Page 63 of The Family Plot
“But Lyle knew about your family’s shed,” Greta reminds me. “And he told Ruby to stay away from it. So it seems like he and Fritz kept in touch.” She pauses. “I’ve got theories, of course.”
I grip the phone. “Tell me.”
She draws in a breath like someone about to sink beneath water. “Okay, theory one: Fritz is the Blackburn Killer, like you originally thought. Lyle knows something is weird about the shed but isn’t surewhat—just that his old friend gets really squirrelly about it. In this theory, it’s just a coincidence that Lyle got sick around the time the murders stopped.
“Theory two: Lyle is the Blackburn Killer, and he got access to the shed from Fritz. Maybe Lyle told him he needed storage space or something, and Fritz is just an innocent party.”
“But Fritz knew what was under the shed,” I say. “He asked me to help him get rid of it.”
“Right. Okay. Onto theory three: Fritz and Lyle were working together. Because it’s a lot for one person, don’t you think? Moving a body, cleaning it, dressing it, branding the ankle, taking the photographs,thencarrying it down to the shore? That’s a lot of work for a limited window of darkness. All this time, the police have been looking for the Blackburn Killer, but what if it’s the BlackburnKillers?”
A shiver shoots through me, and for a moment, I’m speechless. I pull my blankets toward my chin. “Wow,” I mutter. “I never—”
“There’s more,” Greta says. “In researching Lyle, I found this old newspaper article:Judge dismisses trespassing complaint filed against chief of police.”
“Okay…” I say. “I don’t get it.”
“Chief Edmond Kraft—that’s the guy who always hung around your house, right?”
I straighten at the name. “Yes.”
“According to the article, Lyle saw Kraft ‘snooping around’ the woods one night, and he filed a trespassing complaint against him. The complaint never went anywhere, but still.”
She says that,but still, like her next conclusion should be obvious, but I shake my head, confused. “Edmond was always snooping around,” I say. “He’d walk around our property, checking everythingout. Writing notes. Elijah Kraft says his dad had entire filing cabinets of notebooks, all about us.”
“Exactly,” Greta says. “So. Theory four: the chief went a little deeper into the woods than usual, Lyle saw him, freaked out that Kraft might discover something about the shed, and then tried to make sure he couldn’t go snooping there again.”
I hear the smile in her voice, which is higher than usual. It gets this way whenever she’s forging a new path through a case, following clues like breadcrumbs, invigorated by the search.
“Of course,” she adds, “that just makes theory four an addendum to theory three. Or two. But then there’s theoryfive.”
“Five?” I close my eyes against a whirl of dizziness.
“Last one,” Greta promises. Then she does it again, that presubmerging breath. “I’ve been thinking about my message boards, all the theories that have been kicked around over the years about the Blackburn Killer. And one that comes up a lot is that he might have been someone in law enforcement.”
My eyes jerk open. “A cop?”
“It’s actually not an uncommon theory for cases like this, especially when there’s a lack of evidence. Whoever killed those women knew how to make sure it couldn’t be traced back to him. And then there’s the idea that he could have used his uniform to get the women’s guards down before he strangled them. Or he could have approached them under the guise of questioning them: ‘Hey, miss, what’re you doing out so late?’ That kind of thing.”
I clench my jaw, picturing that scene: someone abusing the trust stitched into their uniform, using their power to inflict unimaginable pain. Greta’s right; it’s not uncommon. I know the stories, the names: Gerard Schaefer was fired from his teaching job, rejected from the priesthood, and finally landed as a police officer in Florida, where hemurdered Susan Place, Georgia Jessup, and buried them in a park. John Christie, another officer, stowed his victims’ bodies under floorboards, in his garden, behind the walls in his kitchen.
And now I’m thinking of Edmond. How he strutted so noticeably around our lawn, never even attempting subtlety. How he sometimes announced his drop-ins with the flashing lights above his cruiser, a reassurance to the islanders that he had an eye on Murder Mansion.
But what if he was never actually investigating us? What if, instead, he was setting us up, laying the groundwork to make us seem suspicious? That way, if the room beneath the shed—his room?—were ever uncovered, people would easily believe that we were to blame.Well, yeah, they might say,I’m not surprised. Police have been looking at the Lighthouses for years.
The air compresses around me.
“Elijah said Edmond’s been in a nursing home,” I tell Greta. “Early onset dementia. I don’t know how long he’s had it, but—”
“That could explain why the murders stopped,” she finishes.
“It doesn’t explain Fritz, though. Or Lyle.”
“I know,” she agrees, and I hear the hunger in her words, the appetite that’s been whetted instead of cured. “That’s why they’re only theories right now. Something’s still missing for sure.”
We rehash her ideas for a few more minutes. Then Greta ends the call with a promise: “I’m going to try something.”
She won’t elaborate on what thatsomethingis, “just in case it doesn’t pan out,” but as she mentions it, her voice becomes tight, restrained, like she’s pinching back the excitement of whatever she has planned.
