Page 32 of The Family Plot
The floor tilts. The room spins. I have to grab her shoulder to keep from spinning too.
She whips her head to the side, narrowing her eyes at my hand. “What?” she spits out.
“How can you do that?” I ask, and I’m so dizzy with despair thatthe words sound like a plea, not the sharp accusation I intend them to be.
Tate sighs, turning back to the dirt at her fingertips. “I have to,” she says.
“No, you don’t.”
“I do, Dahlia. And I’m sorry if it hurts you, or if it makes things harder. But you’ve seen my Instagram. This is what I do.”
What she does. What she does is pin those women to their damp, sandy graves. In her diorama of the Blackburn Killer’s second victim, Stephanie Kepler lies on the shore almost as if she were sunbathing, one arm flung above her head, the other at her side. Her blond hair is blown across her face, and the dark, glassy water is stalled midlick at her branded ankle. Tate crafted the dress so it always looked wet, the bodice of the gown so sheer it gave a glimpse of Stephanie’s nipples beneath.Pornographic, one commenter said.Authentic, wrote most of the rest.
“It’s how I process and cope,” Tate adds.
“That’s bullshit. Your whole Instagram is bullshit. All those dead women? We processed and coped with their murders every time we had one of their Honorings. So no, your Instagram isn’t about that at all. It’s about attention. It’s aboutyou.”
“You’re damn right it’s about me!” she fires back, her blue eyes like the center of a flame. “It’s what I have to do, Dahlia, just to… just to be okay.”
Tears gather in her lashes but they do not fall. She’s breathing heavily, nostrils flaring in and out, lips stitched so tightly together they make a perfect seam.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
She shakes her head, silent for too many moments. Finally, she gestures toward the base of the diorama, exposing the dirt beneathher nails. “This is the only thing I’m good at,” she says quietly. “My Instagram, it’s… the only thing that connects me to other people. I don’t know how to makefriends, Dahlia. Do you?”
The question startles me. Of course I think of Greta, the way she shoves her hair behind her ears when she takes an order at the café, the way she blurts out murder facts to unsuspecting customers.
“I have a friend,” I say.
“Afriend,” she echoes, as if I’ve proven her right. “Well, who can blame us, right? Making friends wasn’t exactly a lesson in Mom’s curriculum. Me, I have Charlie, and there’s an old lady in our building who brings us soup sometimes, and…” She trails off, helplessly lifting her hands. “Now our brother is dead, and the only people in the world who care about that are the people in this house. But a diorama will change that. My followerscareabout the people I post about. The one I just did of Jessie Stanton? It got a thousand Likes in three minutes.”
Jessie Stanton—the last woman to be murdered on the island, the same month we found Andy’s note. Blackburn swarmed with police when she died, like it always did after a woman washed up, but within a week or two, they’d already moved the investigation from their tiny satellite base on the island back to the mainland. They promised to comb through interviews, sift through photos. They promised to find the clue that would lead them to a killer who had eluded them for years.
I remember now that that’s why Dad refused to report Andy’s runaway to the police.They’ve got their hands full with that poor Stanton woman.We’re not going to distract from their investigation by having them chase after someone who chose to leave.I didn’t think of that when I saw Tate’s diorama of Jessie, posted only a few weeks ago. I was too busy focusing on the details that Tate had meticulously re-created: the emerald nail polish on Jessie’s toes; theBon her ankle; the rip inthe blue gown, like an intentional slit up the dress, which newspapers said was likely from her body crashing against the rocks.
“So I can only imagine how many my own brother will get,” Tate continues.
“How many what?”
“Likes.”
My lips part, my breath hitching between them. “You’re doing this forLikes?”
She frowns. “You’re not listening. I’m doing this to… to…”
She stops, shakes her head, as if it’s too much to explain.
“This is theonlything I’m good at,” she says again, tears finally brimming over. “So what else would you have me do?”
I survey the grave she dug in the Styrofoam, that tiny blade that glints in the light. It’s only a matter of time before she builds Andy’s body, too, before she places it in that dirt, sticks it beneath that blade.
“I would have you do a lot of other things,” I blurt. “You could be helping me figure out who did this. You could be stopping Mom from baking herself into a psychotic break. You could be—”
“I don’t see you doing any of those things,” she says, tongue whip-sharp, tears so quickly dissolved. “How exactly are you helping Mom? How areyoufiguring out who did this? Last I heard from Charlie, you went to your room after talking to him yesterday and haven’t come out until now.”
I open my mouth to lash out a response, but nothing comes. She’s right. As much conviction as I had yesterday, promising Charlie I’d locate the key to Fritz’s trapdoor, I found myself suddenly and overwhelmingly exhausted, unable to do much more than head upstairs to my bed and hide beneath the blankets. There, in the darkness I created for myself, I drifted to sleep, and when I finally woke up, Andy was dead again, and my door was gone.
“Fine,” I say. “Maybe I haven’t done enough. But at least I’m not planning to exhibit the worst thing that’s ever happened to our family.”
