Page 38 of The Family Plot
It couldn’t have been the night he followed Fritz. Maybe he snuck after him into the shed, glimpsed the top of his head as he descended into the hole, but didn’t see this room himself until our birthday. Andthen, returning aboveground, stunned and undone, the key still in his hand, Ruby intercepted him.
That’s the only excuse I can think of for why he wouldn’t have told me himself, wouldn’t have dragged me down into this room, held a light to this wall so we could absorb the shock of it together, our mouths gaping and dark.
He would have wanted me to know. I’m certain of that. He wouldn’t have wanted to be alone in the discovery of what Fritz kept locked in this room.
But the ax got to him first.
No, not just the ax. The hands gripping it. The arm muscles tight and flexed. The shoulders that must have strained back. The face that—
The face that would have been the last the Blackburn Killer’s victims ever saw.
I suck in a breath. Elijah Kraft said the M.O. wasn’t the same, that there was no evidence to suggest Andy was a victim of our island’s serial killer. But that’s because Andy wasn’t killed for sport, or ritual, or whatever motivates an evil man like that.
Andy was killed to keep a secret.
I stretch my arm toward the photos, touching a slack lip, a pulseless wrist. But at the sound of something above me, my hand snaps back. Heart pounding, I fumble with my phone to turn off my light.
Seconds accumulate as I listen. And then: the ceiling groans; tentative footsteps creep.
“No,” I hear.
And even though it’s just a syllable, more moan than word, it’s a voice I know so well. The same voice that always warned us to keep out of the shed. The voice that said,It’s a dangerous place for kids like you.
ten
“No,” Fritz says again.“No, no.”
I crouch on the concrete, covering my head with my hands.
The quiet that follows is heavy with Fritz’s presence. He isn’t speaking anymore, but I can feel him, looking down through the trapdoor—which I’ve stupidly left open. I’ve never been scared of him before, but as my mind pieces together the wall behind me, this hidden room, Fritz’s insistence that we never enter the shed, terror vibrates through me. I picture him, feet above me, reaching for a tool he can use as a weapon.
But here, the image falters. Fritz with a weapon?
Even now, even with the photos I’ll never stop seeing, I can’t imagine him intending to do harm. Not to these women. Not to Andy. Not when he’s a man who let us hitch a ride on his tarp of leaves, dragging us around the lawn on what he called his “magic carpet.”
But don’t we all have darkness? Pitch-black parts of ourselves that even those who love us can’t see? Andy had the trees, his ax, the stormy thing that bubbled up inside him, desperate for release. And not just that. He followed Fritz to the shed one night. So he must have known, somehow; he must have had a feeling that something wasn’t right, that somethingunnaturalwas afoot. But he kept that hiddenfrom me. And if Andy could carry things inside him I never would have guessed at, then surely Fritz could, too.
My head jerks at another sound from above. The footsteps stutter across the shed, and then—one second of nothing, two seconds, three—it seems they’re gone.
I wait another minute to be sure before I approach the stairs. Legs shaking, I climb my way up.
The shed above is instantly warmer, even in the chill of November. Out of the hole, I turn to leave—and then I go still. Fritz stands, arms crossed, at the threshold, his body like another door, sealing me in this space.
“Why were you down there?” he asks.
His voice is steely. Colder than I’ve ever heard it. His eyes seem distant, as if detached from the moment, and he shuffles toward the center of the shed. I edge backward—“Fritz, wait”—until the wooden counter stops me.
Fritz stops, too. Then he slams the trapdoor shut.
The sound reverberates, throbbing in my ears. He bends down to grab the key, but I’m younger and faster, plucking it from the lock, curling my fingers around it.
He looks at my closed fist, his expression flat and blank as an empty plate. And it’s that—his stoicism amid such horror—that sharpens my fear into rage.
“What was that?” I demand. “In that room. On the wall.”
It’s a stupid question. But there’s a wild, desperate part of me that hopes I’ve got it all wrong, and until I hear him say it, until he defines what was down there, that part of me will wonder if my rage is meant for someone else.
“Trophies,” Fritz says.
