Page 29 of The Family Plot
“When will he be back?”
“I’m not sure. I told him to take all the time he needs. But you know Fritz. He never stays away for long.”
I nod. Even on days he designated for time off, we’d see him sometimes, lumbering around our lawn.All this sun, he explained once, pointing toward a hot August sky.I was worried about the peonies.
“Why are you so curious about the trapdoor?” Mom asks. She’s set her spatula down, and now she’s regarding me with a tilt of her head.
I respond to her question with another. “Are you sure you don’t have the key?”
She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
It seems there’s a lot you don’t know.I hear Elijah’s words, gently accusing me of something, when he last brought up the note.
“What about Andy’s note?” I try, and Mom startles a little, her lips parting. After a moment, she closes her mouth, then turns away to grab a binder from the counter behind her. She opens it to a seemingly random page, running her finger down a handwritten recipe.
“I found my mother’s baking book,” she says quietly. “So now I can make those raspberry cookies.”
“Mom,” I say. She doesn’t turn back to face me, but her finger goes still. “Andy’s note. Do you know where it went? Elijah Kraft thinks it might be evidence. That whoever did this to Andy”—even from behind, I see Mom wince—“might have written it to make us think he ran away.”
“I don’t have it,” she mumbles. “I already told him that.”
“Well, somebody must. Do you think maybe Dad—”
“I don’t know!” she cries, spinning around. “Don’t you think I wishI knew? I never saw it after that day. It just— The note just disappeared!”
Tears overwhelm her eyes, and she clears them away with furious blinks. Then she smiles, a ghastly slash of teeth across her face.
“Now, please,” she says. “Let me make these cookies for you. Please, Dahlia. I have to.”
Mom’s unraveling. And she’s wrong, too. The note has to be somewhere. It didn’t just disappear into thin air, unwriting Andy’s—or the killer’s—words. That terrible morning, we passed it around, hand to hand to hand, and someone had to be the last to hold it. And then what did they do—just toss it in the trash?
Maybe, actually. It fits with the rest of my family’s carelessness, the way they treated Andy’s absence like it wasn’t worthy of concern. But I can’t bring myself to imagine it: this solid piece of evidence, gone, destroyed. Long since decomposed.
I try Charlie next. I find him in the living room, kneeling in front of the coffee table, writing with black Sharpie on a small piece of white cardboard. He’s got another Sharpie gripped between his teeth, and he squints in concentration.
The room is a mess. Empty boxes are tossed into one corner, heaped into crooked towers, and there are piles of stuff—candles, DVDs, papers, portraits I recognize as ones taken from the victim room—spread throughout the space. I step over a heap of murder documentaries and find myself inches away from a collection of guns—five or six, at least, stacked together like logs in a fire. I read the card that Charlie has placed beside it:Daniel Lighthouse’s Hunting Rifles.
“What is this?” I ask.
Charlie cranes his neck to see past the piles and down at myfeet. Speaking around the Sharpie in his mouth, he says, “An exhibit.”
“You’re displaying Dad’s guns?”
He pulls the marker from between his teeth. “That’s usually what an exhibit means, yes.”
Mom will hate that. She always turned away from Dad’s rifles, stung by the sharp reminder of her parents’ deaths.
“But why?” I ask. “I thought the whole point was to have the islanders see us as humans instead of… violent and dangerous.”
“That’s right,” Charlie says. “And what’s more human than killing animals for sport? Or, in our case, for dinner?” He smiles at me, but when I don’t return his grin, he leans back against the couch and huffs. “Don’t tell me you’re some kind of vegetarian or something.” I cross my arms and don’t respond. “Oh god. Vegan?”
“No. Stop. I’m not anything. I just think you could be doing something a lot more useful with your time.”
“Like what? Baking cookies?”
“Like helping me figure out who murdered my brother.”
Charlie’s smile disintegrates. “He was my brother, too,” he says, voice cold. “And that’s the police’s job.”
