“I know they’re a little… dark,” she continues. “But I’m getting better, I swear.”
“Why don’t you take a break?” I suggest. “You’ve been baking nonstop.”
“I don’t need a break,” Mom snaps, and the cookie drops to the floor. We look at it there, split into three chunks. Mom closes her eyes and takes a slow breath.
“I don’t need a break,” she repeats, calmer now. “I want to do this for you. You’re all going through so much. You’ve lost your father, your—” She thrusts out her hand to cup my face. Instinctively, I back away, but she catches my cheek in time. “Andy!” she continues. “Oh, Dahlia, you’ve lost Andy.”
The stroke of her thumb feels like a scrape.
“So have you,” I say.
She nods, face pinched, as if she’s concentrating on holding something in. Tears, maybe. Or words.
“Yes,” she says after a moment, hand slipping from my face. “Yes, I lost him, too.”
She inhales shakily and points her gaze away from me. “I just want to do something to comfort my children. I’ve never made you cookies before. What kind of life is that? Going without cookies from your mother. My mother made me cookies all the time, and I…”
Her lower lip trembles, but she sinks her teeth into it, biting hard.
“Hey,” I say, “we did all right. And anyway, Andy and I were more into pie.”
I mean to make her smile, but instead, she lifts her eyes to mine, horrified.
“I don’t know how to make pie,” she says. “I can barely make these goddamn cookies!”
I flinch in surprise. I’ve never heard her curse.
Andy was the one to teach me swear words, which he learned while hunting with Dad. He said “fuck” when the deer got away, Andy relayed one day. And he warned me not to repeat it. Especially around Mom.
Fuck, I said quietly, cross-legged on my bed.
Fuck, Andy parroted. He shifted his body so it mirrored my own.
Fuck, we said together, clapping hands over our mouths, catching the laughter that frothed from our lips.
Now I blink. I do it again and again—until I don’t see him in front of me anymore, until there’s only Mom, and the kitchen, and this gutting absence that will never be gone.
“I was kidding,” I say. “Cookies are great. I’m just not hungry right now.”
Mom pushes strands of brown hair back toward her floppy ponytail. “Oh,” she says. “Well, I’ve been putting them in Tupperware when they’re done. You can have your pick, once you’re ready.”
“Thanks.” I attempt a smile. “But— Did you hear my question when I came in? About the trapdoor?”
Mom turns back to the stove, using the spatula to transfer the cookies to a cooling rack. “A trapdoor? Where?”
“In Fritz’s shed. Under the carpet.”
“Oh,” she says. “That.” She lifts another cookie and slides it into place with the rest.
“What’s it lead to?” I ask.
“Just a little basement area. My family used to use it for storage. But the shed’s been Fritz’s domain for decades now, basically since I was a teenager. I imagine it’s still just storage. Old tools and such.”
“Do you have a key for it?” I ask. Because her answer doesn’t satisfy me. If Andy had seen Fritz with old tools and such, it wouldn’t have left him so unsettled.
She tilts her head, considering. “I don’t know,” she says again. “It’s possible your father made a copy of Fritz’s—but I doubt it. It’s Fritz’s space. We’ve always trusted him to use it right.”
“Where is Fritz? I didn’t see him outside.”
“Oh.” Mom waves a hand through the air, casually dismissing his absence. “He needed some time off after—” Her hand jerks to a stop. “After the other day,” she finishes a moment later. “He’s understandably shaken.”
“When will he be back?”
“I’m not sure. I told him to take all the time he needs. But you know Fritz. He never stays away for long.”
I nod. Even on days he designated for time off, we’d see him sometimes, lumbering around our lawn. All this sun, he explained once, pointing toward a hot August sky. I was worried about the peonies.
“Why are you so curious about the trapdoor?” Mom asks. She’s set her spatula down, and now she’s regarding me with a tilt of her head.
I respond to her question with another. “Are you sure you don’t have the key?”
