The Family Plot

by Megan Collins

  “It’s not a vacation,” Mom disagreed. “It’s a chance to know one another. Away from all this. We can fight. We can scream and cry. The three of you can yell at me until you can’t speak, I don’t care, I deserve that. Just as long as we’re together for a while. Somewhere safe.”

  “Somewhere safe,” Charlie repeated, eyes cast away from Mom. “I think that’s the most motherly thing you’ve ever said.”

  Mom shifted in her chair, looking both pleased and apologetic.

  Chewing thoughtfully, Tate watched Charlie. “I think we should do it,” she said. Then she turned to me. “But you have to come, too, Dahlia. It’s not a family vacation—or a family… chance-to-know-each-other—if we’re not all there.”

  “I don’t think I—”

  “Come on,” she insisted. “Let’s be sisters.”

  I searched her expression for mockery, for meanness, for acknowledgment that the comment was absurd—we’ve always been sisters, even if just in name—but her face was wide open, hopeful as a child’s. Her eyes sparkled in the overhead light, bright as the ocean from movies, blue waves glittering with sun. Turns out, it’s hard to resist the pull of a look like that, one meant to draw you in instead of keep you out.

  So I agreed. Against the itch on my skin, the sickness swimming inside me, I agreed to leave with them. And it’s true, there’s still time; I could tell Elijah everything. He could read Charlie his rights, haul him out to his car. But I don’t want Charlie—or any of us—to leave like that. Not in handcuffs. Not in a police cruiser with the lights flashing like there’s a criminal inside. I want us all to walk out the door of this house on our own, to look back if we have to, and know that whatever we did to each other inside, we made it out of there together. Alive.

  Now, Charlie’s mask begins to slip. He glares at Elijah, working hard to seem defiant, but it’s clear he can’t hold it much longer. Already his eyes are darkening, tears seeping forward, ready to trickle down his cheeks. Before Elijah can catch it—the shame, the agony, the secrets my brothers both had to carry—I distract him with a question. I commit to the fiction, too.

  “Do you think my father killed Andy? Do you think that Andy found out who he was, and then my dad killed him to protect his secret?”

  It’s the same theory I’ve been throwing at him for days—that the Blackburn Killer murdered my twin—but knowing now that it isn’t true makes it so much harder to say.

  I think the lie will always be a thorn in my throat. I think I’ll have to choose to swallow it again and again.

  When Elijah responds, there’s a hint of sympathy in his voice, maybe even a clot of his own pain. Dad and Edmond don’t compare, of course, but Elijah, too, has been hurt by his father, a man whose behavior he never understood.

  “We don’t have proof of that at this time,” he answers. “But it’s possible.”

  It’s what I was fishing for him to tell me. Still, I avoid his eyes.

  I know this fiction won’t fix us, won’t heal what’s broken and lost. But right now, glancing at Charlie, I find him looking the same as yesterday, when he held my hand to his face, when we saw in each other the same desire to undo our brother’s wounds. And it makes me sure—as sure as I’ll ever be, at least—that keeping his secret is the best thing to do.

  Not the right thing. I will never believe it’s right. But I can believe in doing what’s best for my family, and I can wish that right and best weren’t at such terrible odds.

  In the end, Elijah doesn’t question us for long. I think he senses our exhaustion, our devastation, hanging like fog in the air. He promises, though, to follow up soon.

  I walk him to the door, an uneasy quiet stretching between us.

  “One more thing,” he says as I reach for the knob. “Did you ever ask Charlie about the crime scene photo?”

  I keep my expression steady—no twitch or blink that he can read.

  “I did,” I say.

  He watches me expectantly.

  “And I think I was wrong,” I add, resisting the urge to clear my throat, “about it being him.”

  “Really,” Elijah says, and now he reaches inside his jacket to pull out a copy of the photograph. He unfolds it carefully, like he’s setting up a trap. “This isn’t him?”

  He points to that skinny figure tucked within the woods.

  All I can see this time is how small Charlie looks. How vulnerable. How alone. He leans to the left like a tree about to fall, and I wish I could reach inside the photo, help to hold him up.

