“What are you doing?” I ask.
Without answering, she approaches the window closest to me, mere feet from the bed, and repeats the hunching and rubbing until her fingers find the grooves Andy carved into the wall.
“Here it is,” she says, smiling at me. “I’ve always wanted to see it.”
And for a moment, it feels like I’m breathing through a straw, like I’m only allowed a sip of air.
“He told you he carved his name here?” I ask.
She nods, tracing the letters of his name, letters I stared at for years while I waited for him to come home.
“Why?” I say.
She looks at me, lifts one shoulder and drops it. “He told me lots of stories about you.”
It’s not the answer I was expecting. My eyes sting with a warning, and I reach for one of the tissues on my bed.
Ruby stands from her crouching position, scanning the rest of the room. There isn’t much here. My bed. An old dresser. A desk with a drawer that’s always jammed. The beanbag chair that’s identical to Andy’s. He’d often drag his into my room, and we’d flop onto the chairs in sync, waving our arms and legs to make “bean angels.” With Andy right next door, spending as much time in my room as he did in his, I never felt the need to adorn my walls with pictures or to pretty the hardwood floor with a rug. For years, Andy and I filled the room with laughter, with stories, with silence we sometimes wrapped ourselves in like a blanket—and afterward, when he was gone, the emptiness felt like a promise: he’d come back for me; he’d never leave me so unfinished.
“You and I could be friends, you know,” Ruby says. “Like Andy and I were. I’d really like that. It gets so lonely here, up on this island.”
She stares at me so intensely I have to look away.
“I don’t live here anymore,” I say toward the wall. “I’m leaving as soon as I know what happened to Andy. You said you remembered something. What was it?”
“I could visit you,” she pushes. “Wherever you live. Grandpa will be dead soon anyway.”
My eyes slingshot back toward her face. “Whoa. That’s—”
“It’s just the truth. He’s been sick for so long—basically as long as Andy’s been gone—and that’s felt like forever to me. Haven’t the last ten years felt like forever to you?”
When I don’t respond, she takes a step forward.
“So I’ve been thinking: when Grandpa does die, it’s time for me to move on. Leave the island like I always wanted. I’ll sell the house, and… maybe I could stay with you for a while.”
She moves even closer, her thigh touching the edge of the bed.
“My place is tiny,” I tell her, scooting back an inch.
“That’s okay. I don’t take up much space.”
“No, it’s… barely bigger than this room.”
“Well, we could always get a new place. Something we pick out together. We could go to…” She trails off, examining my face. “Oh,” she says. “I’m freaking you out.” She slumps onto the bed, plunks her elbows on her knees, her forehead on the heels of her hands. “Andy always told me I come on a little strong. And I don’t mean to, I never…” She lifts her head to look at me. “I’m just nervous I won’t have anyone, once Grandpa goes. It would be nice to have a friend to live with. After.”
Tears shine in the corners of her eyes, threatening to spill.
“You don’t even know me,” I say.
“But I knew your brother.”
As if knowing Andy is the same as knowing me. Which, maybe it is, but still: how bold of her to assume she knew him that well in the first place. So they hung out sometimes. So they talked and wrote down silly phrases. What bean angels did the two of them ever make? Where in her room did he sign his name?
Shaking my head, I stand from the bed and take a step back, putting some distance between us. “What did you remember, Ruby?”
She looks at her hands, knotted together in her lap, and nods as she sighs. It’s as if she was expecting my impatience, but is still disappointed to hear it.
“It was a week before Andy… died,” she begins. “We were supposed to meet up the next night; that’s what we’d planned, anyway—but I was too excited to see him.” She shrugs. “So I decided to watch your house.”
She stands up and leans against the wall and peers through the sheer curtain hanging over the window.
“Andy’s room didn’t have any curtains like this,” she says, skimming her fingers along the fabric. “And since it faced the backyard, I could see in a bit, whenever the light was on.”
I swallow as she caresses the curtain. It isn’t lost on me that she asked which room was Andy’s, but she seems to have already known.
