The Family Plot

by Megan Collins

  I wait for her to respond.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says finally. “And yeah, your family’s being really weird.”

  I close my eyes, comforted by the acknowledgment.

  “That trapdoor, though,” she continues. “That’s intriguing. The carpet, the lock. Why go to such lengths to hide some extra equipment?”

  “I don’t think it is extra equipment.”

  “No, I don’t either,” Greta agrees. “But if Andy saw it, like you think he did, why wouldn’t he have told you about it? Especially if it shook him up so much.”

  I’ve been trying not to think about that, how there might be something else he kept from me—first Ruby, now this—when, all along, I thought we shared everything.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It doesn’t make sense. But I just have this feeling that the shed is connected somehow. To what happened to Andy.”

  “Then you have to break in.”

  I scoff at how simply she says it.

  “I’m serious,” she insists. “You have to go with your gut. You know my friend Alan, from my message boards? He was camping with his grandmother once, same spot they went every summer, when all of a sudden Nana gets this weird feeling and makes everyone pack up and leave. A couple days later? A dead body was found right near their campsite.”

  Goose bumps swell on my skin, even as I shake my head. “I don’t think there are dead bodies under the shed.”

  “I know, but… gut feelings exist for a reason. Now, do you want me to walk you through how to pick a lock? I’m not saying I once broke into an abandoned building because I thought it was the scene of a cold-case murder when actually it was just an old doctor’s office, but… let’s just say: I know how to get in places.”

  I picture the lock again, that small black hole in the wood. I see the possibility of Fritz, returning to work, finding me tampering with a door I’m not supposed to know about. Then I see Andy, the week after he followed Fritz to the shed, when his eyes wouldn’t stop darting, when he rushed through meals, hardly even tasting his food.

  And now, standing up from the closet floor, I answer Greta.

  “I’ll pick the lock. Just tell me what to do.”

  nine

  The door to the shed is cracked open.

  “Fritz?” I call.

  He wasn’t shearing the hedges out front, or raking leaves onto a tarp in the yard. There weren’t any tools left out that would indicate he’s back. Still, I peek into the shed, expecting to find him there. When I don’t, I slink inside.

  Dropping to my knees, I peel back one corner of the carpet, but it’s as resistant as the first time I tried to yank it up. Tugging back enough to look at the bottom, my heart hammers at what I see: fresh tape applied to each edge.

  But if Fritz isn’t here, then who would have done that? And why?

  As I throw the carpet back, the dark lock reveals itself. I’ve brought two bobby pins, which Greta said I would need. I open one and remove the rubber tip, then bend the other at the closed end to create a lever. I follow Greta’s directions, inserting both pins into the hole, pushing the first in deeper, twisting upward as I use the lever for tension, but all I hear are futile scrapes against the wood. Greta admitted she’d never picked a lock for a skeleton key.

  I look around for something else to try and am just about to grab a screwdriver when a throat clears behind me. I stiffen, spinning toward the open door.

  “Ruby,” I say. “What the hell?”

  “Maybe this will help,” she says, and at first I’m not sure what this is; she’s got her fingers on her sweater again, picking at the fabric along her sternum, just like she did the other times I saw her. But now she hooks a finger under her collar and pulls out a thin silver necklace. She grasps its pendant. Only—I squint through the space between us; she’s hard to see, backlit from the sun outside—it’s not a pendant at all. It’s a key.

  A small skeleton key.

  “Where did you get that?” I demand.

  She unclasps the necklace, slides the key off the chain, and holds it out to me. “Try it.”

  I eye her for another moment, her face giving nothing away, and then I grab it from her. Kneeling in front of the door, I put the key to the lock—and it slides in so easily, offering a satisfying click the moment my wrist turns.

  For now, I keep the door closed, snapping my head back toward Ruby. “Where did you get this?” I ask again.

  “It was Andy’s,” she says.

  The answer pushes me back, my weight thrust onto my heels. “What?”

