The Family Plot

by Megan Collins

  I gape at them both, each so adamant that theirs is the correct way to mourn. But Andy would hate it all: the spectacle of it, how unnatural it feels. He’d grab my wrist, pierce me with an urgent stare, tell me for the hundredth time that we should leave.

  If I’d listened to him, would he be alive right now? Would I have run away with him one night, stood by his side on the ferry as we watched the ocean throw itself against the rocks? Maybe we would have made it out there, together, Leaving Money be damned. Maybe we’d mimic our siblings’ choices: live in the same apartment, cheer each other on as we followed our separate dreams. But my only dream has been to find my twin, so now what do I do?

  “You better get a move on,” Charlie says to Tate, “if you want to be done in time.”

  Tate nods, brushing past me with a sad, pitying glance, and heads for the stairs.

  “Done in time for what?” I ask.

  Charlie opens the box on top of his stack, pulls out some papers, and answers me as he reads. “For the museum. The diorama will be a very popular exhibit.”

  “She’s going to display it?” I seethe. I’m about to keep going, tell our brother that his and Tate’s grief is shredding their sanity, but Charlie raises his head sharply, sniffs a few times, and squints at the foyer behind me.

  “What’s that?” he asks.

  I turn to see that the air is blurred. Smoke billows past the living room, rising up the stairs.

  “Something’s burning,” Charlie declares—and I smell it, too, as soon as he says it.

  “Kitchen!” I blurt, but he’s already on his way there. I lift the collar of my sweater to cover my mouth as I follow.

  When we burst through the swinging door, we find Mom waving a cloth toward the oven, coughing into her arm. It’s a strange sight; I’ve never known her to burn anything. Dad did most of the cooking, but on his hunting days, Mom made dinner so he could eat as soon as he got back. On those nights, roasts were medium rare at best, potatoes difficult to cut. Undercooked, Charlie would grumble, and Dad would hiss at him to be grateful, prompting an appreciative twinkle in Mom’s eyes.

  “What is this?” Charlie asks.

  “It’s cookies!” Mom says, shoving her arm into the smoke to pull a pan of thin black discs from the oven. She drops it onto the stove as if it’s burned her through her mitt.

  The three of us stare at these supposed cookies: charred skins, overlapping edges.

  “Please don’t tell me these are for the LMM,” Charlie says.

  “LMM?” Mom asks.

  “That’s what we’re calling the Lighthouse Memorial Museum,” he replies. “It was Dahlia’s idea.” He winks at me.

  I wait for Mom to protest his plans for the memorial. She was the one who made us live this way—shuttered and shut in, protected from people like the ones who killed her parents, our boundaries shrinking smaller each time the Blackburn Killer struck. I can’t imagine her welcoming islanders into our home, offering them dessert as they gawk at our grief. But she only sighs.

  “The cookies were for you kids,” she says. “These are chocolate chip. Tate’s favorite.”

  I bite back my bitterness. Is Mom aware that Tate is going to minimize Andy’s death to an eight-by-ten display? Does she know that, right now, the daughter she’s baking cookies for is “gathering supplies” to turn him into an exhibit? A post?

  “And then I’m going to make snickerdoodles for Dahlia, and peanut butter for you, Charlie. And then who knows what else—sugar, or oatmeal raisin, or, oh! My mother used to make these raspberry almond cookies that would melt in your mouth. Except—we’d need jam, raspberry jam, and I don’t know if…”

  She trails off as she darts toward the pantry. Charlie crosses his arms, amused, and I look closer at Mom. Grains of brown sugar freckle her cheek; clumps of flour whiten her hair.

  “You don’t need to make us cookies,” I say. “It seems like a lot of trouble.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Mom replies. “I just… I got distracted down the hall for a minute. Forgot to keep watch.” She laughs, high and girlish. “I can handle cookies, Dahlia. Cookies are easy.”

  Except I’ve never seen her bake them before. Or anything else for that matter.

