The Family Plot

by Megan Collins

  He takes off toward the back hall, and Elijah follows without another glance my way.

  What was in that folder? Charlie’s eyes darted toward it the same way they darted toward Tate when the police were searching his room. He never answered my question about that, never explained the anxiety I saw. You have to trust us, is all he said. Me, Tate, Mom—we’re all you have left.

  But Mom’s a liar. And Tate cares more about followers than family. And Charlie was nervous about that folder, nervous about the officers traipsing across his floor.

  I want to lurk at the victim room door, listen to Elijah’s questions, Charlie’s answers, but my brother is clearly defensive right now, enough to be wary of an eavesdropper. I’ll need to speak to Elijah alone, after he’s talked to Charlie. And maybe I should be wary of an eavesdropper, too.

  Slipping into my shoes near the door, I’m about to head outside to wait for Elijah when I register how the foyer’s been transformed. Small tables with white cloths dot the wide space. A typewritten card announcing the items that will be displayed sits on each table. The items themselves remain in piles in the living room, where more surfaces wait, draped in white.

  It looks like a room full of ghosts.

  I open the front door and walk into another gray day, clouds low and heavy in the sky. The wind carries the smell of the ocean, Andy’s least favorite scent, and I pull my chunky sweater closed. Elijah’s police cruiser sits at the end of our walkway, and as I approach it, voices drift up from the bottom of the driveway.

  “… but that’s because it’s Murder Mansion. There was some kind of fuss there the other day. Tons of police.”

  “Well, yeah. They found that boy.”

  “No, this was after that. Susan said the driveway was packed with cruisers. There was even…”

  The voices shrink and fade, belonging to walkers on the road. I take a few sips of air, trying to unhear how flippantly one of them spoke of Andy, how, just like Lyle Decker, she referred to him as that boy.

  “Hey.”

  Ruby emerges from the trees near the side yard, as if I’ve conjured her by thinking of her grandfather. Or as if she’s been lingering in the woods. Watching.

  “Did you talk to the police about me?” Her question is unexpectedly forceful. She squeezes her lips together, waiting.

  “I talked to them about your grandfather.”

  “Why the hell would you do that?”

  She flexes her fists at her sides, and as I answer, I watch her hands curl and uncurl.

  “There were things you said that I wanted them to look into. Things that didn’t add up.”

  Or added up too well, I keep myself from saying.

  “That’s none of their business.” Ruby steps forward, shoving a finger into the air, so close I can see the dirt beneath her nails. “Grandpa and me—we’re just trying to get by. We don’t need the police coming over, riling him up, digging into my past with Andy.”

  So Elijah did question Lyle. I feel a gush of relief, almost gratitude, even as Ruby’s finger jabs toward me.

  “Your grandfather was riled up?”

  “Of course he was! I told you how he gets when it comes to Andy. You saw it yourself the other day. The detective got him so upset, and— You had no right, absolutely no right, to accuse us of anything.”

  “I didn’t accuse you,” I say, leaning away, my back against Elijah’s car. “Why are you so mad?”

  For the first time, her eyes aren’t big at all; they’re narrowed to slits as thin as paper. Moments pass, the ocean throbbing in the distance, and it’s a while still before her stare loses its sharpness. When her hand falls back to her side, it’s stuck in a fist, knocking against her thigh.

  “It’s just,” she starts. Then she sighs, finally relaxing her fingers. “I thought you and I… I thought we connected yesterday.”

  “Connected?”

  “Yeah. As friends.”

  The wind circles us, and Ruby breaks my gaze to button her coat. I cross my arms, tightening against the cold.

  “We’re not friends,” I tell her. I try to be gentle about it, but I want to be clear: I’m not her path back to Andy, her detour from loneliness.

  “We’re something,” she insists. “We understand each other. We were closer to Andy than anyone else.” She sniffles loudly. “We feel the same loss.”

  We don’t, though. Whatever pain Ruby feels, it’s only residue from a teenage crush. It’s nothing compared to the crater I will harbor inside me forever. Someday, Ruby will find another boy to love, but a twin, my twin, Andy, is irreplaceable. I will only grow emptier, the older I grow without him.