“But his window was dark that night,” she says, shooting a glance my way. “And it seemed strange to me. I’d started watching around eleven thirty, and I stayed there, hoping I’d catch a glimpse of him when he got ready for bed. But the room just kept being dark.”
She pulls one end of the curtain aside, staring out the glass. “I waited for so long. And it was hours—the middle of the night, really—before I saw anything at all.”
My heart thrusts against my ribs. “What did you see?”
“Your groundskeeper,” she says.
“Fritz? In the middle of the night? That can’t be right.”
My entire childhood, Fritz always left at six p.m. on the dot. He’d take the last ferry back to the mainland, head off to a home I still find difficult to picture. I glimpsed him often, over the last seven years, as I watched the ferry from my window, and it took seeing him in that context, off Blackburn Island, to realize I knew nothing of his life beyond our house.
“He was heading toward the shed,” Ruby says, ignoring my disbelief, “and he was carrying something—something large and… and heavy, it seemed. Something in a big, black bag. And then I—”
“What makes you think it was Fritz? It would’ve been dark, right? Difficult to see clearly?”
She gives a dismissive wave, annoyed to be interrupted. “His height,” she says. “His build. The way he was kind of”—she lurches across the floor a few feet, mimicking Fritz’s walk—“staggering. His limp is easy to recognize. Even at night.”
“Okay, but—”
“And then,” she says sharply, eyes latched to mine as she walks backward, returning to the window, “I saw Andy.” She leans against the wall. “He was creeping behind your groundskeeper—behind Fritz—like he was secretly following him. He was walking so slowly, so carefully, his feet didn’t make a sound.”
She angles her body to face the window again. “Fritz went into his shed. And a minute or so later—so quiet, so careful—Andy did, too.”
Andy in Fritz’s shed? I can’t imagine that. The shed has always been off-limits. There’s too much that’s too sharp in there, Fritz told us. It’s a dangerous place for kids like you—even though he was fine with Andy leaning his own too-sharp ax against the exterior. I was always so curious about that shed, curious about the part of Fritz that was closed off to us when the rest of him was wide open—but Andy never cared. When I asked what he thought was inside it, he said, Something unnatural, I’m sure.
“Could you see what they were doing in there—through the windows or anything?”
“Oh no,” Ruby says, shaking her head. “I didn’t get close enough for that. Grandpa always told me to stay away from the shed.”
“From… from our shed?” I frown at the echo of Fritz’s warnings.
“Yeah, it was one of his rules. He caught me near it one time when I was, like, five. I’d wandered off into the woods, I guess. And when he found me there, he got so mad. And it just became this thing after that: Don’t go anywhere near the Lighthouses’ shed.”
“But why?” I ask. Besides the obvious reason—people shouldn’t trespass—I can’t imagine why Lyle Decker would care about our shed.
Ruby shrugs. “I don’t know. Just Grandpa being Grandpa. He was always telling me where
I could and couldn’t go.”
“Okay, well— What happened after,” I press, “when Andy and Fritz came out of the shed?”
“I never saw them come out. They were in there for so long, and it had already been so late to begin with, that I went back home. I was worried Grandpa might wake up and check on me, which he used to do a lot. But I asked Andy, the next day, what he’d been doing in the shed, and he denied it even happened.”
She lifts her hand, touches the space right over her heart, and begins to pick at her shirt. Squeezing and plucking—the same thing she was doing yesterday: a nervous tic, perhaps.
But why is she nervous?
“He got pretty mean about it,” she says, “insisting I was seeing things. So I dropped it. He was in such a mood after that—for days. I didn’t want to upset him even more.”
“So… wait. This happened a week before Andy…?”
She nods.
Cold coils through me. Is this why he was so wound up, the week before our birthday? I remember how taut he seemed, his back rigid at the dinner table, his eyes squinting and skittish. Did something happen in the shed to set him off? And why didn’t he tell me he went inside?
