The Family Plot

by Megan Collins

  The sentence startles me, but I force myself to stay rigid. “There was nothing in that chest. I checked.”

  “There was nothing in it,” Charlie says quietly, “because I broke into it.”

  I picture the splintered wood on top of the trunk. “When?” I ask.

  He answers me slowly. “After Fritz found the body… Andy… I knew it was only a matter of time before the police searched the shed. I waited until the middle of the night, when Kraft and everyone else was gone. I didn’t know the combination to the lock on the chest, so I chopped it open. With Fritz’s ax.”

  “That was you?” I’d been certain it was Andy, proof that he’d uncovered secrets that someone would kill to protect. But now I stutter onto another thought. “Why did you go down there? How’d you even know about the room?”

  Charlie swallows. “It was just the iron in the chest that night. But that used to be… That’s where the dresses—” He stops, his mouth moving soundlessly before he continues. “I planned to take the photographs, too. But they weren’t like that, back then. Hung up like that. They used to be in the chest. And I couldn’t breathe looking at that wall. I barely made it out without throwing up.”

  I feel my pulse thrumming, a taut string plucked. “Charlie,” I manage. “How did you know what was in the chest?” I stare at the key overlapping the brand on my palm. “Where did you get this key?”

  Charlie’s gaze darts toward Tate.

  “It’s okay,” she says softly, and there are tears shimmering on her cheeks.

  He closes his eyes, mouth shut tight, inhaling through his nose.

  “I got it from the Blackburn Killer,” he says. Beside me, Tate releases a breath. I find myself holding mine. “I got it from Dad.”

  “What? No!” Mom shouts.

  I fall back against the counter, my hip stabbed by its edge.

  “Why would you say that?” Mom cries. “How could you even think that of him?”

  “Because I was there!” Charlie bellows. “I was involved with it! Always.”

  Silence plows through the room. I’m stuck inside it, embraced too tightly by the quiet. When sound finally surges back, it bursts from Mom’s lips, her words coming out like wails.

  “What does that mean, Charlie?”

  It’s a while before he answers. My heart pounds out the seconds, my head becoming so light I worry it’ll float away.

  “It started when I was six,” he says, voice flat.

  I watch his lips move.

  “Dad came into my room, late one night. Yanked the blankets off me, told me we were going hunting.”

  Charlie knocks his fist against his forehead. Once. Twice. I flinch both times.

  “I didn’t question it. Even though it was dark out. Even though he didn’t take the rifle. He had this bag I’d never seen before, and I… I went with him. I followed him to the road that leads down to the shore—which I did think was weird; he only ever hunted in the woods. But suddenly Dad stopped, and we just stood there, waiting for”—he shakes his head—“I didn’t know what.”

  My heart keeps banging. I grip the counter to remain upright.

  “Nothing happened,” he says. “We waited and waited, and when I asked him what was going on, he told me to keep my mouth shut. Finally, we went back home, he sent me back to bed, and in the morning, I thought I’d… I thought I’d dreamed it. Until it happened again, a few nights later. The same thing: pulling me out of bed, leading me to that road. Only this time, we heard footsteps in the distance, someone’s shoes on the gravel, coming up from the shore.

  “Dad looked down the road and he whispered to me. Said there was a woman coming, and I had to make myself cry. I had to pretend to be lost and scared and alone so she’d stop to help me. I didn’t know what he… But then he pinched me, hard, and I did start crying. He shoved me out into the lane and crouched back, into the bushes. And when the woman came, she… she looked so concerned. She asked where I lived, who my parents were, and I was so scared. I didn’t understand what was happening, but something in me knew to be terrified.”

  He pauses, kneading his knuckles against his closed eyes. “The woman got down next to me, and she kind of… gathered me in her arms? And then, she was jerked away. Making these horrible noises. I didn’t— I almost couldn’t see… But it was Dad. He had a rope around her neck. He was strangling her. He was…”

  Charlie trails off. The room feels close to airless.

