Page 30 of The Family Plot
“Then helpthemfigure it out. They’re looking for Andy’s note, you know.”
Charlie twirls his Sharpie between his fingers. “I’m aware.”
“So? Do you know where it is?”
“I do not.”
“How is that possible? How can no one know?”
Charlie shrugs, hunching over the coffee table again. He squints at a piece of cardboard, holding it down at one edge as he drags the marker across it.
Portrait of Catherine Susan “Kitty” Genovese, he writes,painted by Tate Lighthouse, age fourteen.
And now, beneath those words, he’s drawing a line, about three inches long, and leaving an inch-wide space before adding a dot. It looks like a sideways lowercasei. Dropping my eyes toward the card for Dad’s guns, I see the same mark.
“What is that?” I ask.
“What’s what?”
“That.” I point toward the card beneath his fingers. “That weirdithing you’re doing.”
He stares at the card, brow furrowed, as if seeing the mark for the first time. “It’s not ani.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s… I don’t know, you’ve never seen it before? Tate calls it my trademark flair. It’s just what I do when I write things. Rent checks, grocery lists, whatever.” He shrugs. “Everything’s boring without it.”
At another moment, it might have struck me as sad—how I know Charlie so little that I don’t even recognize something he considers to be his “trademark flair.” But this is a moment too close to that other one:He was my brother, too. And that moment has only underscored how quickly Charlie left, so soon after we discovered that Andy was gone.I’ve got an audition, he said to me,a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: Brutus inJulius Caesar. Andy will turn up, Dolls. Or else he won’t, and that’s the way he wanted it. But I’ve got to go for now.
Only it wasn’tfor now; it was forever.
I remember thinking how appropriate the role was: Brutus—the man who stabbed in the back someone so close to him that his name became synonymous with betrayal. (I only knew the play in the first place because of the gruesomeness of Caesar’s murder; even theliterature Mom taught us always ended with somebody lying in their own blood.) And though I know, now, that there’s nothing Charlie could have done, it still boils me up inside to recall how quickly he left.
He looks up at me, brows raised. “Is there something else I can help you with?”
“Maybe,” I say, tamping down my bitterness. “You know Fritz’s shed?”
“The thing that’s been on our property our entire lives?” Charlie asks, picking up another piece of cardboard and holding his Sharpie above it. “Nope, never seen it. What’s it like?”
“There’s a trapdoor inside it,” I say, ignoring his sarcasm. “Under the carpet. Do you know anything about that?”
He straightens.
“A trapdoor? No. But I’ve never been inside the shed. Don’t you remember it wasn’t allowed?” He rolls his eyes before continuing. “Why do you care about a trapdoor?”
“Ruby Decker said she saw Fritz and Andy go inside the shed in the middle of the night, about a week before Andy was murdered.”
“The middle of the night?” Charlie glares at his cardboard. “That can’t be right; Fritz—”
“Always leaves at six, I know. And when I went to ask him about it, he wasn’t in the shed, and I ended up finding the trapdoor. Which is locked, of course. And Mom isn’t sure what’s down there, but she said it’s like a basement or something.”
Charlie leans against the couch again, shrugging as he crosses his arms. “So? What are you thinking?”
“I don’tknowwhat I’m thinking, that’s the problem. But maybe Fritz is keeping something down there, something… illegal? Maybe he’s growing drugs! And maybe Andy found out by following him one night, and Fritz… Fritz…”
“… killed our brother?” he finishes for me. “To protect hisdrugs? Are we talking about the same Fritz here? The guy who worships at the altar of spiderwebs? The guy who sings to grass to make it grow?” He chuckles. “Actually, maybe Fritzhasbeen on drugs this whole time. It would explain a lot.”
“This isn’t funny.”
