The Family Plot

by Megan Collins

  “What about it?” I snap.

  Elijah’s eyebrows shoot up. “A few of the crime scenes she depicted of the Blackburn Killer’s victims—the positions the bodies were found in, where on the shore they washed up—they’re… oddly accurate.”

  I cross my arms, let out a huff. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “No?”

  “She’s obsessed with accuracy. She researches each case until she can’t see straight anymore. And then there are her ‘studies.’ ”

  Elijah flips back through his notebook, hunting for something. Then he taps a page. “Her hashtag BehindTheCrimeScenes posts?” He says hashtag like it’s a made-up word. “I found those particularly interesting. Sketches of every angle of the crime scene.”

  I nod. “So she can perfect the details before she commits them to the diorama. Like I said: obsessed with accuracy.”

  I bet she’s out there right now, collecting handfuls of dirt to make the hole in which Andy was found appear more authentic.

  “And where does she get her information?” Elijah asks. “When she researches the cases.”

  “I don’t know. Newspapers? Internet? You’ll have to ask her.”

  He scribbles once again. “It seems there’s a lot you don’t know.”

  “They’re not my dioramas.”

  “I don’t just mean this. Where the note went, for example.”

  “I told you—” I start, but then I’m stopped by a noise at the door, someone on the other side trying to push it open.

  “For fuck’s sake,” I hear Charlie say. His grunts are muffled through the wood, the knob turning uselessly. Elijah glances at me, puzzled, but I just shrug. This house is old and the doors tend to stick. Some keep you in. Others keep you out.

  The door gives way, and Charlie barrels through. His hair is tousled, face red, and he has a streak of dirt on his sweater.

  “Detective Good Boy!” he says. “Sorry, I didn’t know Dolls had company.”

  “He’s not company,” I say.

  Charlie smirks as he heads for the shelves. Running his hands over the newspaper folds, he plucks some out, letting them fall to his feet. Soon, the floor looks carpeted in black and white.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, and I can’t help the shrillness in my voice. I see flashes of victim names—JonBenét Ramsey, Christopher Byers—as he plucks and drops, plucks and drops. This isn’t how Mom taught us to handle the papers; she always warned us to be careful with the pages, make sure our hands were clean and the corners never bent. Then again, Charlie often flouted Mom’s wishes when it came to respecting victims—goofing off during Honorings, wagging his candle in the air instead of holding it solemn and straight. Andy and I giggled at it then, but now, seeing those murdered people tossed so casually to the floor, my chest feels tight.

  “I’m pulling out options for the LMM,” Charlie replies.

  “The LMM?” Elijah inquires.

  Charlie stops, head turned over his shoulder to strike me with a mock scowl. “You didn’t tell him, Dahlia?” He spins around, rubbing his hands together. “The Lighthouse Memorial Museum. In honor of our brother and father. Tate will debut a new diorama, we’ll be—”

  “A diorama of what?” Elijah interrupts.

  Impatience creases Charlie’s forehead. “Andy, of course.”

  Elijah gives me a curious look before returning to his notes.

  “For one day only,” Charlie continues, “we’ll be showcasing family artifacts. Exposing our history, our traditions. Basically, we’ll be giving the people of this island exactly what they’ve always wanted: our lives splayed open. All you can ogle!”

  Elijah scrawls until his fist falls off the page. “Why?” he asks.

  Charlie smiles, slick and taunting. He’s slouching a little toward the left, his usual posture. When he was a teenager, I always thought it looked like one side of him was heavier than the rest, like his skinny body that seemed to be all limbs was always off-balance. Now, it only makes him look casual, like he’s leaning against an invisible doorframe, like the museum he’s planning isn’t strange at all.

  “Why not?” he answers. “We’ve got nothing to hide. You’ll have to come, Detective.”

  Elijah bites the inside of his cheek—exactly the same way his father did, whenever he was sniffing around, certain of something. He meets Charlie’s eyes, and I watch as they stare at each other, gazes hard and unyielding.

