Page 4 of The Family Plot
“We’re burying himhere?” Charlie asks Mom.
“Of course. They’ll transport him when we’re ready.”
“But— Isn’t that a bit… ghoulish?” Charlie asks. And it’s a strange question, given our lives.
Mom’s shoulders roll back as if he’s offended her. “Not at all. That’s where my parents are buried. It’s the family plot. We put in stones for your father and me.”
“Um, guys?” Tate says. She gestures to Fritz, whose eyes are wide, seemingly all pupil.
“I don’t know what…” our groundskeeper starts. “Or-orhow, but somebody’s already…”
“Already what? Spit it out!” Charlie booms, plucking his bourbon off the credenza.
Fritz swallows then, throat bobbing in his neck like all those actors in the crime scene reenactments we saw, their fear looking hard and bulbous inside them. It makes me swallow, too, makes me rub at the hair still rising on the back of my neck. But when Fritz speaks again, his voice doesn’t waver.
“Somebody’s already buried in Mr. Lighthouse’s plot. And I think—” Fritz shifts his gaze to me. “I think it’s Andy.”
two
“When was the lasttime you spoke to your brother?”
A detective is here. He’s sitting across from me in the living room, and he’s got a notepad and a pen and a sympathetic smile I don’t need. Before this, people in white jumpsuits were shuffling back and forth between a van in the driveway and the woods in our backyard. They took samples from the bones, or something like that. Because it’s mostly just bones; it isn’t Andy.
“It’s not my brother in that grave,” I tell the detective.
“I hope you’re right,” he says. “And we’re working right now to identify the remains. Dental records, DNA. But in the meantime, your groundskeeper seemed sure it was Andy. Do you have any idea why that might be?”
“You questioned him, didn’t you?”
“I did. But I’d like to hear what you think.”
I squeeze my mug of hours-old tea. “It’s the ax. You talked to my siblings, so I’m sure they told you: Andy used to hack at the trees in our backyard.”
“He’d chop them down?”
“No, not chop. More like… chip. He’d chip away at them, when he was stressed or angry. It was a coping mechanism.”
He leans forward, repositions his pen. “Coping mechanism for what?”
“For… I don’t know. He’d get mad sometimes. But I guess—well, Fritz said—there was an ax in the… that that’s what…”
“The body was buried with an ax,” he finishes for me, “and the skull has fractures consistent with the blade of that ax, leading us to believe, at this point, that the person whose remains are in that grave was killed by the ax they were buried with. And the ax in question appears to belong to your brother. Apparently he carved his name into the handle?”
Andy had bitten his lip as he engraved it, slicing out theA, theN, struggling with the curve in theD. The skin around his eyes, which crinkled so easily, had crimped with concentration.
“That’s right,” I say. “But if the murder weapon was Andy’s ax, wouldn’t the assumption be that Andy was the killer—not the one killed?”
“You think your brother murdered someone?”
“Of course not. I’m just saying: it’s not my brother in that grave. My family told you he ran away, right? Ten years ago. Anyone could have used the ax after that. But not on him. He was already gone.”
“So you’ve spoken to him in the last decade?”
“Yes, I— Well, no. Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
The curtain behind him sways, a tiny shiver of movement. And even though the living room doors are closed and the windows are locked, I know it’s just a draft. I don’t think for a moment that it might be Andy’s ghost.
