The Family Plot

by Megan Collins

“Now,” he adds, smacking the pad onto his lap, “let’s get back to your father.”

  twelve

  All throughout the mansion, the rooms look like a tornado swept through, leaving nothing untouched. Furniture is askew, drawers ajar. Clothes are strewn; books are splayed. It’s been twelve hours since the police left, ducking back into the darkness, empty-handed but for the warrant they came with. Still, the house retains the feeling of strangers inside it.

  Charlie’s in the living room, working on his museum like yesterday never happened. He’s already fixed what Elijah’s search undid: the piles of DVDs, the towers of newspapers, the pyramids of Honoring candles. Bent toward the coffee table, Charlie slams his fingers against the keys of an old typewriter, focusing on it with the intensity of a surgeon.

  Beside him is a glass of brown liquid, and as he retrieves a white card from the typewriter, he takes a sip. I should be relieved, I guess, that he’s not slugging straight from the bottle anymore.

  “Would you like a monologue?” Charlie asks, and it’s only now I realize that I’ve been hovering in the doorway, drowsily observing him.

  “What?”

  “Usually people don’t watch me like that unless I’m performing.” Half a smile slithers up his cheek. “I could give you a little Stanley from Streetcar, if you’d like.”

  “I’m good,” I say, weaving through empty boxes toward the couch. “What are you doing?”

  “Remaking the artifact cards.” He gestures toward a messy pile of his handwritten labels, right beside a tidy stack of typewritten ones.

  “Why?” I touch one he’d written on, tracing that sideways lowercase i he scrawled beneath them all. Murder Report: The Black Dahlia, this one says.

  He slaps my hand away. “The first ones looked amateur.”

  “Even with your trademark flair?” I ask, pointing to that mark beneath the words. There’s mockery in my voice, implied air quotes, but he takes the question seriously.

  “It looked too busy. These are cleaner. More precise. But here, if you’re going to miss it so much…” He grabs a Sharpie, grabs my arm, and before I understand what he’s doing, he’s scrawled the sideways i onto my hand. Then he smiles up at me, eyes bright with mischief.

  I yank my hand away, rubbing at the ink that’s already seeping into my skin.

  “Is this really appropriate? Carrying on with your museum after”—I pause—“yesterday?”

  “It’s more appropriate than ever! You handed Fritz over on a silver platter, and what did the police do? They came for us. And they found nothing, of course, but that won’t keep people from talking. From painting us as the murderers. Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t…” I shake my head, struggling to process his response, which seems so far from the point. “I don’t really care what people think. I just want to know who killed Andy.”

  He picks up his drink and throws his head back to down the rest of it. “Well,” he says. “You have your priorities, I have mine.”

  My breath catches. I go so still it feels like my heart stops beating.

  “I mean…” Charlie tries to backtrack. “That’s not what I meant. Andy’s important to me, too, obviously, I just— I don’t know what you want from me, Dolls. I’m not a detective. But this”—he opens his arms to encompass the room—“this is something I can do for Andy.”

  “For Andy? You’ve got to be kidding. You’re calling this the Lighthouse Memorial Museum, but where’s the memorial part of it? All I see are films and paintings and a bunch of old homework.”

  And Dad’s guns shoved into the corner. I wonder what Elijah thought of that, if one of the times he pulled Mom from the dining room last night—“Just another quick question, Mrs. Lighthouse”—was to ask her about them.

  “I can’t keep explaining the LMM to you,” Charlie says, staring into his empty glass. “But it’s as much about setting the record straight about Andy as anything else. Showing people that he was… Fuck, he was human, okay? He was a kid! He didn’t have it coming to him because he lived in Murder Mansion.”

  Charlie tips his head back again, lips on the mouth of his glass, trying to extract a final drop.

  “And what do you think’s going to happen when they hear about the shed?” he continues. “Or serial killer headquarters, as you called it. They’ll lump Andy in with the Blackburn Killer’s victims, and that’s what he’ll be forever—part of that story. It makes me sick just to think of it.”