She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
It seems there’s a lot you don’t know. I hear Elijah’s words, gently accusing me of something, when he last brought up the note.
“What about Andy’s note?” I try, and Mom startles a little, her lips parting. After a moment, she closes her mouth, then turns away to grab a binder from the counter behind her. She opens it to a seemingly random page, running her finger down a handwritten recipe.
“I found my mother’s baking book,” she says quietly. “So now I can make those raspberry cookies.”
“Mom,” I say. She doesn’t turn back to face me, but her finger goes still. “Andy’s note. Do you know where it went? Elijah Kraft thinks it might be evidence. That whoever did this to Andy”—even from behind, I see Mom wince—“might have written it to make us think he ran away.”
“I don’t have it,” she mumbles. “I already told him that.”
“Well, somebody must. Do you think maybe Dad—”
“I don’t know!” she cries, spinning around. “Don’t you think I wish I knew? I never saw it after that day. It just— The note just disappeared!”
Tears overwhelm her eyes, and she clears them away with furious blinks. Then she smiles, a ghastly slash of teeth across her face.
“Now, please,” she says. “Let me make these cookies for you. Please, Dahlia. I have to.”
* * *
Mom’s unraveling. And she’s wrong, too. The note has to be somewhere. It didn’t just disappear into thin air, unwriting Andy’s—or the killer’s—words. That terrible morning, we passed it around, hand to hand to hand, and someone had to be the last to hold it. And then what did they do—just toss it in the trash?
Maybe, actually. It fits with the rest of my family’s carelessness, the way they treated Andy’s absence like it wasn’t worthy of concern. But I can’t bring myself to imagine it: this solid piece of evidence, gone, destroyed. Long since decomposed.
I try Charlie next. I find him in the living room, kneeling in front of the coffee table, writing with black Sharpie on a small piece of white cardboard. He’s got another Sharpie gripped between his teeth, and he squints in concentration.
The room is a mess. Empty boxes are tossed into one corner, heaped into crooked towers, and there are piles of stuff—candles, DVDs, papers, portraits I recognize as ones taken from the victim room—spread throughout the space. I step over a heap of murder documentaries and find myself inches away from a collection of guns—five or six, at least, stacked together like logs in a fire. I read the card that Charlie has placed beside it: Daniel Lighthouse’s Hunting Rifles.
“What is this?” I ask.
Charlie cranes his neck to see past the piles and down at my feet. Speaking around the Sharpie in his mouth, he says, “An exhibit.”
“You’re displaying Dad’s guns?”
He pulls the marker from between his teeth. “That’s usually what an exhibit means, yes.”
Mom will hate that. She always turned away from Dad’s rifles, stung by the sharp reminder of her parents’ deaths.
“But why?” I ask. “I thought the whole point was to have the islanders see us as humans instead of… violent and dangerous.”
“That’s right,” Charlie says. “And what’s more human than killing animals for sport? Or, in our case, for dinner?” He smiles at me, but when I don’t return his grin, he leans back against the couch and huffs. “Don’t tell me you’re some kind of vegetarian or something.” I cross my arms and don’t respond. �
��Oh god. Vegan?”
“No. Stop. I’m not anything. I just think you could be doing something a lot more useful with your time.”
“Like what? Baking cookies?”
“Like helping me figure out who murdered my brother.”
Charlie’s smile disintegrates. “He was my brother, too,” he says, voice cold. “And that’s the police’s job.”
“Then help them figure it out. They’re looking for Andy’s note, you know.”
Charlie twirls his Sharpie between his fingers. “I’m aware.”
“So? Do you know where it is?”
“I do not.”
“How is that possible? How can no one know?”
Charlie shrugs, hunching over the coffee table again. He squints at a piece of cardboard, holding it down at one edge as he drags the marker across it.
Portrait of Catherine Susan “Kitty” Genovese, he writes, painted by Tate Lighthouse, age fourteen.