  “Odd that the smoke detectors didn’t go off,” Mom muses, shoving aside boxes of pasta, cans of beans. “I’ll have to call someone about that.” She swallows, and it’s the first moment since we’ve walked in that she seems even remotely sad. “I suppose that’s something Daniel would have done.”

  Her voice hitches on Dad’s name. Her face crumples, and in the creases of her skin, there’s the weight of what she’s lost. My eyes sting with tears, but before my vision can blur, the moment is over. Mom smiles so wide it scares me.

  “First!” she chirps. “We’ll need these cookies. I’ll have to redo the chocolate chip, start again from scratch.”

  As she dives back into the pantry, I can only stare. This bustling, beaming version of my mother is so unlike the one I know. That mother smiled thinly, when she smiled at all. That mother couldn’t make it up or down the stairs without stopping to gape, for minutes sometimes, at her parents, no doubt remembering their gruesome end.

  Now, Mom mumbles as she runs her hands over rows of spices, canisters of sugar and flour. Then she spins around.

  “We’re out of baking powder!” she cries. “I’ll need to go into town to get some.”

  She reaches back to untie the waist of her apron and pulls it over her head, revealing the same sweats from yesterday.

  “Tate’s going,” I say. “Why don’t you let her pick it up for you? I can tell her to—”

  “No!” Mom shouts, and it shocks me, honestly, to hear her raise her voice. “I’m perfectly capable. I can get the baking powder. I can call about the smoke detectors. I can make my children’s favorite cookies!”

  By the last syllable, she’s shrill as a teakettle. And now she’s twirling toward the door and shoving it open. Charlie and I watch the door swing hard in her wake.

  “Well,” Charlie says. “That was… a thing that just happened.”

  He picks up a burnt cookie from the pan on the stove, sniffs it, inspects it, and taps it against the counter. Black crumbs flake off the cookie’s surface.

  “I think she forgot the chocolate chips,” he says. Then he looks at me. “Well. Now that we know the house isn’t burning down, I better get back to work. The LMM won’t curate itself.”

  “Charlie,” I say, “don’t you think it’s a bad idea to—”

  “Uh, uh, uh,” he interrupts, wagging a finger in the air. “Criticisms of the LMM will only be received after the LMM. Just like any other show. At that point, you can publish a full-page review in the Blackburn Gazette for all I care.”

  He spins around with exaggerated grace, and then he leaves me alone.

  They’ve all gone crazy. Charlie, Tate, Mom. They want to display Andy, exploit him—or bury their heads in a bowl of flour—so why should I stay here a minute longer? This memorial, this museum, won’t be about him. There’s no way I’ll stand there, in a room of gossip guzzlers, and tell them how he carved his name all over this house. How he always stubbed his toe on the fourth floorboard from the top of the stairs. How I thought that was the funniest thing.

  My phone chirps with a text, muffled by the pocket of my sweater. When I pull it out, I see Greta’s name, and I close my eyes before I read her message, aching with nostalgia.

  I want to go back. Back just a couple days, to the little apartment that always smells of cinnamon. Back to Greta’s knocks on my door, offering me search tips I hadn’t thought of yet: Have you checked assessor’s websites? Some nights, when she got off work, we’d set up our laptops side by side—her on her message boards, toggling between open tabs; me crossing one city off my list before moving on to the next—and I want to go back to that. Back to when I believed my twin was alive, and my biggest problem was that I couldn’t find him.

  Oh my god, Greta’s written,
I just saw your text, I can’t believe it. I’m so sorry. How are you doing? What can I do?

  My fingers hover above the screen, unsure what to type. I know friends are supposed to support you in times of tragedy—but friendship remains an uncomfortable fit for me, like an itchy sweater, or a too-tight turtleneck. Back when we first met, Greta glommed on to me quickly, giddy that, most times, when she referenced a cold-case murder, I actually knew what she was talking about. It’s like we share a language, she said one time—but it’s a language I grew up speaking and therefore find no beauty in, whereas Greta labors over learning it, marveling at its every sound. We’re not as similar as she thinks we are. We’re not like me and Andy, who didn’t need language at all.

  Call me when you’re ready, she texts now, but I slip the phone back into my pocket.