  It makes me sick, too. That’s why I haven’t returned the texts from Greta that I woke to today. Any luck with the door?? the first one said, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her, to confirm that she’d been right the other day, when she suggested a connection between the Blackburn Killer and Andy. She’s been my friend for years, but for longer than that, she’s been a self-proclaimed “true-crime junkie,” a “citizen detective,” a person who’s “literally obsessed with the Blackburn Killer.” I want, for a little longer at least, for Andy to be mine. Not an eager, all-caps post on a message board. Not an update on a serial killer’s Wikipedia page.

  Also, Greta wrote next, I’m sure you’re working with the police about your brother, but do you want my help looking into anything?

  I don’t know exactly what she does each day, when she’s at her computer. I know she makes requests for public documents, consults with retired detectives. I know she pores over police records, discusses theories with people like her. But beyond that, it’s a mystery to me. Even when we sit side by side, working our separate searches, I’ve never felt tempted to glance at her screen, a place I didn’t think I’d find Andy. So what would it mean, for her to help me? How long would it take her to follow the police’s footsteps and start asking me about Dad?

  “They think Dad might be the Blackburn Killer,” I say, and Charlie’s forehead wrinkles.

  “I’m aware,” he says. “I imagine I was badgered with the same questions as you.”

  We didn’t talk about it last night. Sitting around the table, one of us gone at a time, we mostly kept quiet. Even Charlie, returning from his own interview, stopped trying to taunt Officer Bailey. Instead, he sat, arms crossed, beneath Dad’s deer, face scrunched in an indignant scowl.

  “What do you think,” I ask, “about that theory?”

  Charlie’s eyes blaze with pain. It’s so quick, gone as soon as he blinks, but for a moment, I see Andy in him—the burst of emotion that would surge across his face, right before he stomped toward his ax—and it opens something up in me, an instinct to reach out, to offer my palms to Charlie as a place to put that pain.

  “I think it’s ridiculous,” he says, voice hard, vulnerability tucked away. “I think they’re desperate, they’re—” He stops to squint at me. “Why? What do you think?”

  I shrug. “The same, I guess.”

  “You guess.”

  After the police left, I lay in bed for a long time, gaze scratching the ceiling as I tried to see things as Elijah did. I remembered that, when I asked how Ruby knew it was Fritz that Andy snuck after in the woods, she said it was the man’s height, his build, which, for Fritz and Dad, is about the same. But Ruby also said she saw Fritz’s limp, and Dad was always solid and sturdy, his walk more akin to a heavy-footed march.

  No matter how long I tried last night, the sky blushing with light when I finally fell asleep, I couldn’t see Dad as the man in the shed, the Blackburn Killer, the person with such horrible secrets to protect. More important, I couldn’t see him murdering Andy, the son he partnered with on hunting trips, the son he looked at with a cool sort of pride whenever he served us venison stew.

  To be fair, though, when I tried to picture Fritz with the ax, it was difficult to imagine, too.

  “It’s just, he and I were never close,” I tell Charlie. “So when Elijah asked me questions about him, there wasn’t a lot I could say beyond the basics. But you actually spent time with him, so… what was he like? What’d you even talk about, all those times you went huntin
g?”

  “We talked about nothing.”

  “Nothing? You didn’t say anything to each other?”

  “Not really.” Charlie scans my face, reading my skepticism. Then he snorts with impatience. “I don’t know, Dolls. He mostly talked about nature. The beauty of nature. Appreciating nature.”

  I think of the deer head on the dining room wall, the dinners we ate chaperoned by its crown of antlers, its watchful yet unseeing eyes.

  “How is killing animals appreciating nature?” I ask. “Seems like a contradiction.”

  Charlie straightens his cards. “Not to him. He had this philosophy: nature is a continuum, with these discrete, sublime moments that most people miss because life moves so fast.”

  Now he leans back on the couch, brows pushed together, as if remembering Dad is like pressing a fresh bruise. And I know that pain, of course I do. Except my memories of Andy aren’t bruises; they’re seeping, open wounds.

  “I don’t understand,” I say, and Charlie grunts.

