Page 2 of The Family Plot
“Come on,” Charlie says. He sets his glass on the credenza, gestures with his chin toward the staircase. “Mom’s been waiting for you.”
As I follow him up, I glance behind me, still always checking for Andy.
“Don’t be rude, Dahlia, say hi to Grandma and Grandpa,” Charlie says, throwing me another smirk over his shoulder. And that’s fine, ifhe needs to make this all a joke, but the photos of Mom’s parents that line the staircase wall are anything but funny. I know the faces in those frames aren’t ghosts—ghosts don’t have weddings, don’t smoke cigarettes, don’t kiss with smiling lips—but they started this, didn’t they? Our haunted childhoods. Our haunted lives. And maybe this is what Andy meant when he said our family was unnatural. Because Mom crowded our walls with her murdered parents.
It is unusual, our origin story: Mom moved here at twenty-one, to her family’s summer house, immediately after home invaders killed her parents at their Connecticut estate; she married Daniel Lighthouse, an orphan himself, who—for someone who didn’tknow what to do with girls—captivated Mom right away; and Dad indulged her eccentricities, encouraged them even, and did not protest as she turned the mansion into something like a mausoleum.
Before we reach the top of the stairs, I hear footsteps on the landing, and then a gasp. It’s Tate, pushing Charlie to the side, rushing to meet me.
“Dahlia!” she says. “What the hell? You’re all grown-up!”
She laughs like I’m playing a joke on her, like I’ll unzip my skin and emerge as the girl I was the last time she saw me. Then she pulls me into a hug so fierce I almost lose my footing.
“Careful, Tate,” Charlie says. “Let’s not kill our sister, shall we? Mom hardly has any room left in her shrine.” He smiles at our grandparents on the wall, as if they’re in on the joke.
It’s weird, though—these hugs they’ve both given me, as if we Lighthouse children were a happy foursome of siblings, not divided into pairs by the difference in our ages, by the fact that Andy and I could read each other’s minds, and that Tate just worshiped Charlie. She ignores him now, stepping back to examine me again, and she’s as striking as ever, wavy blond hair piled on top of her head, wayward curls framing her face. She’s wearing a turquoise sweater over a pairof magenta jeans, and she’s the first bright thing I’ve seen since entering this house. That’s part of her “brand” now, brightness. When she photographs herself with her dioramas on Instagram, she’s always in pink or aqua or yellow. It’s contradictory to her depictions of the Blackburn Killer’s crime scenes—the dark rocky shores, the obsidian water, those dead women, who, even in their miniature ice-blue dresses, look like shadows flung upon the rocks—but it works somehow.
I wonder if Andy is one of Tate’s fifty-seven thousand followers. I wonder if he ever scrolls through the feed of @die_orama, feeling exposed by our sister’s art.
TheNew York Postprofiled her last year, and Greta taped those pages to the café wall, insisting I was related to “true-crime royalty.” When I read the article, I held my breath, unsure how much Tate had shared with thePostabout our way of life. Greta’s the only one I’ve told about the possibly “unnatural” things from our childhood, details she’s both devoured and savored: the library in the back hall, which we dubbed “the victim room,” its bookshelves crowded with newspapers reporting on murders; Mom’s homeschooling curriculum that required us to write our own “murder reports,” in which we presented our theories of unsolved cases in neat five-paragraph essays. (This detail is Greta’s favorite;You were just like me, she says,a citizen detective!At first, I thought she invented that term, until she told me about the network of people online who lose hours each day investigating cases.)
The article didn’t mention murder reports, but Tate explained that she felt a kinship with the Blackburn Killer’s victims, given that he’d been active on the island while she lived there. More than that, she believed that by re-creating the bodies, right down to the rope marks on the women’s necks, theBbranded on their ankles, she was returning the focus to the seven people whose lives were cut short, instead of the intrigue of “whatever sick fuck” did the cutting.
In her Instagram posts, Tate never writes how we grew up honoring those seven women on the anniversaries of their deaths, accumulating dates as the years went by, as the killer kept strangling, kept branding, kept dressing his victims in identical ice-blue gowns, and dumping their bodies in shallow water. But whenever I see Tate’s dioramas—those intricate, lifelike, bite-size crime scenes—I can’t help but feel like she’s sharing family secrets.
“You’resogrown-up,” Tate tells me again. She turns so she appears in profile and tilts her chin up. “And what about me? How do I look? How’s”—she pauses to give a mock grimace—“thirty-five treating me?”
“You look great,” I say. But she knows that. In the selfies she posts between dioramas, her followers shower her with praise:Girl, you’re gorgeous; I’d kill for your hair. They love her style, her dioramas, her captions about each victim—and they love Blackburn, too. ThePostprofile, which quoted people who’d learned of Blackburn through @die_orama, explained that Tate has essentially transformed it into a tourist destination, that the shores where all those women were found are now a draw, not a deterrent. “It’s exhilarating,” one person said, “standing on land where a real serial killer dumped his bodies.”
It’s been a decade since the Blackburn Killer last struck, but people on the island still dead bolt their doors—a precaution we never needed. It seemed that no one, not even a serial killer, wanted to slip inside our house. “Murder Mansion,” the islanders called it.
“Dahlia. You came.”
It’s Mom at the top of the stairs this time.
“Of course I came,” I say.
She’s dressed the same as always—sweats and slippers—but she’s paler than I’ve ever seen her, skin like a crumpled piece of paper someone’s tried to smooth back out.
Mom wraps me in her arms, leaning down to rest her chin on my shoulder. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she says on a sigh.
Charlie, above us, fidgets with the strap of my bag. “Yes, what a lovely family reunion,” he says. “Right where everyone hoped it would take place: on the stairs.”
Tate smacks his arm. Mom exhales into my neck, breath heavy with loss. As she hugs me tighter, I feel how potently she’s missing Dad. She was like a moth with him, drawn to a light I could never see. When he entered a room, her eyes flew to his face; when he recounted a recent hunting trip, she leaned forward, fluttery with anticipation. He didn’t have to say much—usually didn’t—and maybe it’s because he said so little that she hung on every word, grateful and stunned that he’d spoken to her at all.
“I’m sorry,” I say to her.
“About what?” she asks.
“Global warming?” Charlie can’t help but quip. “The wage gap? All your fault, Dolls.”
Tate smacks him again.
“About Dad,” I say.
Mom pulls back to put her hands on either side of my face. Her eyes are puffy and red, cupped by dark pouches. “Don’t be sorry about Dad, he didn’t suffer at all. It was a quick, natural death. Shocking, and horrible, but the best there is in the end.” She strokes my cheek. “Now, if you’re going to be sorry about anything…”
“Oh, Mom, not again,” Tate says.
