Page 34 of The Family Plot
It’s a drawing of Andy. His eyes closed. Blood streaming from his head.
Hand covering my mouth, I look at another. Andy, again, clearly dead, face slack, cheek pressed to the ground.
The edge of each drawing touches another, forming a horrifying mosaic, a grotesque collage. I follow the trail of sketches—dozens of them; dozens!—looking ahead as much as I can, avoiding these apparitions of Andy, and when they finally stop, there’s a few yards of space before I reach a new door. I open it, struggling for air, and find myself in another dark room. My flashlight bounces around, and whenit highlights something I recognize—magenta jeans, crumpled on the floor—I rest against the doorframe so my mind can catch up.
I’m in Tate’s closet, which apparently connects with Mom and Dad’s. And those drawings, I understand now, are Tate’s studies for the Andy diorama, completed in the same style as the ones in her #BehindTheCrimeScenes posts: pencil on paper, innumerable attempts at getting the victims’ poses exactly right. I can picture the ones she did for the Blackburn Killer’s victims as clearly as if I’ve pulled them up on my phone. For Amy Ragan, the fifth murdered woman, Tate drew her legs alone at least a hundred times, posting her sketches over a number of days, garnering more comments that way, more Likes.
The man who stumbled across Amy during his morning walk told the papers that her leg had been bent at such a strange angle that at first he thought it was broken, thatthatwas why she was lying there motionless—a broken leg, a horrible but commonplace injury. But as soon as he started running toward her, he registered the ice-blue gown, and his feet froze on the sand. Turns out, Amy’s leg had been mangled by the force of the waves tossing her back onto shore. Tate wrote in the caption of one round of studies that she needed to get the leg just right, because to do so would capture the true violence of the murder: not just the strangulation that killed her, not just theBmutilating her ankle, but the reminder that she had been thrown into the ocean.Like a cigarette butt, she wrote.Like a rock skipped across water, purely for entertainment.
Now, my heart throbs: just like she did for the dioramas of the Blackburn Killer’s victims, Tate has sketched Andy over and over, practicing for the position of his body, the anatomy of his wounds, so she can glue and paint him permanently into place. Dead. Always dead.
I stand up, step back into the passageway, and close the doorquietly behind me. I can’t risk her hearing me, investigating the sound. I can’t risk a conversation with her right now when all I have in me is the capacity to claw at her, to shout.
Stumbling back along this gruesome hall, led by the light on my phone, I almost make it out. But I’m stopped by the drawings again, even as I try so desperately not to see them. My gaze shifts there anyway, without warning, and now I’m inches from a sketch I didn’t linger on my first time through.
In this one, Andy’s eyes are open, and they’re sohim, sohis, the crinkling of them so agonizingly exact. They stare out at me like they did a million times before—and I can see him, free of this paper, real and alive, squinting at nothing but air, just before he stomps outside to grip the handle of his ax.
Or another time, the blazing annoyance in those eyes, the night of our sixteenth birthday, Tate and Charlie whispering at each other behind a closed door while Andy itched to talk to them, ask them about life away from this house. He’d had his questions lined up for weeks, and he was so furious they’d locked us out, I thought he might yell those questions through the wall, louder and louder until they thrust open the door, let him inside just to shut him up.We don’t need them, I reminded him—and the implication was:because we have each other. But the next morning, I didn’t have him anymore. So I had nobody left at all.
Tate has rendered him perfectly—except for the wound at his temple, which leaks graphite blood all over the page. The ax itself is missing, as if the killer, off paper, has lifted it above his head to take another swing. And no matter how many times I blink, Andy’s eyes never close; they still stare out at me.
Or out at the person with the ax.
I’m going to scream. I feel it bubbling up like bile in my throat,ready to spew out. But when I open my mouth, I hear a different sound, the chime of my phone announcing a text.
You want that muffin yet?
Greta. I call her without thinking, my legs shaking as I step out of the passageway and back into Mom’s closet.
“I guess you do!” she says in greeting, and I slump against the wall, sink to the floor, Dad’s hunting jackets brushing my shoulders.
“My sister is sick!” I tell her. “She’s doing a diorama of Andy, and she’s done all these studies of his death, and she’s taped them up in this weird passageway behind her closet. And I mean”—I glance at the shadowy hole leading back to that hall—“why would she put them in there, where she can’t even see them, if the point is to use them as references for the diorama?”
As Greta hesitates, I barrel forward to answer my own question. “I guess she wanted to hide them—from me, probably, because she knew I’d react this way if I saw them. But you know what? Putting them in there like that—that just means sheknowswhat she’s doing is messed up. And yet, she’s still over there, spreading dirt on Styrofoam, making anax, building hisbody. It’s disgusting! All of it! And then there’s Charlie. And my mom! They’ve all gone completely crazy!”
I huff into the phone, catching my breath.
“What’s happening with Charlie and your mom?” Greta asks.
So I tell her about the museum, and the cookies, and our doorless rooms. Then I tell her the rest of it, too. About Ruby Decker, and what she saw the week before Andy died. About the door in the shed, and Mom’s explanation that doesn’t sit right. I tell her about the missing note, about Elijah Kraft, about the people on this island who still won’t leave us alone. I tell her everything you’re supposed to tell your closest friend, and when I’m done, I feel like my skin’s scraped off, like someone’s wedged apart my ribs, like my heart is beating in open air.
I wait for her to respond.
“I’m so sorry,” she says finally. “And yeah, your family’s being really weird.”
I close my eyes, comforted by the acknowledgment.
“That trapdoor, though,” she continues. “That’s intriguing. The carpet, the lock. Why go to such lengths to hide some extra equipment?”
“I don’t think itisextra equipment.”
“No, I don’t either,” Greta agrees. “But if Andy saw it, like you think he did, why wouldn’t he have told you about it? Especially if it shook him up so much.”
I’ve been trying not to think about that, how there might be something else he kept from me—first Ruby, now this—when, all along, I thought we shared everything.
“I don’t know,” I say. “It doesn’t make sense. But I just have this feeling that the shed is connected somehow. To what happened to Andy.”
“Then you have to break in.”