And now, beneath those words, he’s drawing a line, about three inches long, and leaving an inch-wide space before adding a dot. It looks like a sideways lowercase i. Dropping my eyes toward the card for Dad’s guns, I see the same mark.
“What is that?” I ask.
“What’s what?”
“That.” I point toward the card beneath his fingers. “That weird i thing you’re doing.”
He stares at the card, brow furrowed, as if seeing the mark for the first time. “It’s not an i.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s… I don’t know, you’ve never seen it before? Tate calls it my trademark flair. It’s just what I do when I write things. Rent checks, grocery lists, whatever.” He shrugs. “Everything’s boring without it.”
At another moment, it might have struck me as sad—how I know Charlie so little that I don’t even recognize something he considers to be his “trademark flair.” But this is a moment too close to that other one: He was my brother, too. And that moment has only underscored how quickly Charlie left, so soon after we discovered that Andy was gone. I’ve got an audition, he said to me, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: Brutus in Julius Caesar. Andy will turn up, Dolls. Or else he won’t, and that’s the way he wanted it. But I’ve got to go for now.
Only it wasn’t for now; it was forever.
I remember thinking how appropriate the role was: Brutus—the man who stabbed in the back someone so close to him that his name became synonymous with betrayal. (I only knew the play in the first place because of the gruesomeness of Caesar’s murder; even the literature Mom taught us always ended with somebody lying in their own blood.) And though I know, now, that there’s nothing Charlie could have done, it still boils me up inside to recall how quickly he left.
He looks up at me, brows raised. “Is there something else I can help you with?”
“Maybe,” I say, tamping down my bitterness. “You know Fritz’s shed?”
“The thing that’s been on our property our entire lives?” Charlie asks, picking up another piece of cardboard and holding his Sharpie above it. “Nope, never seen it. What’s it like?”
“There’s a trapdoor inside it,” I say, ignoring his sarcasm. “Under the carpet. Do you know anything about that?”
He straightens.
“A trapdoor? No. But I’ve never been inside the shed. Don’t you remember it wasn’t allowed?” He rolls his eyes before continuing. “Why do you care about a trapdoor?”
“Ruby Decker said she saw Fritz and Andy go inside the shed in the middle of the night, about a week before Andy was murdered.”
“The middle of the night?” Charlie glares at his cardboard. “That can’t be right; Fritz—”
“Always leaves at six, I know. And when I went to ask him about it, he wasn’t in the shed, and I ended up finding the trapdoor. Which is locked, of course. And Mom isn’t sure what’s down there, but she said it’s like a basement or something.”
Charlie leans against the couch again, shrugging as he crosses his arms. “So? What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking, that’s the problem. But maybe Fritz is keeping something down there, something… illegal? Maybe he’s growing drugs! And maybe Andy found out by following him one night, and Fritz… Fritz…”
“… killed our brother?” he finishes for me. “To protect his drugs? Are we talking about the same Fritz here? The guy who worships at the altar of spiderwebs? The guy who sings to grass to make it grow?” He chuckles. “Actually, maybe Fritz has been on drugs this whole time. It would explain a lot.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“I’m sure that Fritz would agree! You’re all but accusing him of having a grow room under the shed and murdering a kid so… what? Dad never found out? You’re grasping at straws, Dolls. But, hey, if you’re so worked up about this door, why don’t you go ask Fritz to unlock it for you?”
“He isn’t here right now. And Mom doesn’t know where the key is.”
“Well, see? There you go.”
“There I go, what?”
“Dahlia, I need to concentrate. The LMM is only four days away, and I can’t have you buzzing around me like this with theories about how the mildest, meekest man in the world might have axed our br—”
He stops the second he looks at me. And I guess I’m grateful—that he has enough kindness in him to leave that image incomplete.
“Sorry,” he says, shifting his eyes back toward the cardboard. “Just let it go, Dolls, okay? You’re going to make yourself sick.”
He lifts his hand to continue writing. And he’s right, about one thing at least. It doesn’t make sense, the idea of Fritz—gentle, sweet, easygoing Fritz—killing someone he’d only ever been kind to before.
