I try to stop the thoughts flying through my mind. But it’s too late. They’re swarming together—
Andy insisting we needed to leave
—buzzing around each other—
Andy swinging at trees like there was something inside him he couldn’t get out
—flapping their furious wings—
Andy telling Ruby, “Who knows what I’d do to a kid? Who knows what’s in my blood?”
Now, Mom moans so loudly on the floor, it sounds like it’s happening in my head. But as I watch her crawl closer to Charlie, chugging out sobs, I realize the moan is mine this time, gushing from between my lips.
I clamp my hand over my mouth, as if I could hold back the truth: Andy’s role in Jessie Stanton’s murder, in the murders of Alexis Shea and Amy Ragan before her.
I think of their Honoring dates, scrambling to do the math as my stomach curdles. Andy would have been eleven when Dad killed Alexis. Only seven with Amy. Just a boy, like Mom said.
But with Jessie, he was days from sixteen, tipping toward adulthood, transitioning from boy to man.
“He was so disturbed that week,” I say, thinking out loud. “After Jessie Stanton, he was so on edge. He wasn’t even sleeping.”
Now, I focus on Charlie, aiming my words at him. “He was old enough, at that point, to really understand it. So do you think… do you think he threatened to tell someone? And maybe Dad—”
A sob punches out of me, sudden and searing.
“Did Dad kill Andy?” I finish. “To keep him quiet?”
“No,” Mom cries. “No. No. No, no.”
But then Tate hangs her head. And that’s when I know. She’s already come to this conclusion. For ten years, she’s known what Dad was. And when she learned that Andy had been killed, she didn’t cry or scream or stay in bed all day. She got to work on a diorama—exactly as she did for all the other victims of the Blackburn Killer.
I swing my gaze—slowly, heavily—between her and Charlie. “All week,” I say, voice low, breath shallow, “you’ve watched me suffer, trying to figure this out. You told me to trust the family, Charlie. To trust you. And Tate. But the whole time, the two of you knew Dad killed Andy. And you said nothing.”
“No!” Mom howls. “Daniel did not kill Andy! He was sick that night. He was very ill!”
Hunched on the floor, she balls up her hands like she wants to punch the tile.
“He was sick!” she repeats. “Your father was very sick! We were up all night.”
The first time she mentioned this, I felt such relief that she could prove Elijah wrong. Now, I almost pity her, how hard she’s working to hold this conviction, one she should already see crumbling.
“You must have fallen asleep,” I suggest.
“No.” Mom stamps her denial into the air. “And even if I did, I would have woken up if he left. Or… or when he came back.”
“Like you woke up all the other nights?” Charlie snarls. An old anger, scraped up from somewhere deep, shadows his words.
Mom gapes at him, aghast. “I… I didn’t…” She closes her mouth, swallowing.
“You’ve always been a very deep sleeper,” Tate tries gently. “It has to have been Dad. Who else would have reason to hurt Andy? Who else could be so violent?”
“I wasn’t asleep!” Mom yells. “Daniel was sick!”
Still on her knees, she slouches forward, digging her head into her flattened hands like somebody deep in prayer. Or, I consider instead, like somebody begging.
“Oh Charlie, why did he…” she starts. Sitting up, she reaches for Charlie’s foot, but his leg jerks away so suddenly her palm slaps against the tile. She doesn’t seem to notice. “Why did Daniel mur-murder all those women?”
Charlie chokes out a scoff. “How the fuck should I know? You think we chatted about it?”
“Please,” Mom pleads. “He didn’t… He didn’t say anything?”
In Mom’s question, I hear the echo of my own—You didn’t say anything to each other?—when I asked Charlie what he and Dad spoke about while hunting.
The beauty of nature, he answered. Appreciating nature.
Now, at the memory of that response, I tremble. My insides hum with horror.
Dad killed deer, Charlie told me, to preserve their beauty before time destroyed it. And now I see the photographs—those women who will never change, never age, will only lie broken but beautiful in their ice-blue gowns—mounted on the wall like the head of a deer.