  Through the kitchen window, a flash of yellow catches my eye. It’s police tape, I see when I squint, and it’s fluttering in the wind. There’s a mound of dirt out there—in the woods, in the family plot—hunched like a tumor on top of the earth, and my muscles seize at the reminder: Andy didn’t just die; someone killed him. They picked up his ax, lifted it over their head, and they—

  Afterward, they dug a hole for him. A hole.

  They dug up the plot that waited for our father, marked by a stone that always chilled me with its prematurity. Daniel Lighthouse, it proclaimed—or warned—right beside another that waited for Mom, Lorraine Lighthouse, set into the ground beside her parents’ graves.

  Somebody dropped Andy’s body into a plot that was never meant for him. They covered him in dirt. But how did they know we wouldn’t notice him back there? That we wouldn’t see the freshly turned earth and wonder what had been buried? They’d have to have known our patterns: that I gave the family plot as wide a berth as I could; that Charlie and Tate would be too self-involved to stick around; that Dad took a different path for his hunts; that even Mom only went there on the Honoring day for her parents—which occurred months after Andy’s disappearance.

  And who would have wanted to hurt him? Elijah asked about Fritz last night, but it couldn’t have been him. Fritz has always been gentle, a man who gave us wildflower seeds and told us to think of them as food for fairies as we sprinkled them onto the grass. We never believed in magic or fairies, but we played along, as old as eleven or twelve the last time we did it, tossing those seeds around the edges of the yard because we knew that Fritz loved beauty, loved brightness, loved every growing thing.

  Still, to bury Andy in our family plot, the killer would have had to know, first, that the plot was there at all.

  I try to think of anyone, besides Fritz, I ever even saw in our woods. There was Chief Kraft, of course. He often did a sweep of our entire property before he knocked on our door for one of his “casual drop-ins,” as he called them. He claimed he was keeping us safe, making sure nobody was “up to mischief” on our expansive property, but we knew the truth. In his view, we were the threat.

  Then there were the islanders. They usually kept to the side of the road, where they stood and stared, gossiped and judged. But I suppose they could have snuck into our woods easily enough.

  And it’s that image—a person skulking between trees—that reminds me of something, someone, I haven’t thought of in years.

  There was a girl, back when we were younger, who lived on the other side of the woods with her grandfather. She was around our age, with dark curly hair and the biggest eyes that Andy and I had ever seen. Her name was Ruby Decker. But that’s not what we called her.

  We called her the Watcher.

  We were ten the first time we noticed her. She was prowling our woods like a stray cat, gaze fastened to the back of our house, as if counting its every stone. At night, her flashlight beam bounced off branches and leaves. For years, we spied on her spying on us, using binoculars to see her more clearly through the trees. We talked about her enormous eyes, joking that they must have been surgically enlarged. The better to see us with, we guessed.

  But then, when we were fifteen, Andy came inside one day and told me he’d spoken to her. She’d approached him while he was swinging his ax at a tree, and they’d talked for a while, and she was actually kind of cool.

  Cool? I repeated. Are you friends now or something? I couldn’t imagine that, couldn’t even see the point. What use was some girl through the woods when Andy and I had each other?

  He shrugged off my question. He said he’d been all riled up, but Ruby helped to calm him down. She made him laugh, he added, helped him pick a splinter from his palm.

  After that day, he lost interest in spying on her. She’s just a girl, he said, pulling my binoculars away. She’s not a spectacle.

  But we were one to her. And maybe she saw something the night Andy died. Maybe I should talk to her grandfather, ask him for Ruby’s number, see if she remembers the boy who hacked at trees.

  Then again, there’s another option, one I think of as I hear a crash in the living room, followed by Charlie’s cursing. I could leave this place, before the museum, before Tate even begins her diorama. I could ditch the smell of burnt cookies, take tonight’s ferry, crawl into my bed above the café, and cry for Andy until I’m desiccated inside.

  It’s a tempting thought—comforting, even, in a brutal sort of way. But I already left Blackburn Island once, back when I had no idea that my brother’s body was rotting in its soil. I cannot leave it again until I find out who buried him there.