But still—
“I’m going to find that key,” I announce.
eight
Every morning, there’s a moment when I don’t remember Andy is dead. For that tiny sliver of time, he’s still out there somewhere, sitting on a park bench maybe, draped in the shade of an abundant oak. Or he’s seated at a table in a restaurant, contemplating the chair across from him I do not fill. Or he’s standing on a boardwalk, scowling at an ocean that’s deep and indigo and will not take him home.
It hurts, of course—imagining him, in all those places, living a life without me—but it’s nothing compared to the pain I feel when the moment ends. When I open my eyes. When I blink to find that my lashes are stiff from last night’s tears. When reality trudges inside me, crushing my lungs.
And on this, the third morning in which I’m yanked upon waking into a world where Andy is dead, I roll over to find that my bedroom door has been removed while I slept.
At first, I’m certain I’m seeing things. But my door is gone, its hinges empty and useless, gripping nothing but air.
I spring out of bed, march to the gaping hole, and I see down the hall that other doors are missing too—all of them, it seems, except for the one to the bathroom. I grip the doorjamb as I shiver. It’s unnerving—not just the mystery of where the doors have gone, or how I managed to sleep through their removal—but the effect of the doorlessness itself. The hallway is flooded with sunlight when normally it’s dim during the day, our rooms shut tight whether we’re in them or not.
I make it only two steps down the hall before I have to stop: Andy’s door is missing too. I try to snap my gaze away, but it’s too late; I’ve seen inside. His room is still so similar to mine—same bed, same dresser, same beanbag chair—and somehow, that guts me harder than if every trace of him had been erased.
I can’t linger here when his room is open, festering like an unbandaged wound. Spreading my hand against the wall, I steady myself and keep going. When I reach Tate’s room, I find her walls unchanged from years ago, displaying the different phases of her childhood art: melancholy watercolors of our gray mansion; monochromatic sketches of the living room, victim room, kitchen; oil portraits of her namesake, the corn silk of Sharon Tate’s hair and the bronzer on her cheekbo
nes the only color on Tate’s walls at all.
Hunched at her desk, back facing the doorway, Tate is cast in a glow from the lamp beside her. Her hands work at something on top of the desk.
“Where are the doors?” I ask.
She jumps at the sound of my voice but doesn’t turn around. “Charlie took them,” she says.
“Why?”
“Something to do with his museum.”
Anger ripples through me, sending me stomping into her room.
“He’s going to display our rooms? That’s— This whole thing is ridiculous, but that’s taking it way too far. You have to talk to him, Tate. He’ll listen to you.”
She waves a hand, swatting away my words, and it’s such a Charlie gesture.
“I don’t think he’s displaying them,” she says. “But even so, let him grieve how he wants to, okay?”
Her voice is flat, inflectionless. Gone is the warmth with which she greeted me my first day here. Gone are the jarring hugs, the doe-eyed how are you doings. Now, here she is, the Tate I’m most familiar with: working Tate, distracted Tate, give me a minute Tate. When Andy and I were kids—just five to Tate’s fourteen—we’d try to climb all over her before she’d nudge us away, deeply embedded in one art project or another. Sometimes she glued together household items—spoons, peppermills, thimbles—making sculptures that only Charlie could identify: Oh, cool, a grandfather clock. Other times, her fingertips were smudged with paint as she eyed a photo of Bessie Darling or Lynn Eusan and committed them to canvas. Either way, Andy and I got used to the distant, detached tone with which Tate spoke (a tone that, years later, she would mask with exclamation points in her emails), and now as she sits with her back to me, her hands still tinkering with something on the desk, I don’t have to peer over her shoulder to know what she’s doing.
I do it anyway, though. I stand on my tiptoes, look at what she’s making. She holds a hot glue gun in one hand, and with the other, she moves dirt, real dirt, back and forth across a square of painted Styrofoam, her fingers raking it into place.
The Family Plot Page 9