The Family Plot

by Megan Collins

  She clenches her jaw, and it’s a loud, windy moment before she continues. “So I buried it, here, in line of sight of Andy’s window, hoping he’d see me and come out. I was sure, at the very least, that we’d meet up again soon, and when we did, we’d talk, and he’d apologize, and he’d want his present back. I never… never thought it would be ten years before I dug this up.”

  Her eyes well up. They’re probing mine, wanting something from me. But I feel so removed from her, my thoughts still knotted up with Lyle.

  “You have to use it,” she says, pushing the embroidery into my hands.

  “Use it?” I ask dimly.

  “In the Lighthouse Memorial Museum. It’s all people are talking about in town, and as soon as I heard about it, I knew the embroidery had to be part of it. Please.”

  She bites her lip, face twisted and tortured. “Everything between us is so unfinished. I never got to say goodbye to him. I never got to give this back. And I just want to feel like… like he has it, in some way. Like he knows that, even though I ran from him, I really did love him.”

  Tears spill onto her cheeks. “Please,” she says again.

  I watch her for a moment, still somewhere else in my mind. Finally, I nod, and she relaxes.

  But as we stand to go, I’m not thinking of the embroidery she thrust into my hands. I’m thinking of the call I’ll make to Elijah as soon as I’m back inside. He needs to know that, for all the hours they searched our house last night, looking for the Blackburn Killer’s brand, there was another house, just through the woods, they should have been searching instead.

  fourteen

  “You think Lyle Decker used someone else’s shed as his trophy room.”

  Elijah’s voice on the phone is skeptical. I picture him arching a brow.

  “Think about it,” I say, shoving Ruby’s embroidery into my dresser drawer. “If you’re going to keep an entire roomful of evidence, would you want it on your own property, where it would immediately implicate you if somebody found it?”

  I expect Elijah to use my words against me, remind me that the roomful of evidence on our property implicates us. Instead, he throws a question back at me.

  “Haven’t you wondered,” he starts, “why your brother was buried in your father’s plot?”

  I freeze, midpace, in the middle of my room. “Of course I’ve wondered.”

  “Do you want to hear my theory?”

  I wait without answering, eyes fixed on my beanbag chair. For a second, I see Andy flopping onto it, before the image shifts, and he’s flopping into a grave.

  “Actually, it’s an extension of a theory you mentioned,” Elijah says. “That the Blackburn Killer is the same man who murdered your brother.” He clears his throat in a way that sounds forced. “As you surmised, we’re looking into your father as a possible suspect for the Blackburn murders. So say it’s true that the crimes were committed by the same person. If your father killed your brother, in the heat of the moment, maybe, upon learning that Andy saw what was under the shed—again, a theory you articulated—there’d be a benefit, wouldn’t there, to burying him in his own plot?”

  I see where he’s going. But I won’t say it. I won’t admit that, for one delirious moment last night as I tried to push his questions out of my head, I thought of this, too.

  “It would ensure,” Elijah continues, “as much as he could, at least, that the body wouldn’t be discovered until he himself was dead—when his own grave was dug, when it would be too late to hold him accountable for the crime. For any crimes, in fact.”

  I’m annoyed by his tone—smug, self-satisfied. I can picture him writing in his notepad, hand hurrying across the page to describe my silence.

  “Do you normally discuss your theories with the family of your suspects?” I ask.

  Elijah pauses so long I check to make sure the call wasn’t dropped. Eventually, he says, “Things are a little different, in this case, given that the suspect in question is deceased.”

  “So you’re not going to look into Lyle Decker,” I reply. “Even with what I told you Ruby said. That he was weird about our shed. That he found out Andy hurt her the same night Andy was killed. He said he was going to get that Lighthouse boy. And when I saw him the other day, he told me my brother deserved what he got.”

  “That’s all very circumstantial,” Elijah says. “But if you have reason to believe that Lyle Decker had access to your shed, that might be another story.”

