Page 10 of The Family Plot
“So you’re on board,” I say, “with this… Lighthouse Museum thing?”
“LighthouseMemorialMuseum,” Charlie pipes in. “But we can shorten it to LMM, if that’s easier for everyone.”
“I’m on board in the sense that Charlie will do what Charlie wantsto do,” Tate says. “It’s notmypreferred way to memorialize our family, but I respect the intention behind it.”
“But you’re actively helping with it?” I say, nodding at the paintbrush in her hand.
“Oh!” She looks at the brush like she forgot she was holding it. “No. This is for my own project. A new diorama.”
My mouth drops open. “You’re making onenow?”
“I have to. It’s all— It’s too much otherwise. I need to process. And this is how I do that. If I can remake Andy’s body, I can—”
“Wait,” I stop her. “You’re doing a diorama ofAndy?”
“Of course,” she says, standing straighter. “He was murdered, Dahlia. He was… All this time, he’s been there.” She points toward the back of the house. “I need to make sense of that. Don’t you?”
“Not to fifty-seven thousand strangers I don’t!” I whip toward Charlie. “Not to an island full of people who’ve always thought we were monsters.”
“That’s not what my Instagram is about,” Tate says, her voice overlapping Charlie’s.
“That’s the whole point!” he bellows, stabbing a triumphant finger into the air. “They won’t think of us as monsters after this.”
I gape at them both, each so adamant that theirs is the correct way to mourn. But Andy would hate it all: the spectacle of it, howunnaturalit feels. He’d grab my wrist, pierce me with an urgent stare, tell me for the hundredth time that we should leave.
If I’d listened to him, would he be alive right now? Would I have run away with him one night, stood by his side on the ferry as we watched the ocean throw itself against the rocks? Maybe we would have made it out there, together, Leaving Money be damned. Maybe we’d mimic our siblings’ choices: live in the same apartment, cheereach other on as we followed our separate dreams. But my only dream has been to find my twin, so now what do I do?
“You better get a move on,” Charlie says to Tate, “if you want to be done in time.”
Tate nods, brushing past me with a sad, pitying glance, and heads for the stairs.
“Done in time for what?” I ask.
Charlie opens the box on top of his stack, pulls out some papers, and answers me as he reads. “For the museum. The diorama will be averypopular exhibit.”
“She’s going to display it?” I seethe. I’m about to keep going, tell our brother that his and Tate’s grief is shredding their sanity, but Charlie raises his head sharply, sniffs a few times, and squints at the foyer behind me.
“What’s that?” he asks.
I turn to see that the air is blurred. Smoke billows past the living room, rising up the stairs.
“Something’s burning,” Charlie declares—and I smell it, too, as soon as he says it.
“Kitchen!” I blurt, but he’s already on his way there. I lift the collar of my sweater to cover my mouth as I follow.
When we burst through the swinging door, we find Mom waving a cloth toward the oven, coughing into her arm. It’s a strange sight; I’ve never known her to burn anything. Dad did most of the cooking, but on his hunting days, Mom made dinner so he could eat as soon as he got back. On those nights, roasts were medium rare at best, potatoes difficult to cut.Undercooked, Charlie would grumble, and Dad would hiss at him to be grateful, prompting an appreciative twinkle in Mom’s eyes.
“What is this?” Charlie asks.
“It’s cookies!” Mom says, shoving her arm into the smoke to pull a pan of thin black discs from the oven. She drops it onto the stove as if it’s burned her through her mitt.
The three of us stare at these supposed cookies: charred skins, overlapping edges.
“Please don’t tell me these are for the LMM,” Charlie says.
“LMM?” Mom asks.
“That’s what we’re calling the Lighthouse Memorial Museum,” he replies. “It was Dahlia’s idea.” He winks at me.
