“N-nothing,” Mom stutters. “I don’t know what you— Nothing, I swear.”
From her place on the floor, Tate touches Charlie’s leg. “Hey,” she says quietly. “Mom didn’t know.”
Charlie scoffs.
“Know about what?” I ask.
I point my light toward Charlie’s face, watching as his eyes lose the gleam of their anger, as they dim into resentment instead. “The shed,” he mutters.
Mom gasps. “No! I didn’t! I had no idea.”
Charlie shrugs one shoulder, the movement lacking his sharpness from a moment ago. “You lied to us our entire lives.”
“Not about that!” Mom cries. “If I had any idea what was down there, I would have…”
She continues on, but I’m not listening. I’m focusing, instead, on the sketches again, tugged toward an earlier thought.
“But they’re so similar,” I say, and silence swells around my interruption. “Mom—why did you tape up your drawings like this? Exactly like the photographs in the shed.”
“Seriously, Dahlia?” Tate stands up with a grunt. “First, you accuse me of taking those photographs, and now you’re accusing Mom?”
“She accused you?” Charlie asks.
“I wasn’t… I wasn’t accusing you,” I say. “Or I didn’t mean to, anyway. But Mom”—I turn back to her—“did you ever see the wall of photos? Is that why you…?” I gesture to her sketches.
“No! I’ve never been down in that room, not even when my father used it. It was always just storage, just—” She touches her forehead. “I don’t know what else to say. I already told the police.”
Charlie stiffens. “Told the police what?”
“They found my drawings last night, during their search. Detective Kraft pulled me aside, and I explained everything as I explained it to you—my lie about my parents, my fears about Andy—but he asked me about the similarity to the photographs, and I told him I don’t know! It’s just a coincidence.”
“What did Elijah say?” I ask. “Did he buy that?”
On the phone today, he was still pushing me toward his theories about Dad. Did he see this wall as further evidence that he might be guilty, that perhaps Dad copied Mom’s collage? Or worse, did the connection between the photos and the sketches nudge Elijah toward a different theory? One where Mom was involved with the Blackburn murders, too.
“Did he buy that?” Tate seethes. “Why don’t you just say it, Dahlia? You think we’re all a bunch of killers.”
“What? I didn’t—”
“You’re suspicious of Mom’s sketches, suspicious of my dioramas—which, ten minutes ago, you equated to photographing dead bodies!”
There’s pain in her emphasis, her lips twisted around the words. I open my mouth to protest, to remind her, again, that I didn’t mean what I said—but Elijah’s theories are whirling through my mind, his questions spinning like yarn into a gruesome knot. At Tate’s mention of her dioramas, I feel a strand get snagged.
“Why are your dioramas so accurate?” I ask.
She flinches away. “Excuse me?”
“Elijah Kraft said the crime scenes you depicted get a lot of things right. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but—how did you know, exactly, how to position everything?”
Tate looks at Charlie, mouth agape. He returns her gaze with a bewildered shake of his head. When she turns to me again, her expression is furious and wild, her face almost monstrous in the shadows. “What the fuck are you implying?”
“I don’t know!” I admit. “I’m not implying anything, I just—” I lean back against the wall, stare at the sketches opposite me: Andy’s head bashed in, his eyes forever closed; Andy slumped on the ground, his eyes open but vacant. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“We’re your family,” Charlie says coolly. “You can’t be saying things like that.”
Now I whirl toward him. “You’re the one who asked Mom what other secrets she’s been keeping!”
“I was in shock. I’m shocked, okay? About her lie. But the way you’re talking to us… It’s like you don’t even know us at all.”
“I don’t really know you at all! I’ve barely spoken to you in the last ten years.”
“And that’s our fault?” Tate fumes. “How many times have I contacted you? How many emails have you returned? How often did you call to check on Mom?”
“That’s not— How is that relevant?”
“It’s relevant because you’re making such”—her voice cracks—“horrible accusations.” Tears pool in her eyes, but I see her trying to maintain her anger. “And if you’d reached out to us even half the times I reached out to you over the last decade, you wouldn’t be treating us all like suspects right now.”
