Page 61 of The Family Plot
“What? I didn’t—”
“You’re suspicious of Mom’s sketches, suspicious of my dioramas—which, ten minutes ago, you equated tophotographing dead bodies!”
There’s pain in her emphasis, her lips twisted around the words. I open my mouth to protest, to remind her, again, that I didn’t mean what I said—but Elijah’s theories are whirling through my mind, his questions spinning like yarn into a gruesome knot. At Tate’s mention of her dioramas, I feel a strand get snagged.
“Why are your dioramas so accurate?” I ask.
She flinches away. “Excuse me?”
“Elijah Kraft said the crime scenes you depicted get a lot of things right. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but—how did you know, exactly, how to position everything?”
Tate looks at Charlie, mouth agape. He returns her gaze with a bewildered shake of his head. When she turns to me again, her expression is furious and wild, her face almost monstrous in the shadows. “What the fuck are you implying?”
“I don’t know!” I admit. “I’m not implying anything, I just—” I lean back against the wall, stare at the sketches opposite me: Andy’s head bashed in, his eyes forever closed; Andy slumped on the ground, his eyes open but vacant. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“We’re your family,” Charlie says coolly. “You can’t be saying things like that.”
Now I whirl toward him. “You’rethe one who asked Mom what other secrets she’s been keeping!”
“I was in shock. I’m shocked, okay? About her lie. But the way you’re talking to us… It’s like you don’t even know us at all.”
“Idon’treally know you at all! I’ve barely spoken to you in the last ten years.”
“And that’s our fault?” Tate fumes. “How many times have I contacted you? How many emails have you returned? How often did you call to check on Mom?”
“That’s not— How is that relevant?”
“It’s relevant because you’re making such”—her voice cracks—“horrible accusations.” Tears pool in her eyes, but I see her trying to maintain her anger. “And if you’d reached out to us even half the times I reached out to you over the last decade, you wouldn’t be treating us all like suspects right now.”
“Why would I reach out to you? You and Charlie never made timefor me and Andy when we were kids. You were always wrapped up in your own cocoon.”
“We werekids!” Tate says. She swipes at her cheeks. “And you were nine years younger than me. And even if we did ‘make time’ for you, what would have happened? You think we were in a cocoon? Well, you were like ivy, Dahlia, clinging to Andy all the time.”
“I didn’t cling to him, we— If anything, we clung to each other.”
“I know that’s what you tell yourself, but how well did you even know him?”
Charlie reaches for her elbow. “Okay, Tate…”
“No,” she says, wrenching out of his grasp. “You act like the two of you were so connected—”
“We were!”
“—like you could read his mind, feel everything that happened to him.”
“I could, I… I thought I could.”
“But you didn’t even know he was dead!”
For a few seconds, silence expands around us like foam. Then a sound rips out of me—a ragged, helpless sob—as I drop to my knees on the floor.
“I know!” I cry. “I know, okay? I failed him. I know!”
Mom crouches beside me. “Oh, Dahlia, you didn’t fail him.” She places a hand on my shoulder, but I shrink from her touch.
“You failed him, too!” I yell, and she leaps back. “He hated how you raised us. He said it was unnatural, and he always, always wanted to leave! All because you couldn’t face your parents’ death. All because you found comfort inmurder.”
“All right, Dolls,” Charlie says.
