I shrug. I’ve never known what was special to them about our sixteenth birthday. It wasn’t the rite of passage to us that it was to others. We weren’t gifted cars, like kids in movies.
“Was there something specific”—he tilts forward—“that all of you were staying away from?” He lowers his voice. “Did your parents ever hurt you?”
“What? No!”
“Then why didn’t any of you come back?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know about Charlie and Tate, other than Tate doesn’t do anything without Charlie and Charlie wanted to stay in New York. But me, I just—my brother ran away—and I waited for him until I was nineteen, until I finally took him for his word, what he said in the note about never coming back. And I wasn’t as close with the rest of my family as I was with him.”
That’s an understatement. The truth is, it felt pointless to get close to them. Mom was always dying in front of us, each reenactment more convincing than the last, so I began to think of her as only half there. Dad was there even less, lacing his boots to head out hunting, barely registering my presence, even as we stood in the same circle for Honorings. Charlie and Tate were a unit, indifferent and impenetrable to Andy and me—which was fine, because Andy and I were a unit, too, and as long as I had him, I knew I was valued, complete.
Andy gave me the best of everything. If we split a sandwich, he handed me the bigger half. If he grabbed two glasses from the cabinet, he offered me the one without water spots. If we sat on the porch steps, he gestured for me to take the seat in the sun. I’d say to him, You deserve the best thing, too, you know, and he’d reply, No I don’t. Not like you.
“So if he wasn’t here,” I say to Elijah around the lump in my throat, “if he wasn’t going to be here—then I didn’t see the need to be here either.”
Elijah scribbles, then turns the page, scribbles again. “And what about your groundskeeper, John Fritz,” he says, eyes on the words he writes even as he speaks. “Did he ever hurt you?”
“Fritz?” I spit out. “Why would Fritz ever hurt me? I’ve known him my whole life.”
He snaps his head up. “People we’ve known our whole lives can still hurt us. Some might argue they can hurt us more.”
“More than what?”
He glances at the page. “A stranger.”
He pulls in his lower lip, chewing it for a moment. Through the doors, I hear someone’s footsteps. They get close, get silent, and then they move away.
Elijah clears his throat. “It appears a crime’s been committed. You understand that, right?”
My mind leaps to Andy’s namesake, all those Borden crime scene photos. The couch with a back like three cresting waves. Andrew’s head against the pillow as if he’d merely been napping.
But the blood. The split skull. The implication of an ax.
It isn’t Andy, lying out there. He’s in Jacksonville or Lansing, or some city I haven’t covered yet in my latest round of searches, but he isn’t—he has not been—here.
“I understand,” I say. “But I don’t know who was killed out there. And I don’t know who killed them either. And you can’t possibly think… Fritz?”
Fritz who rested his arm on the handle of a rake, watching us laugh in our leaf piles. Fritz who swept more leaves together, telling us, Go ahead, dive in. Fritz with a pronounced limp, from an injury he doesn’t talk about. Fritz who picks up every caterpillar he finds, strokes its back, wishes it good luck in the cocoon.
“We’re going to be investigating all possibilities,” Elijah says.
“Okay. So does that include the Blackburn Killer? Because Fritz isn’t a murderer. But we’ve got one, don’t we? On this island? One your dad failed to find.”
Elijah squints at me. We both know it isn’t fair to put that on Chief Kraft. The Blackburn Killer was masterfully elusive, his kills sporadic enough to seem almost random. Two years went by between the first two murders, four between the final two, and the month always varied; the first woman was killed in September, and the last, nineteen years later, in July.
The police never found his DNA, either. When he dragged the bodies into shallow water, he made sure of that. By the time they washed back onto shore—a different stretch of shore each time—the salty ocean had licked them clean. And another thing: the nails of the women were always immaculate, not a single foreign cell stuck beneath them.
In one of Greta’s breathless monologues about the Blackburn Killer, she told me how the police focused on the blue dresses for a while, tried to find who designed them, where they’d been purchased, but that was a dead end, too, as if the gowns, gauzy and cold, had been stitched from the ocean itself. Even the branding iron, with which the Blackburn Killer marked the women’s ankles, led police nowhere. Experts said the curve of the B was “crude and rudimentary,” Greta explained, so they think it was made by the killer himself.