  Bending closer, I pretend to scrutinize the image. Then I straighten and shake my head.

  “It was cloudy and dark the day you showed me. But in this light”—I gesture to the chandelier—“I can see it better. It isn’t him.”

  Elijah opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again. I rush to fill his silence.

  “Anything else? I’d like to get back to my family.” I open the door for him to leave, and a cold breeze shoves into the house. “As I’m sure you can imagine, we have a lot to process.”

  Elijah searches my face before turning his attention toward the back hall. He waits a moment, as if hoping Charlie will hurry out to tell him the truth, then returns his gaze to me.

  “That’s it,” he says, “for now,” and he tucks the photo back into his coat, where I hope I never see it again.

  * * *

  Greta is quick to forgive me. I call her in the afternoon, but as soon as I apologize, she heaps the blame onto herself.

  “You were right,” she says. “My obsession with the Blackburn Killer gave me tunnel vision, and I lost sight of how deeply this affects you. It was insensitive, acting all excited to talk to suspects.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” I reply. “I wasn’t pushing you away because you were out of line. I was pushing you away because I was scared for you to learn the truth.”

  I’m standing in the backyard, facing the family plot, the wind growing louder as I wait for Greta to respond.

  “What truth?” she says.

  She deserves to hear it from me, not from some headline on the news. Still, the fear kicks in—that she’ll see my family as nothing more than facts for all her folders.

  I take a breath, let the salty air sting my lungs, and I tell her anyway.

  “I found out a couple days ago,” I say, “that my dad really was the Blackburn Killer.”

  I wince within her silence, waiting for the barrage of questions, the giddy spring to her voice. But in a moment, she groans, like the revelation pains her.

  “Shit,” she says. “I’m so sorry. You must be going through hell. What can I do for you?”

  Tears rush to my eyes, hot with gratitude and relief. I look at the sky, almost silver today, its clouds shiny with a light that tries to break through. Then I look into the woods, at the dirt where Charlie buried Andy, where he wanted to bury a part of himself, and I cry even harder.

  “Hey,” Greta says softly. “Talk to me.”

  I think I will. When I see her again, I think I might tell her everything—what my father did to my brothers, what they did to each other, what I’ve chosen to do for them—and I want to believe that she’ll keep our secret. That even as I walled myself off from anyone but Andy, even as I searched for him each day until I could hardly see, I still found something true, something real, something I didn’t know the value of until now.

  “Thank you,” I tell her.

  “For what?”

  “Just for—” A sob cuts through my sentence, but I push myself to finish it. “For being a friend.”

  Later, when I’m off the phone with Greta, I find my family transforming the house. Tate boxes the museum’s exhibits, Charlie returns the doors to their rightful hinges, and Mom dismantles the victim room.

  I watch her for a moment, through the open doorway. She sits with a shredder on the floor between her legs, feeding it newspapers two pages at a time. For so long, those newspapers were my textbooks. Their gruesome stories taught
me the lessons I clung to for years—that no one can be trusted; that there’s safety in seclusion; that if you keep away from others, you keep yourself from harm. And yet I’ve learned in recent days that all those lessons were wrong.

  Around the room, trash bags are swollen with paper strips, and still, the shelves are only half empty. It’s a fool’s errand; destroying the stories won’t bring back the dead. But already, the room looks bigger, brighter, the paperless shelves revealing themselves to be painted a gleaming white.

  Sensing me, Mom lifts her head. She gives me half a smile, eyes watery but resolute, before returning to her chosen task.

  My task is to take the stuff from the museum down to the driveway. Not all of it—the murder reports get thrown away—but we’ve decided to offer the rest of it to the islanders.

  “Should we… donate it?” Tate asked at first.

  “Put it all outside,” Charlie said. “It’ll be gone by the end of the day.”

  Turning around after plopping the last box on the curb, I’m stopped by a glimpse of a girl in the trees. Ruby’s been Watching again, and as she slips out of the woods to walk toward me, her big eyes look a little smaller, the edges pinched with sadness.