  “For Dad,” he explains, “there were two options: we leave the deer to age and die and rot—by which its beauty lessens—or we freeze it in the prime of its beauty; we mount its head on our wall.” He gestures out the doorway, in the direction of the dining room. “We eat and appreciate its meat while it’s still delicious. His words, not mine. I, for one, hate the taste of venison.”

  He grimaces dramatically, then hunches forward again, attention back on his typewriter. As he pecks at the keys, I shift closer to read: Daniel Lighthouse’s Hunting Rifles. I look at the guns in the corner of the room. To me, they’re still just weapons, not tools with which to preserve beauty.

  “What else was he into?” I ask. “I know he liked to cook—or at least he did cook, but—”

  “Dahlia, what is this?” Charlie cuts in. “You’re starting to sound like Kraft with all these questions. Next thing I know you’ll be pulling out a warrant.”

  He glares at me, a challenge in his eyes, but the mention of the warrant jerks me back to last night, his hand clasped with Tate’s, their gaze tight and anxious as footsteps thudded upstairs.

  “Why were you so worried when they were searching your room?” I ask.

  The twitch beneath his eye is immediate. The thin skin spasms.

  “I wasn’t worried,” he says. He yanks the card from the typewriter and drops it on top of the others, upsetting the tidy pile.

  “I saw Tate mouth to you that they were in your room, and you were staring at each other like you were scared they’d find something.”

  He shakes his head. “You must’ve been seeing things.” He sets another card into the typewriter, twisting the knob to get it perfectly in place. He rests his fingers on the keys, but he doesn’t type. “Makes sense, after the day you had.”

  The day I had. As if my discovery in the shed was devastating to me alone.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?” I push.

  He exhales slowly, scrutinizing the blank white card.

  “This is exactly what Kraft wants,” he says. “For us to turn on each other.” Behind Charlie, the living room windows rattle in their frames, jostled by the wind. “Better for us to stick together, don’t you think?”

  Right now, the skin around his eyes is crinkled exactly like Andy’s. The resemblance is so remarkable that, for a moment, I struggle to breathe. But then I blink and he’s Charlie again—skinny, smirky Charlie, the corners of his lips quirked in private amusement.

  “We have to trust each other,” he says. “You have to trust us. Me, Tate, Mom—we’re all you have left.”

  In a way, he’s right. Without Andy—without the possibility of Andy—I’m painfully untethered, no cord around my waist to tug me through my days. It would be nice, maybe, to feel like I’m still a part of something, an essential piece of a greater whole. For so long, I’ve pushed my family away, angry that they never looked for Andy, that they left me alone in my bleary pursuit of him. But now I know: from the moment I started searching, he was already gone. Their help wouldn’t have mattered. We still would have ended up here.

  Now, I wince against a rush of images: the police tape, the grave, the photographs in a concrete room. It seems impossible that I could ever stand in this house, on Lighthouse land, without feeling utterly haunted. Even harder to imagine: sharing a life with my remaining family, unshadowed by the darkness that, for years, crept unnoticed in our own backyard.

  As Charlie types, the bones in his hands flick beneath his skin, same as they did when he squeezed Tate’s fingers last night. No matter what he says, I’m sure of what I saw: they stared at each other, their mouths set in grim, identical lines.

  “You do trust us,” he says, shifting his eyes from the typewriter to me, “don’t you?”

  I watch him for a while, waiting for a flash of Andy in his features again. Finding none, I turn to go, unable to answer him yet.

  * * *

  There’s a shattered eggshell on the kitchen floor. Its yolk, glossy as sunlight, oozes between the tiles. A rack of unburnt cookies cools near the oven, edges perfectly golden.

  Mom’s slumped over the counter, silent and motionless, arm on the marble, forehead on her arm. I watch for the rise and fall of breath, listen for a moan or cry. When she remains as still as a grave, I step over the egg to approach her, stretching out a tentative hand.

  As soon as I touch her, she jolts. “Dahlia! Oh!”

  I jump back, palm pressed to my chest.

  “Here!” she says.

