my family say it meant?” I ask.
“Your sister said to ask you. That you were closest with Andy.”
“I am closest with Andy,” I correct him—because, really, past tense? It’s just bones in a hole in the ground, and Andy’s out there, in Vegas maybe, where people spend thousands each night on the hope for a brighter tomorrow, where any shadows are chased away by flashing, exuberant lights. I bet no one talks about murder out there. I bet he loves it.
“He wanted something different,” I tell the detective, “from the way we were raised.”
“And how were you raised, exactly?”
I stare at him. “I think you know.”
With all the commotion before—the people in white jumpsuits; Fritz tracking dirt into the house, throwing condolences around as if he had any way of knowing it was Andy in that grave—I didn’t recognize the detective at first. He seemed a few years older than me, and he looked like anybody: thin, average height, dark hair that swooped at the top, like a cat had been licking him. But when we started this “interview,” he introduced himself to me again—Elijah Kraft—and I almost laughed. You’re Chief Kraft’s son, I said, and he had the decency, at least, to look a little sheepish. He’s not the chief anymore, he told me. My father’s in a nursing home. For dementia. I think I was supposed to feel sorry for him. But was Edmond Kraft sorry? Did he ever think of it all—his obsession with us back then; his slinking around our property, always with the intention to catch us in some dark, criminal act—and feel even a tinge of remorse? I doubt it. Chief Kraft was like everyone else: suspicious of us, monitoring us, believing himself entitled to his intrusions.
“I know the rumors,” Elijah says.
“Ones your father probably started.”
“I know they call this place Murder Mansion.”
“They’re idiots,” I say.
“I know your family worships the dead.”
And at this, I actually do laugh.
“No?” Elijah asks, jotting something down. “Is that incorrect?”
“We honor the dead,” I tell him. “Specifically, victims of murder.”
Which Andy isn’t. He isn’t.
“And what does that mean exactly?” Elijah asks. “To honor them?”
I glance at the living room doors, slid together, shut tight. It feels so odd, to talk about this with a stranger, especially Chief Kraft’s son. I can picture Mom, listening at the door, bristling as I speak. But this man is a detective, he’s seen bones in our backyard, and I know what he’s thinking.
“On the anniversaries of their murders,” I say, “we would light candles for them. Say their name, say a prayer. The idea was to meditate on their death—but more important, their life.”
“A prayer to whom?” he asks, eyes stuck to whatever he’s writing. “You said you didn’t worship them, but prayer is a means of worship, right?”
His pen races across the page, moving too much for the little I’ve said. “A prayer on their behalf,” I reply.
“To God?”
“No, not to God. To… I don’t know.”
My siblings and I never took the Honorings as seriously as our parents did. Charlie made faces as we lit the candles, shimmied his shoulders as we chanted the words, and the rest of us smothered our smiles so Mom wouldn’t see. It was never the murders we were mocking, or the victims themselves—we respected every story we learned. It was just the “silly, incessant ritual” of it all, as Charlie once said, the idea that candles and a sentence could do anything for the dead.
“You don’t know,” Elijah repeats.
“God wasn’t part of our homeschool curriculum.”
Now he looks at me. His eyes, shadowed by dark brows, narrow. “I’ve heard it referred to as ‘the murder curriculum.’ Is it true that’s all you learned about? Murder?”
“We learned about mur-ders,” I correct him.
“And that was your whole education? Just… murder?”
“Mur-ders,” I say again, because there’s a world of difference. “We learned plenty of other things, too. I know math up to trigonometry. I know supernovas and black holes. I know the Gettysburg Address. I just also know Rachel Nickell.”
Forty-nine stab wounds; killed in broad daylight; her two-year-old son covered in her blood.
“And she is?” Elijah prompts.
I remember Mom’s reenactment. This was something she did to illustrate the brutality of a crime—and to protect us against it. She believed that if we witnessed the horrors that others had experienced, we’d recognize the same danger if it ever came our way. For Rachel Nickell’s reenactment, she wore an outfit of all white, and jabbed herself with a red marker, scribbling on her shirt to indicate blood. Forty-nine times she struck herself. Forty-nine times I flinched.
“She was murdered,” I say.
He bites the inside of his cheek, but it feels like he’s biting his tongue. “I see.” He looks at his notebook again. “So you say Andy left ten years ago, when the two of you were sixteen.”
“The night of our sixteenth birthday. Yes.”
“And what was he like that day? The last time you saw him.”
“He was fine,” I say. “Our siblings had come back for the first time since they’d left home. It’d been eight years since we’d seen Charlie, seven since Tate. So he was excited.”
Excited is not the right word, but I’m certain that the real ones—moody, jittery—would only keep the detective jotting in his notebook. I remember it well, though: the way Andy’s leg shook beneath the table like a jackhammer. I remember, later, Charlie staring at us from across the candles as we said the prayers for our namesakes. He seemed astonished by us, almost unsettled, like he’d only now remembered we existed. I glanced at Andy to see if he’d noticed our brother’s stare, but he was scowling at his candle as if he could blow out its flame with only his gaze.
He’d been stormy for days, spending more time with the trees, his ax. Whenever I asked him what was wrong, he snapped away from me like a startled animal. Nothing, I’m just tired, I haven’t been sleeping well—and he did have bags beneath his eyes, dark as bruises. On our birthday, he went to bed soon after the Honoring, grumbling about Tate and Charlie, how they scurried away together into one of thei
r rooms before the smoke from the candles had even cleared. He’d been planning to ask them about “out,” he said. That’s what he called it. Out.
“Excited,” Elijah echoes. “So excited he ran away that night? So excited he said, The only way out is to never come back?”
I fidget with my mug. “We were very sheltered growing up. We really only left the island a handful of times. And I think Andy saw Charlie and Tate that night, back from a big city, and got inspired to leave early. Be out in the world like them.”
That’s what I’ve been telling myself, for all these years. But inspired or not, Andy broke something that night when he left. I always pictured our connection like a silver cord between us, a taut wire, but when he wrote that note, snuck into the darkness to wait for the ferry, he might as well have cut it in two. Hacked it apart with his ax.
“Inspired to leave early,” Elijah mumbles, reading back his notes. “Earlier than what?”
“Eighteen. When we were supposed to leave.”
His expression darkens. “You were forced to leave at eighteen?”
“No, not forced, just— Our siblings did it first, when they each gained control of their trust funds. And Andy and I planned to do the same.”
The trust fund is how I manage the way I do—jobless, hunched over my laptop, scouring photos of any crowd on social media, looking for crinkly eyes, for the cowlick on the back of Andy’s head.
Elijah nods, writing down my answer.
“And once someone in your family left home,” he says, “they just… never returned? Until now, anyway?” He pauses. “I was sorry to hear about your father.”
But he doesn’t sound sorry. He sounds suspicious. His gaze creeps around my head to the wall behind me, where Honoring candles are stacked like skinny firewood on the shelves.
“Like I said,” I tell him, “Charlie and Tate came back one time.”
“That’s right. On the night before you noticed Andy was gone. Ten years ago. Why did they come back on that night in particular?”
The Family Plot Page 2