  “You’re leaving, aren’t you?” she asks.

  “Soon,” I tell her.

  She nods, gaze drifting away.

  “I was surprised,” I say, “not to see you yesterday. I put your embroidery on display, like you asked.”

  She shrugs one shoulder. “I didn’t think I was welcome. You kept sending people to question us.”

  “Right,” I say, and I don’t correct her about Greta. “Sorry about that.”

  “Besides,” she adds, “I wouldn’t feel Andy in there.” She nods toward the house. “I feel him out back, in the woods, where we spent our time together.”

  She bites her lip, trying to keep it from trembling. She catches me watching and attempts a weary smile.

  “Well, goodbye,” she says, thrusting out her hand.

  It’s a strange, too-formal gesture, but I return it anyway.

  As she pumps my arm, I’m surprised by the swell of regret inside me. Here is a girl who loved my brother—even with his anger, his tornadic moods—and I wish I knew what drew him toward her all those nights, what the two of them laughed about, if Ruby ever saw him cry.

  I love her, Andy said to Charlie, but anyone who dares to love me will only be ruined.

  He was wrong about that. Ruby wasn’t ruined. She’s intense and she’s odd, but she’s part of our story now. Without her memories of Andy, the key she offered without a clue of everything it would ultimately unlock, I’m not sure I’d have ever learned the truth.

  So no. She isn’t ruined. In a way, she helped to save us.

  “He did love you,” I tell her now.

  “Andy?” she asks, apprehensive. Then her wariness dissolves as her eyes swell with hope. “How do you know? You said he never talked about me.”

  “Trust me,” I say—and that’s all it takes. Light beams across Ruby’s face, even as the sky stays gray.

  * * *

  The next morning, our bags are by the door. We wait for Mom in the foyer, listening to the house groan in the wind.

  “It’s complaining that we’re leaving,” Tate says.

  “Let it,” Charlie scoffs.

  We’ve managed to avoid the news so far, turned away the persistent reporters. But last night, voices frothed up from the street like waves, trying to drown us with their anger, their disgust, their how could they not have knowns. None of us blame them. Actually, it’s a relief, that the islanders, the victims’ families, finally have the answer they’ve always deserved.

  When Mom appears, she seems haggard, overwhelmed, her hands lost in the sleeves of her oversize sweater, its pockets deep and sagging.

  “Sorry,” she says. “That was Fritz on the phone, clarifying our arrangement. He’ll keep an eye on things while I’m gone.”

  At Fritz’s name, I feel a twitch of discomfort, one I know is misplaced. I wonder when I’ll stop associating him with the room beneath the shed, when I’ll think of him again without flashing to his fearful grip on my ankle, when my body will accept the truth my mind already knows: Dad was the dangerous one among us. Only Dad.

  “Oh,” Mom says. She reaches into her pockets, pulls out four slim candles and a lighter. “I thought we could…” she starts, but when she sees our faces, she stops. “What is it?”

  “You said no Honorings,” Charlie says.

  “There won’t be, once we leave. I just thought—well, we have to do something for Andy, don’t we? And how else can we… But no. No, you’re right.” She opens her palm to stare at the lighter. “I just don’t know another way.”

  She isn’t wrong. Right now, there’s no grave we can visit, no ashes in an urn. Any other family would plan a service, scour a funeral home’s brochures. But we’re not another family. We will try to be, I think, in the future we’ll head toward when we walk out the door, but for now, we’re still just us. And this is what we know of honoring someone. This is how we remember the dead.

  Tate and I glance at each other, and between us, Charlie rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he says, sighing. He grabs the candles from Mom and passes them out.

  Something sour squats on the back of my tongue, a taste so potent I could gag. But as Mom tries to light her candle with a shaking hand, I force myself to swallow. In a moment, the flame catches, and from there, it’s muscle memory. Mom touches her wick to Tate’s, who touches hers to Charlie’s, and the circle’s complete when he passes the flame to me. Above the shared light of our candles, his gaze meets mine.

  “You want to start?” he asks.

