Page 49 of The Family Plot
Mom beams, hands tucked toward her chin, clasped as if in prayer. Her smile reaches her eyes, lighting them up, and it completely transforms her, the slumped woman from just moments ago now bouncing on her toes.
“How are you doing?” I ask. “After yesterday.”
Her smile dims, flickering once before disappearing completely. She looks at the egg on the floor but doesn’t bend to clean it up. “I’m… managing,” she says carefully. “How are you?”
She glances at the sink, the cookies, the gaping hole where the kitchen door once was, and it’s strange, watching her try this hard to avoid my gaze. Even when she told us how Dorothy Stratten, once a Playboy playmate, was found naked on the carpet, her brains blown out of her head in chunks so big that “one resembled a whole roast chicken,” she stared at me and Andy as if daring us to look away.
“Managing,” I agree.
Mom reaches into a cabinet for a plastic container and begins placing the cookies inside, three neat little rows.
“Fritz called,” she says, matter-of-factly, and right away, my skin feels shivery, my forehead moist. “He said that, given the circumstances, he’s going to take some more time off.”
“Time off?” I practically yell. “I hope you told him he’s fired! At the veryleast, he’s fired.”
Mom freezes for a second, a vein jumping at her temple. But then she shakes her head, stacking more cookies on top of one another. “Detective Kraft said they let him go. They don’t think he’s the… the Blackburn Killer.” Her movements slow, the spatula gliding to a midair stop. “Or Andy’s. And I know what you said yesterday, but the more I think about it, the more impossible it seems, that Fritz could have—”
A timer bleats, startling us both.
“My shortbread!” Mom cries. She opens the oven door, shoves her hand into a mitt, and pulls out another tray of cookies. These are pale and square and glistening with heat. She sets them on the stove and shakes off her mitt.
“Here!” she says, grabbing one with bare fingers, then dropping it instantly. “Ow!”
“Mom! They just came out!”
The cookie she tried to give me is now a broken lump. Beneath it, the delicate crust of another shortbread is crushed.
“Oh,” Mom moans, as if the loss of two cookies is too much to bear. Then her “oh” morphs back into “ow” as she looks at her fingers, shiny with grease.
I guide her to the sink and hold her hand beneath the water. She’s stiff at first, but then she leans against me.
“Thank you,” she whispers, head tipped toward mine. When I shut off the faucet, she exhales a chuckle. “Decades of lighting Honoring candles and I never once burned myself. But now…” She holds up her hands, twisting them to show each side. “I’m marked all over.”
“What did you say to Fritz?” I ask.
She pushes some flour off the counter and into the sink.
“I told him that makes sense. Taking time off.”
“You…” I gape in disbelief, watching as she walks to the pantry and runs her fingers over ingredients like words in a book. “Yourealize, don’t you, that the reason the police don’t think Fritz did it is because they thinkDaddid.”
“Yes,” she says, pulling out a bag of walnuts and scouring its label. “And I told Detective Kraft that that was impossible. For one thing, if my husband were going out in the middle of the night to… to kill women, and do whatever in that shed, wouldn’t I know? Wouldn’t I wake up each time he left or returned?”
I don’t remind her that she sleeps like the dead.Like the murdered, Charlie always joked.
“Besides,” she continues, putting the walnuts back on the shelf, “Daniel has an alibi for the night Andy—” Even with her back to me, I see her stiffen. “The night of Andy.”
“What alibi?”
“You remember,” she says confidently, turning to face me again. “He was sick that night, on your birthday. He made it through dinner and the Honorings, but then he was up all night because he was sick as a dog. He kept running back and forth to the bathroom.”
As she speaks, something lightens in me—because I do remember his queasiness, the way he grimaced each time he swallowed. I even remember that, the next morning, when I screamed upon finding the note, when everyone but Andy came running, Dad looked unusually exhausted, his skin tinged with gray. And though I already told myself Elijah must be wrong, I still feel buoyant with relief at the memory.
Until I think of Fritz.
“So if you’re sure it wasn’t Dad, then that means it was Fritz. And you’re just chatting with him on the phone!”
“We weren’tchatting,” she insists. “It was a very quick exchange.”