“Why?” Mom persists. “Why would he do it, Charlie?”
When Charlie answers this time, his eyes are twin torches burning into Mom. “Fuck his reasons!” he shouts. “It’s never about the killer’s reasons, right? Because it can never be justified. You taught us that. And now you want me to rationalize a psychopath’s behavior? You married him, Mom. Why don’t you know?”
He pauses, features pinching together. “Why didn’t you know?” he screams.
The question reverberates once, and then it’s gone. Still, it spears us all, pinning us into place with the real questions behind it: Why didn’t you see what was happening? Why didn’t you save me?
In my head, I hear them in Andy’s voice.
“I don’t know,” Mom whispers. “I still can’t believe—”
“You never paid attention to what was really going on. You focused on films and newspapers and your shrine of portraits, all to hold on to your pathetic lie about your parents. You made me say their names!” he explodes. “In all those Honorings, I had to say the names of women I’d… And I had to hear Dad say them too! All because, what? You think there’s comfort in darkness? In other people’s suffering? You spent years steeping us in murder, but you don’t know the first thing about it. You have no idea how hideous it looks, how disgusting it smells. You thought Dad was okay with living in the darkness you created here—but you had it all wrong; he was the darkness. Why the fuck didn’t you know that?”
Mom’s face is slack with shame. “I don’t know,” she says again. “I’m so sorry.”
“That’s not enough,” Charlie huffs. “You were the adult. You loved him, and you refused to see what he was hiding right in front of you.”
Mom searches Charlie’s eyes, but he refuses to look at her.
“Charlie, you… you have to understand.” Her words break as she cries. “I had no one when I came here. I’d lost everyone who meant something to me. Couldn’t even keep up with friends because of the lie I was telling.”
“The lie was your choice,” Charlie seethes. “You could have corrected it.”
“And Daniel,” Mom continues, “he wanted me. He gave me a family again. He gave me you.”
As Charlie scowls, face turned from her, tears creep into his eyes.
Mom stretches toward him, even as he inches away. Tate envelops him tighter now, rocking him slightly, her chin resting on top of his head. And just like that, he goes limp in her arms, like the fire he was spewing only moments ago has been extinguished.
“But you’re right,” Mom whispers. “I didn’t know. And I’m so sorry.”
Her palm hovers above Charlie’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she repeats. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.” She touches him, and though he flinches, he doesn’t lurch away. “I’m so sorry.”
She buries her head in his shoulder as Charlie stares ahead, nose wrinkled, eyes brimming. The sheen of tears looks strange on him; I’ve never seen him cry.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.”
The words are stifled against Charlie’s shirt, but to me, they’re louder than ever.
I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t know, Andy. I’m sorry.
Tate reaches across Charlie to put her hand on Mom’s arm. She grips her tight, locking Charlie between them, holding him in a cage of what she thinks is comfort. Tears spill over onto Charlie’s cheeks the same second they slide onto mine. Tate looks up at me, blue eyes big and imploring, ringed with red from tears of her own. Silently, she beg
s me to join them on the floor, to be a part of their misery, their circle of solace—but how can I? How can I possibly hug these people, each of whom kept such horrifying secrets?
“We have to tell the police,” I say. “Let them know they’re right about Dad.”
Tate sucks in a breath as Charlie snaps his gaze up at me.
“Dahlia, no,” Tate says.
“We have to. What if they arrest someone else for the murders? Like Fritz!”
“They won’t arrest Fritz,” she argues. “They have nothing on him because he wasn’t involved.”
“So someone else then. Either way, they need to know everything Charlie told us.”
Charlie’s reply is stony. “You’d throw me to the wolves like that? Andy, too?”
“The police will understand. Dad forced you to do it. You were only kids.”
“We were teenagers, too.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Dahlia.” Charlie drags his hand down his face, raking away his tears. “The islanders still want to see someone go down for the murders, and the only person left with any involvement is me. I trusted you with this, I shared it with you. And now you want to take it to Kraft, just hand him the evidence he’s hunting for so he can prove that his dad was right about us all along? That the Lighthouses are monsters?”