  I inhale deeply, wondering if there’s any part of Andy that lingers in the air, if the cells he left behind could have lasted this long, survived the grime of all these years. He’d think it was stupid, me wishing for that, wanting so badly to breathe him in. But at my core, there’s a longing for Andy I know I’ll never lose. I feel it as I watch the flame, as I let his name fall from my lips like a tear from an eye.

  “Andrew Lighthouse,” I say.

  Then Charlie, voice foggy: “Andrew Lighthouse.”

  Then Tate, quiet but controlled: “Andrew Lighthouse.”

  And, finally, like we always did, we end with Mom. “Andrew Lighthouse,” she whispers.

  We don’t need to look at one another to see when to speak. We know the rhythm of this moment, the space between the final utterance of his name and the first word of our prayer.

  “We can’t restore your life,” we say together, “but we strive to restore your memory with this breath.”

  And as we blow out the candles, smoke spiraling up to obscure the air, I see him for a second, still just a boy. He opens the door of the credenza, urging me to follow him into the dark. Come on, Dahlia, he says, voice all squeaky, his beckoning hand so small. My throat hardens, the image wobbles in front of me, and when I feel a tentative palm against my back, I blink to find my brother gone.

  “You okay?” Charlie asks me.

  “Are you?” I ask back.

  He shrugs. I shrug. It’s the best we can do.

  We grab our bags, pass through the front door, let Mom lock up behind us. When we’re halfway down the driveway, I do what Andy never got the chance to: I look back at the house one last time—its gray stone, its walls that kept our secrets—and I turn away from it, knowing what Charlie’s note said was true: the only way out is to never come back.

  We’re going to walk to the ferry, accept the islanders’ gasps, their circling whispers, the way their eyes press on us as palpably as hands. Then we’ll stand with our backs to the wind as the boat chugs us toward its perpetual destination: away.

  Charlie, Tate, and Mom have booked rooms in a hotel on the mainland, one with a view of water instead of woods. We can’t go far or the police might think we’re fleeing, like we have something else to hide, but we’ll take some time to live among one
another, to figure all this out. Meanwhile, Mom will decide if she’ll return to our haunted house or, like the rest of us, leave it behind for good.

  Tonight, I’ll walk toward my tiny apartment, down the street from their hotel. Greta will be waiting for me in the café, face lit by her laptop on the counter, the scent of fresh muffins in the air. When I come through the door, she’ll open her arms to me, and instead of merely tolerating her embrace, like I did at the museum, I will savor it this time. I will be sure to hold on tight.

  Beyond that, I don’t know. Maybe even after my family scatters—Charlie and Tate to New York, Mom to wherever—I’ll stay in that room above the café, the one I chose because it was close to the boat that would take me back if news ever came of Andy’s return.

  But maybe not. I’ve got no need to wait for him now. I can go anywhere.

  The world is cruel, yes—my mother taught me that; my whole family did—but it’s enormous, too. And there’s got to be some space, some people in it, for me.

  acknowledgments

  Once again, I must begin by thanking you, the reader. Thank you for investing your time in this story, these characters, this strange and unsettling family. Special thanks to the bookstagrammers, bloggers, librarians, and booksellers who passionately—and tirelessly—strive to connect readers with books. I’m sure I speak on behalf of all authors when I say that the work you do is invaluable to us.

  Thank you to the best of all agents, Sharon Pelletier, whose storytelling instincts and editorial feedback are unparalleled—except by my editor, Kaitlin Olson, whose insightful suggestions and questions always open up new layers of my own story to me. Book by book, these smart, kickass women have made me a better writer, and I am so lucky to have this opportunity to work with them.

  Thank you so much to everyone at Atria Books, especially Megan Rudloff, Isabel DaSilva, and @AtriaMysteryBus mastermind David Brown, all of whom are behind-the-scenes literary rock stars. Thank you to editorial assistant Jade Hui, copyeditor Laurie McGee, and huge thanks as well to designer Kelli McAdams and art director Jimmy Iacobelli for creating what is truly the cover of my dreams.