Page 96 of The Family Plot
“No, you don’t understand,” I reply. “I wasn’t pushing you away because you were out of line. I was pushing you away because I was scared for you to learn the truth.”
I’m standing in the backyard, facing the family plot, the wind growing louder as I wait for Greta to respond.
“What truth?” she says.
She deserves to hear it from me, not from some headline on the news. Still, the fear kicks in—that she’ll see my family as nothing more than facts for all her folders.
I take a breath, let the salty air sting my lungs, and I tell her anyway.
“I found out a couple days ago,” I say, “that my dad really was the Blackburn Killer.”
I wince within her silence, waiting for the barrage of questions, the giddy spring to her voice. But in a moment, she groans, like the revelation pains her.
“Shit,” she says. “I’m so sorry. You must be going through hell. What can I do for you?”
Tears rush to my eyes, hot with gratitude and relief. I look at the sky, almost silver today, its clouds shiny with a light that tries to break through. Then I look into the woods, at the dirt where Charlie buried Andy, where he wanted to bury a part of himself, and I cry even harder.
“Hey,” Greta says softly. “Talk to me.”
I think I will. When I see her again, I think I might tell her everything—what my father did to my brothers, what they did to each other, what I’ve chosen to do for them—and I want to believe that she’ll keep our secret. That even as I walled myself off from anyone but Andy, even as I searched for him each day until I could hardly see, I still found something true, something real, something I didn’t know the value of until now.
“Thank you,” I tell her.
“For what?”
“Just for—” A sob cuts through my sentence, but I push myself to finish it. “For being a friend.”
Later, when I’m off the phone with Greta, I find my family transforming the house. Tate boxes the museum’s exhibits, Charlie returns the doors to their rightful hinges, and Mom dismantles the victim room.
I watch her for a moment, through the open doorway. She sits with a shredder on the floor between her legs, feeding it newspapers two pages at a time. For so long, those newspapers were my textbooks. Their gruesome stories taught me the lessons I clung to for years—that no one can be trusted; that there’s safety in seclusion; that if you keep away from others, you keep yourself from harm. And yet I’ve learned in recent days that all those lessons were wrong.
Around the room, trash bags are swollen with paper strips, andstill, the shelves are only half empty. It’s a fool’s errand; destroying the stories won’t bring back the dead. But already, the room looks bigger, brighter, the paperless shelves revealing themselves to be painted a gleaming white.
Sensing me, Mom lifts her head. She gives me half a smile, eyes watery but resolute, before returning to her chosen task.
My task is to take the stuff from the museum down to the driveway. Not all of it—the murder reports get thrown away—but we’ve decided to offer the rest of it to the islanders.
“Should we… donate it?” Tate asked at first.
“Put it all outside,” Charlie said. “It’ll be gone by the end of the day.”
Turning around after plopping the last box on the curb, I’m stopped by a glimpse of a girl in the trees. Ruby’s been Watching again, and as she slips out of the woods to walk toward me, her big eyes look a little smaller, the edges pinched with sadness.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” she asks.
“Soon,” I tell her.
She nods, gaze drifting away.
“I was surprised,” I say, “not to see you yesterday. I put your embroidery on display, like you asked.”
She shrugs one shoulder. “I didn’t think I was welcome. You kept sending people to question us.”
“Right,” I say, and I don’t correct her about Greta. “Sorry about that.”
“Besides,” she adds, “I wouldn’t feel Andy in there.” She nods toward the house. “I feel him out back, in the woods, where we spent our time together.”
She bites her lip, trying to keep it from trembling. She catches me watching and attempts a weary smile.