  Ruby moves some loose pebbles on the driveway with her foot, her bottom lip curling into a pout. “You didn’t change your mind, did you? About including the embroidery in the memorial?”

  “No,” I assure her, even though I haven’t thought of it since yesterday, when I closed those words—Ruby loves Andy—inside a drawer.

  “Good,” she says, punctuating the word with a choked and bitter chuckle. “It all went so wrong, you know.” She shakes her head, jaw tensing. When she speaks again, she shoves the sentence through gritted teeth. “That night I tried to give it to him, everything went so terribly wrong.”

  Terribly wrong. Wrong. It echoes off the trees, her voice gusting around us like wind. Ruby doesn’t seem to notice. She squints at her shoe, still stabbing at gravel.

  “I need to get back to Grandpa,” she adds. Her eyes harden, tiny and tight once again. “In the meantime, stop talking about me behind my back.”

  “I wasn’t—” I start, but she’s already turned around, rushing toward the woods. I watch her go, hands shoved into her pockets, curls billowing out behind her, until she’s too far for me to distinguish her from the shadows cast by trees. I pull out my phone to check the screen.

  No messages.

  “Updates soon,” Greta promised me earlier. It hasn’t been long since we hung up, but as I wait for Elijah, arms taut across my chest, I hope for another call. I want to know what Greta would make of it—Ruby’s strange anger, prompted, it seems, by Lyle’s reaction to the police; Elijah questioning Lyle only to return, again, to question Charlie.

  I look at my hand, scraping at Charlie’s “trademark flair” that he Sharpied across my skin. So far, it’s refused my attempts to scrub it away. It lingers defiantly, a day later, this tattoo I didn’t ask for. When my hand turns raw from rubbing, I turn my attention to the clouds growing thicker above me. Andy always struggled to find shapes in them. Me, I saw everything: cars, trees, deer. Look, it’s antlers, I said to him once. He scrunched up his face, followed my finger with his eyes, then kicked at the grass, giving up too soon. It’s just moisture, he replied. Just water and ice.

  He was like that, always seeing what things were made of, instead of what they could be. Who knows what’s in my blood? he asked Ruby, as if the unnatural lifestyle he wanted to escape was woven into his DNA.

  When I finally hear the front door, I leap off the car. Elijah clomps down the walkway, gripping his folder tightly.

  “I was looking for you,” he says, stopping a few feet in front of me. “Inside.”

  “I figured we should talk out here. Away from… everyone else.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wanted to know why you were talking to Charlie. But now I want to know what happened with Lyle. Ruby was here. She said you questioned him.”

  Elijah leans forward, reaching past me to drop his green folder on top of his car. “I’m sure you know I can’t really say.”

  The wind nudges the folder open, rustling the papers inside. I try to scan them quickly, but he slaps the folder closed before anything flies away. He pulls it back toward his side, eyeing me as he tucks it under his arm.

  “I told you about Lyle,” I argue. “Don’t I have a right to know if you think he’s a suspect?”

  “You know that’s not how this works.”

  “What about Charlie then?” I try.
“What were you talking to him about?”

  He watches me for a few more seconds before he looks away. Shifting the folder to his other hand, he opens it to glance inside, then shuts it again before aiming his attention toward the woods.

  “Will you take a walk with me?” he asks.

  I blink at him. “A walk? I’m asking about Charlie.”

  “I understand. But there’s something I want to show you.” He considers my crossed arms, quivering in the cold. “It’s a bit of a walk, so you might want to grab your coat.”

  “A walk to where?”

  The corners of his mouth quirk up. “It’s a surprise,” he says. Then his expression eases, flattening into something more earnest. “You’ll be safe, I promise. And when we get there, I’ll tell you exactly what I asked your brother.”

  I study him, weighing his strange proposition, how he’s assuring my safety when I hadn’t even thought to be concerned for it. But that phrase—exactly what I asked your brother—hooks me more than I’d like. It feels so specific, significant, and swirling beneath the words, I hear Elijah’s suspicion.

