And now I see: she’s already dug a hole, already made an ax. It’s whittled from a pencil, attached to a blade that shines with aluminum foil.
The floor tilts. The room spins. I have to grab her shoulder to keep from spinning too.
She whips her head to the side, narrowing her eyes at my hand. “What?” she spits out.
“How can you do that?” I ask, and I’m so dizzy with despair that the words sound like a plea, not the sharp accusation I intend them to be.
Tate sighs, turning back to the dirt at her fingertips. “I have to,” she says.
“No, you don’t.”
“I do, Dahlia. And I’m sorry if it hurts you, or if it makes things harder. But you’ve seen my Instagram. This is what I do.”
What she does. What she does is pin those women to their damp, sandy graves. In her diorama of the Blackburn Killer’s second victim, Stephanie Kepler lies on the shore almost as if she were sunbathing, one arm flung above her head, the other at her side. Her blond hair is blown across her face, and the dark, glassy water is stalled midlick at her branded ankle. Tate crafted the dress so it always looked wet, the bodice of the gown so sheer it gave a glimpse of Stephanie’s nipples beneath. Pornographic, one commenter said. Authentic, wrote most of the rest.
“It’s how I process and cope,” Tate adds.
“That’s bullshit. Your whole Instagram is bullshit. All those dead women? We processed and coped with their murders every time we had one of their Honorings. So no, your Instagram isn’t about that at all. It’s about attention. It’s about you.”
“You’re damn right it’s about me!” she fires back, her blue eyes like the center of a flame. “It’s what I have to do, Dahlia, just to… just to be okay.”
Tears gather in her lashes but they do not fall. She’s breathing heavily, nostrils flaring in and out, lips stitched so tightly together they make a perfect seam.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
She shakes her head, silent for too many moments. Finally, she gestures toward the base of the diorama, exposing the dirt beneath her nails. “This is the only thing I’m good at,” she says quietly. “My Instagram, it’s… the only thing that connects me to other people. I don’t know how to make friends, Dahlia. Do you?”
The question startles me. Of course I think of Greta, the way she shoves her hair behind her ears when she takes an order at the café, the way she blurts out murder facts to unsuspecting customers.
“I have a friend,” I say.
“A friend,” she echoes, as if I’ve proven her right. “Well, who can blame us, right? Making friends wasn’t exactly a lesson in Mom’s curriculum. Me, I have Charlie, and there’s an old lady in our building who brings us soup sometimes, and…” She trails off, helplessly lifting her hands. “Now our brother is dead, and the only people in the world who care about that are the people in this house. But a diorama will change that. My followers care about the people I post about. The one I just did of Jessie Stanton? It got a thousand Likes in three minutes.”
Jessie Stanton—the last woman to be murdered on the island, the same month we found Andy’s note. Blackburn swarmed with police when she died, like it always did after a woman washed up, but within a week or two, they’d already moved the investigation from their tiny satellite base on the island back to the mainland. They promised to comb through interviews, sift through photos. They promised to find the clue that would lead them to a killer who had eluded them for years.
I remember now that that’s why Dad refused to report Andy’s runaway to the police. They’ve got their hands full with that poor Stanton woman. We’re not going to distract from their investigation by having them chase after someone who chose to leave. I didn’t think of that when I saw Tate’s diorama of Jessie, posted only a few weeks ago. I was too busy focusing on the details that Tate had meticulously re-created: the emerald nail polish on Jessie’s toes; the B on her ankle; the rip in the blue gown, like an intentional slit up the dress, which newspapers said was likely from her body crashing against the rocks.
“So I can only imagine how many my own brother will get,” Tate continues.
“How many what?”
“Likes.”
My lips part, my breath hitching between them. “You’re doing this for Likes?”
She frowns. “You’re not listening. I’m doing this to… to…”
She stops, shakes her head, as if it’s too much to explain.
“This is the only thing I’m good at,” she says again, tears finally brimming over. “So what else would you have me do?”
I survey the grave she dug in the Styrofoam, that tiny blade that glints in the light. It’s only a matter of time before she builds Andy’s body, too, before she places it in that dirt, sticks it beneath that blade.
