I slide away an inch, pivoting so I face her directly. “Greta, why did you come?”
Her forehead furrows at the bite in my voice.
“You know how I told you I wanted to try something?” she says.
I nod.
“I went to see Lyle Decker. Asked him some questions.”
“What? I thought you weren’t supposed to do that.”
She once told me that the first rule of being a citizen detective is to avoid interfering in real life. She could research from her computer, rifle through public documents, even track down old yearbooks like she did the other day, but she couldn’t speak to suspects of an open case. To do so could jeopardize the official investigation.
“I couldn’t help myself,” she admits, a shiver of excitement bolting through her. “He was so close, just a ferry ride away. I had to see him.”
I glance at the people in the foyer, ensuring no one’s close enough to hear. “And?”
“I met Ruby,” she says. “She was… intense. Wait—she’s not here, is she?” Greta surveys the crowd.
“No,” I say, and I’m actually surprised not to have seen her yet. I expected Ruby to be first in line, eager to make sure I included the embroidery.
“Okay, good,” Greta says. “She did not like me. She wouldn’t leave Lyle’s side, and she was, like, shooting daggers at me out of her eyes.”
“That sounds right.” I remember how she glared at me in the driveway, hands bunched into fists, furious that I’d told Elijah about her grandfather. I guess I don’t blame her. It’s a brutal thing, having someone in your family suspected of a murder.
“Anyway, I don’t think Lyle did it,” Greta says, and when I stiffen, she notices. She glides her gaze over my face in a way that makes me itch.
“Why not?”
“I asked about his trespassing complaint against the police chief. He said it was just because Ruby was scared, seeing a cop in their woods. She kept asking Lyle if she was in trouble, and that made him angry. And when I asked why he forbid Ruby from going near your shed, he said Fritz walked Ruby home one day after he found her inside it, reaching for pruning shears or something. Lyle was scared she’d hurt herself.”
“That’s not how Ruby told the story,” I say. “She said Lyle found her wandering near it.”
I’m not sure why I’m arguing. I already know, with gutting certainty, that it wasn’t Lyle who used the shed.
Greta shrugs. “Either way. I got the feeling that Lyle was telling the truth. He didn’t seem defensive about my questions. Just annoyed.”
She pauses as the front door opens. An older couple walks in, hands linked.
“And for what it’s worth,” she says when they walk toward the living room, “it sounds like the police already asked him all this. He kept saying, ‘I told this to your colleague already.’ ” Mischief glints in Greta’s eyes. “I didn’t correct his assumption.”
I take in her outfit, a dark blazer over gray slacks. She looks like every detective on TV, sharply dressed in muted colors, and I wonder if she chose these clothes for that very reason.
“So,” she says, almost cheerfully, “onto the next.”
“The next what?”
“Suspect.” Her lips twitch, nudging toward a smile. “I’ve been thinking of my next move, now that Lyle’s tentatively off the list, and I think I should—”
“Greta, you have to stop.” Panic pinches my throat, raising the pitch of my voice. Greta’s half-formed smile reshapes into a frown. Still, I don’t back down. “This isn’t just some case, okay? It’s my brother.”
She watches me before responding, and I hope she can’t hear my heart drumming. How many next moves will she go through, crossing off suspects one by one, until all that’s left is Dad?
“I know that,” she says. “Of course I know that. But you asked for my help.”
“That was a mistake. I mean, look what you’re doing, coming to the island without asking me first—”
“Asking you? I didn’t think I needed your permission.”
“—talking to people when you know you’re not supposed to.”
“The police already questioned him. It’s not a big deal.”
“It is to me!”
A woman, bending toward Tate’s paintings, looks my way. I lower my voice before continuing. “I want you to leave.”
Hurt blares in Greta’s eyes. “But… it’s your brother’s memorial. I came here for you.”
“That’s not why you’re here.”
