“Hey!” one of them calls. “Hey, you’re one of the daughters, aren’t you?”
“Hey, come here a sec,” another says. “We just want to know what happened.”
I look at the women for one more moment, their faces indistinct from this far away, and then I turn around, hurrying toward the back entrance of the house.
On my way, I glance toward the woods, that yellow tape and mound of dirt—and that’s where I see Elijah Kraft, staring down into what I can only imagine is a human-size, Andy-size hole.
Grief gushes through me like a shot of adrenaline. I’m stopped short by the raw, potent force of it.
From where he stands near the headstones, Elijah gestures for me to wait. He takes one last look at the dirt, jots something in his notepad, then weaves through the trees and out into the yard.
“Glad you turned up,” he says. “Your brother told me he didn’t know where you were.”
For a moment, I think he means Andy, and my heart leaps into my throat. It stays there, pounding, even when I remember Charlie.
“I know this probably isn’t the best time,” Elijah says, “but I have some questions for you, and I—”
“You’re right. It’s not the best time.”
Tears creep into my eyes as Elijah regards me. I bite my lip to keep them from spilling.
“I understand,” he says. “But I’m trying to figure out what happened to Andy, and I could use your help. Should we head inside?” He fiddles with the lapels on his unbuttoned coat, drawing them closer against the cold. “Or if you’re uncomfortable speaking around your family, I’m happy to take you down to the station instead.”
“Why would I be uncomfortable speaking around my family?”
He shrugs, flipping to a fresh page in his notebook. “I’m just offering.”
Even now, before I’ve agreed to anything, his pen is poised, reminding me of his father. Whenever Chief Kraft spoke to Dad, his notepad was always out, his pen digging into the page like a shovel stabbing at dirt. I glare at Elijah for a few seconds before I feel myself loosen. I’ve got no energy for resisting.
“Inside is fine,” I sigh, leading him toward the back door.
As soon as we enter, I hear clinking sounds in the kitchen. I imagine bowls colliding as Mom fumbles through another attempt at cookies. At least the smoke is gone, for now.
Walking toward the center of the house, where two hallways branch off just before the foyer, I hear something scrape against the floor. Elijah and I pause, our heads tilted toward the noise, and when Charlie appears, hunched over, pushing a large box out of the living room, I clench my teeth until pain jolts through my jaw.
Charlie hasn’t noticed us yet. He’s frowning at an open box, hands on his hips, as if its contents have disappointed him. I wave Elijah down the hall and open the second door on the right.
Together, we enter the victim room.
“Wow,” Elijah says when I close the door behind him. He moves toward the farthest wall and points to a portrait hanging there. “Is that Kitty Genovese?”
I nod. It’s one of Tate’s paintings, which Mom would sometimes let her do in lieu of a murder report. Tate really took to Kitty’s story; the New York Times claimed—erroneously, it later turned out—that thirty-eight people witnessed her stabbing in Queens, but none of them did a thing. When Kitty’s Honoring came around each March, Tate would bow her head, ignoring Charlie’s eye rolls. We can’t restore your life, but we strive to restore your memory with this breath, we’d chant, and after we blew out the candles, Tate would add, quietly, “I’m sorry everyone’s such a coward.”
“What is this room?” Elijah asks. His eyes skim over the newspapers stacked along the built-in shelves. He touches one of the bright red tabs poking out: B, it says, denoting the section where articles about Penny Bell, Kirsty Bentley, and the Boy in the Box are stored.
“It’s our… library,” I say—careful not to use the name we’d coined. “It’s where we keep information about murder victims.”
As he cocks a brow at me, I regret my choice of room. Even the foyer would have been preferable; Charlie’s preparations would be less a distraction than the newspapers stacked fold out, one of which blares the headline “Woman Found Dead in Grade School Playground.”
“Do you want to sit?” I ask, gesturing to the couch in the center of the room. He has to drag his attention away from the shelves, but then he nods, sloughing off his coat and settling onto the cushions. I take a seat in the reading chair across from him.