  “He was playing with it the last time I saw him. On his birthday. We met up, and—”

  “Wait, you saw him on our birthday?”

  “Of course. Not till late at night, but yeah.”

  A sickening feeling slithers through my stomach. Late at night means she saw him after I did, when I thought we’d both gone to bed. Late at night means she might have been the last person—besides his killer—to see him alive.

  “We were arguing that night,” Ruby says. “And I hate that. I’ve always hated it—that the last conversation we had was a fight.” She gestures toward the key, still slotted into the lock. “But he kept fiddling with it. And it was driving me crazy. I was already upset—we were having an important conversation—but it was clear he was distracted, just playing with the stupid key. So I grabbed it from him.”

  I look at it again: dark brass, a circle at its end. I don’t remember ever seeing it before.

  “He let you have it?” I ask.

  “Well… he was mad at first. He, like, lunged at me.”

  “He lunged at you?”

  I can’t picture that. Despite the handle of his ax that fit into his palm like it had been made for him alone, despite the growls that thundered through him each time he whacked at another tree, I never saw a whisper of violence in Andy. Not toward a person anyway.

  “He didn’t hurt me,” Ruby’s quick to reply. “He didn’t even touch me. And when he saw how startled I was, he backed down immediately. He was like ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ and then he put his head in his hands and just… grunted. This really primal grunt. It scared me a little because I’d never seen him like that. Not even when I watched him with his ax. So I ran off, ran back home. And I still had the key.”

  She bites her lip, combing one hand through her hair, examining her split ends. “He didn’t come after me. I thought he would. I thought, at the very least, if he didn’t want to apologize about our fight, then he’d want to get the key back. But he just let me go. And I never saw him again.”

  I blink and I’m there, inside that night, standing beside Andy as he watches Ruby run away. I see him squint into the darkness, and maybe that distraction—eyes pulled toward the diminishing girl in the woods—was enough to keep him from noticing someone behind him, raising an ax over their head, ready to swing it down onto—

  But the key. Why did he have it?

  “Honestly, I thought it was his house key,” Ruby says. She sinks to her knees beside me, running her hand over the bottom of the door. “I even tried it in your front door a couple weeks later, but—”

  “You tried to break into our house?”

  “No, not break in. I thought I had a key. But it didn’t work. So I put it on a chain and I’ve been wearing it since then. To remember Andy, I guess. The last thing I had of him.”

  She reaches for the key in the lock. Tracing the round end of it with her finger, she loops around the dark metal circle over and over. Then she pulls the recessed handle. The door creaks as it starts to open.

  I shove it back down. “What are you doing?”

  “We should see what’s inside,” she says. “Maybe this is where Andy ended up that night I saw him enter the shed. You’re thinking that, too, right? That’s why you were trying to pick the lock.”

  “There’s no we in this, Ruby. This doesn’t concern you.”

  “But,” she protests, lower lip protruding like a child’s,
“I gave you the key.”

  “I know, thank you for that. But now…” I gesture for her to go.

  “But you clearly want to get in there, and you wouldn’t even be able to if it weren’t for me. I could have kept it, you know. It’s been mine for years. It’s special to me.”

  “Sounds like you stole it,” I say. I hear the unkindness in my voice, but I don’t know how else to speak right now. I have no idea what’s beneath the trapdoor, or why Andy had the key that night; all I know is I need to get in there. And I need to do it alone.

  Ruby’s eyes seem to shrink, squinty with hurt. “Andy was right about you,” she says. My shoulders rear back. “I told him he should bring you sometime, when we met up at night. I was interested in getting to know you. But he said you wouldn’t go for it. That you were too closed off.”

  “Closed off?” The words are high-pitched, indignant, and I’m unable to meet Ruby’s stare.

  “He said you had problems trusting people. That you only really trusted him. I remember thinking that sounded sad. And lonely.”