  “When she went limp, he didn’t hesitate. He grabbed a tarp from his bag, the same kind he used for deer, and he wrapped her up, and headed back home with her in his arms. And then… the shed… He took her to the shed. He went down into that room. With the tarp. The woman in the tarp. The woman who had crouched down to see if she could help me.” A choking sound grates in Charlie’s throat. “I didn’t understand what was happening.”

  On either side of me, Mom and Tate are crying, but my tears won’t come. My eyes feel hot, itchy, and I realize now I haven’t been blinking.

  “He made me keep watch that night,” Charlie says, “up in the shed. But through the hole, I could… I could see her head on the floor, the skin all purple around her eyes, like someone had punched her. I saw him wrap a blue scarf around her neck.”

  A blue scarf. Melinda Wharton. The only woman who wasn’t discovered in the dress.

  “No,” Mom moans. Over and over she says it, a chorus of cries beneath Charlie’s story.

  “Then he wrapped her in the tarp again and carried her up from that room. And he made me follow him, again. But this time, we went down to the ocean. And we walked along the shore for a long time, even as he stumbled beneath the weight of her. Then he walked into the water, pushed her out. The whole time, I didn’t say anything. But he said if anyone saw us on our way back, we’d tell them we found a woman in the ocean and were on our way to get help. He muttered something, more to himself, like, ‘A man can’t be a murderer if he’s out with his son.’

  “He told me it was our secret, one that no one else would understand. He said, ‘If you tell anyone what we did tonight, you’ll be in big trouble. They’ll take you away and throw you in jail, and I won’t be able to stop them.’ ”

  Mom sobs, and I feel her hand close over mine on the counter. When Charlie looks at her, his face is filled with disgust—at himself, or at Dad, I don’t know.

  “I was so scared,” Charlie says, gaze fixed on Mom, “but I still didn’t really get it. Even seeing the body, even with Dad using that word, murderer, even when the news about Melinda Wharton started spreading around the island—I couldn’t make sense of what had happened that night. I just knew I felt terrible, all the time. Like I was cut up inside. Every day another cut.”

  He hangs his head. “It was two years before it happened again. I don’t really remember the second woman the way I remember the first. It’s all so… it’s like seeing it through gauze. Though I did register the differences, from Melinda. Now, there was a dress. And a burn on her ankle.”

  He nods toward my hand, which holds the brand. Seeing it still there, I drop it immediately, as if it singed my own skin. The key falls with it, clattering to the floor. Charlie watches it, dark metal on white tile.

  “Dad made me keep the key,” he continues, “in a space he’d carved out in my closet. He said we’d store it there, in case Edmond Kraft ever searched his things. He said ‘we’ like I agreed to it. Like I wanted to be part of it. When, really, at some point, I sort of just… woke up to it. Woke up into this reality where I understood, definitively, what Dad had done. And by then, it was too late. I couldn’t tell anyone. How could I tell? In implicating Dad, I’d be implicating myself.”

  Mom’s hand slips off mine. She might be crying still—Tate, too—but all I can hear is Charlie’s voice, a fractured melody above my percussing heart.

  “A couple times, the morning after, I went down to where we’d left the body. I don’t know why I wanted to see it. Maybe to know for sure what I’d done. To puni
sh myself. One of the times, the police were already there, but I stood in the trees, watching them work. They took photos of her. Like Dad had done only hours before. And I thought about saying something. But then I heard his voice: ‘They’ll take you away and throw you in jail.’ Because he planned it that way. He made me his partner in crime.”

  Charlie puts his fist to his mouth. Then his cheeks puff out with his breath, as if he’s trying not to be sick. Soon, his hand falls to his side like a dead thing lying on the tile.

  My mouth is slack. It’s too much to process at once. Beside me, Mom sobs out lines of denial, of horror—“No, no, oh Daniel, no”—and as my vision goes foggy, my body grows numb.

  Dad.

  The man who carried dead deer to our door.

  The man who returned from hunting with beads of blood on his hands, who wiped them away like specks of mud.

  It was always so casual, the relationship he had with death.

  Locking my knees to keep from falling, my mind works to transform Dad from hunter to killer. Instead of him stalking through the woods beneath a blue sky, I see him crouching behind a bush, clothes as dark as the night itself. Instead of him aiming a rifle at the heart of a deer, I see him holding a rope and pulling it taut. Instead of him squeezing a trigger, he’s squeezing a neck.