Without warning, Ruby whips her head my way. “But it was probably nothing, right?” she says, suddenly dismissive of this story she crossed the woods to tell me. “It wasn’t like your groundskeeper was breaking in somewhere he shouldn’t have been. I mean, the shed, it’s… it’s his shed. He has all sorts of reasons to go in there. No matter the hour, right? So maybe something was broken and needed to be fixed really fast. And maybe… maybe Andy wasn’t following Fritz or sneaking up on him, like it seemed; maybe he was just helping him with something. Or maybe…”
I stop hearing her. I see her mouth moving, releasing reasons into the air, but I’m snagged on the fact that pricked me the moment she mentioned the middle of the night.
Even two days ago, during the most extraordinary of circumstances, when Fritz dug up bones in our woods, he asked the police if they could finish questioning him by his “usual departure time,” so he wouldn’t get stuck on the island. Because Fritz has always left—always, always, always left—promptly at six p.m.
So why would he have still been here in the middle of the night?
Or if he left our house at six as usual, why didn’t he get on the ferry? Why did he return after dark?
seven
I follow Ruby out. Part of me wants to make sure she actually leaves, that she doesn’t crouch between trees, waiting for us to walk by the windows and perform our misery for her. The rest of me is on a mission: find Fritz.
From the side yard, I watch Ruby amble through the woods in the back—slowgoing, but going nonetheless. Then I scan the landscaping out front, the evergreen hedges, the dormant rhododendrons, the hydrangeas whose petals are dead. I don’t see Fritz, or any of his tools, anywhere. I’m about to turn toward the backyard when a voice calls out to me.
“Hey.”
I don’t recognize the boy who’s climbing over the crest in our driveway. He looks about eleven or twelve, so he would have been a toddler when I lived here, if he’s even an islander at all.
“Hi…?” I say.
He juts a chin toward the house. “My mom says they found a body in your backyard.” I hear snickering behind him, and he glances down the driveway toward a part hidden from me by the pavement’s curve. “Can I see?”
“Yeah, can we see?” another voice, bodiless as a ghost, pipes up.
More snickering. A whisper of Murder Mansion carried on the wind.
“My brother is dead,” I tell him, and I wish my voice didn’t quiver.
The boy checks over his shoulder again before taking a step forward, a mean little smile warping his face. “Isn’t that, like, a party for you guys?”
I hesitate only a moment before running toward him, a growl rising up from somewhere in my body, an animal part of me I didn’t know I had. I make it just a few yards before the boy’s eyes widen. “Go! Go!” he yells to his friends, his sneakers already slapping against the pavement.
In the quiet that follows, I pant out the energy that surged through me like electricity. Boys like that, their gossiping parents—those are the people Charlie would have us open our house to. And if he wants to play docent to our dad’s death, our brother’s murder, the parts of our childhood that are none of their business, then fine—but I don’t want to be here to see it.
I have to find out what happened to Andy. Then I have to leave this place for good.
But first, I need to talk to Fritz. I need to know what happened in the shed a week before our birthday, because there’s a rotten, slithering thing in my gut telling me it’s somehow connected to that ax in Andy’s skull. And I need to disprove that theory. Because wouldn’t it mean that Fritz is connected too?
The backyard is empty when I round the corner of the house. Once again, no Fritz, no tools. Just a handful of leaves tumbling across the grass. As I step into the woods, I see the police tape, a yellow smudge bouncing in the breeze, and I force myself to focus on other things. The trees with scars from Andy’s ax. The nearly naked branches.
Fritz’s shed.
Its brick walls are as dirty as I remember. Ivy hugs the corners, threatening to fill in all four sides, transform this shed into a living thing. I asked Fritz once why he didn’t scrape the ivy off—or do whatever it is that keeps climbing plants at bay. Who am I to take away its home? he had answered, and he’d stroked the side of the shed like it was a pet in need of soothing.
“Fritz?” I call from just outside. Only the wind answers back. As I open the door, its hinges creak, and within the sound, I hear an old warning: You’re not supposed to be here.
