Page 47 of The Family Plot
“I don’t…” I shake my head, struggling to process his response, which seems so far from the point. “I don’t really care what people think. I just want to know who killed Andy.”
He picks up his drink and throws his head back to down the rest of it. “Well,” he says. “You have your priorities, I have mine.”
My breath catches. I go so still it feels like my heart stops beating.
“I mean…” Charlie tries to backtrack. “That’s not what I meant. Andy’s important to me, too, obviously, I just— I don’t know what you want from me, Dolls. I’m not a detective. But this”—he opens his arms to encompass the room—“this is something I can do for Andy.”
“For Andy? You’ve got to be kidding. You’re calling this the LighthouseMemorialMuseum, but where’s the memorial part of it? All I see are films and paintings and a bunch of old homework.”
And Dad’s guns shoved into the corner. I wonder what Elijah thought of that, if one of the times he pulled Mom from the dining room last night—“Just another quick question, Mrs. Lighthouse”—was to ask her about them.
“I can’t keep explaining the LMM to you,” Charlie says, staring into his empty glass. “But it’s as much about setting the record straight about Andy as anything else. Showing people that he was… Fuck, he was human, okay? He was a kid! He didn’t have it coming to him because he lived in Murder Mansion.”
Charlie tips his head back again, lips on the mouth of his glass, trying to extract a final drop.
“And what do you think’s going to happen when they hear about the shed?” he continues. “Or serial killer headquarters, as you called it. They’ll lump Andy in with the Blackburn Killer’s victims, and that’s what he’ll be forever—part ofthatstory. It makes me sick just to think of it.”
It makes me sick, too. That’s why I haven’t returned the texts from Greta that I woke to today.Any luck with the door??the first one said, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her, to confirm that she’d been right the other day, when she suggested a connection between the Blackburn Killer and Andy. She’s been my friend for years, but for longer than that, she’s been a self-proclaimed “true-crime junkie,” a “citizendetective,” a person who’s “literally obsessed with the Blackburn Killer.” I want, for a little longer at least, for Andy to be mine. Not an eager, all-caps post on a message board. Not an update on a serial killer’s Wikipedia page.
Also,Greta wrote next,I’m sure you’re working with the police about your brother, but do you want my help looking into anything?
I don’t know exactly what she does each day, when she’s at her computer. I know she makes requests for public documents, consults with retired detectives. I know she pores over police records, discusses theories with people like her. But beyond that, it’s a mystery to me. Even when we sit side by side, working our separate searches, I’ve never felt tempted to glance at her screen, a place I didn’t think I’d find Andy. So what would it mean, for her to help me? How long would it take her to follow the police’s footsteps and start asking me about Dad?
“They think Dad might be the Blackburn Killer,” I say, and Charlie’s forehead wrinkles.
“I’m aware,” he says. “I imagine I was badgered with the same questions as you.”
We didn’t talk about it last night. Sitting around the table, one of us gone at a time, we mostly kept quiet. Even Charlie, returning from his own interview, stopped trying to taunt Officer Bailey. Instead, he sat, arms crossed, beneath Dad’s deer, face scrunched in an indignant scowl.
“What do you think,” I ask, “about that theory?”
Charlie’s eyes blaze with pain. It’s so quick, gone as soon as he blinks, but for a moment, I see Andy in him—the burst of emotion that would surge across his face, right before he stomped toward his ax—and it opens something up in me, an instinct to reach out, to offer my palms to Charlie as a place to put that pain.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” he says, voice hard, vulnerability tucked away. “I think they’re desperate, they’re—” He stops to squint at me. “Why? What do you think?”
I shrug. “The same, I guess.”
“Youguess.”
After the police left, I lay in bed for a long time, gaze scratching the ceiling as I tried to see things as Elijah did. I remembered that, when I asked how Ruby knew it was Fritz that Andy snuck after in the woods, she said it was the man’s height, his build, which, for Fritz and Dad, is about the same. But Ruby also said she saw Fritz’s limp, and Dad was always solid and sturdy, his walk more akin to a heavy-footed march.
No matter how long I tried last night, the sky blushing with light when I finally fell asleep, I couldn’t see Dad as the man in the shed, the Blackburn Killer, the person with such horrible secrets to protect. More important, I couldn’t see him murdering Andy, the son he partnered with on hunting trips, the son he looked at with a cool sort of pride whenever he served us venison stew.
To be fair, though, when I tried to picture Fritz with the ax, it was difficult to imagine, too.
“It’s just, he and I were never close,” I tell Charlie. “So when Elijah asked me questions about him, there wasn’t a lot I could say beyond the basics. But you actually spent time with him, so… what was he like? What’d you even talk about, all those times you went hunting?”
“We talked about nothing.”
“Nothing? You didn’t say anything to each other?”
“Not really.” Charlie scans my face, reading my skepticism. Then he snorts with impatience. “I don’t know, Dolls. He mostly talked about nature. The beauty of nature. Appreciating nature.”
I think of the deer head on the dining room wall, the dinners we ate chaperoned by its crown of antlers, its watchful yet unseeing eyes.
“How is killing animals appreciating nature?” I ask. “Seems like a contradiction.”
Charlie straightens his cards. “Not to him. He had this philosophy: nature is a continuum, with these discrete, sublime moments that most people miss because life moves so fast.”