  I shake my head, jolting the images to a stop. It shouldn’t be so easy, blurring the lines between hunter and murderer.

  My mind sputters back over Charlie’s story. It’s unbearable to take it all in, to recalibrate my distant father as an actual monster, one this island has feared for decades. Despair sinks into my stomach, cold and heavy, as I think of all the women, the people, he—

  My heart plummets. My legs threaten to give out. Because if I keep amending my previous theories—Dad in the shed, instead of Fritz or Lyle or even Edmond; Dad with such horrible secrets to protect—I will never escape the place where Charlie’s story inevitably leads.

  “But Ruby said it was Fritz,” I cry out, desperate for a loophole. “She said she saw Fritz go into the shed in the middle of the night, carrying a big black bag.”

  “She was wrong,” Charlie says dimly. “It was Dad. Fritz was never there.”

  I shake my head. “She said she knew it was him from his limp. The man was limping.”

  “He was carrying a dead body,” Charlie mutters.

  I glance at Mom, who’s finally silent. I want her eyes to be pinched with disbelief, but she’s staring blankly ahead, tears stalled on her cheeks.

  And now I can’t fight it. My mind forces other memories to the surface: times I saw Dad walking out of the woods, hauling his dead deer home. Sometimes he’d tarp them, so all he’d have to do was drag. But for the smaller ones, a hundred pounds or so, he’d carry them in his arms. And Charlie’s right. Bile creeps toward my throat, burning my esophagus, because he’s right. When Dad held those deer, he never moved too steady. He stumbled more than walked. Someone watching in the dark might even say he limped.

  “So when Ruby saw Andy following someone,” I say, words sluggish, almost slurred, “he was really following… Dad. Which means, Andy must have figured out what Dad was up to, who he was, and he must have been looking for proof, or—”

  I’m cut off by a humorless laugh.

  “You don’t get it,” Charlie says, squinting at the floor. “Andy wasn’t following him that night. Not in secret anyway.”

  My heart thumps out a warning, begging me not to ask. But my mouth disobeys. “What do you mean?”

  Slowly, Charlie lifts his head. As our eyes connect, his are so pained it’s like looking into open wounds. I stop myself from breathing—knowing, somehow, that his response will change me forever.

  “The last woman I watched Dad kill was his fourth victim. Claudia Adams. I was fourteen at the time. After that, I was too old to seem helpless. So Dad needed someone else he could use as bait. Someone he could groom to take my place.”

  I shake my head, raising my hands like shields. Squeezing my eyes shut, I grit my teeth against his words.

  “Three years later, Amy Ragan was murdered. Dad’s fifth victim,” he says. “And Andy’s first.”

  nineteen

  Time stops as Mom gasps. We become statues, frozen in this moment. Even Tate, who flinched at Andy’s name, has gone completely still. My pulse, once thrashing, is silent.

  “No,” I mutter.

  It’s a No of astonishment, of anguish. It’s a No of refusal. A No that means You’re wrong.

  “You’re lying.”

  “That would be nice,” Charlie scoffs. “But no. I’m not. Dad told me, ‘You’re old enough now that the women are more likely to feel threatened than protective. Andy’ll work better.’ ”

  Something slinks into my stomach, cold but clawing. Its nails scrape against my insides, tentative for now, but still drawing blood.

  “I would have known,” I say, “if my twin were a murderer.”

  Tate inhales sharply. “Dahlia, no. They weren’t murderers. Not Charlie and Andy. They were victims of Dad. Same as those women.”

  I turn my head to glare at her. “I hardly think those women would see it the same way.”

  “We were bait,” Charlie says. “So, is— Is a worm what kills a fish, because it draws it to the hook? Or is it the hook that kills it? Or the man holding the rod?” He looks up at me, eyes desperate and wide. “Which is it? Because I really don’t know.”

  “It’s the man!” Tate cries.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Andy didn’t do it. I would have known. I would have known.”

  Mom places a shaky hand on my shoulder, but I shrug it off.

