Page 40 of The Family Plot
“The Blackburn Killer,” I blurt. “I know who it is. Please. Get here now.”
Silence oozes for a moment, until the dispatcher asks for my name and address. But I’m staring at Charlie, who’s rigid and astonished, working to put it together. Finally, he looks at the back door. His brow furrows; his lip curls back. “Fritz?” he says.
“Ma’am? Can I have your name please?” the dispatcher asks.
“Sorry,” I say. “Dahlia Lighthouse. I’m at 16—”
Charlie snatches the phone from my hand. Then he ends the call with a stab of his finger.
I gape at him. A flurry of emotions—panic, confusion, disappointment—sweep across his face.
“Dahlia,” he says, and his voice is coarse. “What the hell have you done?”
The police march in and out of the shed, a trail of ants with cameras and clipboards. From here, at the kitchen window, their white glovesmake their hands look porcelain; their bright blue shoe covers could be mistaken for slippers. I watch the scene with drowsy detachment, standing between Mom and Tate as my mind moves at a sluggish pace.
You’re in shock, Elijah told me when I mumbled apologies, slow to comprehend his questions.Take your time.But time has only dragged me further from the shed, making me wonder if I dreamed those photographs, if Fritz’s hand on my ankle was only a hallucination.
Behind us, Charlie keeps grumbling. He grips a bottle of Glenlivet, storming back and forth across the tile. Every so often, he pauses, shoots an angry glance out the window, and scoffs.
“Unbelievable,” he mutters now, the first coherent word he’s said since Elijah and his team arrived.
“I’ve been working relentlessly,” he says, “to show people we’re nothing to be afraid of, and now we’ve got police traipsing around our yard like we’re a gang of criminals. Thanks a lot, Dolls.”
“Knock it off,” Tate says. “It isn’t her fault.”
Charlie scoffs again, rolling his eyes until they land on the bowl Mom deserted when I ran into the kitchen, crying about what I’d found. With his free hand, he stirs furiously at the wet ingredients, slugging his whisky with the other.
His resentment rouses me enough to respond.
“Are you really saying I shouldn’t have called the police? I was supposed to just—let it go, the fact that, under our shed, there’s a… a…”—I fumble for the words—“serial killer’s headquarters?”
“We don’t know that’s what it is,” Charlie says.
“You didn’t see what I saw! The photographs. Fritz’s trophies. That washisword. Whathecalled them.”
Charlie frowns at that. “Trophies,” he repeats, finally sounding disturbed.
Beside me, Mom lets out a tiny whimper as Tate shakes her head.
“I still don’t understand,” Tate says. “Fritzconfessed? He said he was the Blackburn Killer?”
“Not in those exact words. But he asked me to help him get rid of the evidence.”
Tate turns to Charlie. They exchange a dumbfounded look.
“And there was a chest,” I continue. “In that room, a locked chest. Only it had been broken into. By anax.”
I wait for their gasps of comprehension, the catch in their throats as they register that Andy has entered this story. They all stare at me, though—Tate and Mom wide-eyed, Charlie squinting.
“An ax!” I say again. “And the chest was empty, but… but Andy was there. The night of our birthday!”
Tate scrunches her brow. “How do you know it was that night?” she asks, and I realize I’ve left so much unsaid. I fill them in on what Ruby saw: Andy fidgeting with the key, and the week before that, Andy sneaking behind Fritz as he carried a—
I freeze in my retelling, stopped by a realization, a timeline snapping together.
“Oh god,” I moan.
“What?” Tate asks.