“I would have you do a lot of other things,” I blurt. “You could be helping me figure out who did this. You could be stopping Mom from baking herself into a psychotic break. You could be—”
“I don’t see you doing any of those things,” she says, tongue whip-sharp, tears so quickly dissolved. “How exactly are you helping Mom? How are you figuring out who did this? Last I heard from Charlie, you went to your room after talking to him yesterday and haven’t come out until now.”
I open my mouth to lash out a response, but nothing comes. She’s right. As much conviction as I had yesterday, promising Charlie I’d locate the key to Fritz’s trapdoor, I found myself suddenly and overwhelmingly exhausted, unable to do much more than head upstairs to my bed and hide beneath the blankets. There, in the darkness I created for myself, I drifted to sleep, and when I finally woke up, Andy was dead again, and my door was gone.
“Fine,” I say. “Maybe I haven’t done enough. But at least I’m not planning to exhibit the worst thing that’s ever happened to our family.”
Tate looks at the dirt on her desk. Then she picks up the tiny ax, twirling it between her fingers. “It’s not the worst thing,” she says.
“Excuse me?”
She meets my gaze, pain swimming in her eyes. “Worse has happened to our family.”
Air sputters out of me.
“Like what? Dad? Dad’s death? We barely knew him, Tate. He acted like you and I were Mom’s kids alone and all he had to do was tolerate us. So how could you possibly say that losing him is worse than—”
“I don’t care that Dad’s dead,” she says. Then she jolts, as if startling herself with her own admission. “I mean— That didn’t come out right. I just mean…” She sighs. “Never mind, Dahlia, okay? I need to get back to work.”
I’m about to argue, but I’m stopped by a sound in the hallway: footsteps, followed by something banging against the wall.
“Shit,” Charlie mutters.
I march into the hall to find him holding up a door with one hand and rubbing at a new mark in the wall with the other.
“What are you doing with the doors?” I demand.
“Dolls!” he exclaims, like he’s happy to see me, like he didn’t sneak into my room to unscrew my door while I slept. “I’m so glad you asked!”
Even feet away, I can smell him; bourbon seeps through his pores.
“No doors until after the LMM is over,” he explains. “You all need to get used to feeling exposed. I had a director once, Lorenzo Fichera”—he pauses, as if waiting for me to recognize the name—“who made me stand in Times Square in my underwear as an exercise in vulnerability. So just be grateful I’m not sending you half naked into town.”
Seconds pass. “Are you serious?”
“Hey, I don’t make the rules. And anyway, this’ll be good for us. There’s too much hiding going on in this house, you know? Too much squirreling away. Mom in the kitchen, you in your bed—”
“Mom’s not hiding,” I cut him off. “She’s… manically baking.”
“Well. Either way. Nobody’s immune.” He uses both hands to lift the door. “This is Mom and Dad’s. But you’re right, she probably won’t even
notice—since it’s a door, not a cookie tray. This is the last of ’em up here, though, so I’ll do the kitchen next.”
He sweeps past me, carrying the door with ease, despite how lean he is, arms still twig-thin even in his thirties. Mouth ajar, feet frozen to the floor, I watch him go. When he disappears down the stairs, I take in the hallway around me. Bursts of sun, from the windows of open rooms, pour onto the carpet—an old runner that’s been here forever but only now reveals its stains. Dark splotches mar its red like blood clots in a vein.
I avert my gaze from the space where Andy’s door should be. Down the hall that branches off to the right, I see light splashing out from Mom and Dad’s room.
Curiosity pulls me toward it, a place I haven’t seen inside in decades, not since I was five or six. I’d had a bad dream—the Black Dahlia, split in half on the grass, was still alive, reaching out to me, her new smile bleeding all over her teeth—and I pounded on Mom and Dad’s closed door. When Dad opened it, I told him I had a nightmare, looking past him for Mom, who, a notoriously deep sleeper, didn’t seem to have stirred. Go back to bed, is all he told me, and he shut the door in my face. After that, whenever a nightmare troubled me, I went to Andy’s room, crawled beneath the blankets he was already holding up to let me in.