“Why would I reach out to you? You and Charlie never made time for me and Andy when we were kids. You were always wrapped up in your own cocoon.”
“We were kids!” Tate says. She swipes at her cheeks. “And you were nine years younger than me. And even if we did ‘make time’ for you, what would have happened? You think we were in a cocoon? Well, you were like ivy, Dahlia, clinging to Andy all the time.”
“I didn’t cling to him, we— If anything, we clung to each other.”
“I know that’s what you tell yourself, but how well did you even know him?”
Charlie reaches for her elbow. “Okay, Tate…”
“No,” she says, wrenching out of his grasp. “You act like the two of you were so connected—”
“We were!”
“—like you could read his mind, feel everything that happened to him.”
“I could, I… I thought I could.”
“But you didn’t even know he was dead!”
For a few seconds, silence expands around us like foam. Then a sound rips out of me—a ragged, helpless sob—as I drop to my knees on the floor.
“I know!” I cry. “I know, okay? I failed him. I know!”
Mom crouches beside me. “Oh, Dahlia, you didn’t fail him.” She places a hand on my shoulder, but I shrink from her touch.
“You failed him, too!” I yell, and she leaps back. “He hated how you raised us. He said it was unnatural, and he always, always wanted to leave! All because you couldn’t face your parents’ death. All because you found comfort in murder.”
“All right, Dolls,” Charlie says.
“And you!” I fling my gaze up at him. “Andy wanted to talk to you that night, to you and Tate. He wanted to ask you what it was like to get out of this place. But the two of you were off with each other like always, and maybe if you’d been there, he wouldn’t have been alone outside and someone wouldn’t… wouldn’t have…”
My head falls into my hands, my tears instantly wetting my palms. My body burns with pain, like fireworks bursting, scorching me from the inside out. I know I’m barely making sense, braiding together a rope of blame that isn’t tied to Andy’s murder, but I’m heaving and hurting and I’m sick, so sick, of Andy being gone.
When my sobs finally subside, I look at Tate and Charlie and Mom. They’re gawking at me, like they have no idea what to do with me. And it’s fine. I don’t mind. I don’t know what to do with them, either.
“Let’s go,” Tate says after a moment, tugging on Charlie’s sleeve.
“But—” Mom starts.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Tate snaps.
She closes the door behind them, leaving me with Mom in this dim, constricting space.
“What can I—” she tries.
I shoot a hand up to cut her off.
“Not right now,” I say, “please,” and I glare at the floor until, moments later, I hear her leave.
Alone in the passageway, I put my elbows on my knees, let my head fall back into my palms. Even with my eyes closed, I see the sketches on the wall—Andy bleeding, Andy dead, Andy never coming back. I look at the tears on my fingertips, watching them glisten like glass shards. And all the while, my chest vibrates with a rhythmic, persistent t
hud I barely even recognize as the thump of my own heart.
sixteen
“I have some news.”
The phone is pressed between my pillow and ear, and even as Greta speaks, I feel myself tugged toward sleep. Since Mom’s confession yesterday, I’ve been incurably drowsy, as if a sedative swirls in my bloodstream, too potent to resist. And I don’t want to resist it, because if I do, I’ll have to be awake in this unnerving truth: for all our lives, our mother lied to us as effortlessly as dreaming.
I hear the floorboards creak in Andy’s room. It’s quick, just a splinter of sound, but as soon as it happens, my stomach sours. It’s not the creak itself, achingly familiar, reaching me through the wall we shared; it’s that I don’t imagine, even for a second, that it might be him. Already I’m growing used to Andy’s absence, my heart settling like a house around the empty space he’s left.
“Dahlia? Are you there?”
“Mmm,” I mumble.
“I found some info on Lyle.”
I sit up in bed, blankets pooling around my waist, cool air rushing in to replace their warmth. “What is it?”
