Page 25 of The Family Plot
“My place is tiny,” I tell her, scooting back an inch.
“That’s okay. I don’t take up much space.”
“No, it’s… barely bigger than this room.”
“Well, we could always get a new place. Something we pick out together. We could go to…” She trails off, examining my face. “Oh,” she says. “I’m freaking you out.” She slumps onto the bed, plunks her elbows on her knees, her forehead on the heels of her hands. “Andy always told me I come on a little strong. And I don’t mean to, I never…” She lifts her head to look at me. “I’m just nervous I won’t have anyone, once Grandpa goes. It would be nice to have a friend to live with. After.”
Tears shine in the corners of her eyes, threatening to spill.
“You don’t even know me,” I say.
“But I knew your brother.”
As if knowing Andy is the same as knowing me. Which, maybe it is, but still: how bold of her to assume she knew him that well in the first place. So they hung out sometimes. So they talked and wrote down silly phrases. What bean angels did the two of them ever make? Where in her room did he sign his name?
Shaking my head, I stand from the bed and take a step back, putting some distance between us. “What did you remember, Ruby?”
She looks at her hands, knotted together in her lap, and nods as she sighs. It’s as if she was expecting my impatience, but is still disappointed to hear it.
“It was a week before Andy… died,” she begins. “We were supposed to meet up the next night; that’s what we’d planned, anyway—but I was too excited to see him.” She shrugs. “So I decided to watch your house.”
She stands up and leans against the wall and peers through the sheer curtain hanging over the window.
“Andy’s room didn’t have any curtains like this,” she says, skimming her fingers along the fabric. “And since it faced the backyard, I could see in a bit, whenever the light was on.”
I swallow as she caresses the curtain. It isn’t lost on me that she asked which room was Andy’s, but she seems to have already known.
“But his window was dark that night,” she says, shooting a glance my way. “And it seemed strange to me. I’d started watching around eleven thirty, and I stayed there, hoping I’d catch a glimpse of him when he got ready for bed. But the room just kept being dark.”
She pulls one end of the curtain aside, staring out the glass. “I waited for so long. And it was hours—the middle of the night, really—before I saw anything at all.”
My heart thrusts against my ribs. “What did you see?”
“Your groundskeeper,” she says.
“Fritz? In the middle of the night? That can’t be right.”
My entire childhood, Fritz always left at six p.m. on the dot. He’d take the last ferry back to the mainland, head off to a home I still find difficult to picture. I glimpsed him often, over the last seven years, as I watched the ferry from my window, and it took seeing him in thatcontext, off Blackburn Island, to realize I knew nothing of his life beyond our house.
“He was heading toward the shed,” Ruby says, ignoring my disbelief, “and he was carrying something—something large and… and heavy, it seemed. Something in a big, black bag. And then I—”
“What makes you think it was Fritz? It would’ve been dark, right? Difficult to see clearly?”
She gives a dismissive wave, annoyed to be interrupted. “His height,” she says. “His build. The way he was kind of”—she lurches across the floor a few feet, mimicking Fritz’s walk—“staggering. His limp is easy to recognize. Even at night.”
“Okay, but—”
“And then,” she says sharply, eyes latched to mine as she walks backward, returning to the window, “I saw Andy.” She leans against the wall. “He was creeping behind your groundskeeper—behind Fritz—like he was secretly following him. He was walking so slowly, so carefully, his feet didn’t make a sound.”
She angles her body to face the window again. “Fritz went into his shed. And a minute or so later—so quiet, so careful—Andy did, too.”
Andy in Fritz’s shed? I can’t imagine that. The shed has always been off-limits.There’s too much that’s too sharp in there, Fritz told us.It’s a dangerous place for kids like you—even though he was fine with Andy leaning his own too-sharp ax against the exterior. I was always so curious about that shed, curious about the part of Fritz that was closed off to us when the rest of him was wide open—but Andy never cared. When I asked what he thought was inside it, he said,Something unnatural, I’m sure.
“Could you see what they were doing in there—through the windows or anything?”
“Oh no,” Ruby says, shaking her head. “I didn’t get close enough for that. Grandpa always told me to stay away from the shed.”
“From… fromourshed?” I frown at the echo of Fritz’s warnings.