  She pirouettes toward the cookies, scoops one up with a spatula, and places it on a napkin that she pushes into my hand. I look at the chocolate chips studding the top of it, and the scent that wafts toward me is sweet and familiar, whiffs of Greta’s café. For the first time since returning home, my mouth waters; my stomach churns with hunger.

  “Thanks,” I say, and I take a bite. The cookie is soft and buttery and warm. I give an appreciative groan as I lick the chocolate off my teeth. “Wow. It’s good.”

  Mom beams, hands tucked toward her chin, clasped as if in prayer. Her smile reaches her eyes, lighting them up, and it completely transforms her, the slumped woman from just moments ago now bouncing on her toes.

  “How are you doing?” I ask. “After yesterday.”

  Her smile dims, flickering once before disappearing completely. She looks at the egg on the floor but doesn’t bend to clean it up. “I’m… managing,” she says carefully. “How are you?”

  She glances at the sink, the cookies, the gaping hole where the kitchen door once was, and it’s strange, watching her try this hard to avoid my gaze. Even when she told us how Dorothy Stratten, once a Playboy playmate, was found naked on the carpet, her brains blown out of her head in chunks so big that “one resembled a whole roast chicken,” she stared at me and Andy as if daring us to look away.

  “Managing,” I agree.

  Mom reaches into a cabinet for a plastic container and begins placing the cookies inside, three neat little rows.

  “Fritz called,” she says, matter-of-factly, and right away, my skin feels shivery, my forehead moist. “He said that, given the circumstances, he’s going to take some more time off.”

  “Time off?” I practically yell. “I hope you told him he’s fired! At the very least, he’s fired.”

  Mom freezes for a second, a vein jumping at her temple. But then she shakes her head, stacking more cookies on top of one another. “Detective Kraft said they let him go. They don’t think he’s the… the Blackburn Killer.” Her movements slow, the spatula gliding to a midair stop. “Or Andy’s. And I know what you said yesterday, but the more I think about it, the more impossible it seems, that Fritz could have—”

  A timer bleats, startling us both.

  “My shortbread!” Mom cries. She opens the oven door, shoves her hand into a mitt, and pulls out another tray of cookies. These are pale and square and glistening with heat. She sets them on the stove and shakes off her mitt.

&nb
sp; “Here!” she says, grabbing one with bare fingers, then dropping it instantly. “Ow!”

  “Mom! They just came out!”

  The cookie she tried to give me is now a broken lump. Beneath it, the delicate crust of another shortbread is crushed.

  “Oh,” Mom moans, as if the loss of two cookies is too much to bear. Then her “oh” morphs back into “ow” as she looks at her fingers, shiny with grease.

  I guide her to the sink and hold her hand beneath the water. She’s stiff at first, but then she leans against me.

  “Thank you,” she whispers, head tipped toward mine. When I shut off the faucet, she exhales a chuckle. “Decades of lighting Honoring candles and I never once burned myself. But now…” She holds up her hands, twisting them to show each side. “I’m marked all over.”

  “What did you say to Fritz?” I ask.

  She pushes some flour off the counter and into the sink.

  “I told him that makes sense. Taking time off.”

  “You…” I gape in disbelief, watching as she walks to the pantry and runs her fingers over ingredients like words in a book. “You realize, don’t you, that the reason the police don’t think Fritz did it is because they think Dad did.”

  “Yes,” she says, pulling out a bag of walnuts and scouring its label. “And I told Detective Kraft that that was impossible. For one thing, if my husband were going out in the middle of the night to… to kill women, and do whatever in that shed, wouldn’t I know? Wouldn’t I wake up each time he left or returned?”

  I don’t remind her that she sleeps like the dead. Like the murdered, Charlie always joked.

  “Besides,” she continues, putting the walnuts back on the shelf, “Daniel has an alibi for the night Andy—” Even with her back to me, I see her stiffen. “The night of Andy.”

  “What alibi?”

  “You remember,” she says confidently, turning to face me again. “He was sick that night, on your birthday. He made it through dinner and the Honorings, but then he was up all night because he was sick as a dog. He kept running back and forth to the bathroom.”