  I think of the key, dangling from a chain on Ruby’s neck for the last ten years. But that came from Andy, she said, not her grandfather.

  “I don’t,” I concede. “Not really.”

  I know it’s not a perfect fit. The revelations about Lyle don’t change how Fritz spoke about the room beneath the shed—calling the photographs trophies, begging me to help him get rid of the evidence—and it doesn’t change that Ruby was sure it was Fritz she saw in the middle of the night. It’s possible that, in the dark, she could have mistaken another man for Fritz, but would she really not recognize her grandfather?

  “Maybe Lyle was in cahoots with Fritz,” I offer.

  “Cahoots,” Elijah repeats, as if it’s a word he’s never heard before. “Have you known Mr. Decker and your groundskeeper to be close?”

  “No,” I admit. “But there’s clearly a lot I didn’t know about Fritz.”

  “And—going back to motive here—I’m unclear if you think that Mr. Decker killed your brother as revenge for hurting his granddaughter, or because Andy discovered he was the Blackburn Killer.”

  My nails stab my palm, the mark from Charlie’s Sharpie stretched tight over my fist. “I don’t know—both, maybe.” I force myself to relax my hand. “That’s why I called you, so you can figure it out.”

  “All right,” Elijah says. “I appreciate the info. But while I’ve got you here—have you had any luck finding the runaway note?”

  “No.” I glance at my floor, its debris of sweaters left scattered by the police. “But if we still had it, wouldn’t your officers have found it last night?”

  “It wasn’t the subject of our search. And anyway, a single piece of paper is kind of a needle in a haystack.”

  “Well, I asked around. No one knows what happened to it.”

  “Okay,” Elijah acknowledges, but I hear that smugness again. Right away, I know what he’s thinking: Dad might have thrown it away. It fooled us, the morning we read it, but if Dad had forged it, if Andy’s fingerprints were never even on it, maybe it wouldn’t have fooled the police, who would have had the resources to analyze it.

  “Lyle had access to Andy’s handwriting,” I blurt. Because now I’m remembering another part of Ruby’s story: after Andy rejected her, she was sobbing on her bedroom floor, surrounded by his notes. Lyle found her like that, and when she told him what happened, he grabbed some of the papers before storming out of the house.

  I tell this to Elijah, adding threads to my theory as quickly as my mind can spin them: “It’s possible Lyle didn’t even have to forge it. The only way out is to never come back? That might be something Andy wrote himself. It sounds exactly like him. Which is why I never questioned it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Elijah says, distraction fogging his voice.

  “Uh-huh? That’s it?”

  “Sorry,” he says, and now there’s a sound on his end, like chair legs scraping against the floor. “Something just came in. I have to go.”

  “Something about Andy?”

  “I’ll talk to you later, Dahlia.”

  “Wait. Are you going to question Lyle?”

  “I assure you,” he says coolly, “I’m following every lead.”

  But I don’t believe him. Even after he hangs up, his voice lingers, allowing me to hear the echo of his father. I assure you, Elijah said just now, a phrase that Edmond often used.

  I assure you, I’m only doing my job, Edmond would say when Andy, answering the door, squared his shoulders, refusing to call down the hall for Dad. I assur
e you—just a quick chat.

  I can’t leave this to Elijah, someone brainwashed to suspect us. He’s told me—assured me—that he hasn’t been swayed by his father, but still, he keeps coming after mine. And the longer he looks for answers here, the longer they’ll go unfound.

  I don’t know how the families of the Blackburn Killer victims have managed—living for decades without knowing the truth, enduring the public’s fascination with our island because of what happened to their daughters, their sisters, their wives. And all this time, no one has been able to give them justice, to punish the man who derailed their lives.

  But I know someone who’s hunted that man for years, even after the case went cold. While I squinted at pictures of city streets, she pored over newspaper photos, sweeping a magnifying glass across audience members at public meetings. I bet you anything, Greta once told me, that when police held meetings about the Blackburn Killer, that motherfucker showed up to watch.