  “I’ll get my coat,” I say.

  seventeen

  We head down Breaker Lane, which ends at the beginning of the rest of the world. The road, paved with gravel, empties out onto the shore, the gray sea unfolding beyond it like a sheet of aluminum foil. Even with my mouth closed, I taste the brine of the ocean, salty as the broth in Dad’s stews. The wind is thicker here, like coarse fabric rubbed against my cheeks.

  Standing at the edge of Blackburn Island, it takes more effort to breathe—and it’s impossible, I find, not to think of those women. Tate’s dioramas flip like flash cards through my mind: the angle of Amy’s leg, folded grotesquely against the hard-packed sand; Claudia’s red hair, snarled with seaweed; and the slit in Jessie’s dress, evidence of the rocks that battered her body as she washed onto shore.

  I look to Elijah for direction. He stares at the water, gaze stretching toward a horizon filmed with fog.

  “Is this what you wanted to show me?” I ask.

  On the way down Breaker, all he offered was that he wanted to see if I could identify something. Something of Andy’s? I asked. But he shook his head, glancing at his folder.

  I wondered, again, at its connection to Charlie, to this destination Elijah refuses to name. I didn’t tell him, then, that most of this coast is new to me, that even growing up on the island, I hardly ventured this far. Andy hated the water, and that was enough of a reason to avoid it.

  It’s strange, though—how he viewed the ocean as an obstacle to getting away. Dodging the foam that reaches toward my shoes, I realize that it seems like the opposite, like the water wants to suck me in, drag me out toward somewhere else. Shouldn’t Andy have seen it, then, as a means of escape?

  But again—those women. They confirm, I guess, that Andy was right. The fact that their bodies were returned to our shore, spit onto sand instead of carried to another coast, is proof that the ocean wants us here, contained to Blackburn Island.

  “It’s this way,” Elijah finally answers, and he sets off walking, gesturing for me to follow.

  Water rushes toward our feet as we navigate the pebbled shore. We keep to the dryer side as much as we can, but even the beach grass here is wet, the giant rocks darkened by a recent tide.

  “Your brother’s putting a lot of work into his museum,” Elijah says after a while. “What do you think of it?”

  I stop for a second, but he doesn’t. He continues down the coast, oblivious to—or ignoring—my hesitation, and I step over driftwood to try to catch up.

  “I’m not sure,” he says when I don’t answer, “that, if it were me, I’d be okay with it. Be careful there.” He points to a jutting log, waiting to make sure it doesn’t trip me. “Seems like it’s making a spectacle, don’t you think, of such a personal loss?”

  When I stop this time, Elijah pauses, too. His eyes look curious, unguarded, as if he genuinely wonders what I think. And I’m struck by the word he used—spectacle—which is what I’ve called it, too.

  “Charlie is all about spectacle,” I reply. “He’s an actor. He loves an audience.”

  “Yeah?” Elijah starts walking again. “Is he any good?”

  Trailing behind him, I watch the impressions his shoes leave in the sand. It would be easy, stepping inside those prestamped spaces, using them to guide me along. Instead, I weave around the prints like rocks.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I tell him. “I’ve never been to any of his shows.”

  “Huh,” Elijah acknowledges. “So… you’re okay with the memorial then?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He slows again until I step into pace beside him. I feel him watching me. “What about the rest of your family? What do they think?”

  At the suspicious glance I cut his way, he puts up his hands. It’s a gesture of innocence, surrender, but it forces the folder between us, a thin green barrier.

  “Is that a detective question,” I ask, “or a personal one?”

  “I’m honestly just curious,” he says. “Look.” He opens one side of his jacket to reveal an inner pocket, the spiral of his notebook jutting from the top. “I’m not even writing this down.”

  He lets go of his coat and the notebook disappears. I pull in a mouthful of air, push it back out.

  “Tate’s okay with it, I guess. She’s always fine with whatever Charlie does. And anyway, she’s busy making her own kind of spectacle.”

