Page 74 of The Family Plot
“Nothing happened,” he says. “We waited and waited, and when I asked him what was going on, he told me to keep my mouth shut.Finally, we went back home, he sent me back to bed, and in the morning, I thought I’d… I thought I’d dreamed it. Until it happened again, a few nights later. The same thing: pulling me out of bed, leading me to that road. Only this time, we heard footsteps in the distance, someone’s shoes on the gravel, coming up from the shore.
“Dad looked down the road and he whispered to me. Said there was a woman coming, and I had to make myself cry. I had to pretend to be lost and scared and alone so she’d stop to help me. I didn’t know what he… But then he pinched me, hard, and I did start crying. He shoved me out into the lane and crouched back, into the bushes. And when the woman came, she… she looked so concerned. She asked where I lived, who my parents were, and I was so scared. I didn’t understand what was happening, but something in me knew to be terrified.”
He pauses, kneading his knuckles against his closed eyes. “The woman got down next to me, and she kind of… gathered me in her arms? And then, she was jerked away. Making these horrible noises. I didn’t— I almost couldn’t see… But it was Dad. He had a rope around her neck. He was strangling her. He was…”
Charlie trails off. The room feels close to airless.
“When she went limp, he didn’t hesitate. He grabbed a tarp from his bag, the same kind he used for deer, and he wrapped her up, and headed back home with her in his arms. And then… the shed… He took her to the shed. He went down into that room. With the tarp. The woman in the tarp. The woman who had crouched down to see if she could help me.” A choking sound grates in Charlie’s throat. “I didn’t understand what was happening.”
On either side of me, Mom and Tate are crying, but my tears won’t come. My eyes feel hot, itchy, and I realize now I haven’t been blinking.
“He made me keep watch that night,” Charlie says, “up in the shed.But through the hole, I could… I could see her head on the floor, the skin all purple around her eyes, like someone had punched her. I saw him wrap a blue scarf around her neck.”
A blue scarf. Melinda Wharton. The only woman who wasn’t discovered in the dress.
“No,” Mom moans. Over and over she says it, a chorus of cries beneath Charlie’s story.
“Then he wrapped her in the tarp again and carried her up from that room. And he made me follow him, again. But this time, we went down to the ocean. And we walked along the shore for a long time, even as he stumbled beneath the weight of her. Then he walked into the water, pushed her out. The whole time, I didn’t say anything. But he said if anyone saw us on our way back, we’d tell them we found a woman in the ocean and were on our way to get help. He muttered something, more to himself, like, ‘A man can’t be a murderer if he’s out with his son.’
“He told me it wasoursecret, one that no one else would understand. He said, ‘If you tell anyone what we did tonight, you’ll be in big trouble. They’ll take you away and throw you in jail, and I won’t be able to stop them.’?”
Mom sobs, and I feel her hand close over mine on the counter. When Charlie looks at her, his face is filled with disgust—at himself, or at Dad, I don’t know.
“I was so scared,” Charlie says, gaze fixed on Mom, “but I still didn’t really get it. Even seeing the body, even with Dad using that word,murderer, even when the news about Melinda Wharton started spreading around the island—I couldn’t make sense of what had happened that night. I just knew I felt terrible, all the time. Like I was cut up inside. Every day another cut.”
He hangs his head. “It was two years before it happened again. I don’t really remember the second woman the way I remember thefirst. It’s all so… it’s like seeing it through gauze. Though I did register the differences, from Melinda. Now, there was a dress. And a burn on her ankle.”
He nods toward my hand, which holds the brand. Seeing it still there, I drop it immediately, as if it singed my own skin. The key falls with it, clattering to the floor. Charlie watches it, dark metal on white tile.
“Dad made me keep the key,” he continues, “in a space he’d carved out in my closet. He said we’d store it there, in case Edmond Kraft ever searched his things. He said ‘we’ like I agreed to it. Like I wanted to be part of it. When, really, at some point, I sort of just… woke up to it. Woke up into this reality where I understood, definitively, what Dad had done. And by then, it was too late. I couldn’t tell anyone. How could I tell? In implicating Dad, I’d be implicating myself.”
Mom’s hand slips off mine. She might be crying still—Tate, too—but all I can hear is Charlie’s voice, a fractured melody above my percussing heart.
“A couple times, the morning after, I went down to where we’d left the body. I don’t know why I wanted to see it. Maybe to know for sure what I’d done. To punish myself. One of the times, the police were already there, but I stood in the trees, watching them work. They took photos of her. Like Dad had done only hours before. And I thought about saying something. But then I heard his voice: ‘They’ll take you away and throw you in jail.’ Because he planned it that way. He made me his partner in crime.”
Charlie puts his fist to his mouth. Then his cheeks puff out with his breath, as if he’s trying not to be sick. Soon, his hand falls to his side like a dead thing lying on the tile.
My mouth is slack. It’s too much to process at once. Beside me, Mom sobs out lines of denial, of horror—“No, no, oh Daniel, no”—and as my vision goes foggy, my body grows numb.
Dad.
The man who carried dead deer to our door.
The man who returned from hunting with beads of blood on his hands, who wiped them away like specks of mud.
It was always so casual, the relationship he had with death.
Locking my knees to keep from falling, my mind works to transform Dad from hunter to killer. Instead of him stalking through the woods beneath a blue sky, I see him crouching behind a bush, clothes as dark as the night itself. Instead of him aiming a rifle at the heart of a deer, I see him holding a rope and pulling it taut. Instead of him squeezing a trigger, he’s squeezing a neck.
I shake my head, jolting the images to a stop. It shouldn’t be so easy, blurring the lines between hunter and murderer.
My mind sputters back over Charlie’s story. It’s unbearable to take it all in, to recalibrate my distant father as an actual monster, one this island has feared for decades. Despair sinks into my stomach, cold and heavy, as I think of all the women, the people, he—
My heart plummets. My legs threaten to give out. Because if I keep amending my previous theories—Dad in the shed, instead of Fritz or Lyle or even Edmond; Dad with such horrible secrets to protect—I will never escape the place where Charlie’s story inevitably leads.
“But Ruby said it was Fritz,” I cry out, desperate for a loophole. “She said she saw Fritz go into the shed in the middle of the night, carrying a big black bag.”
“She was wrong,” Charlie says dimly. “It was Dad. Fritz was never there.”
