Page 37 of The Family Plot
I don’t know what I’m looking for, I want to hiss.I can’t fathom what Andy might have seen down there, what unsettled him so much, left him fidgeting with the key on his last night alive.
“Go,” I insist as Ruby lingers in the doorway.
With a final huff, she turns away and closes the door behind her, plunging the shed into shadow. I wait for my eyes to adjust, listening to the softening crunch of her footsteps outside. When the only thing I hear is the steady pulse of the ocean, its waves a whisper even in this closed room, I take a deep breath and take hold of the handle.
As the door yawns open, a dark pit gapes at me from beneath the shed floor. I turn on my phone’s flashlight, shine it into the hole, but all I see is a set of stairs that lead to more darkness. I don’t allow myself to wait or second-guess. I don’t indulge the chill that’s inching up my spine. I sink my foot onto the first step and begin to descend.
The air gets colder the deeper I go beneath the shed, and soon I’m standing on a concrete floor. My phone illuminates an overhead bulb in the center of the low ceiling, but when I pull its dangling string, it doesn’t turn on.
There’s nothing in the room—no furniture, no equipment—except for a wooden chest against the farthest wall.
I go to examine it, my light catching on its sealed combination lock before I see that its lid has been split open, the wood caved in. The chill lingering in my spine explodes into a shiver.
Andy.
I recognize the anger, the frustration, the desperation in the broken box, the same I saw whenever I’d rub my fingers along the cuts he inflicted in our trees.
Andy was here. With his ax—which he used to hack into the chest. That means he must have been down here before Ruby took the key from him. And maybe that’s why he was so on edge with her. Maybe he’d found something he wished he hadn’t.
I reach into the jagged hole that Andy created, but my hand gropes at nothing. The wall behind the chest is blank and gray, offering no answers. Slowly arcing my phone across the room, I investigate the rest of the space, inching along the perimeter, sticking my nails into every crack I see. So far, it’s only a concrete room, icy and empty—but that doesn’t make sense. Why would Fritz put nothing down here but a chest, then go to such lengths to keep the room sealed up?
It’s not until I reach the last wall that I know. My throat goes painfully dry.
There are photographs, taped all over the wall, edges overlapping. They’re snapshots of a woman—of several women, I think: here, there’s a lock of red hair, limp across a shoulder; and here, a blond ponytail, curled at the end; here, a pale ear, jutting out from beneath a black bob.
Then I notice an arm in a sheer blue sleeve, an ankle burnt with aB. I notice wide-open, glassy, unseeing eyes.
My lungs burn and my joints lock.
I’ve seen that same shade of blue, that same shape of aB—in studies, in dioramas, I’ve seen it a hundred times. But instead of Tate’s renderings, which could only sketch them in pencil onto pages, or craft them out of porcelain and cloth, these photos are of real bodies.
Real women.
All of them dead.
I clamp a hand over my mouth. As I breathe through my fingers, cold air rushing into my lungs, my mind slows. Then it catalogs each photo, separating them from the horror of the whole.
There’s the nape of a neck, pink from the grip of a rope. A pair of lips, parted and purple.
There’s a hand, its fingers curling inward. A foot, its toenails emerald green.
The foot belongs to Jessie Stanton then. Part of me is lucid enough to link that detail to Tate’s diorama. What Tate didn’t capture, though, was the way the nail polish chipped in the right-hand corner of Jessie’s big toe.
There’s a leg, stretching from the hem of the ice-blue skirt that, on this woman, cuts off at the calf. This would be Erica Shipp. The third victim. The papers said she was too tall for the dress.
There’s a round breast, nipple hard and dark beneath the sheer fabric.
There’s a birthmark on a wrist—the way they identified Alexis Shea, the sixth woman. Her husband didn’t need them to lower the sheet from her face in the morgue; he saw her wrist poking out and knew.
There’s a tattoo on a collarbone:the world is wide and I am small—Stephanie Kepler, the second victim.
There’s red hair on a shoulder: Claudia Adams, the fourth.
There’s an ear with a diamond stud. A crooked nose, the crest of a cheekbone, a freckle that’s—
When did Andy see this?
My mind veers without warning, steering away from the neatness of facts, and now I’m in it again, the constricting terror, the vise around my ribs. The photos grow blurry the longer I look, but really,when did he see this?