Now, I linger in the doorway, absorbing details of a room that still feels off-limits. Not that it was, really. Not officially, like Fritz’s shed. It’s important that everyone has their own space, Dad once said. As if space was our problem in this massive, echoing house. Still, he proclaimed, You can’t go in someone else’s space unless you’re invited in—which I later learned, from one of Greta’s favorite TV shows, is how vampires have to live.
My eyes sweep across the room. The big bed. The reading chair beside a full-length mirror. The dresser made of dark, shiny wood. And on top of the dresser, a set of keys.
My heart kicks when I see it—this reminder of the trapdoor, the dark unyielding lock, the key I swore to Charlie I’d find. Mom said Dad might have it, and the ones on the dresser are definitely his. I recognize them from his key chain, a piece of antler whittled down to a few inches long. As I hurry toward them, I quickly find that all of them are regular, no skeleton key among them that would fit the lock in the shed’s trapdoor. But my pulse beats faster, spurring me on.
I open the dresser drawers, rummage through my parents’ socks, underwear, pants. I look through each of their nightstands. I even crouch on the floor, lift up the bed skirt, and search beneath it for boxes that may be keeping keys. When I find nothing unusual, I turn toward my parents’ walk-in closet—the door of which Charlie has kept intact. Once inside, I feel past the hanging clothes for hooks on the walls. Then I search the clothes themselves, palming the pockets of Dad’s shirts and jackets, waiting to register something hard and metallic.
The smell of him wafts off the hangers, gamy and musty, and it strikes me suddenly, as I run my hands along his hunting jackets, that even this doesn’t make me miss him. Whatever weight I felt from his death when I headed back to the mansion—it’s gone now, crushed beneath the boulder of mourning Andy. And honestly, it’s freeing in a way, Dad being dead. For ten years, my body has housed a vibrating bitterness toward him, and now, it’s a relief, knowing I have no reason to try to forgive him anymore.
I wrench apart the final cluster of coats, ready to pull each pocket inside out if I have to—but my hands go still when I see the back of the closet. Instead of a blank, uninterrupted wall, I’m met with another door.
Tentatively, I reach toward it, hair pricking up along my arms. When I turn its knob, I expect resistance, but it opens easily, without so much as a creak.
I stare into the dark void I’ve revealed. Then I activate the flashlight on my phone.
It’s a passageway, no wider than four feet across, and as I point my light straight ahead, I can’t even see where it ends. The walls are unfinished; exposed studs and cracked beams reek of mildew. I creep in farther, my empty hand spread out toward the side, until it brushes against something.
I swing my phone toward the planks of wood beside me. Taped to them—all over it, it seems—are sheets of paper. They overlap, colliding with each other, and when I step closer and shine my light on one in particular, my knees almost buckle.
It’s a drawing of Andy. His eyes closed. Blood streaming from his head.
Hand covering my mouth, I look at another. Andy, again, clearly dead, face slack, cheek pressed to the ground.
The edge of each drawing touches another, forming a horrifying mosaic, a grotesque collage. I follow the trail of sketches—dozens of them; dozens!—looking ahead as much as I can, avoiding these apparitions of Andy, and when they finally stop, there’s a few yards of space before I reach a new door. I open it, struggling for air, and find myself in another dark room. My flashlight bounces around, and when it highlights something I recognize—magenta jeans, crumpled on the floor—I rest against the doorframe so my mind can catch up.
I’m in Tate’s closet, which apparently connects with Mom and Dad’s. And those drawings, I understand now, are Tate’s studies for the Andy diorama, completed in the same style as the ones in her #BehindTheCrimeScenes posts: pencil on paper, innumerable attempts at getting the victims’ poses exactly right. I can picture the ones she did for the Blackburn Killer’s victims as clearly as if I’ve pulled them up on my phone. For Amy Ragan, the fifth murdered woman, Tate drew her legs alone at least a hundred times, posting her sketches over a number of days, garnering more comments that way, more Likes.