  “You can count on it,” Elijah promises.

  six

  The doorbell won’t stop ringing. I try to block it out, burrowing deeper into my beanbag chair, but it shrieks through the air, cutting through my walls. I curl up tighter, fetal and aching.

  It’s been a day since those women stood in our driveway, but now, from the sound of it, people have gotten bolder. Charlie’s voice booms up the stairs—“Well, hello!”—every time he opens the door, and it makes my head, already pounding from a second night of too many tears, feel like it’s splitting wide open.

  Another chime rings out, quieter than the bell downstairs, and it takes me a moment to recognize it as the sound of a text. I fumble for my phone, lost in a fold of the beanbag chair, and when I finally find it, I stare at a message from Greta.

  Just checking in. Here whenever you need me. Police are saying there’s no apparent connection between the Blackburn killings and Andy’s death, but it’s hard not to go there, right? Let me know if you want my help, or a blueberry muffin, and I’ll be on the next ferry.

  I know what she means by help. I can imagine her, ravenously reading the news, typing notes into her “Thoughts & Theories” document, which has grown a hundred pages since I met her. I don’t doubt she wants to be here for me, that she’s genuine in her offer of support. But I know a part of her must be tingling at the knowledge of another murder on Blackburn Island. It’s the same part of her that showed me, one Halloween, a picture she’d found in which someone had dressed as a Blackburn Killer victim. They were wearing a light blue—not ice-blue—dress, and they were grinning like a jack-o’-lantern, pointing to the cursive B they’d drawn on their ankle. People are sick, Greta said, but her eyes, bright and gleaming, lingered on the photo.

  I don’t want that for Andy. For him to be a thought or theory in someone’s obsession with a killer—even if Greta’s right: it is hard not to go there.

  I shove the phone into my pocket. Later. I’ll find words for Greta later. Right now, I need something for my headache—ibuprofen, or a sleeping pill even, something to knock me into a state of blank unconsciousness.

  The doorbell rings again before I make it down the stairs. I hover on the landing as Charlie, unaware of my presence, arranges his face into a look of cheerfulness and thrusts open the door. “Well, hello!”

  From here, I can’t see who’s on the other side, but I watch as Charlie receives a casserole dish covered in aluminum foil.

  “Thank you so much,” he says, cradling it like a baby. “That’s incredibly kind of you. My mother’s all but banned us from the kitchen while she auditions for America’s Next Top Cookie Chef, so this is much appreciated.”

  There’s a murmur I can’t make out as the casserole bringer replies.

  “No, no, it wasn’t like that,” Charlie says, “but have you heard about the memorial we’re holding? I think you’ll find that all your questions will be answered then.”

  He runs through the details of his grotesque museum, words I’m already tired of hearing—artifacts, exhibits—before thanking the visitor again, smiling and unhurried. When he closes the door, his smile slips off his face and he puts the casserole on top of the credenza, where, I see now, others have already been placed.

  He looks up as I walk down the stairs. “It’s like a food bank in here,” he says.

  “Why are you even answering?” I ask. “You know they just want to gawk.”

  Charlie studies my face as I reach the first floor. “Your eyes are puffy,” he says, lip curled in distaste. “I hav
e a cream for that, you know. Remind me later to give it to you.”

  He heads toward the living room, but he’s stopped midstep by the bell once again. He tries to nudge me aside as he lurches for the knob.

  “Hey.” I slap a palm against the door. “You don’t have to answer it.”

  Charlie pinches his lips together, looking at my hand as if it’s a spider splayed on the wood. Then he plucks it off.

  “Of course I do,” he says. “Don’t you get it? The PR team is coming to us. They’ll spread the word to the rest of the island and we won’t have to lift a finger. Well, except to…” He nods toward the casserole dishes on the credenza. “Why don’t you go deal with those? And maybe check on Mom? I think I smell burning again.”

  I smell burning, too. Last night, Mom thrust a pan of too-dark cookies at us. “Snickerdoodles!” she proclaimed proudly. But Tate was the only person to take one, nibbling politely at its crispy edges.

  Again, the bell, piercing and insistent, and when Charlie opens the door, it’s to a trio of girls, each one ponytailed and smiling.