  “I regret it,” Charlie says, “not protecting him from it. Not fighting Dad, telling him he couldn’t do to Andy what he did to me. But at the same time, I was so relieved that it wasn’t me anymore. That the secret wasn’t just his and mine anymore; someone else had to hold it, too.”

  “Oh, Charlie,” Mom whimpers. “He was just a boy.”

  “So was I,” he snaps.

  Mom nods, chastised, taking a step back. I tighten my grip on the counter, ignoring the talons in my stomach, even as they dig in deeper.

  “And I hated it,” Charlie continues. “I couldn’t stand knowing what Dad was doing to him. Why do you think I left, the second I got my inheritance? I couldn’t be in this house. And when Tate and I finally returned home, Andy was turning sixteen—two years older than I was when Dad said I wouldn’t work anymore. Jessie Stanton had just been killed, but I figured that would be the end of it. He would have told Andy, like he told me, that it was over for him now. And I wanted to see him. Andy. I wanted to know he was okay.

  “But when we got here, I knew right away I was wrong. Nothing was over. I could feel it everywhere—the oppressive control Dad had over Andy. The control I’d barely escaped. And it just… it triggered all the—the terror, and rage, and self-hatred I’d always tried so hard to tamp down, until I was in my room, freaking out and… I couldn’t hide it anymore. I confessed it all to Tate.”

  I blink at him, his last sentence slow to sink in. Then I turn toward Tate.

  “You knew.”

  Of course she did: You have to tell them, she said, when I confronted Charlie with the brand. And before that, she held his panicked gaze when the police were searching his room. They’re so intertwined, so fastened together within their cocoon, that there’s probably nothing they don’t know about each other.

  But this— This is more than a secret shared between siblings; it’s a secret kept from everyone. From me.

  “You’ve known,” I say, “for ten years, that Dad was the Blackburn Killer.” My voice quivers. “And you didn’t tell anyone? You never thought to call the police?”

  Tate goes to Charlie now, sinking down beside him. As she wraps him in her arms, they lean toward each other, the sides of their foreheads touching. Tate studies the floor as she speaks.

  “I wanted to tell someone.”

 
“Then why didn’t you?”

  “We didn’t think Dad would kill again. He’d lost all his bait.”

  Bait. My fist clenches at the word. A sour taste pools onto my tongue.

  “What if you were wrong?” I spit out. “What if he murdered another woman? That was a chance you were willing to take?”

  “He didn’t, though!” Tate cries. “And we didn’t know how to tell anyone without Charlie getting in trouble. He was a teenager the last time Dad dragged him along. Just a few years away from being a legal adult. We couldn’t be sure he’d be safe.”

  From the corner of my eye, I see Mom sag against the counter. I have no strength inside me to hold her up, keep her standing. Instead, I watch her slip down until she’s kneeling on the floor, head dropping into her hands, sobs muffled by her palms.

  “You could have told the police about the shed,” I say. “You could have said you just found it. Left Charlie out of it altogether.”

  Tate shakes her head. “What if Dad admitted that Charlie and Andy were part of it?”

  The thing in my stomach goes still. Its claws retract, the blood it drew going dry. Now, in place of that pain, my body burns, as if struck by lightning, my bones scorched and sizzling.

  “You’re wrong about Andy,” I say. “He would’ve told me.”

  But even as I say it, I know it’s a tattered, worn-out belief, one that hardly fits anymore. In truth, there was so much he didn’t tell me: about Ruby; about why he hacked at trees, why anger brewed in him sometimes, severe as a storm; about why he felt our family was unnatural—

  I stop right there.

  Dread gathers inside me. One by one, my memories of Andy slot into Charlie’s story.

  “It’s true, Dahlia,” he says now. “Why else do you think he had a key to the trapdoor? Dad gave him one. Just like he gave one to me.”

  I shake my head, still fighting it.

  “And why else would the murders have stopped after Andy was gone? Dad couldn’t do it without us. He said that once: ‘I couldn’t do this without you, Charlie.’ Like it was something for me to be fucking proud of. Well, apparently he couldn’t do it without Andy, either.”