  My eyes sting at the corners. My throat burns. She’s wrong. My childhood—sitting on my beanbag chair with Andy, crouching beside him in the credenza, making forts from leaves and twigs—was happy. I was never lonely until the morning after our sixteenth birthday. Never sad until he didn’t come back.

  “I trust people fine,” I reply.

  But really, who was there to trust in our house? Tate and Charlie, who cocooned themselves together, cooing over each other’s art and ambitions? Dad, who treated me more like a chore than a child? There was Mom, I guess—but she was consumed by her curriculum, obsessed with acquiring new papers, new films. And when she wasn’t teaching us, she was stuck on the stairs, gazing at her parents on the wall, promising herself she would protect us from their fate, would ensure we knew that the worst could come for anyone. And yet I didn’t know—for a decade I had no idea—that it had already come for my twin.

  “Then let’s open it,” Ruby says. “Together.”

  I don’t like her insistence, the way she’s needling her way into spaces she doesn’t belong. It’s consistent with how she’s always been—our Watcher—but it’s still unnerving, like there’s something in this for her.

  “Ruby. Please just leave.”

  Her gaze combs my face. She chuckles a little: you can’t be serious. But when I only watch her in return, she shakes her head, dusting off her knees as she stands.

  “Fine,” she says. “Hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  I don’t know what I’m looking for, I want to hiss. I can’t fathom what Andy might have seen down there, what unsettled him so much, left him fidgeting with the key on his last night alive.

  “Go,” I insist as Ruby lingers in the doorway.

  With a final huff, she turns away and closes the door behind her, plunging the shed into shadow. I wait for my eyes to adjust, listening to the softening crunch of her footsteps outside. When the only thing I hear is the steady pulse of the ocean, its waves a whisper even in this closed room, I take a deep breath and take hold of the handle.

  As the door yawns open, a dark pit gapes at me from beneath the shed floor. I turn on my phone’s flashlight, shine it into the hole, but all I see is a set of stairs that lead to more darkness. I don’t allow myself to wait or second-guess. I don’t indulge the chill that’s inching up my spine. I sink my foot onto the first step and begin to descend.

  The air gets colder the deeper I go beneath the shed, and soon I’m standing on a concrete floor. My phone illuminates an overhead bulb in the center of the low ceiling, but when I pull its dangling string, it doesn’t turn on.

  There’s nothing in the room—no furniture, no equipment—except for a wooden chest against the farthest wall.

  I go to examine it, my light catching on its sealed combination lock before I see that its lid has been split open, the wood caved in. The chill lingering in my spine explodes into a shiver.

  Andy.

  I recognize the anger, the frustration, the desperation in the broken box, the same I saw whenever I’d rub my fingers along the cuts he inflicted in our trees.

  Andy was here. With his ax—which he used to hack into the chest. That means he must have been down here before Ruby took the key from him. And maybe that’s why he was so on edge with her. Maybe he’d found something he wished he hadn’t.

  I reach into the jagged hole that Andy created, but my hand gropes at nothing. The wall behind the chest is blank and gray, offering no answers. Slowly arcing my phone across the room, I investigate the rest of the space, inching along the perimeter, sticking my nails into every crack I see. So far, it’s only a concrete room, icy and empty—but that doesn’t make sense. Why would Fritz put nothing down here but a chest, then go to such lengths to keep the room sealed up?

  It’s not until I reach the last wall that I know. My throat goes painfully dry.

  There are photographs, taped all over the wall, edges overlapping. They’re snapshots of a woman—of several women, I think: here, there’s a lock of red hair, limp across a shoulder; and here, a blond ponytail, curled at the end; here, a pale ear, jutting out from beneath a black bob.

  Then I notice an arm in a sheer blue sleeve, an ankle burnt with a B. I notice wide-open, glassy, unseeing eyes.

  My lungs burn and my joints lock.

  I’ve seen that same shade of blue, that same shape of a B—in studies, in dioramas, I’ve seen it a hundred times. But instead of Tate’s renderings, which could only sketch them in pencil onto pages, or craft them out of porcelain and cloth, these photos are of real bodies.

