Page 16 of The Family Plot
She pauses, leaving space for me to respond, but I don’t know what she expects from me. My brother is dead, and sick or not, her grandfather just said he deserved it.
“So I gave up my dream of leaving,” she says. “Grandpa’s always taken good care of me, and what was I going to do? Hop on a ferry as soon as he needed my help? I’m all he has. And anyway, there hasn’t been a murdered woman on this island in over a decade. I don’t need to—”
“But what hesaid,” I interrupt. “Why would he say that about Andy?”
“Because Andy was a boy,” she replies. “He was a boy I spent time with, and Grandpa figured it was only a matter of time before he took the last girl in his life he had left to love.” She swallows, her lower lip trembling. “And he was right. I would have left with your brother. I truly believed I was going to.”
The wind sweeps her hair, slapping it like a gag over her mouth. She tears it away as she continues.
“GrandpahatedAndy. Or the concept of him, at least. So we started meeting up in secret, late at night. I told Grandpa we’d stopped hanging out altogether, but even still, he’d talk about Andy like he was this predator I’d escaped. Like he’d been sharpening his claws just for me, and I was lucky to have made it out alive.”
She’s too close to me now. Her breath crashes against my face, and it’s as if she’s been inching toward me as she speaks.
I move back a little, but she steps into the space I’ve created.
“It was so lonely,” she adds, “having to keep my only friend a secret. And I’d been starving for companionship—from someone my own age—for a really long time.”
There’s a rustle in the trees, and we both turn our heads, searching for the source of the sound. I half expect Lyle Decker to wheel himself out from the woods, reveal he’s been eavesdropping. But nothing moves, nothing appears. Even the wind has paused.
Ruby crosses her arms and points her magnified gaze back at me. “I guess that’s why I was so fascinated by your family. All those siblings. A fatheranda mother. Even on nights when Andy and I weren’t meeting up, even before we officially met, I’d sneak out and just… watch your house. I’d see windows light up, or darken, and I’d pretend I was inside, just another Lighthouse kid.”
I picture her perched in a tree, her owly eyes observing what we thought nobody could see, and the image is enough to snap me out of her story, remind me why I crossed the woods to find her in the first place.
“Did you ever see anything?” I ask. “When you were watching us, did you see anything—anyone—who shouldn’t have been there? Around the time Andy disappeared?”
Right away, she moves back. Just a fraction of a step, but I notice it anyway: this space she’s put between us.
“No,” she says. “I’m sorry, I— No.”
A thump comes from inside the house. Ruby glances at one of the windows, and I look at it, too, its curtain swaying back and forth.
“I have to go,” she says, big eyes darkening. “But listen. I know the islanders have a lot to say about you all. But for all the rumors about your family, I never saw anything strange.”
She walks backward toward the house. “I know Andy thought you all were unnatural,” she adds. “But I would have givenanythingto be one of you.”
five
Ihear voices.
I’m back near the front of the mansion, about to step along the cobbled walkway to the front door, when the conversation reaches my ears.
“How do you just… not notice, when a body’s been buried in your backyard?”
“I guess they found him in the woods. A little ways back.”
“I bet they killed him themselves. Some Satanic ritual.”
“They’re not Satanists, though, right?”
“Tomato, to-mah-to.”
I freeze, as if becoming immobile is the same as invisible. There are four of them, all women, standing on the part of our driveway that crests up from the road. That means they’re trespassing, clumped together on our property, though still fifty yards from me at least. Arms crossed, they squint at the imposing stone of our home.
How easily it comes back—that old inclination to duck from the islanders’ gaze. But if I duck, I move, and if I move, they’ll—
“Hey!” one of them calls. “Hey, you’re one of the daughters, aren’t you?”
“Hey, come here a sec,” another says. “We just want to know what happened.”