I couldn’t help myself, she said about Lyle. And I don’t expect her to, if she learns the truth about the Blackburn Killer. She’s been hunting him since before we met. I can’t imagine our friendship would be enough to stop her from telling the police, from blasting this news to the internet. And I’m not ready, not yet, for Andy’s murder to become more of a spectacle. I’m not ready for Greta to look at me, the daughter of a serial killer, and wonder what’s in my blood.
As she searches my face, I’m terrified of what she sees.
“Greta, please go.” My voice is small but firm. In my lap, my hands shake. I clasp them together to hold them still.
“Are you sure?” she says after a moment.
I’m not sure of anything. But I tell her yes. Then I watch her leave, exactly as I asked.
* * *
Something strange is happening with Charlie.
I expected him to be puffed up, proud of his work, parading around to prove that—though quirky—our family is nothing to be afraid of. Instead, he’s slouched in a corner of the foyer. Tate keeps trying to talk to him, pull him into the center of things, but he waves her away to wilt even further. As he glances around, gaze skipping over me on the stairs, he winces like he’s in pain.
I wonder if he’s realizing that all this was only a Band-Aid, that changing the islanders’ minds about us won’t help him change the past. From what I’m hearing, it doesn’t even sound like he’s swayed too many islanders. “It’s all so morbid,” one of them mutters at the portrait of Andrew Borden. Another, near the door, says to her friend, “We should wait outside where it’s less busy. I hear they’re doing a ceremony at the end.”
“What kind of ceremony?” her friend asks, readjusting a toddler on her hip.
“I don’t know, some witchy thing.”
“Oh my god, I can’t wait.”
As they walk out the door, someone else steps inside. I recognize the shuffling of the person’s feet as they cross the threshold. Slowly, I raise my face to his, my ankle suddenly aching where he bruised it.
“Fritz,” I say.
His shoulders are slumped as he shuts out the wind, and at the sound of my voice, he looks my way, then limps toward me on the stairs. I stand up, planting my feet on the bottom step to better match his height.
“Dahlia.” He bows his head, his long hair curtaining his face. “I came to pay my respects.”
“Your respects,” I scoff.
He nods soberly. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what? For grabbing me in the shed”—I scan the foyer, checking for eavesdroppers—“or for keeping my father’s secret?”
His eyes widen as he stumbles back.
“You knew,” I whisper. “What was down there. And you never told.”
“N-no,” Fritz stammers. “No, I swear, I didn’t know.”
“You called them trophies,” I hiss.
“Hunting trophies. Hunt-hunting trophies. That’s what Mr. Lighthouse told me was down there.”
I give him a scornful look. “What?”
“He always said it was his trophy room. For deer! That I should stay away from it, because he knew how much I hate”—he grimaces—“I hate hunting. All those beautiful, innocent animals… It disgusted me, it pained me, the thought of them down there.”
“You told me to help you get rid of the evidence,” I remind him.
“Get rid of the deer,” he insists. “Mr. Lighthouse’s trophies. I figured, now th
at he was—gone, there was no need for…” He trails off, shaking his head. “But I couldn’t do it myself. I could barely even think of them without feeling sick. How trapped they were, down in that room, frozen in the moment of their death. I told the police all this. I had no idea about any of those photographs. About what he did down there. I’m as horrified as you.”
He straightens a little, as much as his bad leg allows. “Does this,” he says, tentative, “does this mean that Mr. Lighthouse was…”
As the question hangs, unfinished, in the air, I look around again. Charlie’s no longer in the corner—I don’t see him anywhere, in fact—but in the living room, a couple laughs, whispering to each other about a murder report. Everyone else seems preoccupied with the portraits, the Honoring candles, the calendars. Some of them even take pictures.
“You really had no idea?” I ask Fritz. I let my skepticism sharpen every word.
When his gaze falters, eyes stuttering away from mine, I cross my arms. “So you did know.”
“No,” he says quickly. “No, it’s just… after the police interviewed me about the shed, I remembered something. About Andy.”
My heart pounds once before going still.