  Phone still in my hand, I pull up her number, and as soon as she answers, I hear the café—spoons clinking against mugs, laughter overlapping, the burble of conversation like a distant stream.

  “Bad time?” I ask.

  “Perfect time. I’ve been meaning to take my break.”

  The background noises soften, and I hear Greta shutting the door to the stairwell that leads to my apartment. We’d sit there sometimes, splitting a muffin while she rested between shifts, and I’d inevitably think of Andy. Even years after I last saw him, it still felt like a tiny betrayal, sharing a meal with anyone else.

  “I need your help,” I say to Greta.

  “Anything.”

  When I tell her about the shed, I ignore her gasp. I speak for minutes at a time—explaining about Fritz, about Ruby, about Lyle—while Greta whispers a refrain of holy shit. Only at the end do I mention Elijah, how he tore our house apart, searching for the brand.

  By the time I finally stop, Greta’s unusually quiet.

  “Seems a little on the nose,” she says after a while. “Your father being a suspect.”

  The response is so unexpected I almost laugh. “What?”

  “Just with the way you were raised and all. It’s too—I don’t know—tidy, I guess, to think that someone who told you all these murder stories was out there murdering the whole time.”

  “It was my mom who told us the stories,” I say. And I don’t know why I do that, contradict Greta while she’s defending Dad.

  “Still,” she says, “he was part of that. And I mean, take me, for example. I’m as obsessed with murder as they come. You’ve seen my murder spreadsheets. But that doesn’t mean I actually want to kill someone.”

  “So you think Elijah’s just biased?”

  “Well, I get why he did the search. Your family owns the shed, and they can’t really ignore that. But do I think your father was this vicious serial killer, and you all had no idea? No. I don’t.”

  I release a long breath. Despite my own theories, my dismissing of Elijah’s, there’s something about hearing Greta say this that feels especially validating.

  “Will you look into Lyle Decker for me?” I ask. “See if there’s anything… off about him? A criminal record maybe? I don’t know. You’re always able to dredge stuff up.”

  “I’m on it,” Greta says, a tremor of excitement in her voice. I imagine her scribbling notes on her server’s pad, itching to add Lyle’s story to her folder of files.

  “I’ll see if I can connect him to any of the Blackburn victims,” she adds. “I actually really like him for this. It’s creepy, how overprotective he is of Ruby. What if he killed women as, like, a way to rewrite the story of his wife and daughter leaving him? He couldn’t get them to stay on the island, but he can make sure other women never leave.”

  I pull my cardigan tighter. Outside my window, bare branches shudder. “Wow. That’s—”

  “I’ll dig into your groundskeeper, too. He’s definitely involved in this. Actually, I should go. If I close early, I can get a head start. I’m sure the cops are waiting to announce the shed until they have a concrete suspect—which is good; it means they don’t have enough on your dad—but as soon as they go public, it’ll make things trickier.”

  I try to ignore the buzzing of her eagerness, the reminder that, for Greta, this isn’t just a favor she’s doing for a friend; it’s an opportunity. I bet she can’t believe her luck: the privileged information, the glimpse into suspects no one else has heard of.

  “Thanks,” I say, throat tightening. “But please, remember that this is… That Andy’s not just—”

  “This is about your brother. Well, the Blackburn women, too. But right now, it’s about Andy, and I promise I won’t lose sight of that. You can trust me, Dahlia, okay? You can trust me.”

  * * *

  I’m heading toward the stairs when Tate calls my name.

  I find her at her desk, hair piled into a knot on top of her head, and her room seems back to normal, the police’s mess not evident when I first walk in. Then I notice a sweater sleeve stretched out on the floor, looking like an arm reaching for help, and I realize she’s stuffed everything under the bed. Its ruffled skirt bulges out, trying to hold it all in.