The man who stumbled across Amy during his morning walk told the papers that her leg had been bent at such a strange angle that at first he thought it was broken, that that was why she was lying there motionless—a broken leg, a horrible but commonplace injury. But as soon as he started running toward her, he registered the ice-blue gown, and his feet froze on the sand. Turns out, Amy’s leg had been mangled by the force of the waves tossing her back onto shore. Tate wrote in the caption of one round of studies that she needed to get the leg just right, because to do so would capture the true violence of the murder: not just the strangulation that killed her, not just the B mutilating her ankle, but the reminder that she had been thrown into the ocean. Like a cigarette butt, she wrote. Like a rock skipped across water, purely for entertainment.
Now, my heart throbs: just like she did for the dioramas of the Blackburn Killer’s victims, Tate has sketched Andy over and over, practicing for the position of his body, the anatomy of his wounds, so she can glue and paint him permanently into place. Dead. Always dead.
I stand up, step back into the passageway, and close the door quietly behind me. I can’t risk her hearing me, investigating the sound. I can’t risk a conversation with her right now when all I have in me is the capacity to claw at her, to shout.
Stumbling back along this gruesome hall, led by the light on my phone, I almost make it out. But I’m stopped by the drawings again, even as I try so desperately not to see them. My gaze shifts there anyway, without warning, and now I’m inches from a sketch I didn’t linger on my first time through.
In this one, Andy’s eyes are open, and they’re so him, so his, the crinkling of them so agonizingly exact. They stare out at me like they did a million times before—and I can see him, free of this paper, real and alive, squinting at nothing but air, just before he stomps outside to grip the handle of his ax.
Or another time, the blazing annoyance in those eyes, the night of our sixteenth birthday, Tate and Charlie whispering at each other behind a closed door while Andy itched to talk to them, ask them about life away from this house. He’d had his questions lined up for weeks, and he was so furious they’d locked us out, I thought he might yell those questions through the wall, louder and louder until they thrust open the door, let him inside just to shut him up. We don’t need them, I reminded him—and the implication was: because we have each other. But the next morning, I didn’t have him anymore. So I had nobody left at all.
>
Tate has rendered him perfectly—except for the wound at his temple, which leaks graphite blood all over the page. The ax itself is missing, as if the killer, off paper, has lifted it above his head to take another swing. And no matter how many times I blink, Andy’s eyes never close; they still stare out at me.
Or out at the person with the ax.
I’m going to scream. I feel it bubbling up like bile in my throat, ready to spew out. But when I open my mouth, I hear a different sound, the chime of my phone announcing a text.
You want that muffin yet?
Greta. I call her without thinking, my legs shaking as I step out of the passageway and back into Mom’s closet.
“I guess you do!” she says in greeting, and I slump against the wall, sink to the floor, Dad’s hunting jackets brushing my shoulders.
“My sister is sick!” I tell her. “She’s doing a diorama of Andy, and she’s done all these studies of his death, and she’s taped them up in this weird passageway behind her closet. And I mean”—I glance at the shadowy hole leading back to that hall—“why would she put them in there, where she can’t even see them, if the point is to use them as references for the diorama?”
As Greta hesitates, I barrel forward to answer my own question. “I guess she wanted to hide them—from me, probably, because she knew I’d react this way if I saw them. But you know what? Putting them in there like that—that just means she knows what she’s doing is messed up. And yet, she’s still over there, spreading dirt on Styrofoam, making an ax, building his body. It’s disgusting! All of it! And then there’s Charlie. And my mom! They’ve all gone completely crazy!”
I huff into the phone, catching my breath.
“What’s happening with Charlie and your mom?” Greta asks.
So I tell her about the museum, and the cookies, and our doorless rooms. Then I tell her the rest of it, too. About Ruby Decker, and what she saw the week before Andy died. About the door in the shed, and Mom’s explanation that doesn’t sit right. I tell her about the missing note, about Elijah Kraft, about the people on this island who still won’t leave us alone. I tell her everything you’re supposed to tell your closest friend, and when I’m done, I feel like my skin’s scraped off, like someone’s wedged apart my ribs, like my heart is beating in open air.
The Family Plot Page 10