Scribbling at the top of his notepad, Elijah peers at me. His gaze is dark and tight, eyes like buttons sewn too snugly into his face.
“So,” he starts, “did Andy have any enemies?”
I almost laugh at the question—lifted, it seems, straight from a police procedural.
“Of course not,” I say.
We hardly had anyone in our lives; how would we have managed to acquire any enemies?
“No one who had a grudge against him?”
I pause at his rephrasing. “Apparently Lyle Decker didn’t like him. But for stupid reasons. Andy and his granddaughter were… friends, I guess, and Lyle didn’t like her hanging out with boys.”
“Okay,” Elijah says, writing. “That’s helpful. Anyone else?”
“People on this island have always had a grudge against my family. Like—just now, there were women in the driveway, gossiping about my brother. Calling us Satanists.”
“Is that how you identify? As Satanists?”
“No!”
“Do you think one of those women might have wanted to hurt your brother?”
“What? No, I—” I narrow my eyes. “What are you doing, exactly, in this investigation? Shouldn’t you be checking DNA, or… or prints on the ax?”
Elijah clicks the top of his pen, clicks and clicks it again. “Unfortunately, all we have are Andy’s remains. Any hair or skin cells, any foreign fibers, have long since decomposed. As for the ax, I’m afraid that with the time that’s passed, and the moisture in the soil…”
He trails off, not needing to say the rest: DNA, fingerprints—all that evidence is gone.
I press my lips together, waiting for a wave of nausea to dissolve.
“I assure you we’ll be doing everything we can, questioning the appropriate people. But in the meantime, I’d like to go back to Andy’s note. Can you tell me again about the circumstances in which it was found?”
I swallow. I was the first one up that morning, which was unusual. It was just after eight, and the house was filled with a quiet that felt like the world was holding its breath. Dad had been sick the night before, muscling through dinner with a queasy grimace, so I figured he and Mom were sleeping in. But Andy—he should have been awake already, rummaging in the kitchen for pots and pans, making enough eggs or oatmeal for both of us to share.
The note was waiting on the credenza, folded like a tent, and later, it made sense to me that Andy would leave it there. As kids, the credenza was a place we’d crouch inside, waiting to jump out and scare Mom. It was a hideaway in which we whispered and giggled, back when Andy was still small enough to find joy in the closed-up dark.
As soon as I finished reading the note, it slipped from my fingers, and Mom told me afterward that she thought I was being murdered, from the scream I emitted.
I relay this story to Elijah.
“And the handwriting,” he says. “It looked like Andy’s?”
“I… think so? It was a long time ago, but— Wait.” I lean forward, Elijah’s meaning suddenly clear. “You think it wasn’t his note. That’s what you’re getting at. Whoever… whoever killed him must have written it, trying to make us think he’d run away. Which we did. Oh my god.”
How could I not have noticed? I knew Andy’s handwriting as well as my own. I should have recognized a forgery. But then again, maybe I was too shocked to notice: shocked by the note altogether, shocked he would mean those words, never come back. Shocked he would actually g
o.
“Well, wait a minute,” Elijah says. “Yes, that’s one possibility we’re looking into, but it’s also possible that Andy did write the note, that he left the house that night, but was killed before he had the chance to leave the island.”
I shake my head, watching it play out in my mind: someone—not Andy—slipping into the darkness of our house, sneaking across the foyer, leaving the note where they were certain we’d see it.
“I don’t think Andy wrote it,” I tell Elijah.
Because if he didn’t write it, then he didn’t intend to leave me behind.
“Okay, let’s say for a moment it was forged,” Elijah concedes. “From what you’ve said, it sounds like the handwriting was pretty convincing. Any idea how someone might have managed that?”
“I don’t know. Isn’t it your job to figure that out?”
“I’m just thinking: they would have needed samples of Andy’s handwriting. And then of course there’s the issue of—”
“The murder reports,” I say.
“The… What?”