  “Well, hello!” he says, and then, turning to wink at me, “No casserole?”

  “What?” One of them laughs. “No, we’re, uh… Is Tate Lighthouse here?”

  Charlie crosses his arms over his chest. “Tate Lighthouse,” he repeats, as if the name is unfamiliar. “You don’t look like islanders.”

  And they’re not. I know it before the one in front responds. They’re tourists, lured by Tate’s Instagram toward an island with nothing to offer them. No cutesy shops. No soft, sandy beaches that, even in November, might provide a relaxing place to stroll. All that’s here—all they care about being here—are the dark, jagged rocks on which the Blackburn Killer’s victims were found.

  “We go to University of Rhode Island,” the girl chirps. “We read online that… Sorry, is Tate here? We figured she’d be back.”

  Charlie chuckles, clearly entertained. “You know my sister?”

  “Your sister. Wow.” She turns to her two friends and the three of them laugh, nervous but giddy. “No, sorry—not personally, but—”

  “Tate!” Charlie yells up the stairs. I jump at his sudden interruption. “You have visitors!”

  A few seconds of silence, then footsteps from above, followed by the creak of a door. When Tate descends the stairs, I’m surprised to see her looking disheveled. Well—her version of disheveled, anyway: a smudge of mascara beneath one eye, hair more limp than wavy. Even her lavender sweater looks rumpled.

  “Friends of yours,” Charlie says, opening the door wider to reveal the three suddenly bashful girls.

  “No, no,” the girl in front says. “God, we wish, but”—she blurts out a giggle—“No. We’re just really big fans, and we… we heard about your brother.” She sobers, mouth flattening. “We’re really sorry.”

  The girls’ eyes are stapled to Tate, their sympathy directed only at her. And I don’t need strangers and gawkers to tell me they’re sorry, but it would be nice, maybe, to get some acknowledgment—that the person here with the biggest hole in them is me.

  “Thank you,” Tate says, her lashes lowered, appearing more demure than I know her to be. “That’s really kind of you.”

  “Oh, you’re welcome!” the girl says. “And we were wondering”—she looks back at her friends, who reply with the tiniest nods—“could we get a selfie with you?”

  “Oh,” Tate says. She edges toward Charlie, who quickly steps in.

  “Sorry, no,” he says. “She’s not really dressed to impress right now, as you can see. Yuck, right? She hardly slept last night. She’s been working ’round the clock on a new diorama.”

  The girls, who’d slumped a little at Charlie’s refusal, perk back up.

  “Really?” two of them say in unison.

  “Can we… can we see it?” the other one asks—and though I’ve never interacted with Blackburn’s tourists before, it’s clear these girls feel they have as much a right to our lives as the residents do. My skin crawls with their audacity, their fervor.

  “Absolutely!” Charlie says, closing the door just a little, concealing Tate as she tiptoes back up the stairs. “My sister will be debuting it in four days, at three o’clock, at an event we’re calling the Lighthouse Memorial Museum. LMM, for those acronym lovers among us.” He points to one of the girls’ sweatshirts, where URI is stitched across the chest. The tourists giggle again.

  “We’ll see you there?” Charlie asks.

  They nod, seemingly starstruck at the thought.

  “Great,” Charlie says. “See you soon. Tell your friends!”

  The second he shuts the door, his grin goes slack. Without his theatrical brightness, he’s visibly tired. His sweater hangs off his shoulders, too big on his lanky frame.

  “Well,” he says, looking with heavy eyelids toward the boxes he’s piled in the living room, “back to work.”

  “Charlie, why are you doing this?”

  “I told you,” he says, weary and annoyed. “We’re setting the record straight, proving to the islanders that we’re not the monsters they think we are. We’re just…”—the last word comes out on a sigh—“people.”

  “But those weren’t islanders. They were tourists.”

  He pinches the bridge of his nose like he, too, is battling a headache. “Things have changed since we lived here, Dolls. The tourists basically are the islanders. They come for the stories of the Blackburn Killer, and by the time they leave, they’ve heard all those rumors about us; they’re tweeting about Murder Mansion before the ferry’s even docked.” He looks at me, the whites of his eyes zigzagged with red. “That’s not the legacy Andy would have wanted for us.” He clears his throat, gaze sinking toward his feet. “Neither would Dad.”

