Page 54 of The Family Plot
“It would ensure,” Elijah continues, “as much as he could, at least, that the body wouldn’t be discovered until he himself was dead—when his own grave was dug, when it would be too late to hold him accountable for the crime. For any crimes, in fact.”
I’m annoyed by his tone—smug, self-satisfied. I can picture him writing in his notepad, hand hurrying across the page to describe my silence.
“Do you normally discuss your theories with the family of your suspects?” I ask.
Elijah pauses so long I check to make sure the call wasn’t dropped. Eventually, he says, “Things are a little different, in this case, given that the suspect in question is deceased.”
“So you’re not going to look into Lyle Decker,” I reply. “Even with what I told you Ruby said. That he was weird about our shed. That he found out Andy hurt her the same night Andy was killed. He said he was going toget that Lighthouse boy. And when I saw him the other day, he told me my brother deserved what he got.”
“That’s all very circumstantial,” Elijah says. “But if you have reason to believe that Lyle Decker had access to your shed, that might be another story.”
I think of the key, dangling from a chain on Ruby’s neck for the last ten years. But that came from Andy, she said, not her grandfather.
“I don’t,” I concede. “Not really.”
I know it’s not a perfect fit. The revelations about Lyle don’t change how Fritz spoke about the room beneath the shed—calling the photographs trophies, begging me to help him get rid of the evidence—and it doesn’t change that Ruby was sure it was Fritz she saw in the middle of the night. It’s possible that, in the dark, she could have mistaken another man for Fritz, but would she really not recognize her grandfather?
“Maybe Lyle was in cahoots with Fritz,” I offer.
“Cahoots,” Elijah repeats, as if it’s a word he’s never heard before. “Have you known Mr. Decker and your groundskeeper to be close?”
“No,” I admit. “But there’s clearly a lot I didn’t know about Fritz.”
“And—going back to motive here—I’m unclear if you think that Mr. Decker killed your brother as revenge for hurting his granddaughter, or because Andy discovered he was the Blackburn Killer.”
My nails stab my palm, the mark from Charlie’s Sharpie stretched tight over my fist. “I don’t know—both, maybe.” I force myself to relax my hand. “That’s why I called you, so you can figure it out.”
“All right,” Elijah says. “I appreciate the info. But while I’ve got you here—have you had any luck finding the runaway note?”
“No.” I glance at my floor, its debris of sweaters left scattered by the police. “But if we still had it, wouldn’t your officers have found it last night?”
“It wasn’t the subject of our search. And anyway, a single piece of paper is kind of a needle in a haystack.”
“Well, I asked around. No one knows what happened to it.”
“Okay,” Elijah acknowledges, but I hear that smugness again. Right away, I know what he’s thinking: Dad might have thrown it away. Itfooled us, the morning we read it, but if Dad had forged it, if Andy’s fingerprints were never even on it, maybe it wouldn’t have fooled the police, who would have had the resources to analyze it.
“Lyle had access to Andy’s handwriting,” I blurt. Because now I’m remembering another part of Ruby’s story: after Andy rejected her, she was sobbing on her bedroom floor, surrounded by his notes. Lyle found her like that, and when she told him what happened, he grabbed some of the papers before storming out of the house.
I tell this to Elijah, adding threads to my theory as quickly as my mind can spin them: “It’s possible Lyle didn’t even have to forge it.The only way out is to never come back? That might be something Andy wrote himself. It sounds exactly like him. Which is why I never questioned it.”
“Uh-huh,” Elijah says, distraction fogging his voice.
“Uh-huh? That’s it?”
“Sorry,” he says, and now there’s a sound on his end, like chair legs scraping against the floor. “Something just came in. I have to go.”
“Something about Andy?”
“I’ll talk to you later, Dahlia.”
“Wait. Are you going to question Lyle?”
“I assure you,” he says coolly, “I’m following every lead.”
But I don’t believe him. Even after he hangs up, his voice lingers, allowing me to hear the echo of his father.I assure you, Elijah said just now, a phrase that Edmond often used.
I assure you, I’m only doing my job, Edmond would say when Andy, answering the door, squared his shoulders, refusing to call down the hall for Dad.I assure you—just a quick chat.