“He came to me,” Fritz continues, “a couple days before he left—before we thought he left—and he asked me what I knew about the trapdoor. I told him the truth, what I thought was the truth. Then he said he’d been down there, and it was like he was trying to get me to admit I had, too, that I knew more than I was saying. He got so upset after a while. I’d never, never seen him like that, not even with his ax. He said, ‘You let him! You knew and you let him!’ The poor boy was sobbing so hard—but I couldn’t help him. I didn’t know what he was saying I let Mr. Lighthouse do.”
I’m stunned by the image he’s conjured: Andy sobbing so hard. Like Charlie, I never saw him cry, a fact I’m dumbfounded to realize. His face would scrunch and redden, his fists would squeeze the handle of his ax, but I never saw tears—and it hurts so much to picture them now. Instead, I focus on unraveling the rest of Fritz’s story.
Was I right, did Andy want to tell someone what Dad had done, and was he hoping Fritz would help him? And when Fritz refused, did he believe that our groundskeeper, the gentlest man we’d known, had actually been Dad’s accomplice? I can’t imagine how betrayed, how utterly alone, that would have made him feel. He would have believed that no one was safe—and no one could save him.
“Until the other day,” Fritz says, “I hadn’t thought of that moment in such a long time. But back when it happened, I did wonder, for a little bit, if there was more to that room than I knew. And I decided, ultimately, to push that concern aside. Mr. Lighthouse was always good to me. Paid me well. And”—he pats the thigh of his bad leg—“I have bills.”
Shame deepens the crease in his brow. “I wish now… I wish so much that I’d looked into it. But it was easier, I suppose, to pretend it hadn’t happened.”
I’m scowling at him, appalled that money was enough for him to ignore Andy’s cries. But I can’t deny that his words resonate.
It was easier, I suppose, to pretend.
I think of Charlie, strutting around here somewhere, playing the part of a grieving but otherwise unburdened man.
I think of Tate, believing her art could revive a victim, make them—and herself—a little more whole.
I think of Mom, finding solace in other people’s stories, slipping inside a fiction dark enough to absorb her pitch-black pain.
And me. Did I really not know? For all those years, when my neck grew sore from my endless hunching over laptop screens, did I really not think, even for a second, that Andy might be dead? Or was it easier to search instead of suffer, to obsess instead of mourn?
“Can you forgive me, Dahlia,” Fritz asks now, “for not knowing the truth, even when it was right beneath me, every single day?”
As he waits for my reply, I look at his hands—calloused, capable of bruising me, but the same hands that have stroked the backs of caterpillars, scattered nuts for squirrels. Growing up, I knew Fritz to be a man who believed in tenderness, in beauty. Is it any wonder, then, he didn’t push to know the ugliness Dad hid?
Now, he wants me to absolve him—of his ignorance, his refusal to look deeper—but how can I, when I’m guilty of the same things?
* * *
A reporter is here. She identifies herself to someone as working for the Blackburn Gazette. She pauses at each exhibit, taking notes, asking islanders for quotes, and I’m relieved that, so far, she’s failed to notice me on the stairs.
“I think that’s real dirt,” I hear a girl say. She’s squinting at Tate’s diorama.
“No way,” someone responds. “Do you think it’s, like, from his actual grave?”
“It has to be, right? Tate is so meticulous. And oh my god, is it just me or does Andy seem like he’d be… kind of hot?”
“Tess, he has a head wound! You can’t even see his face!”
“I know, exactly. It’s like: whoa, mystery man.”
Tess’s friend laughs and the two of them take out their phones to snap some pictures. Tess poses in front of the diorama for a selfie, tucking her fist under her chin, angling her face just right. Nausea snakes through me, but I’m finding it hard to care. Not about this, not about the toddler I saw ripping up a murder report, not even about the fact that Andy’s diorama will apparently make it online, whether or not Tate posts it herself. Ever since Fritz left, I’ve been watching the LMM play out before me like shows I’m flipping through on TV—and none of them hold my interest.
Until I see Elijah.