  I stand up straighter, surprised to hear him mention Dad. I know he’s why we came here to begin with, but when there’s a hole blown open inside you, bubbling with acid at the edges, burning through you more and more each moment, it’s hard to notice the pain of a paper cut. And honestly, I have no idea what Dad would have wanted for us. By his own admission, he didn’t know what to do with girls; Tate and I weren’t invited to be part of his legacy.

  “Sorry,” I say, “I know you—”

  I’m cut off by a noise at the door—a knock this time instead of the bell—and it’s as if someone’s pulled a string at Charlie’s back; he lights up and breaks into motion.

  “Well, hello!” he says, tearing open the door.

  “Hi,” a voice says, husky and unsure.

  “Can I help you?” Charlie prompts.

  I crane my neck over his shoulder to find Ruby Decker standing on the porch. The moment she sees me, a wrinkle in her forehead relaxes. “Hi,” she says again.

  Charlie looks back and forth between the two of us. “This a friend of yours, Dolls?”

  He doesn’t recognize her. Which makes sense. She would have been only seven when he left at eighteen, and I don’t remember her being the Watcher until Andy and I were ten.

  “This is Ruby,” I tell him, “Lyle Decker’s granddaughter.”

  “Hello, Lyle Decker’s granddaughter. How can we help you?”

  Ruby ignores Charlie, gaze pointed at me. “I remembered something.”

  “You remembered something,” Charlie repeats. “How satisfyingly specific. Would you care to—”

  “Come in,” I say, and Ruby slips through the door, not even glancing at Charlie.

  “Sure, yeah, come inside,” he says. “Oh, and you’ve tracked some dirt in on the floor, that’s good. I wanted the house to be clean for the LMM, but this is better.”

  He crosses his arms, leering at Ruby, who peers up at him with wide, unblinking eyes. “What?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” I say. “We can talk upstairs.”

  “What’s the LMM?” she asks, following behind me, but when I turn to answer her, I see she’s already forgotten the question. She’s studying the photographs along the staircase, mouth ajar.


  “Andy told me about these,” she says, so reverentially, like she’s finally seeing a masterpiece in person she’d previously only read about in a textbook. She leans toward one in particular, where Mom’s parents smile in front of a wall of mounted guns, arms stretched wide as if in awe of their company’s success: all of this is ours.

  It’s a photo I’ve often wondered about, given that Mom hates to even think of her parents’ work. After she told us the most chilling detail of their murder—that the gun that killed them had been one they’d manufactured—she never let us ask about it again. I don’t want anyone to think, she said firmly whenever we tried, that because they created something that killed so many people, it was karma that they were killed by that thing in return.

  But wasn’t this picture just a reminder of that, with the guns lurking behind them, almost taunting their proud, carefree smiles? Sometimes I think Mom overcompensates, that maybe she’s the one who believes their deaths were karma, and the guilt about that is what keeps her insisting that victims of murder must be honored.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Charlie watches us, interest and irritation battling on his face. A few moments pass before he plods off toward the living room. “Well, hello there!” he says to one of the boxes.

  “Come on,” I tell Ruby, and she trails me reluctantly to the second floor.

  “Which one is Andy’s room?” she asks, following me down the hall.

  I nod toward a closed door near mine. Ever since I arrived, I’ve tried not to look at it, and now, even just gesturing to it sends a jolt of pain ricocheting through me. What ghosts are trapped inside that room? What dust of Andy and me? I stop abruptly, causing Ruby to crash into me from behind.

  “Whoa,” she says. “Are you okay?”

  My lungs are hot and tight. “Sorry,” I manage, and I lead her toward my room, turning my face from Andy’s.

  After we enter, I close the door behind us and make my way to the bed. The old mattress groans as I sit, and if Ruby’s notices the tissues littered across my blankets, she doesn’t mention them. Instead, she walks toward the window near the corner of the room, hunches down, and rubs her hand along the wall.