“Surely you know,” Elijah says, “that the death in question is nothing like the deaths of those women. They were discovered on the shore, for one thing. This person was buried.” He pauses. “On your property.”
I tighten my grip on the mug.
“But as I said,” he continues, “we’ll be investigating all possibilities.”
On the table beside him, his phone rings. He frowns at its screen.
“Excuse me, I need to take this.”
As he slides apart the living room doors, the darkness of the foyer gapes like the mouth of a cave. Strange that nobody’s turned on the chandelier, that the eight p.m. sky seems brighter than the inside of our house. Elijah steps outside to answer his phone, and I feel my way along the walls, following the voices coming from the kitchen.
The swinging door is closed, but when I open it, there’s finally light—a little, at least, from the bulb above the stove. Tate and Charlie sit at the counter, legs dangling from stools, palms circling mugs. Mom paces back and forth between the sink and the oven.
“Is Detective Good Boy done with you?” Charlie slurs, and I don’t think it’s tea in his mug.
“He got a call.”
“From the bone people?” Tate asks, her spine straightening.
“Is that what we’re calling them?” Charlie says. “I’m fine with it if we are. Did you see that one guy, the really tall one? He can bone me whenever he wants.”
“Charles!” Mom says, voice like a whip.
“Sorry, Mom. Sorry. Not my fault—it’s the city. It’s made me so crass.”
“It’s made you an ass,” Tate mumbles, and Charlie slaps his hand over his heart, pretending to reel from a stab.
“Stop,” Tate whines. She puts her elbows on the counter, massaging her temples. “You’re acting like we’re hanging out at a bar or something, when really—”
“Oh,” Charlie cuts her off, looking around as if taking in his surroundings for the first time. “This isn’t a bar? No wonder the service sucks.”
“—when really,” Tate continues, “we’re waiting to hear if it was our brother out there.”
“It wasn’t Andy,” I say.
Charlie turns so sharply I almost jump.
“Is that what Kraft said?” he asks.
“No. I just know. He’s not dead.”
Mom makes it over to me in two quick strides. “You’ve spoken to him, haven’t you—your brother?” She picks up my hand, stroking the back of it with a firm, insistent touch. “In these last ten years, you’ve heard from him, right? And maybe you didn’t tell me because he needed more time away, but… you know where he is, don’t you?”
Her eyes are frantic, flicking like a too-fast metronome.
“I…” I start to say, but the kitchen door swings open behind me, and I look back to find Elijah Kraft. In one hand, he holds his cell phone, and in the other, dangling at his side, is the notepad where he’s been writing down our lives.
Mom’s grip on my hand tightens. Tate and Charlie perk up on their stools.
“Is there news?” Tate asks, just as Mom says, “Wh
at is it?”
Elijah glances at his feet, and when he looks up, he looks around—at the clock that’s always broken, at the Honoring calendar pinned to the wall, at the butcher block and all its knives.
“I’m afraid,” he begins—and right away, it’s like someone turns down the volume, “that we’ve been able to confirm it.”
And this, as he continues, comes to me as only a whisper: “The remains in that grave, they belong to…”
And this—like a blade thrusting toward me—comes to me in silence (but I’d know the shape of his name anywhere; I can see it on Elijah’s lips): “Andy.”
Mom screams. I see her mouth split open, her face go red, but I don’t hear it. I don’t hear anything at all.
three
On our thirteenth birthday, Andy carved his name into the wall beneath my bedroom window. Even then, he was thinking of leaving.
We should go, he said, concentrating on the knife. We’re old enough now to figure things out on our own.
But I didn’t feel old enough. We’d only just reached the age at which Mary Phagan was raped and strangled, her body found in the basement of the pencil factory where she worked. We were only just as old as Lisa Ann Millican had been when she was abducted by a disturbed couple, who, among other horrors, injected her with drain cleaner. At thirteen, I was still scared to venture too far beyond our door. It wasn’t until I was nineteen, living without Andy for three years already, that it became scarier to walk the halls of a house where I could only trail after his ghost.