He’s inching between the tables in the living room, frowning at each exhibit. I sit up straighter, wondering when he got here. And how could I have missed him, if he used the front door like everyone else?
The reporter latches onto him, peppering him with questions he seems reluctant to answer. As he talks to her, he keeps glancing in my direction, and I shrink toward the wall, hoping the banister is enough to conceal me. But when he excuses himself, pulling away from the reporter to head toward the foyer, I see what he’s really looking at: the diorama.
Was it only yesterday that I asked him if it was as accurate as the others? He said he wouldn’t know until the body was in place, and now, I wonder what he makes of Tate’s choices: the doll facedown, as if Andy was rolled into the hole; the wound on the back of the head, indicating that the killer struck from behind. She’d have no reason, this time, to know any details, but I wonder how close her guesses are, if Elijah will see something suspicious in them, something that keeps his eyes narrowed on us.
I try to gauge his reaction, but his face remains neutral. A minute passes, people crowding around him to view the diorama. Finally, he pulls his notebook from his pocket, writes something down, and turns away. He breezes past the sign designating the foyer and living room as the only spaces open to visitors. Then he disappears down the back hall.
Should I follow him? I don’t want him to see me, to press me on questions my haunted expression will answer. Did you ask Charlie, I imagine him saying, about being at the crime scene? But it’s a risk, too, letting him walk unguarded through the house, giving his theories space to fester and spread.
Moving away from the stairs, I try to force a decision, but I only make it a few feet before a conversation stops me.
“Should we go? This is kind of boring.”
I jerk my head toward the voice—a man speaking to a woman, standing at the table of Honoring candles. The woman touches the last one in Andy’s row, his sixteenth, the candle he lit and blew out just hours before he was killed.
I step toward them into the living room, the word boring lodged like a bullet in my chest. This museum is a spectacle, a diversion, but it’s appalling to call it boring as they linger over evidence of what we’ve lost.
“Boring?” the woman says. “Have a little respect. Someone was murdered here, Jack.”
I relax a little, even as I kee
p inching toward them.
“Yeah, but… this is just a bunch of old movies and papers. I was expecting…”
“What? A confession? ‘Hey, we killed the kid’?”
Jack chuckles. “Something like that.”
“I’m still positive it was the Blackburn Killer,” the woman replies. “Anything else is too crazy. Two murderers on the same little island? No way.”
And there it is: the fear I keep returning to, the knot at the center of my tangled concerns—that when the case is closed on the Blackburn Killer, it will be closed on Andy, too.
The further I get from the moment I learned about Dad, the less vividly I see him as Andy’s murderer. And maybe I’m just fooling myself; maybe I’m pretending there’s a way to absolve my own guilt. Maybe I’m desperate for his killer to be someone still breathing, still capable of suffering the punishment they’ve earned.
All I know is I can’t let Elijah prove that Dad was the Blackburn Killer, not if he could dismiss my brother as one of his victims.
I’m about to head to the back hall to find Elijah, but a hand on my arm makes me pause.
“You’re a Lighthouse, right?” the reporter asks. I stare at her hand until she lets go. “Can I ask you some questions?”
Beside me, a girl in a Rhode Island sweatshirt loudly whispers to her friend. “What’s he doing? He’s not getting rid of it, is he? I haven’t had a chance to see it yet.” I try to follow her gaze, but the reporter steps even closer.
“Ms. Lighthouse,” she says, “do you have any comments about your brother?”
“What’s he doing?” the girl asks again.
“Ms. Lighthouse?”
Turning toward the foyer, where the girl’s attention is pointed, I see Charlie—or the back of him, at least. He’s hunched over the credenza, arm moving like he’s writing something down, and I notice he’s put the diorama on the floor. It’s in people’s way now, an easy target for trampling, and I realize that the only thing worse than seeing the diorama would be seeing it destroyed. I picture a foot crushing the doll’s head, Andy’s skull splintering all over again, and suddenly, I want to throw myself over his fake little body, protect it like I couldn’t do for him.
The Family Plot Page 24