Page 33 of The Family Plot
Tate looks at the dirt on her desk. Then she picks up the tiny ax, twirling it between her fingers. “It’s not the worst thing,” she says.
“Excuse me?”
She meets my gaze, pain swimming in her eyes. “Worse has happened to our family.”
Air sputters out of me.
“Like what? Dad? Dad’s death? We barely knew him, Tate. He acted like you and I were Mom’s kids alone and all he had to do was tolerate us. So how could you possibly say that losing him is worse than—”
“I don’t care that Dad’s dead,” she says. Then she jolts, as if startling herself with her own admission. “I mean— That didn’t come out right. I just mean…” She sighs. “Never mind, Dahlia, okay? I need to get back to work.”
I’m about to argue, but I’m stopped by a sound in the hallway: footsteps, followed by something banging against the wall.
“Shit,” Charlie mutters.
I march into the hall to find him holding up a door with one hand and rubbing at a new mark in the wall with the other.
“What are you doing with the doors?” I demand.
“Dolls!” he exclaims, like he’s happy to see me, like he didn’t sneak into my room to unscrew my door while I slept. “I’m so glad you asked!”
Even feet away, I can smell him; bourbon seeps through his pores.
“No doors until after the LMM is over,” he explains. “You all need to get used to feeling exposed. I had a director once, Lorenzo Fichera”—he pauses, as if waiting for me to recognize the name—“who made me stand in Times Square in my underwear as an exercise in vulnerability. So just be grateful I’m not sending you half naked into town.”
Seconds pass. “Are you serious?”
“Hey, I don’t make the rules. And anyway, this’ll be good for us. There’s too muchhidinggoing on in this house, you know? Too much squirreling away. Mom in the kitchen, you in your bed—”
“Mom’s not hiding,” I cut him off. “She’s… manically baking.”
“Well. Either way. Nobody’s immune.” He uses both hands to lift the door. “This is Mom and Dad’s. But you’re right, she probably won’t even notice—since it’s a door, not a cookie tray. This is the last of ’em up here, though, so I’ll do the kitchen next.”
He sweeps past me, carrying the door with ease, despite how lean he is, arms still twig-thin even in his thirties. Mouth ajar, feet frozen to the floor, I watch him go. When he disappears down the stairs, I take in the hallway around me. Bursts of sun, from the windows of open rooms, pour onto the carpet—an old runner that’s been here forever but only now reveals its stains. Dark splotches mar its red like blood clots in a vein.
I avert my gaze from the space where Andy’s door should be. Down the hall that branches off to the right, I see light splashing out from Mom and Dad’s room.
Curiosity pulls me toward it, a place I haven’t seen inside in decades, not since I was five or six. I’d had a bad dream—the Black Dahlia, split in half on the grass, was still alive, reaching out to me, her new smile bleeding all over her teeth—and I pounded on Mom and Dad’s closed door. When Dad opened it, I told him I had a nightmare, looking past him for Mom, who, a notoriously deep sleeper, didn’t seem to have stirred.Go back to bed, is all he told me, and he shut the door in my face. After that, whenever a nightmare troubled me, I went to Andy’s room, crawled beneath the blankets he was already holding up to let me in.
Now, I linger in the doorway, absorbing details of a room that still feels off-limits. Not that it was, really. Not officially, like Fritz’s shed.It’s important that everyone has their own space, Dad once said. As if space was our problem in this massive, echoing house. Still, he proclaimed,You can’t go in someone else’s space unless you’re invited in—which I later learned, from one of Greta’s favorite TV shows, is how vampires have to live.
My eyes sweep across the room. The big bed. The reading chair beside a full-length mirror. The dresser made of dark, shiny wood. And on top of the dresser, a set of keys.
My heart kicks when I see it—this reminder of the trapdoor, the dark unyielding lock, the key I swore to Charlie I’d find. Mom said Dad might have it, and the ones on the dresser are definitely his. I recognize them from his key chain, a piece of antler whittled down to a few inches long. As I hurry toward them, I quickly find that all of them are regular, no skeleton key among them that would fit the lock in the shed’s trapdoor. But my pulse beats faster, spurring me on.
I open the dresser drawers, rummage through my parents’ socks, underwear, pants. I look through each of their nightstands. I even crouch on the floor, lift up the bed skirt, and search beneath it for boxes that may be keeping keys. When I find nothing unusual, I turn toward my parents’ walk-in closet—the door of which Charlie has kept intact. Once inside, I feel past the hanging clothes for hooks on the walls. Then I search the clothes themselves, palming the pockets of Dad’s shirts and jackets, waiting to register something hard and metallic.
The smell of him wafts off the hangers, gamy and musty, and it strikes me suddenly, as I run my hands along his hunting jackets, that even this doesn’t make me miss him. Whatever weight I felt from his death when I headed back to the mansion—it’s gone now, crushed beneath the boulder of mourning Andy. And honestly, it’s freeing in a way, Dad being dead. For ten years, my body has housed a vibratingbitterness toward him, and now, it’s a relief, knowing I have no reason to try to forgive him anymore.
I wrench apart the final cluster of coats, ready to pull each pocket inside out if I have to—but my hands go still when I see the back of the closet. Instead of a blank, uninterrupted wall, I’m met with another door.
Tentatively, I reach toward it, hair pricking up along my arms. When I turn its knob, I expect resistance, but it opens easily, without so much as a creak.
I stare into the dark void I’ve revealed. Then I activate the flashlight on my phone.
It’s a passageway, no wider than four feet across, and as I point my light straight ahead, I can’t even see where it ends. The walls are unfinished; exposed studs and cracked beams reek of mildew. I creep in farther, my empty hand spread out toward the side, until it brushes against something.
I swing my phone toward the planks of wood beside me. Taped to them—all over it, it seems—are sheets of paper. They overlap, colliding with each other, and when I step closer and shine my light on one in particular, my knees almost buckle.