Andy had a gift for writing them. His theories were clever, elegantly expressed, connecting details that most of us had overlooked. Endlessly insightful, Mom had written on the top of one about the then-unsolved East Area Rapist’s crimes, and she hung it on the fridge, where it stayed for years.
Andy’s killer could have walked through the kitchen, looking for a pen with which to write the note. Then he could have seen Andy’s name on that handwritten report and had all he needed to fool us.
I tell Elijah this, in a breathless rush. His gaze lingers on me in a way I don’t understand.
“What we really need,” he says, “is the note itself. Do you know where it is now?”
“No.”
“Hmm,” he muses. “Neither does your mother. Or your siblings.”
I shrug. “I don’t know where it ended up.”
After I read it, I never wanted to see it again.
Elijah cocks his head. “The last words you thought you’d ever hear from Andy and no one knows what happened to them.”
“I didn’t think they were the last words. I was sure he’d come back. Or that I’d find him.”
“Mmm,” he acknowledges, scribbling again. “Well, it would be very helpful to the investigation if you could locate that note.” His eyes, dark as leeches, latch onto my face. “Let’s talk about the party.”
“What party?”
“The birthday party for you and Andy. The night he went missing.”
I wouldn’t call it a party. We didn’t get presents or decorate the house. There was dinner, and a sticky too-sweet cake from the market, and then we capped off the night by honoring our namesakes, Andrew Borden and Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia. We lit candles for them, chanted the words, blew out the flames—just like how, on Charlie’s birthday, we honored the Lindbergh baby, and on Tate’s, we honored Sharon. And then we’d do it all again on the anniversaries of their murders.
Add to that the Honorings for the Blackburn Killer’s victims, and people like Kitty Genovese and the Boy in the Box, and it’s a wonder there was ever a single day in which our lips didn’t part for our prayer. The squares in our Honoring calendars have always been crowded with ink.
“Can you tell me again,” Elijah says, “what it was like that night? Any tension between family members?”
Not between family members. The tension was all in Andy, just as it had been for days. By the time we sat down for dinner, he couldn’t hold his fork without his knuckles turning white.
But Elijah isn’t looking at me, or even his notebook, as he waits for me to answer. Instead, he scans the room, lingering on a portrait of Linda Cook, her permed hair and small mouth, before moving on to Peggy Lynn Johnson, her oval face and prominent gums. Tate was sure to paint both women so they were smiling, and I see Elijah register that, eyes hungry and curious, his hand prepared to jot down assumptions about the room, our family, this house.
“Are you like your father?” I ask him.
He snaps his head toward me. “What?”
“Edmond Kraft was obsessed with us. He was so fixated on exposing whatever dark secrets he’d convinced himself we had that he was willing to break laws to spy on us.”
“Break laws?” He arches a skeptical brow.
“He’d trespass on our property. We’d see him out there, creeping around.”
My mind returns to the women outside. I wonder if they’ve given up and left, or if they’ve only multiplied, swarming like flies on something dead. I think of Ruby, too. Her massive eyes. But at least Ruby stayed in the woods when she watched. At least those women were only on the driveway. Edmond helped himself to our entire lawn, inspecting the grass as if searching for drops of blood, running his hands along the stones of our house as if one would pop out to reveal a hidden tomb. It always agitated Andy. He’d see Edmond’s patrol car return and his fist would instantly tighten. Later, he’d head out back, pick up his ax, and take his frustration out on the trees. Dad had the opposite reaction, watching with amusement as Chief Kraft poked through our hedges, wrote down notes about nothing. Let him, Dad would say.
“Are you like your father?” I ask Elijah again.
Whatever mask he’s been wearing drops in an instant. It’s jarring, really—how quickly he goes from detective to defensive.
“No,” he says. “But this isn’t—”
“But you’ve followed in his footsteps,” I push. “You’re a police officer. You’re here, aren’t you? Investigating crimes on Blackburn Island. Investigating us.”
“I’m questioning your family because your brother was—”
“I see how you’re looking at this room. It’s the same way your father used to look at us.”
