Page 31 of The Family Plot
“I’m sure that Fritz would agree! You’re all but accusing him of having a grow room under the shed and murdering a kid so… what? Dad never found out? You’re grasping at straws, Dolls. But, hey, if you’re so worked up about this door, why don’t you go ask Fritz to unlock it for you?”
“He isn’t here right now. And Mom doesn’t know where the key is.”
“Well, see? There you go.”
“There I go, what?”
“Dahlia, I need to concentrate. The LMM is only four days away, and I can’t have you buzzing around me like this with theories about how the mildest, meekest man in the world might have axed our br—”
He stops the second he looks at me. And I guess I’m grateful—that he has enough kindness in him to leave that image incomplete.
“Sorry,” he says, shifting his eyes back toward the cardboard. “Just let it go, Dolls, okay? You’re going to make yourself sick.”
He lifts his hand to continue writing. And he’s right, about one thing at least. It doesn’t make sense, the idea of Fritz—gentle, sweet, easygoing Fritz—killing someone he’d only ever been kind to before.
But still—
“I’m going to find that key,” I announce.
eight
Every morning, there’s amoment when I don’t remember Andy is dead. For that tiny sliver of time, he’s still out there somewhere, sitting on a park bench maybe, draped in the shade of an abundant oak. Or he’s seated at a table in a restaurant, contemplating the chair across from him I do not fill. Or he’s standing on a boardwalk, scowling at an ocean that’s deep and indigo and will not take him home.
It hurts, of course—imagining him, in all those places, living a life without me—but it’s nothing compared to the pain I feel when the moment ends. When I open my eyes. When I blink to find that my lashes are stiff from last night’s tears. When reality trudges inside me, crushing my lungs.
And on this, the third morning in which I’m yanked upon waking into a world where Andy is dead, I roll over to find that my bedroom door has been removed while I slept.
At first, I’m certain I’m seeing things. But my door is gone, its hinges empty and useless, gripping nothing but air.
I spring out of bed, march to the gaping hole, and I see down the hall that other doors are missing too—all of them, it seems, except for the one to the bathroom. I grip the doorjamb as I shiver. It’s unnerving—not just the mystery of where the doors have gone, or howI managed to sleep through their removal—but the effect of the doorlessness itself. The hallway is flooded with sunlight when normally it’s dim during the day, our rooms shut tight whether we’re in them or not.
I make it only two steps down the hall before I have to stop: Andy’s door is missing too. I try to snap my gaze away, but it’s too late; I’ve seen inside. His room is still so similar to mine—same bed, same dresser, same beanbag chair—and somehow, that guts me harder than if every trace of him had been erased.
I can’t linger here when his room is open, festering like an unbandaged wound. Spreading my hand against the wall, I steady myself and keep going. When I reach Tate’s room, I find her walls unchanged from years ago, displaying the different phases of her childhood art: melancholy watercolors of our gray mansion; monochromatic sketches of the living room, victim room, kitchen; oil portraits of her namesake, the corn silk of Sharon Tate’s hair and the bronzer on her cheekbones the only color on Tate’s walls at all.
Hunched at her desk, back facing the doorway, Tate is cast in a glow from the lamp beside her. Her hands work at something on top of the desk.
“Where are the doors?” I ask.
She jumps at the sound of my voice but doesn’t turn around. “Charlie took them,” she says.
“Why?”
“Something to do with his museum.”
Anger ripples through me, sending me stomping into her room.
“He’s going to display ourrooms? That’s— This whole thing is ridiculous, but that’s taking it way too far. You have to talk to him, Tate. He’ll listen to you.”
She waves a hand, swatting away my words, and it’s such a Charlie gesture.
“I don’t think he’s displaying them,” she says. “But even so, let him grieve how he wants to, okay?”
Her voice is flat, inflectionless. Gone is the warmth with which she greeted me my first day here. Gone are the jarring hugs, the doe-eyedhow are you doings. Now, here she is, the Tate I’m most familiar with: working Tate, distracted Tate,give me a minuteTate. When Andy and I were kids—just five to Tate’s fourteen—we’d try to climb all over her before she’d nudge us away, deeply embedded in one art project or another. Sometimes she glued together household items—spoons, peppermills, thimbles—making sculptures that only Charlie could identify:Oh, cool, a grandfather clock.Other times, her fingertips were smudged with paint as she eyed a photo of Bessie Darling or Lynn Eusan and committed them to canvas. Either way, Andy and I got used to the distant, detached tone with which Tate spoke (a tone that, years later, she would mask with exclamation points in her emails), and now as she sits with her back to me, her hands still tinkering with something on the desk, I don’t have to peer over her shoulder to know what she’s doing.
I do it anyway, though. I stand on my tiptoes, look at what she’s making. She holds a hot glue gun in one hand, and with the other, she moves dirt, real dirt, back and forth across a square of painted Styrofoam, her fingers raking it into place.
And now I see: she’s already dug a hole, already made an ax. It’s whittled from a pencil, attached to a blade that shines with aluminum foil.