“It’s not us, it’s Dad, it’s—”
“Is that what you want for Andy?” Charlie presses. “For people to remember him like that, as someone who played a role in the Blackburn Killer’s crimes?”
Beside him, Mom sobs.
“Is that what you want?” Charlie repeats.
Of course it isn’t.
I’d hate for that to be my brother’s story, for people to view Andy’s murder as a punishment he earned. I can already hear the islanders, gleeful with what they think is justice: Well. He helped a killer. He got what he deserved.
My eyes drift to Mom, whose tears keep falling. Her gaze sinks to the floor, heavy with everything we’ve learned and lost. Among it all, I hope she recognizes this devastating truth: the roots she planted on Blackburn Island, grown from the seed of a single lie, have been rotting from the start.
“Dahlia?” Tate prompts.
But I don’t respond. Instead, I leave my family where they sit, huddled together, waiting for my answer. I hear them calling after me, but I don’t turn back.
Upstairs, I stand at the threshold of Andy’s room. I hesitate for only a moment before walking toward his beanbag chair. When I flop onto it, the dust of our years apart billows around me, clouding a room, a boy, I once saw so clearly.
My whole life, I trusted him, trusted only him, and I thought he trusted me, too—enough to confide in me when someone was hurting him, when something made him feel cut up inside, like Charlie described.
And Charlie—if he’d just told someone, if he’d exposed Dad for the killer he was, then it never would have happened to Andy, who spent his too-brief life flashing in and out of frustration, digging his ax into trees as if, in wounding something else, he’d become woundless himself.
“Goddamnit, Charlie.”
I say it out loud, even though he’s too far to hear me, enshrouded by people who will ignore his sins to soothe his suffering. But as the words come out, I know they’re the wrong ones. I look at Andy’s bed, empty for a decade now. For so long, I made myself believe he’d return to this place, or at least to me, because the alternative was too agonizing to consider. But now, glancing at floorboards that will never again creak beneath his feet, I know: it isn’t Charlie I’m furious with. What Dad did—it would fuck with anyone’s mind, their sense of right and wrong. In truth, I’m furious with myself. For never noticing. For not being someone Andy thought he could tell. For refusing to go all those times he said we should leave. For keeping him here, stuck in the grip of a killer, until he was killed too.
Waves of sobs crash through me, torturous and tidal.
I assumed the chest beneath the shed was split by Andy’s ax, that he found the key somehow, went down to that room, but then was killed before he could show me what he’d uncovered. I assumed it because I couldn’t fathom a world in which he would choose to carry such crushing secrets alone. But I didn’t know him. Not his thoughts. Not his pain. Not the tenderest parts of his heart. All these years, I’ve been searching for, yearning for, a stranger.
Even worse: he harbored something so dark inside him, something no child should ever be near, let alone have to know.
But it’s not true, is it, that he didn’t try to tell me? He said our family was unnatural, too decked out in death—only I never wanted to listen. I wanted only to exist in the bubble of us.
Charlie, Tate, Mom—they’re all downstairs, arms tangled up in one another, the space between them squeezed to almost nothing. It’s okay, I imagine Tate saying, we’re here, Charlie, we’re here.
And I’m in a dead boy’s room, the cool air my only company. I’ve got no one to hold me but myself.
twenty
The Lighthouse Memorial Museum is moving ahead as planned. Two rooms down, Charlie tells Tate to hurry up.
“I’m putting the finishing touches on everything right now,” he says. “So either you’re done or it doesn’t get displayed.”
“I’m going as fast as I can. I lost a lot of time yesterday.”
“Oh! I’m sorry if my emotional breakdown came at an inconvenient time for you. Next time, I’ll try to schedule it better.”
I can sense the smirk in his voice. How quickly he’s returned to his usual self: sarcastic, spitting out dark humor. It doesn’t even surprise me to hear that he’s joking. He’s the same person who chuckled through Honorings, using fake, high-pitched voices as he chanted the prayer. Only when Mom shot him a glance would he undo his smile, pretend to be reverential.