Elijah’s mouth hangs open, a fish caught on a line. He shakes his head.
“My relationship with my father is complicated,” he says, and there’s not a note of authority left in his voice. Instead, he sounds sad.
“To be honest,” he continues, “I resented him for most of my life. I hated that he paid such little attention to me so he could basically stalk you all instead.”
The word stalk surprises me. I wouldn’t have expected Edmond’s son to see it that way.
“But my father’s in a nursing home now,” he adds. “Early onset dementia. He began to need more from me than I could handle, and I…” He raises a helpless hand. “Most of the time, when I visit, he doesn’t know me. So I’ve had to let a lot of things go. It’s hard to hold grudges against someone who can’t remember what they did to earn them.”
“But you agree,” I say, “that the way he treated my family wasn’t right.”
Elijah tilts his head, thoughtful. “He used to keep these Lighthouse notebooks,” he says after a moment. “Black journals where he’d tape in photos he took, record every detail he could discover about your family. There was this filing cabinet in our house, and you’d open it and see dozens of these things, organized according to year.”
Elijah scowls at his knee, then flicks something off his meticulously ironed slacks. “He didn’t hang on to a single photo of me, but”—he chuckles bitterly—“he had those notebooks.”
He says this while holding a notebook of his own.
“So yes. I know what my father did with your family was inappropriate. And I hated it. Though, admittedly, as a kid, I hated it for my sake instead of yours.”
He chuckles again, a mirthless sound. “I saw you once, you know. You and Andy. My father had taken me with him, for one of his drop-ins. I stayed in the car, and I saw the two of you, playing around with John Fritz in the yard. You were running from him, and he couldn’t keep up—his leg, you know—and Andy pulled you behind some bushes to hide.
“Mr. Fritz was baffled at first, and then alarmed. He called your names, frantically searching for the two of you. And I saw Andy peer out from behind the bush, and he was laughing.
“It wasn’t until Mr. Fritz was a foot awa
y that Andy jumped out at him. And he was so startled he fell back onto the ground, wincing and grabbing his leg as soon as he went down. And your brother’s laughter… Even from the car, I could tell there wasn’t any playfulness in it. Only cruelty.”
Silence pools around us. I remember that day, the shock of seeing someone I cared about lying on the ground, someone who—despite his limp—seemed so solid and strong. But it wasn’t cruelty that kept Andy from noticing what he’d done to Fritz; it was this unnameable energy, this fierce rebelliousness, that would well up inside him. And before it came out as whacks against a tree, it would come out like that: tricks on Fritz or Mom; frenetic laughter that, I’ll admit, seemed inappropriate, at times.
“I told my dad about it,” Elijah says, “when he returned to the car. I thought he’d be proud of me. He was always looking for reasons to mistrust your family, and here was this… really mean thing I’d seen.” He taps his pen against his notebook, a slow and steady rhythm. “Only… you know what my dad said? ‘Don’t waste my time, kid. I’m not looking for mean. I’m looking for evil.’ ”
He strikes the paper harder with his pen. Once. Twice. I blink both times. “So no,” he says, “I’m not like my father. Because I’m not looking for evil. I’m looking for answers.”
His gaze slinks away, taking in the stacks of newspapers on the shelves, as if the answers he seeks are filed with the stories of all those victims. Then he studies another of Tate’s paintings and makes a note.
“But you’re suspicious of my family,” I say—because it’s clear to me now: it’s not just Fritz he suspects; it’s all of us. Any tension between family members? he asked.
“I’m not ruling anyone out,” Elijah confirms.
The temperature in the victim room drops. Cold snakes beneath my clothes.
“Getting back to it,” he says. “I wanted to ask you about your sister’s Instagram.” He glances at his notebook as if he needs the reminder. “Die-underscore-orama, I believe it’s called? Die_orama?”
Dread punches at me. I’d almost forgotten. Right now, Tate is in town, buying supplies for a diorama in which our brother will be glued, for eternity, to an ax and a grave.
The Family Plot Page 6