Page 12 of The Family Plot
Through the kitchen window, a flash of yellow catches my eye. It’s police tape, I see when I squint, and it’s fluttering in the wind. There’s a mound of dirt out there—in the woods, in the family plot—hunched like a tumor on top of the earth, and my muscles seize at the reminder: Andy didn’t just die; someone killed him. They picked up his ax, lifted it over their head, and they—
Afterward, they dug a hole for him. A hole.
They dug up the plot that waited for our father, marked by a stone that always chilled me with its prematurity.Daniel Lighthouse, it proclaimed—or warned—right beside another that waited for Mom,Lorraine Lighthouse, set into the ground beside her parents’ graves.
Somebody dropped Andy’s body into a plot that was never meant for him. They covered him in dirt. But how did they know we wouldn’t notice him back there? That we wouldn’t see the freshly turned earth and wonder what had been buried? They’d have to have known our patterns: that I gave the family plot as wide a berth as I could; that Charlie and Tate would be too self-involved to stick around; that Dad took a different path for his hunts; that even Mom only went there on the Honoring day for her parents—which occurred months after Andy’s disappearance.
And who would have wanted to hurt him? Elijah asked about Fritz last night, but it couldn’t have been him. Fritz has always been gentle, a man who gave us wildflower seeds and told us to think of them as food for fairies as we sprinkled them onto the grass. We never believed in magic or fairies, but we played along, as old as eleven or twelve the last time we did it, tossing those seeds around the edges of the yard because we knew that Fritz loved beauty, loved brightness, loved every growing thing.
Still, to bury Andy in our family plot, the killer would have had to know, first, that the plot was there at all.
I try to think of anyone, besides Fritz, I ever even saw in our woods. There was Chief Kraft, of course. He often did a sweep of our entire property before he knocked on our door for one of his “casual drop-ins,” as he called them. He claimed he was keeping us safe, making sure nobody was “up to mischief” on our expansive property, but we knew the truth. In his view, we were the threat.
Then there were the islanders. They usually kept to the side of the road, where they stood and stared, gossiped and judged. But I suppose they could have snuck into our woods easily enough.
And it’s that image—a person skulking between trees—that reminds me of something,someone, I haven’t thought of in years.
There was a girl, back when we were younger, who lived on the other side of the woods with her grandfather. She was around our age, with dark curly hair and the biggest eyes that Andy and I had ever seen. Her name was Ruby Decker. But that’s not what we called her.
We called her the Watcher.
We were ten the first time we noticed her. She was prowling our woods like a stray cat, gaze fastened to the back of our house, as if counting its every stone. At night, her flashlight beam bounced off branches and leaves. For years, we spied on her spying on us, using binoculars to see her more clearly through the trees. We talked about her enormous eyes, joking that they must have been surgically enlarged. The better to see us with, we guessed.
But then, when we were fifteen, Andy came inside one day and told me he’d spoken to her. She’d approached him while he was swinging his ax at a tree, and they’d talked for a while, and she wasactually kind of cool.
Cool?I repeated.Are you friends now or something?I couldn’t imagine that, couldn’t even see the point. What use was some girl through the woods when Andy and I had each other?
He shrugged off my question. He said he’d been all riled up, but Ruby helped to calm him down. She made him laugh, he added, helped him pick a splinter from his palm.
After that day, he lost interest in spying on her.She’s just a girl, he said, pulling my binoculars away.She’s not a spectacle.
But we were one to her. And maybe she saw something the nightAndy died. Maybe I should talk to her grandfather, ask him for Ruby’s number, see if she remembers the boy who hacked at trees.
Then again, there’s another option, one I think of as I hear a crash in the living room, followed by Charlie’s cursing. I could leave this place, before the museum, before Tate even begins her diorama. I could ditch the smell of burnt cookies, take tonight’s ferry, crawl into my bed above the café, and cry for Andy until I’m desiccated inside.
It’s a tempting thought—comforting, even, in a brutal sort of way. But I already left Blackburn Island once, back when I had no idea that my brother’s body was rotting in its soil. I cannot leave it again until I find out who buried him there.
All I know is how to search for Andy. That’s all I’ve done for years. And I could change my search terms, scour the web for the man who killed him instead. But I won’t find him on the internet, will I? Chances are, I’ll find Andy’s murderer here. On Blackburn Island. A place that has always been filled with people who want us gone.
four
Itake the long waythrough the woods, avoiding the family plot, the fluttering yellow tape. I walk around Fritz’s toolshed, set back into these trees, its ivied, dirty brick too unsightly to blemish the lawn. When I pass the wall where Andy’s ax used to lean, I avert my eyes.
Clouds hang like a canopy overhead as leaves crunch beneath my feet. The wind, omnipresent on Blackburn Island, pushes me forward, and with every breath, the salt of the ocean stings my nose. Even from here, we could always smell it, always hear the rushing waves. We can’t see the water from the top of this island, clogged as it is with trees, but the ocean’s scent is everywhere.
Andy hated that. Hated the ocean itself. He didn’t see it as wide open or freeing, but as something that kept us in.I’d rather be landlocked, he said.At least then there’s always somewhere else to go.For a long time, I didn’t bother searching for him in cities on the water—not until inland searches became dead ends, and I had no choice but to find hope in coastal towns. Still, I couldn’t imagine him there. In our sixteen years together on this island, we hardly ever went to the shore. Part of it was Mom’s rules—she kept us from places where bodies washed up—but part of it was Andy, too. I loved him enough to stay away from what he hated.
When I make it to the clearing in the woods, five minutes from our property, I see Lyle Decker’s cottage, the only other house perched this high on Blackburn’s hill. Compared to ours, it’s a dwarf, yellow and quaint. He might not even live here anymore; whoever answers the door might have no idea who Ruby is, let alone how I can reach her.
I hear a whacking sound, off to the left, and I curve around the side of the house to find a woman, back turned—splitting wood with an ax.
My breath catches. She places another log on the stump, raises the ax above her head, and comes down hard again.Thoomphk.
My exhale sounds like a wheeze. When the woman turns, wiping the back of her hand across her forehead, it only takes us a moment to recognize each other.
“Dahlia Lighthouse?”
Strange how easily she identifies me. She may have been the Watcher, but Ruby and I never stood within ten feet of each other, and Andy and I don’t look enough alike—me with my dark hair and narrow nose; him with his sandy locks and wide mouth—to chalk it up to resemblance.