  Real women.

  All of them dead.

  I clamp a hand over my mouth. As I breathe through my fingers, cold air rushing into my lungs, my mind slows. Then it catalogs each photo, separating them from the horror of the whole.

  There’s the nape of a neck, pink from the grip of a rope. A pair of lips, parted and purple.

  There’s a hand, its fingers curling inward. A foot, its toenails emerald green.

  The foot belongs to Jessie Stanton then. Part of me is lucid enough to link that detail to Tate’s diorama. What Tate didn’t capture, though, was the way the nail polish chipped in the right-hand corner of Jessie’s big toe.

  There’s a leg, stretching from the hem of the ice-blue skirt that, on this woman, cuts off at the calf. This would be Erica Shipp. The third victim. The papers said she was too tall for the dress.

  There’s a round breast, nipple hard and dark beneath the sheer fabric.

  There’s a birthmark on a wrist—the way they identified Alexis Shea, the sixth woman. Her husband didn’t need them to lower the sheet from her face in the morgue; he saw her wrist poking out and knew.

  There’s a tattoo on a collarbone: the world is wide and I am small—Stephanie Kepler, the second victim.

  There’s red hair on a shoulder: Claudia Adams, the fourth.

  There’s an ear with a diamond stud. A crooked nose, the crest of a cheekbone, a freckle that’s—

  When did Andy see this?

  My mind veers without warning, steering away from the neatness of facts, and now I’m in it again, the constricting terror, the vise around my ribs. The photos grow blurry the longer I look, but really, when did he see this?

  It couldn’t have been the night he followed Fritz. Maybe he snuck after him into the shed, glimpsed the top of his head as he descended into the hole, but didn’t see this room himself until our birthday. And then, returning aboveground, stunned and undone, the key still in his hand, Ruby intercepted him.

  That’s the only excuse I can think of for why he wouldn’t have told me himself, wouldn’t have dragged me down into this room, held a light to this wall so we could absorb the shock of it together, our mouths gaping and dark.

  He would have wanted me to know. I’m certain of that. He wouldn’t have wanted to be alone in the discovery of what Fritz kept locked in this room.

  But the ax
got to him first.

  No, not just the ax. The hands gripping it. The arm muscles tight and flexed. The shoulders that must have strained back. The face that—

  The face that would have been the last the Blackburn Killer’s victims ever saw.

  I suck in a breath. Elijah Kraft said the M.O. wasn’t the same, that there was no evidence to suggest Andy was a victim of our island’s serial killer. But that’s because Andy wasn’t killed for sport, or ritual, or whatever motivates an evil man like that.

  Andy was killed to keep a secret.

  I stretch my arm toward the photos, touching a slack lip, a pulseless wrist. But at the sound of something above me, my hand snaps back. Heart pounding, I fumble with my phone to turn off my light.

  Seconds accumulate as I listen. And then: the ceiling groans; tentative footsteps creep.

  “No,” I hear.

  And even though it’s just a syllable, more moan than word, it’s a voice I know so well. The same voice that always warned us to keep out of the shed. The voice that said, It’s a dangerous place for kids like you.

  ten

  “No,” Fritz says again. “No, no.”

  I crouch on the concrete, covering my head with my hands.

  The quiet that follows is heavy with Fritz’s presence. He isn’t speaking anymore, but I can feel him, looking down through the trapdoor—which I’ve stupidly left open. I’ve never been scared of him before, but as my mind pieces together the wall behind me, this hidden room, Fritz’s insistence that we never enter the shed, terror vibrates through me. I picture him, feet above me, reaching for a tool he can use as a weapon.

  But here, the image falters. Fritz with a weapon?

  Even now, even with the photos I’ll never stop seeing, I can’t imagine him intending to do harm. Not to these women. Not to Andy. Not when he’s a man who let us hitch a ride on his tarp of leaves, dragging us around the lawn on what he called his “magic carpet.”