Page 36 of The Family Plot
“He let you have it?” I ask.
“Well… he was mad at first. He, like, lunged at me.”
“Helungedat you?”
I can’t picture that. Despite the handle of his ax that fit into his palm like it had been made for him alone, despite the growls that thundered through him each time he whacked at another tree, I never saw a whisper of violence in Andy. Not toward a person anyway.
“He didn’t hurt me,” Ruby’s quick to reply. “He didn’t even touch me. And when he saw how startled I was, he backed down immediately. He was like ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ and then he put his head in his hands and just… grunted. This really primal grunt. It scared me a little because I’d never seen him like that. Not even when I watched him with his ax. So I ran off, ran back home. And I still had the key.”
She bites her lip, combing one hand through her hair, examining her split ends. “He didn’t come after me. I thought he would. I thought, at the very least, if he didn’t want to apologize about our fight, then he’d want to get the key back. But he just let me go. And I never saw him again.”
I blink and I’m there, inside that night, standing beside Andy as he watches Ruby run away. I see him squint into the darkness, and maybe that distraction—eyes pulled toward the diminishing girl in thewoods—was enough to keep him from noticing someone behind him, raising an ax over their head, ready to swing it down onto—
But the key. Why did he have it?
“Honestly, I thought it was his house key,” Ruby says. She sinks to her knees beside me, running her hand over the bottom of the door. “I even tried it in your front door a couple weeks later, but—”
“You tried to break into our house?”
“No, not break in. I thought I had a key. But it didn’t work. So I put it on a chain and I’ve been wearing it since then. To remember Andy, I guess. The last thing I had of him.”
She reaches for the key in the lock. Tracing the round end of it with her finger, she loops around the dark metal circle over and over. Then she pulls the recessed handle. The door creaks as it starts to open.
I shove it back down. “What are you doing?”
“We should see what’s inside,” she says. “Maybe this is where Andy ended up that night I saw him enter the shed. You’re thinking that, too, right? That’s why you were trying to pick the lock.”
“There’s nowein this, Ruby. This doesn’t concern you.”
“But,” she protests, lower lip protruding like a child’s, “I gave you the key.”
“I know, thank you for that. But now…” I gesture for her to go.
“But you clearly want to get in there, and you wouldn’t even be able to if it weren’t for me. I could have kept it, you know. It’s been mine for years. It’s special to me.”
“Sounds like you stole it,” I say. I hear the unkindness in my voice, but I don’t know how else to speak right now. I have no idea what’s beneath the trapdoor, or why Andy had the key that night; all I know is I need to get in there. And I need to do it alone.
Ruby’s eyes seem to shrink, squinty with hurt. “Andy was right about you,” she says. My shoulders rear back. “I told him he shouldbring you sometime, when we met up at night. I was interested in getting to know you. But he said you wouldn’t go for it. That you were too closed off.”
“Closed off?” The words are high-pitched, indignant, and I’m unable to meet Ruby’s stare.
“He said you had problems trusting people. That you only really trusted him. I remember thinking that sounded sad. And lonely.”
My eyes sting at the corners. My throat burns. She’s wrong. My childhood—sitting on my beanbag chair with Andy, crouching beside him in the credenza, making forts from leaves and twigs—was happy. I was never lonely until the morning after our sixteenth birthday. Never sad until he didn’t come back.
“I trust people fine,” I reply.
But really, who was there to trust in our house? Tate and Charlie, who cocooned themselves together, cooing over each other’s art and ambitions? Dad, who treated me more like a chore than a child? There was Mom, I guess—but she was consumed by her curriculum, obsessed with acquiring new papers, new films. And when she wasn’t teaching us, she was stuck on the stairs, gazing at her parents on the wall, promising herself she would protect us from their fate, would ensure we knew that the worst could come for anyone. And yet I didn’t know—for a decade I had no idea—that it had already come for my twin.
“Then let’s open it,” Ruby says. “Together.”
I don’t like her insistence, the way she’s needling her way into spaces she doesn’t belong. It’s consistent with how she’s always been—our Watcher—but it’s still unnerving, like there’s something in this for her.
“Ruby. Please just leave.”
Her gaze combs my face. She chuckles a little:you can’t be serious.But when I only watch her in return, she shakes her head, dusting off her knees as she stands.
“Fine,” she says. “Hope you find what you’re looking for.”
