Page 50 of The Family Plot
“With a murderer!”
“Stop it!” she says. “We don’t know that! Fritz has always been a… a very gentle man.”
For a second, I feel the flare of pain in my ankle, the bruises Fritz left when he grabbed me yesterday. I found the marks last night as I peeled back my socks for bed, head still ringing with Elijah’s questions.
“And if he’s guilty, then why would he call?” Mom continues, throwing up her hands. “It must be a misunderstanding—”
“A misunderstanding! What exactly was misunderstood?”
“I don’t know, Dahlia! Okay? I—” She shakes her head. “I hate to even think of it.”
She puts her palms on the counter, looking at the marble so she won’t have to look at me.
I don’t know this woman, the one averting her eyes. Where is the Lorraine Lighthouse who raised us? The one who used cooking twine on her own body to demonstrate how the Glamour Girl Slayer bound his victims. The one who planted herself, almost daily, on the staircase, face sad and stony as she stared at her parents.
Mom has always been single-minded in her devotion to people who were murdered. Now, a day after learning that a serial killer kept his trophies beneath our shed, she’s choosing not to think of it, not to demand an explanation when a suspect calls our home.
“But Mom—”
“I can’t discuss this anymore!” she cries. “Not right now. Please, I’m… I’m exhausted.”
She takes in the mess around her: the dirty dishes, the egg still shining on the floor, the cookies she only half packed up. Then she sighs so deeply it sounds like the crash of an ocean wave.
“I’ll take care of this later,” she says. “I need to lie down for a bit.”
She looks so tired that I feel a pull toward sleep myself. As she shuffles away, I ache to lie down, too. But Andy—always sleeping, never sleeping, from now until forever—needs me to keep pushing. For answers, for evidence, for something that will connect Fritz, without a doubt, to the room beneath the shed.
I turn to the window, homing in on that building, its white brick choked by coils of ivy. A perimeter is marked by fresh yellow tape, tauter than the one that flaps around the family plot. And it’s there, near those little headstones, that something seizes my attention: a figure in dark clothes, hunched in the woods not twenty yards past those graves.
A chill scampers up my spine. The figure is too small to be Elijah Kraft—or even his father, a knee-jerk option I consider. I try to see the person more clearly, but they remain just a blur of black among the trees.
I rush to the hall closet, push past coats to the shelf in the back, and I grab the binoculars that look as if they haven’t been moved since the last time Andy and I used them. Grief gushes up, quick and acidic, but I swallow it down, hurrying back to the kitchen.
I aim the lenses into the woods until I catch a hazy glimpse of the person’s dark clothes. Inching the binoculars into the right spot, I twist the knob until the world clicks into perfect focus—and then I gasp.
For a moment, I’m hurtled back in time. It’s Ruby, crouching on our property, just like she did when we were kids.
But that’s not what startled me.
Yards from the place where Andy’s body was discovered, Ruby Decker, clutching a shovel, is digging a hole for something.
Or she’s digging something up.
thirteen
I’ve barely shrugged mycoat on before I’m out the door, calling Ruby’s name. The wind snatches my voice, blowing it back toward the house, and in the distance, Ruby stabs her shovel into the ground, so focused on digging that she doesn’t even hear me.
I’m jogging toward her, closing the space between us, but when I reach the crime scene tape, it stops me like a finish line.
Now I’m rooted here, close enough to really see it—the spot where Andy was buried—and my throat is burning, my lungs are heaving; the air is thin and not enough.
Ruby’s shovel whispers against the dirt, jerking me back to her intrusion. I hear the ocean breathe, its endless in and out, and even though Andy hated all the water locking us in, I soothe myself with its sound.
Steady again, I veer around the grave and march the remaining yards to Ruby, who won’t stop digging, still oblivious to my approach. When she pulls back her arms to pierce the ground again, I grab the end of the shovel and yank it toward me, forcing her off-balance.
“Hey!” she protests.
“What are you doing?” I demand. “Why are you here?”
