Page 14 of The Family Plot
“I don’t know,” she says, “like:You are the rabbit’s foot to my petal-covered moon. Nothing that made sense. We’d compete, sort of, to see who could make the other laugh the hardest.”
Tears still dripping, she raises one hand and brings it to her chest. Then she picks at her shirt, pinching the fabric along her sternum, rubbing it between her fingers.
“Mostly we talked about getting out of here,” she continues, gazedistant, voice thick. “This island has so much darkness. For Andy, it was your family, and for me—”
“My family isn’t dark,” I say—because the word isunnatural.Unnaturalis what he would have told her, if she knew him as well as she says.
“For me, it’s all those women,” she goes on. “I’m twenty-five now. The same age Melinda Wharton was.”
Melinda Wharton. I haven’t heard anyone but Greta say her name in years. But of course I think of her, every September 20. Of course I picture Mom and Dad lighting the candles, without us, saying the prayer for the first woman the Blackburn Killer ever dumped on the shore. She was a preschool teacher, killed before Andy and I were even born, when Charlie was six, Tate five. In her Instagram post about her, Tate explained that Melinda had come to the island to visit her grandmother, who later told police that Melinda left for a walk around ten p.m.
But the next time Mrs. Wharton saw her granddaughter, it was to identify her body, which had first been strangled, then left in shallow waters to wash up onto the rocks. Melinda was the only presumed victim of the Blackburn Killer who wasn’t branded, wasn’t dressed in an ice-blue gown. She was, however, found with a light blue scarf wrapped around her neck. This inconsistency with the next murder, two years after Melinda’s—when Stephanie Kepler was found with aBburned into her ankle, wearing a dress different from the one she’d left her house in—kept police from connecting the murders initially. It wasn’t until three years later, when Erica Shipp was discovered branded and dressed identically to Stephanie, that the termserial killerwas used on the island at all.
It haunted me, of course, all those strangled women; whenever another washed up, there was always the question of who would benext—but unlike Ruby, it never made me want to leave. The world Mom taught us about was teeming with murderers; I believed that if I went somewhere else, I’d only live beside a different killer.
My parents could have taken us away, like the people who fled after the third or fourth woman was discovered, but Dad just grumbled about cowards, insisting that he refused to be driven away from the first place he’d ever called home. His mother had left him, a baby in a car seat, on a crowded beach in Maine, and for his entire childhood, he ping-ponged to different foster homes in New England until he finally landed on Blackburn at nineteen. For a couple years, he worked at the market in town, rented a room over someone’s garage, and was about to move on to someplace bigger when he ended up meeting Mom.
She’d just returned to the island, raw with grief, after selling her parents’ Connecticut estate, which she’d had to scrub clean of their blood. She’d sold their company, too—a generations-old gun manufacturer—largely because of a fact that would forever haunt her, one that, later, she would tell us only once before never speaking of it again.
The gun that killed her parents had been their very own brand.
With the Blackburn house all she had left of them, Mom willed herself to grow roots in the island’s soil. She buried her mother and father in the woods, and she married the market clerk who whipped out an arm to save her from slipping on spilled milk. When she saw Dad, that first time, she actually gasped, startled by his handsomeness.
Mom did keep us closer whenever another woman was found, cinching our boundaries like a belt around a waist, and she often peeked between curtains with a distrustful eye. But since Dad so adamantly scoffed at the thought of running off scared, she never suggested moving, content to seclude herself with the startlingly handsome man who could have gone anywhere, but decided to stay on this rocky, unpretty island with her.
“Andy talked all the time about leaving,” Ruby says now, lips quivering. “He said he’d make sure the Blackburn Killer never hurt me. I thought he meant we’d run away soon, before I was all grown-up, like those women, the victims, always were. But then later—when Andy was gone—and there were no more murders at all… I thought maybe he’d meant something else. Maybe he meant he’d take down the killer, stop him somehow. And then I thought maybe he actually had, and that’s why he had to go so suddenly.”
She swipes a hand across her nose. “But he was supposed to take me with him. Supposed to take both of us.” She gestures to the space between us, including me as part of thatboth. “That’s what he told me, anyway. ‘You, me, and Dahlia. We’ve got to get out of here.’?”
I have to admit: she does a good impression of him. She even hunches her shoulders, speaks out the side of her mouth. It cuts a little to see it.
“He never mentioned you,” I say, “whenever he talked tomeabout leaving.”
It’s mean. I know it is. Her face buckles with the cruelty of it. “Oh,” is all she says, and then she picks at her shirt again, more vigorously than before, like she’s trying to reach past fabric and bone to soothe the heart beneath it.
I should say something. Apologize maybe. Tell her that I never learned how to share him; he was always so singularly mine. We knew each other best, loved each other most—but I didn’t even know he was dead. And I had no idea about her.
Ruby takes her palm off her ax, letting it thump to the ground at her feet. The sound, the swiftness of the movement, startles me,and I’m defenseless against the images that spring up: blood on metal, metal splitting skull.
“I need some tissues,” Ruby says. “You can come if you want.”
Walking past me toward the house, she sniffles, and when I catch my breath, I follow.
Inside, she disappears down a hall. I look around, taking stock of a living room decked out in brown: wood paneling, pine tables, a couch and loveseat the color of mud. Very little hangs on the walls—a crooked painting of the sea; a framed photo of teenaged Ruby; and situated near a lamp, illuminated like something holy, two embroideries in circular wooden frames, each stitched with a different phrase.
Home is a place you’ll never leave, says one, and beneath those words: a yellow house like the one I’m standing in.
The other hasRuby loves Grandpascrawled in the center, surrounded by a wreath of purple and yellow hollyhocks.
“I made those,” Ruby says. I whirl around, find her dabbing her face with a tissue. “Andy loved them.”
Frowning, I return my gaze to the frames. I don’t see anything there that Andy would love. He didn’t care about flowers, not even our own hollyhocks, which bloomed each year in our yard. And the first phrase—Home is a place you’ll never leave—was the opposite of what he believed.
“He only came inside once,” Ruby says, stepping beside me to stare at the words’ navy thread. “But when he did, I caught him admiring them, like he was in awe. Like they were works of art or—”
“Why you talkin’ ’bout that boy?”
I jump at the sound of Lyle Decker’s voice. He’s in a wheelchair, blocking the entrance to the hall. Last time I saw him, on a rare trip into town, he towered over me, offering a grunt instead of a greeting. Now, he’s hooked to an oxygen tank, tubes sticking up his nose, andthere are bruises like fingerprints up and down his arms. Beneath his eyes are bags as big as pockets.