  “Who were you talking to just now?” Tate asks over her shoulder. Even in profile, I can tell her brows are furrowed.

  “My friend.”

  Her skin is unusually pale, and the muscles in one arm keep tensing, like she’s squeezing something in her hand.

  “You shouldn’t be doing that,” she says.

  “Talking to my friend?”

  She snaps her head in my direction. “Talking to your friend about Dad. About the police suspecting him. You can’t just… We should keep that private, Dahlia.”

  Tate turns back to her diorama, which now bears trees so lifelike I expect to see the wind shaking their branches. The hole is still there, waiting for a body.

  “Like you’re planning to keep this private?” I say, gesturing toward her desk.

  She exhales impatiently. “We’ve been over this.”

  “Well, sorry, but I don’t see why it’s okay for you to share Andy with thousands of strangers, but I can’t tell my one friend what’s going on in the investigation.”

  Her arm tenses again. I try to see what’s in her hand, but she pulls it toward her, tucking her fist into the folds of her sweater.

  “There’s a monumental difference between the two,” she says. “The diorama’s only part of it. It’s the thing that gets people’s attention. And when they read the caption, they’ll know that Andy was more than just his death. Telling people about Dad, though?” She pauses to shake her head. “Why would you go out of your way to confirm people’s suspicions of us?”

  I pause at the word confirm.

  “Wait,” I say. “You agree with the police? You think it was Dad?”

  Her eyes flash wide for a moment. Then, just as quickly, they crimp with pain. “Of course not!” she says, the phrase a whip she lashes through the air.

  “I just meant,” she adds, gaze slinking toward her lap, “that you have to be more careful. You can’t be giving people more ammunition than they already have. It’s a slap in the face to all the work Charlie’s been doing.”

  “The work? He’s turning Andy’s death into a spectacle. Both of you are.”

  “You’re not listening,” she groans, punctuating her last word by slapping her hand onto the desk. The sound it makes is strange, like a teacup rattling onto a saucer, and when I look at the space in front of her, I see why.

  She’s built a body. That’s what she was squeezing in her hand, what she’s just smacked onto the desk: the little doll that, once inside the hole, will complete the diorama.

  The body is flat on its back. I brace myself for the four-inch doll to resemble Andy, but when I lean closer, I see it’s featureless, still missing the details that would make it seem human—an outfit, a hairstyle, a specific tint to its skin. Right now, it’s just a cloth torso with porc
elain head and limbs, indistinguishable from the ones Tate has showcased in her #BehindTheCrimeScenes stories, usually posted after the diorama itself, taking her followers through her process, from scattered materials to finished product. I always get goose bumps when I watch those posts, where, at the very beginning, the doll is blank and anonymous, but by the end, it’s a murder victim.

  My hand trembles as I reach for the doll. I feel the sting of tears.

  “You say you’re trying to show people that Andy was more than just his death. But how are you going to paint Andy’s face? With his eyes open? With crinkles around them?”

  She looks from me to the doll, biting her lip. “You know that’s not how I—”

  “You’re obsessed,” I cut in, suddenly so weary, “with showing off his death.”

  “I’m not obsessed.”

  “Yes. You are.” My words are slow, sapped of energy, my shoulders sagging like someone’s holding them down. “I saw the passageway.”

  Tate frowns, forehead creased as she tries to catch up. “Between the closets?” she asks—and just like that, anger flickers through my fatigue.

  “Don’t do that,” I say.

  “Do what?”

  “Act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t been in that passageway in years.”

  Now, my tears burn as I swipe them away. “You expect me to believe that?”

  “I don’t know why you wouldn’t.”

  “How many times did you draw him dead? And how could you bear it?” I swallow down the sob that’s threatening to escape. “He’s our brother. And it’s like… like you killed him over and over.”

  Slowly, she turns her head from side to side. “Dahlia, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”