Page 86 of The Family Plot
“Hunting trophies. Hunt-hunting trophies. That’s what Mr. Lighthouse told me was down there.”
I give him a scornful look. “What?”
“He always said it was his trophy room. For deer! That I should stay away from it, because he knew how much I hate”—he grimaces—“I hate hunting. All those beautiful, innocent animals… It disgusted me, itpainedme, the thought of them down there.”
“You told me to help you get rid of the evidence,” I remind him.
“Get rid of the deer,” he insists. “Mr. Lighthouse’s trophies. I figured, now that he was—gone, there was no need for…” He trails off, shaking his head. “But I couldn’t do it myself. I could barely even think of them without feeling sick. How trapped they were, down in that room, frozen in the moment of their death. I told the police all this. I had no idea about any of those photographs. About what he did down there. I’m as horrified as you.”
He straightens a little, as much as his bad leg allows. “Does this,” he says, tentative, “does this mean that Mr. Lighthouse was…”
As the question hangs, unfinished, in the air, I look around again. Charlie’s no longer in the corner—I don’t see him anywhere, in fact—but in the living room, a couple laughs, whispering to each other abouta murder report. Everyone else seems preoccupied with the portraits, the Honoring candles, the calendars. Some of them even take pictures.
“You really had no idea?” I ask Fritz. I let my skepticism sharpen every word.
When his gaze falters, eyes stuttering away from mine, I cross my arms. “So you did know.”
“No,” he says quickly. “No, it’s just… after the police interviewed me about the shed, I remembered something. About Andy.”
My heart pounds once before going still.
“He came to me,” Fritz continues, “a couple days before he left—before we thought he left—and he asked me what I knew about the trapdoor. I told him the truth, what I thought was the truth. Then he said he’d been down there, and it was like he was trying to get me to admit I had, too, that I knew more than I was saying. He got so upset after a while. I’d never,neverseen him like that, not even with his ax. He said, ‘You let him! You knew and you let him!’ The poor boy was sobbing so hard—but I couldn’t help him. I didn’t know what he was saying I let Mr. Lighthouse do.”
I’m stunned by the image he’s conjured: Andysobbing so hard. Like Charlie, I never saw him cry, a fact I’m dumbfounded to realize. His face would scrunch and redden, his fists would squeeze the handle of his ax, but I never saw tears—and it hurts so much to picture them now. Instead, I focus on unraveling the rest of Fritz’s story.
Was I right, did Andy want to tell someone what Dad had done, and was he hoping Fritz would help him? And when Fritz refused, did he believe that our groundskeeper, the gentlest man we’d known, had actually been Dad’s accomplice? I can’t imagine how betrayed, how utterly alone, that would have made him feel. He would have believed that no one was safe—and no one could save him.
“Until the other day,” Fritz says, “I hadn’t thought of that moment in such a long time. But back when it happened, I did wonder, for a little bit, if there was more to that room than I knew. And I decided, ultimately, to push that concern aside. Mr. Lighthouse was always good to me. Paid me well. And”—he pats the thigh of his bad leg—“I have bills.”
Shame deepens the crease in his brow. “I wish now… I wish so much that I’d looked into it. But it was easier, I suppose, to pretend it hadn’t happened.”
I’m scowling at him, appalled that money was enough for him to ignore Andy’s cries. But I can’t deny that his words resonate.
It was easier, I suppose, to pretend.
I think of Charlie, strutting around here somewhere, playing the part of a grieving but otherwise unburdened man.
I think of Tate, believing her art could revive a victim, make them—and herself—a little more whole.
I think of Mom, finding solace in other people’s stories, slipping inside a fiction dark enough to absorb her pitch-black pain.
And me. Did I really not know? For all those years, when my neck grew sore from my endless hunching over laptop screens, did I really not think, even for a second, that Andy might be dead? Or was it easier to search instead of suffer, to obsess instead of mourn?
“Can you forgive me, Dahlia,” Fritz asks now, “for not knowing the truth, even when it was right beneath me, every single day?”
As he waits for my reply, I look at his hands—calloused, capable of bruising me, but the same hands that have stroked the backs of caterpillars, scattered nuts for squirrels. Growing up, I knew Fritz to be a man who believed in tenderness, in beauty. Is it any wonder, then, he didn’t push to know the ugliness Dad hid?
Now, he wants me to absolve him—of his ignorance, his refusal to look deeper—but how can I, when I’m guilty of the same things?
A reporter is here. She identifies herself to someone as working for theBlackburn Gazette. She pauses at each exhibit, taking notes, asking islanders for quotes, and I’m relieved that, so far, she’s failed to notice me on the stairs.
“I think that’srealdirt,” I hear a girl say. She’s squinting at Tate’s diorama.
“No way,” someone responds. “Do you think it’s, like, from his actual grave?”
“Ithasto be, right? Tate is so meticulous. And oh my god, is it just me or does Andy seem like he’d be… kind of hot?”
“Tess, he has a head wound! You can’t even see his face!”