I didn’t know, then, that “ghost” was not a metaphor. That whatever slip of energy that made him him had already detached from his skin, or that his skin itself was a disintegrating thing, a feast for grubs and worms. But how could I not have known? For ten years, I’ve watched for him, searched for him, worn out the letters of his name on my laptop keys—certain that he was out there, his heart still beating in sync with mine. I always thought that, if he died, I’d feel it, like a coffin snapping shut on my own body. But all this time, I’ve been breathing just fine; all this time, I’ve been wrong.
I’m sitting on my old beanbag chair, the twin to one in Andy’s room, and as I shift, I brace myself for pain. I had no idea how demanding grief is of the body. My eyes feel like they’ve been used as punching bags. I’m thirstier than I can ever remember being, but there’s a hundred-pound weight in my stomach, my chest, my throat, and I don’t know if I can make it to the kitchen for water. I hear footsteps down there, heavy ones that seem to shake the walls. For a moment, I think they must be Dad’s, but then I pause, and I remember. And though his loss is not the one that’s crushing me now, I wince about it anyway. It’s a terrible thing, forgetting someone is dead.
I should check on Mom. Even though she never looked for Andy, the way she gripped my hand last night, the way hope bled from her mouth as she insisted I knew where he’s been—that meant something to me. It meant she lost a piece of herself when she let him go, and all these years she’s been wishing he’d bring it back. But now she’s lost even more: Andy, for good, and her husband, too—a man she always seemed in awe of, a man whose mild attention was enough to make her blush.
As I stand up, I find I’m still in yesterday’s clothes: oversize sweater, dark gray leggings. My bag is in the corner of my room, but I don’t care enough to reach inside it and dig for another outfit. I step into the hall, legs shaky and sore, but I barely make it ten feet before Charlie, holding a large box, rounds a corner and crashes into me.
“Dolls,” he says as I stumble back. He sets the box on the floor and stands there, one shoulder lower than the other, dragged down by his usual slouch. I can smell the alcohol wafting off him, but it smells old, the residue of whatever was in his mug last night.
“What are you—” I try to ask, but he leaps forward, engulfing me in a hug so tight I gasp.
“You must be dying,” he says. “God, if anything ever happened to Tate, I’d just… I know she’s not my twin, but still. It always felt like it was me and her, and you and Andy, and now it’s just… you.”
I can’t breathe; my lungs feel pinned to my ribs. Then Charlie takes a step back, gripping my shoulders and shaking me in a way that jump-starts my breath.
“You’re going to get through this,” he says. He scans the hallway. “We all are. I’m making sure of that.”
I look at the box near my feet. “What is this?”
“It’s from the attic. Our old murder reports. We’re going to include them in the memorial.”
“In… Dad’s memorial?”
“Dad’s and Andy’s. We’re doing a joint one, I’ve decided.”
And there it is again, that pinned-lung feeling. Memorials are for saying goodbye, but I’ve only just discovered Andy’s gone. Really gone, I mean, not a runaway, not anonymous in some city—but gone. In the ground.
“But not only that!” Charlie adds. “We’re going to make it a museum of sorts. The Lighthouse Memorial Museum.” He splays his hands in the air, palms out, spreading them farther apart with each word, as if he’s seeing the name lit up on some theater marquee.
I manage a syllable: “What?”
He drops his hands. “The vultures are circling. The rest of the islanders—they know something’s happened. I got up early this morning, went for a walk into town to clear my head, and a mother accosted me with her baby. ‘Is it true?’ she asked. ‘Two Lighthouses are dead?’ I don’t even know how she knew who I was. Maybe she’s asking everyone. But the way she said our name… It was like we’re these dangerous, blood-sucking freaks, living in Murder Mansion, plotting our next move. But I’ve played Biff in Death of a Salesman, Dolls!”
He shakes his head, indignant. “My instinct was to get away from her,” he adds, “just like we always did.”
