Page 6 of The Family Plot
My siblings and I never took the Honorings as seriously as our parents did. Charlie made faces as we lit the candles, shimmied his shoulders as we chanted the words, and the rest of us smothered our smiles so Mom wouldn’t see. It was never the murders we were mocking, or the victims themselves—we respected every story we learned. It was just the “silly, incessant ritual” of it all, as Charlie once said, the idea that candles and a sentence could do anything for the dead.
“You don’t know,” Elijah repeats.
“God wasn’t part of our homeschool curriculum.”
Now he looks at me. His eyes, shadowed by dark brows, narrow. “I’ve heard it referred to as ‘the murder curriculum.’ Is it true that’s all you learned about? Murder?”
“We learned about mur-ders,” I correct him.
“And that was your whole education? Just… murder?”
“Mur-ders,” I say again, because there’s a world of difference. “We learned plenty of other things, too. I know math up to trigonometry. I know supernovas and black holes. I know the Gettysburg Address. I just also know Rachel Nickell.”
Forty-nine stab wounds; killed in broad daylight; her two-year-old son covered in her blood.
“And she is?” Elijah prompts.
I remember Mom’s reenactment. This was something she did to illustrate the brutality of a crime—and to protect us against it. She believed that if we witnessed the horrors that others had experienced, we’d recognize the same danger if it ever came our way. For Rachel Nickell’s reenactment, she wore an outfit of all white, and jabbed herself with a red marker, scribbling on her shirt to indicate blood. Forty-nine times she struck herself. Forty-nine times I flinched.
“She was murdered,” I say.
He bites the inside of his cheek, but it feels like he’s biting his tongue. “I see.” He looks at his notebook again. “So you say Andy left ten years ago, when the two of you were sixteen.”
“The night of our sixteenth birthday. Yes.”
“And what was he like that day? The last time you saw him.”
“He was fine,” I say. “Our siblings had come back for the first time since they’d left home. It’d been eight years since we’d seen Charlie, seven since Tate. So he was excited.”
Excitedis not the right word, but I’m certain that the real ones—moody, jittery—would only keep the detective jotting in his notebook. I remember it well, though: the way Andy’s leg shook beneath the table like a jackhammer. I remember, later, Charlie staring at us from across the candles as we said the prayers for our namesakes. He seemed astonished by us, almost unsettled, like he’d only now remembered we existed. I glanced at Andy to see if he’d noticed our brother’s stare, but he was scowling at his candle as if he could blow out its flame with only his gaze.
He’d been stormy for days, spending more time with the trees, his ax. Whenever I asked him what was wrong, he snapped away from me like a startled animal.Nothing, I’m just tired, I haven’t been sleeping well—and he did have bags beneath his eyes, dark as bruises. On ourbirthday, he went to bed soon after the Honoring, grumbling about Tate and Charlie, how they scurried away together into one of their rooms before the smoke from the candles had even cleared. He’d been planning to ask them about “out,” he said. That’s what he called it. Out.
“Excited,” Elijah echoes. “So excited he ran away that night? So excited he said,The only way out is to never come back?”
I fidget with my mug. “We were very sheltered growing up. We really only left the island a handful of times. And I think Andy saw Charlie and Tate that night, back from a big city, and got inspired to leave early. Be out in the world like them.”
That’s what I’ve been telling myself, for all these years. But inspired or not, Andy broke something that night when he left. I always pictured our connection like a silver cord between us, a taut wire, but when he wrote that note, snuck into the darkness to wait for the ferry, he might as well have cut it in two. Hacked it apart with his ax.
“Inspired to leave early,” Elijah mumbles, reading back his notes. “Earlier than what?”
“Eighteen. When we were supposed to leave.”
His expression darkens. “You were forced to leave at eighteen?”
“No, not forced, just— Our siblings did it first, when they each gained control of their trust funds. And Andy and I planned to do the same.”
The trust fund is how I manage the way I do—jobless, hunched over my laptop, scouring photos of any crowd on social media, looking for crinkly eyes, for the cowlick on the back of Andy’s head.
Elijah nods, writing down my answer.
“And once someone in your family left home,” he says, “they just… never returned? Until now, anyway?” He pauses. “I was sorry to hear about your father.”
But he doesn’t sound sorry. He sounds suspicious. His gaze creepsaround my head to the wall behind me, where Honoring candles are stacked like skinny firewood on the shelves.
“Like I said,” I tell him, “Charlie and Tate came back one time.”
“That’s right. On the night before you noticed Andy was gone. Ten years ago. Why did they come back on that night in particular?”
