Page 7 of The Family Plot
I shrug. I’ve never known what was special to them about our sixteenth birthday. It wasn’t the rite of passage to us that it was to others. We weren’t gifted cars, like kids in movies.
“Was there something specific”—he tilts forward—“that all of you were staying away from?” He lowers his voice. “Did your parents ever hurt you?”
“What? No!”
“Then why didn’t any of you come back?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know about Charlie and Tate, other than Tate doesn’t do anything without Charlie and Charlie wanted to stay in New York. But me, I just—my brother ran away—and I waited for him until I was nineteen, until I finally took him for his word, what he said in the note about never coming back. And I wasn’t as close with the rest of my family as I was with him.”
That’s an understatement. The truth is, it felt pointless to get close to them. Mom was always dying in front of us, each reenactment more convincing than the last, so I began to think of her as only half there. Dad was there even less, lacing his boots to head out hunting, barely registering my presence, even as we stood in the same circle for Honorings. Charlie and Tate were a unit, indifferent and impenetrable to Andy and me—which was fine, because Andy and I were a unit, too, and as long as I had him, I knew I was valued, complete.
Andy gave me the best of everything. If we split a sandwich, he handed me the bigger half. If he grabbed two glasses from the cabinet, he offered me the one without water spots. If we sat on the porchsteps, he gestured for me to take the seat in the sun. I’d say to him,You deserve the best thing, too, you know, and he’d reply,No I don’t. Not like you.
“So if he wasn’t here,” I say to Elijah around the lump in my throat, “if he wasn’t going tobehere—then I didn’t see the need to be here either.”
Elijah scribbles, then turns the page, scribbles again. “And what about your groundskeeper, John Fritz,” he says, eyes on the words he writes even as he speaks. “Did he ever hurt you?”
“Fritz?” I spit out. “Why would Fritz ever hurt me? I’ve known him my whole life.”
He snaps his head up. “People we’ve known our whole lives can still hurt us. Some might argue they can hurt us more.”
“More than what?”
He glances at the page. “A stranger.”
He pulls in his lower lip, chewing it for a moment. Through the doors, I hear someone’s footsteps. They get close, get silent, and then they move away.
Elijah clears his throat. “It appears a crime’s been committed. You understand that, right?”
My mind leaps to Andy’s namesake, all those Borden crime scene photos. The couch with a back like three cresting waves. Andrew’s head against the pillow as if he’d merely been napping.
But the blood. The split skull. The implication of an ax.
It isn’t Andy, lying out there. He’s in Jacksonville or Lansing, or some city I haven’t covered yet in my latest round of searches, but he isn’t—he has not been—here.
“I understand,” I say. “But I don’t know who was killed out there. And I don’t know who killed them either. And you can’t possibly think… Fritz?”
Fritz who rested his arm on the handle of a rake, watching us laugh in our leaf piles. Fritz who swept more leaves together, telling us,Go ahead,dive in. Fritz with a pronounced limp, from an injury he doesn’t talk about. Fritz who picks up every caterpillar he finds, strokes its back, wishes itgood luck in the cocoon.
“We’re going to be investigating all possibilities,” Elijah says.
“Okay. So does that include the Blackburn Killer? Because Fritz isn’t a murderer. But we’ve got one, don’t we? On this island? One your dad failed to find.”
Elijah squints at me. We both know it isn’t fair to put that on Chief Kraft. The Blackburn Killer was masterfully elusive, his kills sporadic enough to seem almost random. Two years went by between the first two murders, four between the final two, and the month always varied; the first woman was killed in September, and the last, nineteen years later, in July.
The police never found his DNA, either. When he dragged the bodies into shallow water, he made sure of that. By the time they washed back onto shore—a different stretch of shore each time—the salty ocean had licked them clean. And another thing: the nails of the women were always immaculate, not a single foreign cell stuck beneath them.
In one of Greta’s breathless monologues about the Blackburn Killer, she told me how the police focused on the blue dresses for a while, tried to find who designed them, where they’d been purchased, but that was a dead end, too, as if the gowns, gauzy and cold, had been stitched from the ocean itself. Even the branding iron, with which the Blackburn Killer marked the women’s ankles, led police nowhere.Experts said the curve of the B was “crude and rudimentary,”Greta explained,so they think it was made by the killer himself.
“Surely you know,” Elijah says, “that the death in question is nothing like the deaths of those women. They were discovered on the shore, for one thing. This person was buried.” He pauses. “On your property.”
I tighten my grip on the mug.
“But as I said,” he continues, “we’ll be investigating all possibilities.”
On the table beside him, his phone rings. He frowns at its screen.
“Excuse me, I need to take this.”