Mom encouraged us to steer clear of the islanders. She said they wouldn’t understand our way of life, and with their murmurs of “Murder Mansion,” their gazes that followed us whenever we left the house, it was clear she was right.
“But look where that division got us,” Charlie says. “Andy was axed to death!”
“You think one of the islanders did it?” I ask, even though axed to death makes the hallway spin around me.
Charlie stares at me, his eyes opaque. Unreadable. “Yes,” he says. “Someone on this island did it.”
“The Blackburn Killer?”
Charlie hesitates before he shakes his head again, this time like a dog shaking off rain. “They don’t— Nobody knows, Dahlia. But my point is: I’m not hiding anymore. We’re not hiding anymore. The idea came to me this morning like a lightning strike. In five days, we’re going to open our doors to everyone, for one day only—limited viewings draw the best crowds—and we’re going to let them witness it all. I’m collecting artifacts—papers, candles, items from the victim room—anything that tells the story of who we’ve been. It’s time for everyone to see we’re not some freaks on top of the hill. We’re people. We were brought up differently, sure, but we’re human beings, for fuck’s sake.”
He picks up the box and stomps toward the stairs—as if that’s the end of it. As if it’s his decision alone as to who can enter our house or snoop through our things.
“Wait.” I follow him downstairs. Our footsteps rattle the frames along the staircase, and I glance at Mom’s parents—smiling in birthday hats, blowing smoke rings at each other in lieu of a kiss, oblivious to the guns that were coming for their heads.
Charlie carries his box to the living room, dumping it on a stack of others teetering on top of the coffee table. “Find anything, Tate?” he asks, and now I see our sister crouched in the corner, rummaging through the bottom shelf of a cabinet. She’s pointedly not in yesterday’s clothes. Her sweater is a too-cheerful yellow, and her hair, freshly showered, cascades down her back in glossy waves.
“Sort of,” she says, words muffled. She jolts when she sees me. Clamped between her teeth is a paintbrush, but she yanks it out to say my name, h
er lips an unnatural red.
“How are you doing?” she asks, walking toward me, arms outstretched—and again, what is with these hugs? Doesn’t she remember how, as kids, she literally shooed me and Andy—Shoo, little ones, shoo!—whenever we’d ask what she and Charlie were whispering about? Doesn’t she remember how, the last time I saw her, she read Andy’s note like it might accuse her of something, her eyes squinty with caution but not concern?
As she pulls me in, the end of her paintbrush stabs my shoulder blade. “Oops,” she says. “I’ve been gathering supplies.” She turns back to Charlie but keeps her hand on my arm. “There’s not much here; I’ll have to go into town. I can pick up whatever you need while I’m there.”
“So you’re on board,” I say, “with this… Lighthouse Museum thing?”
“Lighthouse Memorial Museum,” Charlie pipes in. “But we can shorten it to LMM, if that’s easier for everyone.”
“I’m on board in the sense that Charlie will do what Charlie wants to do,” Tate says. “It’s not my preferred way to memorialize our family, but I respect the intention behind it.”
“But you’re actively helping with it?” I say, nodding at the paintbrush in her hand.
“Oh!” She looks at the brush like she forgot she was holding it. “No. This is for my own project. A new diorama.”
My mouth drops open. “You’re making one now?”
“I have to. It’s all— It’s too much otherwise. I need to process. And this is how I do that. If I can remake Andy’s body, I can—”
“Wait,” I stop her. “You’re doing a diorama of Andy?”
“Of course,” she says, standing straighter. “He was murdered, Dahlia. He was… All this time, he’s been there.” She points toward the back of the house. “I need to make sense of that. Don’t you?”
“Not to fifty-seven thousand strangers I don’t!” I whip toward Charlie. “Not to an island full of people who’ve always thought we were monsters.”
“That’s not what my Instagram is about,” Tate says, her voice overlapping Charlie’s.
“That’s the whole point!” he bellows, stabbing a triumphant finger into the air. “They won’t think of us as monsters after this.”
The Family Plot Page 3