Page 45 of The Family Plot
I try to conjure his face, but for a second, all I see are his clothes: heavy tan jackets, boots with inch-thick soles. I can’t bring to mind the man that Mom just spoke about, the one she swore took care of us—sons, daughters, and wife alike. All I see is how he looked each time he went out the door, and I realize that whenever I imagined us burying him, I pictured him lying in his coffin, still dressed for hunting.
“What about him?” I ask.
Elijah shrugs, affecting a casual air. “What was he like? What did he do all day? It doesn’t appear he had a job, so I’m curious.”
He touches his pen to his notepad, eager to write.
“You mean you’re suspicious,” I say.
Because suddenly I get it. The warrant. The thumps from upstairs.Even Mom’s unprompted praise, the second she returned from speaking to Elijah. If I wasn’t so horrified, I might laugh at how long it took me to understand.
They think Dad was the Blackburn Killer.
My body responds first: head shaking, pulse racing, cheeks heating with furious disbelief. Then I spit out the words that disprove their theory.
“Whoever killed those women is the same person who killed Andy,” I say. “Andy saw the room under the shed, and the Blackburn Killer murdered him for that. And my father would never have killed my brother. Hisson. So he wasn’t the Blackburn Killer.”
“That’s interesting,” Elijah says, jotting something down. “Your defense of your father is predicated on the idea that he never would have killed your brother. Not that he never would have killed seven women.”
My mouth drops open, ready to whip out a reply. But it hangs slack as his words sink in. “No,” I finally mutter. “I didn’t say that. Of course he didn’t kill those women.”
He stood at Honorings, he chanted the prayers for Melinda, for Stephanie, for all the Blackburn victims. And beyond that, he was a simple man who greeted each morning by stepping outside, inhaling the crisp, salty air of this island. He was a quiet man who loved to hunt.
Hunt animals, I remind myself, after a single queasy second.Not women.Contrary to what the islanders think, we did not live in Murder Mansion.
“Is this about your father?” I ask Elijah. His hand, sprinting across his notepad, stops.
“No,” he says, meeting my gaze. “It’s about yours.”
“Edmond never found the evil he was looking for in my family,” I press on, “so you must be trying to do it for him. To carry on his legacy or whatever, because—”
“I don’t want my father’s legacy.”
“Because, otherwise,” I continue, “none of this makes sense. It’s Fritz’s shed. He called the photographstrophies. He asked me to help him get rid of the evidence. So I don’t know what story he told you, but to me, it was pretty clear who the Blackburn Killer was. Who mybrother’skiller was.”
“You know, it’s funny,” Elijah muses. “You’ve done a complete one-eighty on your groundskeeper.”
“I— What?”
“When I spoke to you about him the other night, you were adamant that he wasn’t a killer.”
My skin flushes hot again, blood surging to the surface. “Haven’t you been listening? Didn’t youseethe shed? Everything’s changed since the other night. Everything but your family’s suspicion of mine.”
Elijah watches me, chewing the inside of his cheek.
“In a way, I get it,” I say to his silence, “if that’s what this is about. I understand, better than most, the pull of family.”
The pull of Andy, anyway. How, for every moment we lived together, I could always feel him in relation to me, like a cord connecting us, wrapped around both our waists. If one of us moved, we felt the tug of the other, even from different rooms. And when he was gone, I thought I still felt him out there, pulling on his end sometimes, trying to show me where he was.
Elijah sets his pen on top of his notepad, which he balances on his thigh with one palm. “Dahlia. I assure you that my questions have nothing to do with my father. The fact is: photographs that we believe belong to the Blackburn Killer are in the room beneath your family’s shed.”
“Fritz’s—” I start to say, but he puts a hand in the air.
“There were also blue fibers found in the hinges of the chest in thatroom. Fibers that appear consistent with the gowns the killer dressed his victims in. We’ll know for sure if they’re a match once we hear from the lab.”
I stare at him, absorbing this new information. All these years, I never saw the actual dresses. The only way I knew how to picture them was from the miniature replicas that Tate stitched for her dioramas. Now, I shiver, realizing how close to me they always were.
Is that what Andy found in the chest that night? Maybe his ax grazed the fabric as it bit into the wood. Or maybe, by then, the gowns were gone—Jessie Stanton being the last to ever wear one.