“Well,” Greta starts, “it’s a couple things. First, you know me: I went down some rabbit holes—but I ended up getting my hands on his high school yearbook. Apparently, he grew up here, not on the island.”
“Okay?” That isn’t particularly newsworthy. Many of the islanders grew up on the mainland before settling here as adults.
“Anyway, there’s a picture of him,” Greta continues. “With your groundskeeper.”
Surprise twangs against my ribs. “With Fritz?”
“Here, I’m texting it to you.”
In a moment, the picture comes through. I zoom in with my fingers, first on the caption—John Fritz and Lyle Decker, cocaptains of the boys’ lacrosse team—and then on the image itself: two skinny teenagers, each with an arm slung over the other. At first, I don’t see the men I know in those faces; they’re too smooth, too slender, too smiling. But as I squint closer, I recognize Fritz’s eyes, mirthful but mild.
“They were friends?” I say.
It’s difficult to imagine. Back when we were kids, we knew Lyle Decker as the cranky man across the woods, the man who offered us little more than a growl of acknowledgment on the rare occasions we saw him. Fritz, on the other hand, has always been playful and polite.
“I’ve never seen them together,” I add.
“Yeah, well, Fritz was always working when you saw him, right?”
“Still. He was friends with our neighbor, and that never came up? I guess they could have drifted apart…”
“But Lyle knew about your family’s shed,” Greta reminds me. “And he told Ruby to stay away from it. So it seems like he and Fritz kept in touch.” She pauses. “I’ve got theories, of course.”
I grip the phone. “Tell me.”
She draws in a breath like someone about to sink beneath water. “Okay, theory one: Fritz is the Blackburn Killer, like you originally thought. Lyle knows something is weird about the shed but isn’t sure what—just that his old friend gets really squirrelly about it. In this theory, it’s just a coincidence that Lyle got sick around the time the murders stopped.
“Theory two: Lyle is the Blackburn Killer, and he got access to the shed from Fritz. Maybe Lyle told him he needed storage space or something, and Fritz is just an innocent party.”
“But Fritz knew what was under the shed,” I say. “He asked me to help him get rid of it.”
“Right. Okay. Onto theory three: Fritz and Lyle were working together. Because it’s a lot for one person, don’t you think? Moving a body, cleaning it, dressing it, branding the ankle, taking the photographs, then carrying it down to the shore? That’s a lot of work for a limited window of darkness. All this time, the police have been looking for the Blackburn Killer, but what if it’s the Blackburn Killers?”
A shiver shoots through me, and for a moment, I’m speechless. I pull my blankets toward my chin. “Wow,” I mutter. “I never—”
“There’s more,” Greta says. “In researching Lyle, I found this old newspaper article: Judge dismisses trespassing complaint filed against chief of police.”
“Okay…” I say. “I don’t get it.”
“Chief Edmond Kraft—that’s the guy who always hung around your house, right?”
I straighten at the name. “Yes.”
“According to the article, Lyle saw Kraft ‘snooping around’ the woods one night, and he filed a trespassing complaint against him. The complaint never went anywhere, but still.”
She says that, but still, like her next conclusion should be obvious, but I shake my head, confused. “Edmond was always snooping around,” I say. “He’d walk around our property, checking everything out. Writing notes. Elijah Kraft says his dad had entire filing cabinets of notebooks, all about us.”
“Exactly,” Greta says. “So. Theory four: the chief went a little deeper into the woods than usual, Lyle saw him, freaked out that Kraft might discover something about the shed, and then tried to make sure he couldn’t go snooping there again.”
I hear the smile in her voice, which is higher than usual. It gets this way whenever she’s forging a new path through a case, following clues like breadcrumbs, invigorated by the search.
“Of course,” she adds, “that just makes theory four an addendum to theory three. Or two. But then there’s theory five.”
“Five?” I close my eyes against a whirl of dizziness.
“Last one,” Greta promises. Then she does it again, that presubmerging breath. “I’ve been thinking about my message boards, all the theories that have been kicked around over the years about the Blackburn Killer. And one that comes up a lot is that he might have been someone in law enforcement.”