  All I know is how to search for Andy. That’s all I’ve done for years. And I could change my search terms, scour the web for the man who killed him instead. But I won’t find him on the internet, will I? Chances are, I’ll find Andy’s murderer here. On Blackburn Island. A place that has always been filled with people who want us gone.

  four

  I take the long way through the woods, avoiding the family plot, the fluttering yellow tape. I walk around Fritz’s toolshed, set back into these trees, its ivied, dirty brick too unsightly to blemish the lawn. When I pass the wall where Andy’s ax used to lean, I avert my eyes.

  Clouds hang like a canopy overhead as leaves crunch beneath my feet. The wind, omnipresent on Blackburn Island, pushes me forward, and with every breath, the salt of the ocean stings my nose. Even from here, we could always smell it, always hear the rushing waves. We can’t see the water from the top of this island, clogged as it is with trees, but the ocean’s scent is everywhere.

  Andy hated that. Hated the ocean itself. He didn’t see it as wide open or freeing, but as something that kept us in. I’d rather be landlocked, he said. At least then there’s always somewhere else to go. For a long time, I didn’t bother searching for him in cities on the water—not until inland searches became dead ends, and I had no choice but to find hope in coastal towns. Still, I couldn’t imagine him there. In our sixteen years together on this island, we hardly ever went to the shore. Part of it was Mom’s rules—she kept us from places where bodies washed up—but part of it was Andy, too. I loved him enough to stay away from what he hated.

  When I make it to the clearing in the woods, five minutes from our property, I see Lyle Decker’s cottage, the only other house perched this high on Blackburn’s hill. Compared to ours, it’s a dwarf, yellow and quaint. He might not even live here anymore; whoever answers the door might have no idea who Ruby is, let alone how I can reach her.

  I hear a whacking sound, off to the left, and I curve around the side of the house to find a woman, back turned—splitting wood with an ax.

  My breath catches. She places another log on the stump, raises the ax above her head, and comes down hard again. Thoomphk.

  My exhale sounds like a wheeze. When the woman turns, wiping the back of her hand across her forehead, it only takes us a moment to recognize each other.

  “Dahlia Lighthouse?”

  Strange how easily she identifies me. She may have been the Watcher, but Ruby and I never stood within ten feet of each other, and Andy and I don’t look enough alike—m
e with my dark hair and narrow nose; him with his sandy locks and wide mouth—to chalk it up to resemblance.

  “You still live here?” I ask.

  She puts the ax blade-down on the ground, holding the handle in place with a flattened palm. “Of course I do,” she replies.

  Her voice is huskier than I imagined it would be. With her black, doll-like curls and pouty mouth, I always thought she’d speak in a whine.

  “I assume you’re back because of your father,” she says.

  I tip my chin in half a nod.

  She looks into the distance, through the woods, toward the place where our mansion would be, if she could see it from here. Her eyes are still so big, cartoonishly round, and she blinks them, hard, as she stands up straighter.

  “Is the rest of your family back?” she asks, and I feel it in my stomach, the absence of Andy, cold and machete-sharp.

  “Some of them,” I say.

  “What about Andy?”

  There’s something hopeful in her gaze, like she thinks that if he had come back, he’d be coming straight to her, a girl he hardly knew.

  “Andy is dead,” I tell her. “He was murdered ten years ago. With his own ax.”

  I could have been kinder about it. Gentler. Or, actually—no, I couldn’t, because there’s nothing gentle about losing Andy. The word murder, once so simple to say, now stings my tongue, a thing that must be spit more than spoken.

  For a few moments, her face is blank. Then there’s a shiver of movement, rippling her expression into one of confusion. Seconds pass in which we only stare, each of us watching, each of us watched, until her features crumple into raw devastation. Her eyes shove out tears, ones so fat I could probably see my reflection in them.

  She bends over, leaning her forehead against the butt of her ax. Then she bangs her head against it. Once, twice—a beat beneath her sobs.

  “Hey, don’t—” I start, but she snaps into a standing position again.