Page 53 of The Family Plot
All at once, the ocean and wind crescendo, and in them, I hear the snarl of her grandfather’s voice, hissing at me how Andydeserved what he got. When he said it, I was shocked by how heartless, how hateful, he sounded.
But what if he was even worse than that?
I comb through my memories, trying to gather what I know of Lyle. Turns out, it isn’t much, only what I’ve learned from Ruby the past few days: he’s extremely protective of his granddaughter, he didn’t like Andy, and he’s been sick for almost a decade.
But now, my mouth falls open, the worddecaderesonating inside me like a struck bell. The same length of time since Andy was killed.
Since Jessie Stanton, too.
In an instant, my mind whips toward something else, something I completely forgot in yesterday’s tangle of horrors: Lyle used to warn Ruby to stay away from our property. But not only that.Don’t go anywhere near the Lighthouses’ shed,he told her.
When she relayed that story, I couldn’t make sense of it. How would he have known about it? Why would he care? But now, pushing these pieces into place, I almost groan.
What if Lyle was the Blackburn Killer? What if the victims ended at Jessie Stanton because he grew too sick, too weak, to murder anyone else?
I focus in again on Ruby, who’s still talking.
“… and I realized a couple days later that if Grandpa saw the embroidery, he’d probably get even madder. I kept thinking,Maybe Andy will change his mind. So I didn’t want to make things worse for us by having Grandpa stumble upon this. I was already thinking of how I could backtrack, tell Grandpa I was being stupid that night, that I’d had a crush and it was over. But this”—she picks up the wooden hoop and immediately drops it back in the box—“Ruby loves Andy? Made to look exactly like the one I made Grandpa? He’d see it as a betrayal. That I’d replaced him somehow. That I was still set on leaving him.”
She clenches her jaw, and it’s a loud, windy moment before she continues. “So I buried it, here, in line of sight of Andy’s window, hoping he’d see me and come out. I was sure, at the very least, that we’d meet up again soon, and when we did, we’d talk, and he’d apologize, and he’d want his present back. I never…neverthought it would be ten years before I dug this up.”
Her eyes well up. They’re probing mine, wanting something from me. But I feel so removed from her, my thoughts still knotted up with Lyle.
“You have to use it,” she says, pushing the embroidery into my hands.
“Use it?” I ask dimly.
“In the Lighthouse Memorial Museum. It’s all people are talking about in town, and as soon as I heard about it, I knew the embroidery had to be part of it. Please.”
She bites her lip, face twisted and tortured. “Everything between us is so unfinished. I never got to say goodbye to him. I never got togive this back. And I just want to feel like… like he has it, in some way. Like he knows that, even though I ran from him, I really did love him.”
Tears spill onto her cheeks. “Please,” she says again.
I watch her for a moment, still somewhere else in my mind. Finally, I nod, and she relaxes.
But as we stand to go, I’m not thinking of the embroidery she thrust into my hands. I’m thinking of the call I’ll make to Elijah as soon as I’m back inside. He needs to know that, for all the hours they searched our house last night, looking for the Blackburn Killer’s brand, there was another house, just through the woods, they should have been searching instead.
fourteen
“You think Lyle Deckerused someone else’s shed as his trophy room.”
Elijah’s voice on the phone is skeptical. I picture him arching a brow.
“Think about it,” I say, shoving Ruby’s embroidery into my dresser drawer. “If you’re going to keep an entire roomful of evidence, would you want it on your own property, where it would immediately implicate you if somebody found it?”
I expect Elijah to use my words against me, remind me that the roomful of evidence on our property implicatesus. Instead, he throws a question back at me.
“Haven’t you wondered,” he starts, “why your brother was buried in your father’s plot?”
I freeze, midpace, in the middle of my room. “Of course I’ve wondered.”
“Do you want to hear my theory?”
I wait without answering, eyes fixed on my beanbag chair. For a second, I see Andy flopping onto it, before the image shifts, and he’s flopping into a grave.
“Actually, it’s an extension of a theoryyoumentioned,” Elijahsays. “That the Blackburn Killer is the same man who murdered your brother.” He clears his throat in a way that sounds forced. “As you surmised, we’re looking into your father as a possible suspect for the Blackburn murders. So say it’s true that the crimes were committed by the same person. If your father killed your brother, in the heat of the moment, maybe, upon learning that Andy saw what was under the shed—again, a theory you articulated—there’d be a benefit, wouldn’t there, to burying him in his own plot?”
I see where he’s going. But I won’t say it. I won’t admit that, for one delirious moment last night as I tried to push his questions out of my head, I thought of this, too.
