Page 26 of The Family Plot
“Yeah, it was one of his rules. He caught me near it one time when I was, like, five. I’d wandered off into the woods, I guess. And when he found me there, he got so mad. And it just became this thing after that:Don’t go anywhere near the Lighthouses’ shed.”
“But why?” I ask. Besides the obvious reason—people shouldn’t trespass—I can’t imagine why Lyle Decker would care about our shed.
Ruby shrugs. “I don’t know. Just Grandpa being Grandpa. He was always telling me where I could and couldn’t go.”
“Okay, well— What happened after,” I press, “when Andy and Fritz cameoutof the shed?”
“I never saw them come out. They were in there for so long, and it had already been so late to begin with, that I went back home. I was worried Grandpa might wake up and check on me, which he used to do a lot. But I asked Andy, the next day, what he’d been doing in the shed, and he denied it even happened.”
She lifts her hand, touches the space right over her heart, and begins to pick at her shirt. Squeezing and plucking—the same thing she was doing yesterday: a nervous tic, perhaps.
But why is she nervous?
“He got pretty mean about it,” she says, “insisting I was seeing things. So I dropped it. He was in such a mood after that—fordays.I didn’t want to upset him even more.”
“So… wait. This happened a week before Andy…?”
She nods.
Cold coils through me. Is this why he was so wound up, the week before our birthday? I remember how taut he seemed, his back rigid at the dinner table, his eyes squinting and skittish. Did somethinghappen in the shed to set him off? And why didn’t he tell me he went inside?
Without warning, Ruby whips her head my way. “But it was probably nothing, right?” she says, suddenly dismissive of this story she crossed the woods to tell me. “It wasn’t like your groundskeeper was breaking in somewhere he shouldn’t have been. I mean, the shed, it’s… it’shisshed. He has all sorts of reasons to go in there. No matter the hour, right? So maybe something was broken and needed to be fixed really fast. And maybe… maybe Andy wasn’t following Fritz or sneaking up on him, like it seemed; maybe he was just helping him with something. Or maybe…”
I stop hearing her. I see her mouth moving, releasing reasons into the air, but I’m snagged on the fact that pricked me the moment she mentionedthe middle of the night.
Even two days ago, during the most extraordinary of circumstances, when Fritz dug up bones in our woods, he asked the police if they could finish questioning him by his “usual departure time,” so he wouldn’t get stuck on the island. Because Fritz has always left—always, always,alwaysleft—promptly at six p.m.
So why would he have still been here in the middle of the night?
Or if he left our house at six as usual, why didn’t he get on the ferry? Why did he return after dark?
seven
Ifollow Ruby out. Partof me wants to make sure she actually leaves, that she doesn’t crouch between trees, waiting for us to walk by the windows and perform our misery for her. The rest of me is on a mission: find Fritz.
From the side yard, I watch Ruby amble through the woods in the back—slowgoing, but going nonetheless. Then I scan the landscaping out front, the evergreen hedges, the dormant rhododendrons, the hydrangeas whose petals are dead. I don’t see Fritz, or any of his tools, anywhere. I’m about to turn toward the backyard when a voice calls out to me.
“Hey.”
I don’t recognize the boy who’s climbing over the crest in our driveway. He looks about eleven or twelve, so he would have been a toddler when I lived here, if he’s even an islander at all.
“Hi…?” I say.
He juts a chin toward the house. “My mom says they found a body in your backyard.” I hear snickering behind him, and he glances down the driveway toward a part hidden from me by the pavement’s curve. “Can I see?”
“Yeah, can we see?” another voice, bodiless as a ghost, pipes up.
More snickering. A whisper ofMurder Mansioncarried on the wind.
“My brother is dead,” I tell him, and I wish my voice didn’t quiver.
The boy checks over his shoulder again before taking a step forward, a mean little smile warping his face. “Isn’t that, like, a party for you guys?”
I hesitate only a moment before running toward him, a growl rising up from somewhere in my body, an animal part of me I didn’t know I had. I make it just a few yards before the boy’s eyes widen. “Go! Go!” he yells to his friends, his sneakers already slapping against the pavement.
In the quiet that follows, I pant out the energy that surged through me like electricity. Boys like that, their gossiping parents—those are the people Charlie would have us open our house to. And if he wants to play docent to our dad’s death, our brother’s murder, the parts of our childhood that are none of their business, then fine—but I don’t want to be here to see it.
I have to find out what happened to Andy. Then I have to leave this place for good.