But it hits me now, like a fist to my diaphragm, that it must be how he copes. Andy hacked at trees; Charlie twists things into jokes. It steals my breath to think of it—that everything I know of Charlie might only be armor. Even his theatrics, his acting. And after what he’s been through, why wouldn’t he want to slip into someone else?
Still, in the wake of everything he unleashed yesterday, it seems obscene, going on as planned, opening our house to hordes of strangers.
I suppose, though, that it makes more sense—why he wants this so badly, why he needs to convince people that the Lighthouses aren’t evil. After everything Dad made him do, Charlie probably believes the islanders are right about him, and he’s desperate to live as if they’re wrong.
“Fine, I’m done,” Tate says from down the hall. “You happy?”
“Thrilled,” Charlie deadpans, and I hear the two of them scurry down the stairs.
I’m lying on Andy’s bed, a half-empty Tupperware of cookies beside me. In the middle of the night, I awoke on his beanbag chair, back stiff, legs sore, and a deep, throbbing hunger pushed me toward the kitchen. There, I grabbed Mom’s cookies, ate two on the way back up, and walked the dark hallway back to Andy’s room. Then I dove onto his bed, where I fell asleep with shortbread in my hand.
His mattress isn’t comfortable. I’d forgotten about that—how he felt most at ease on solid, unyielding surfaces, so much so that he sometimes pulled his blankets off the bed and slept on the floor. Now I wonder if he was punishing himself, if he believed he didn’t deserve any comfort.
My phone chimes with a text from Greta: I’m on the island. Call me when you can.
I bolt upright. Why is she here?
I’m not ready to talk to her, much less see her—not when I still don’t know what I’ll do about Dad. What if she’s getting closer to the truth, realizing that there’s something to Elijah’s theory after all? I squeeze my temples, rocking on the bed. I don’t want to keep Dad’s secret, keep the families of his victims without closure, but maybe even more than that, I don’t want Andy’s murder to be dismissed as retribution.
And what if we’re wrong? What if Dad really didn’t kill him
, just like Mom swore?
The thought worms inside me, tunneling a tiny space for hope. Because it’s excruciating enough, knowing that Dad died without ever being punished for the women he murdered; it’s too much to think he got away with killing Andy, too.
Mom was adamant last night about Dad’s illness, screaming and howling her husband’s innocence. In the moment, I wrote it off as shock, an inability to process the truth of who he was. But I do remember how green Dad looked the night of our birthday, how gray the next morning. And if Mom is right that it wasn’t him, then that means Andy’s killer remains at large.
Once the police learn about Dad, I imagine they’ll draw the same conclusions we have, figure Andy’s murderer is already dead. But if that person is still out there, I can’t take the risk of confirming Elijah’s suspicions. At least not yet. Not until I’m certain someone else didn’t do it.
But who’s left on my list of suspects? Edmond doesn’t make sense anymore. If he wasn’t the Blackburn Killer, then he’d have no reason to murder Andy. Same with Fritz—though, I realize with a wince, Fritz isn’t innocent; he knew what Dad kept beneath the shed, and for some reason, he never said a word.
Why would he protect him like that? Why would he work so hard to save birds with broken wings, but wouldn’t even try to save the island’s women?
And then there’s Lyle. Is it enough of a motive, wanting to hurt the boy who hurt his granddaughter? I’m not so sure anymore. But now I think of Dad’s victims, all those women who were strangers to him until he took their lives, and I remember that people have killed for far less than revenge.
I look at Greta’s text. If I see her, she’ll know something’s changed for me. All she’ll have to do is mention the Blackburn Killer, and my turbulent emotions, so close to the surface, will seep through my skin, my family’s secrets puddling all around me.
Turning off my phone, I watch the screen until it blackens, a dark mirror reflecting my swollen eyes, tortured expression.
That settles it then. I won’t face Greta until I have more answers.
But first: I have to face Charlie’s museum.
The Family Plot Page 22