My eyes jerk open. “A cop?”
“It’s actually not an uncommon theory for cases like this, especially when there’s a lack of evidence. Whoever killed those women knew how to make sure it couldn’t be traced back to him. And then there’s the idea that he could have used his uniform to get the women’s guards down before he strangled them. Or he could have approached them under the guise of questioning them: ‘Hey, miss, what’re you doing out so late?’ That kind of thing.”
I clench my jaw, picturing that scene: someone abusing the trust stitched into their uniform, using their power to inflict unimaginable pain. Greta’s right; it’s not uncommon. I know the stories, the names: Gerard Schaefer was fired from his teaching job, rejected from the priesthood, and finally landed as a police officer in Florida, where he murdered Susan Place, Georgia Jessup, and buried them in a park. John Christie, another officer, stowed his victims’ bodies under floorboards, in his garden, behind the walls in his kitchen.
And now I’m thinking of Edmond. How he strutted so noticeably around our lawn, never even attempting subtlety. How he sometimes announced his drop-ins with the flashing lights above his cruiser, a reassurance to the islanders that he had an eye on Murder Mansion.
But what if he was never actually investigating us? What if, instead, he was setting us up, laying the groundwork to make us seem suspicious? That way, if the room beneath the shed—his room?—were ever uncovered, people would easily believe that we were to blame. Well, yeah, they might say, I’m not surprised. Police have been looking at the Lighthouses for years.
The air compresses around me.
“Elijah said Edmond’s been in a nursing home,” I tell Greta. “Early onset dementia. I don’t know how long he’s had it, but—”
“That could explain why the murders stopped,” she finishes.
“It doesn’t explain Fritz, though. Or Lyle.”
“I know,” she agrees, and I hear the hunger in her words, the appetite that’s been whetted instead of cured. “That’s why they’re only theories right now. Something’s still missing for sure.”
We rehash her ideas for a few more minutes. Then Greta ends the call with a promise: “I’m going to try something.”
>
She won’t elaborate on what that something is, “just in case it doesn’t pan out,” but as she mentions it, her voice becomes tight, restrained, like she’s pinching back the excitement of whatever she has planned.
For an hour after that, I barely even move. The possibilities, the suspects, pin me down—Lyle at my wrists, his breath rasping in his throat; Fritz at my ankles, his long hair scraping my legs; and Edmond at my neck, his fingers squeezing my windpipe like a pen.
They stare at me, eyes dilated, daring me to decide which one is a killer.
“This is ridiculous!”
Charlie’s voice booms up from downstairs, disrupting the image of those men. Instantly, my body feels lighter, like I can actually feel them letting me go.
“It’s hysterical, how off base you are. Were you one of those color-outside-the-line sort of kids? That doesn’t mean you’re creative, you know; it means you’re wrong.”
I lift my head, pointing my ear toward the hall. The doorbell rang a while ago, but until now, I haven’t spared a thought for who might have arrived.
“Do you have one of your fancy little warrants? If not, I’ll have to see you out.”
Adrenaline sprints through me. I spring toward the doorway, trying to catch the other end of the conversation, but the person is too quiet. Creeping across the hall, I edge toward the top of the stairs until I’m able to identify the voice.
“It’s really just a question,” Elijah says.
“Hardly. It’s an insinuation.”
“It’s interesting you’d see it that way.”
I descend a few steps until I see them. In the living room, Elijah studies Charlie, whose shirt is rumpled, half untucked, hair sticking up and out, as if he’s been grabbing at it. In contrast, Elijah is pressed and put-together, a crisp green folder in one hand, a notebook in the other.
“What’s going on?” I ask, and they both look at me.
“Nothing,” Charlie says. But his eyes leap like a startled deer’s to Elijah’s folder.
“I heard something about a warrant,” I prompt.
Charlie ignores me, turning back to Elijah. “If you insist on badgering me with your embarrassingly transparent questions, let’s do it somewhere else, shall we?”
The Family Plot Page 18