Page 18 of The Family Plot
I pause at his rephrasing. “Apparently Lyle Decker didn’t like him. But for stupid reasons. Andy and his granddaughter were… friends, I guess, and Lyle didn’t like her hanging out with boys.”
“Okay,” Elijah says, writing. “That’s helpful. Anyone else?”
“People on this island have always had a grudge against my family. Like—just now, there were women in the driveway, gossiping about my brother. Calling us Satanists.”
“Is that how you identify? As Satanists?”
“No!”
“Do you think one of those women might have wanted to hurt your brother?”
“What? No, I—” I narrow my eyes. “What are you doing, exactly, in this investigation? Shouldn’t you be checking DNA, or… or prints on the ax?”
Elijah clicks the top of his pen, clicks and clicks it again. “Unfortunately, all we have are Andy’s remains. Any hair or skin cells, any foreign fibers, have long since decomposed. As for the ax, I’m afraid that with the time that’s passed, and the moisture in the soil…”
He trails off, not needing to say the rest: DNA, fingerprints—all that evidence is gone.
I press my lips together, waiting for a wave of nausea to dissolve.
“I assure you we’ll be doing everything we can, questioning the appropriate people. But in the meantime, I’d like to go back to Andy’s note. Can you tell me again about the circumstances in which it was found?”
I swallow. I was the first one up that morning, which was unusual. It was just after eight, and the house was filled with a quiet that felt like the world was holding its breath. Dad had been sick the night before, muscling through dinner with a queasy grimace, so I figured he and Mom were sleeping in. But Andy—he should have been awake already, rummaging in the kitchen for pots and pans, making enough eggs or oatmeal for both of us to share.
The note was waiting on the credenza, folded like a tent, and later, it made sense to me that Andy would leave it there. As kids, the credenza was a place we’d crouch inside, waiting to jump out and scare Mom. It was a hideaway in which we whispered and giggled, back when Andy was still small enough to find joy in the closed-up dark.
As soon as I finished reading the note, it slipped from my fingers, and Mom told me afterward that she thought I was being murdered, from the scream I emitted.
I relay this story to Elijah.
“And the handwriting,” he says. “It looked like Andy’s?”
“I… think so? It was a long time ago, but— Wait.” I lean forward, Elijah’s meaning suddenly clear. “You think it wasn’t his note. That’s what you’re getting at. Whoever… whoever killed him must have written it, trying to make us think he’d run away. Which wedid. Oh my god.”
How could I not have noticed? I knew Andy’s handwriting as well as my own. I should have recognized a forgery. But then again, maybe I was too shocked to notice: shocked by the note altogether, shocked he would mean those words,never come back. Shocked he would actually go.
“Well, wait a minute,” Elijah says. “Yes, that’s one possibility we’re looking into, but it’s also possible that Andydidwrite the note, that he left the house that night, but was killed before he had the chance to leave the island.”
I shake my head, watching it play out in my mind: someone—notAndy—slipping into the darkness of our house, sneaking across the foyer, leaving the note where they were certain we’d see it.
“I don’t think Andy wrote it,” I tell Elijah.
Because if he didn’t write it, then he didn’t intend to leave me behind.
“Okay, let’s say for a moment it was forged,” Elijah concedes. “From what you’ve said, it sounds like the handwriting was pretty convincing. Any idea how someone might have managed that?”
“I don’t know. Isn’t ityourjob to figure that out?”
“I’m just thinking: they would have needed samples of Andy’s handwriting. And then of course there’s the issue of—”
“The murder reports,” I say.
“The… What?”
Andy had a gift for writing them. His theories were clever, elegantly expressed, connecting details that most of us had overlooked.Endlessly insightful, Mom had written on the top of one about the then-unsolved East Area Rapist’s crimes, and she hung it on the fridge, where it stayed for years.
Andy’s killer could have walked through the kitchen, looking for a pen with which to write the note. Then he could have seen Andy’s name on that handwritten report and had all he needed to fool us.
I tell Elijah this, in a breathless rush. His gaze lingers on me in a way I don’t understand.