Inside, shadows splay against the walls, dowsing the equipment in darkness. I blink a few times, letting my eyes adjust, and when I see that Fritz isn’t here, I almost turn to leave.
But something about Ruby’s story keeps my feet on the floor. She said Andy seemed to be following Fritz in secret, trying to remain unseen. But this shed is only so big; I can stand in its center and see every corner, every scrap of unused space. Fritz’s equipment is lined up neat and tidy along the perimeter of the room, leaving the middle of the floor, a large square covered in gray outdoor carpeting, wide open. So if Andy really was sneaking behind Fritz that night, how would he have remained undetected once he entered the shed?
Feeling like a trespasser, I study the unfamiliar space. I run my palm along the handle of the push mower, touch a leaf still stuck in the tines of a rake. From the wooden counter along the back wall, I pick up bottles of chemicals and packets of seeds. I have no idea what I’m looking for, but my fingers itch to search.
Crouching beneath the counter, I pull out a bucket, rummage through the gardening gloves inside it, then push it back in place. When I reach for another one, I tug too hard and tip the bucket over. Hundreds of nails spill out.
“Shit,” I breathe.
I sweep up the nails with my hands. Some have scattered, as far as the middle of the carpet, and as I crawl toward them, something jabs into my knee. I lift up my leg, expecting to find a nail on the floor beneath it, but all that’s there is a patch of bare carpet. Except—there’s a bulge in it, a few inches long, unnoticeable unless you’re down this close. I run my hand along it and feel something hard beneath the rug.
It could be anything. A skinny rock. A pencil nub. More than likely, it’s nothing worth discovering. But that itch in my fingers—it has me reaching for the corner of the carpet, and now I’m pulling at the edge, which resists my grip. I yank harder until it slowly peels away, making a ripping sound as it goes.
There’s some kind of tape on the bottom, keeping it from coming free. But now I stand and jerk my arms backward and a bigger section of the carpet pulls up. I examine the uncovered floor, part of me expecting that skinny rock, or that pencil nub. But what I find instead is a hinge.
A trapdoor.
My fingers latch around
its handle, a metal ring in a recessed hole. I lift the ring so it swings outward, and I give it a good pull.
The door doesn’t budge.
Above the handle, there’s a keyhole, the kind for an old skeleton key. It glares at me defiantly, a dark unblinking eye.
I yank on the handle again, with more force this time, as if the problem is my strength and not the fact that the door is locked.
What could be down there? What could Fritz need to lock away, then cover over with a carpet? I think of his warnings about this shed: There’s too much that’s too sharp in there. It’s a dangerous place for kids like you. Only, looking around again, I see that everything dangerous—pruning shears, pointed trowels, an ax that isn’t Andy’s—hangs from hooks on the wall, too high for a child to reach.
I return my attention to the handle. Was this door the real reason Fritz told us to keep out?
And when Ruby saw him carrying something through the woods that night—something in a big, black bag—is this where he brought it, to the space beneath the floor?
And did Andy, creeping behind him, see something he shouldn’t have? Something that rattled him, darkened his mood, turned him sleepless and fidgety until the night he was killed?
As I stare at the door, the lock stares back, daring me to find its key.
* * *
“Do you know there’s a trapdoor in the shed?”
Mom spins around at the sound of my voice. She’s at the kitchen sink, wiping flour off her face, and the room smells like vanilla and char—a meager improvement from just the char. Cooling on the stove is a pan of peanut butter cookies, but I only identify them as such from the jar of Jif on the counter.
“Dahlia!” Mom says. “Here, have one!”
She picks up a cookie with a spatula and holds it toward my mouth.
“No, I’m—” She pushes it closer. “I’m fine, just—”
“No one’s eating my cookies,” she pouts, and she looks so dejected, so unlike the woman who staged crime scenes in the victim room, stretching out on the floor with her feet together, hand on her stomach—the exact position in which Elva Zona Heaster was found.
The Family Plot Page 8