  Elijah nods. “I saw her diorama.”

  “You did?”

  “Just now, at the house. And the other night. During the search.”

  I keep my focus on the damp sand in front of us. The shore is narrowing, nudging us closer to the waves.

  “It’s very realistic,” he adds. “The trees alone…” He blows out an impressed whistle.

  “But is it oddly accurate?” I ask.

  I intended a mocking edge to the question, a reference to his own phrase, but it comes out sounding sincere. I think of Tate’s face in the passageway, when I asked how she knew which way to position the bodies. Her eyes sparked with something hot and raw: hurt, I think; anger for sure. But more than that, I consider now, they flashed like she was threatened.

  Elijah’s brow furrows.

  “You said her other dioramas, the ones from Instagram, were oddly accurate,” I continue. “I’m just wondering if this one is, too.”

  He thinks it over. “Ask me again tomorrow,” he says, “when I see it at the museum. I’m assuming it’ll be finished by then?”

  “That’s the plan…”

  “Okay. Yeah, I don’t know—too soon to tell. There wasn’t a body in it yet.”

  “Well, there wasn’t one in the grave, either,” I say, the words sharp in my throat. “You said it was just his bones.” I force a painful swallow.

  “Right. But we know, roughly, the position he was buried in. We know exactly the point of impact on his skull. And as I’m sure you’re aware, those are details we haven’t divulged.”

  “Okay. So it won’t be accurate then.”

  “We’ll see,” Elijah says.

  Our gaze lingers. In my peripheral vision, I see the green of his folder, the grip of his hand.

  “Is there a reason you asked me that?” he says. “Are you… concerned about something?”

  “No,” I say quickly. I sidestep a clump of seaweed. “Other than the fact that you still won’t tell me where we’re going.”

  He smiles a little, almost sheepish. “It’s not much farther,” he promises.

  Beside us, the ocean roars, ruthless and wild. I turn my head to watch it, entranced by the violence of its rhythm. In a way, it reminds me of Andy—how he thrashed his ax at the trees, how he, too, had wildness in him, his eyes nearly feral each time he swung. As the ocean pulls back, its roar dulling to a fervent whisper, I swear I can hear Andy’s voice: Unnatural, he says. Our family is unnatural, Dahlia. We have to get out.
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br />   “How about your mother?” Elijah asks. “How’s she doing through all this?”

  My scoff comes quickly. “Hard to be sure. I just found out she’s a liar.”

  I regret the admission as soon as Elijah reacts, the mention of lying propelling him into motion. He reaches toward his inner pocket, ready to grab his notebook, but I put my hand out to stop him.

  “I’m talking about her parents,” I explain.

  He waits for me to elaborate.

  “That they died of cancer instead of murder? I know she told you when you questioned her about her sketches the other night.” I scoff again at a realization. “I can’t believe she told you before she told us.”

  Elijah’s forehead wrinkles. “You didn’t know?”

  “Not until yesterday.”

  A crease deepens between his brows. “How is that possible?”

  There’s astonishment in the question. My mind snags on that, slow to comprehend.

  “Wait,” I say. We stop walking. “Did you already know… before she told you?”

  He looks at me strangely, like I’m missing something obvious.

  “Everyone knows,” he says.

  I hesitate. “Who’s everyone?”

  “The people on this island. That’s why my father was so suspicious of your family.”

  I stare at him, jaw slack, until he continues.

  “Your mom and her parents only lived here during the summers at first, right?”

  I nod.

  “But then, your mom moved here permanently, on her own, and started telling people her parents were brutally murdered.”

  I nod again, and in a way, it feels like I’m absorbing the story for the very first time. She didn’t just lie to us. She lied to everyone she spoke to.

  “She didn’t think anybody would see an obituary?” Elijah says. “Everyone knew. And it freaked them out, that a person would lie about something like that.”

  As his words sink in, I waver between shock and embarrassment. I spent years trudging through websites for a single trace of Andy, and all that time, I never thought to check the rest of our family history. I never considered, even for a moment, that our origin story might be a lie.