“Murdered by who?” she demands.
“We… we don’t know. Someone buried him in our woods.”
Her face freezes in horror. Her mouth gapes, dark and twisted, until she covers it with one hand. “I thought he just left!” she wails. “I had no idea he was killed.”
I take a step away from her. She’s shaking now, fingers and shoulders trembling. Her reaction is alarming in its intensity. Suspicious, too. Even though her words could be my own—I thought he just left; I had no idea he was killed—I don’t believe that one conversation with Andy would make her feel his loss this acutely, more than ten years later.
“You didn’t even know him,” I say. “So what is this? What are you doing?”
I try to channel Charlie, inject my tone with superiority, haughty disdain—but as the words come out, I find it’s a hand-me-down that doesn’t fit.
“I knew him better than I’ve ever known anyone,” she cries.
I can’t stop myself from scoffing. “You spoke to him one time.”
Her tears pause for a second as she glares at me. Then she wipes her cheeks, crying even harder. “We hung out all the time.”
“You…” I squint at her. “What?”
“We’d meet up in the woods,” Ruby continues, “mostly at night.”
“At night?” I shake my head. At night, Andy and I lay in beds that were pressed against the shared wall between our rooms, and we both slept easier, deeper, knowing that even when we were separated, we were only inches apart.
“We’d write these notes to each other,” Ruby says, sniffling. “He brought the snacks, and I brought the flashlights—so we could see our paper.”
“Notes?” I can’t stop echoing her words. “What kind of notes?”
She hiccups, or maybe sobs. It’s hard to tell with all the noise she’s making.
“I don’t know,” she says, “like: You are the rabbit’s foot to my petal-covered moon. Nothing that made sense. We’d compete, sort of, to see who could make the other laugh the hardest.”
Tears still dripping, she raises one hand and brings it to her chest. Then she picks at her shirt, pinching the fabric along her sternum, rubbing it between her fingers.
“Mostly we talked about getting out of here,” she continues, gaze distant, voice thick. “This island has so much darkness. For Andy, it was your family, and for me—”
“My family isn’t dark,” I say—because the word is unnatural. Unnatural is what he would have told her, if she knew him as well as she says.
“For me, it’s all those women,” she goes on. “I’m twenty-five now. The same age Melinda Wharton was.”
Melinda Wharton. I haven’t heard anyone but Greta say her name in years. But of course I think of her, every September 20. Of course I picture Mom and Dad lighting the candles, without us, saying the prayer for the first woman the Blackburn Killer ever dumped on the shore. She was a preschool teacher, killed before Andy and I were even born, when Charlie was six, Tate five. In her Instagram post about her, Tate explained that Melinda had come to the island to visit her grandmother, who later told police that Melinda left for a walk around ten p.m.
But the next time Mrs. Wharton saw her granddaughter, it was to identify her body, which had first been strangled, then left in shallow waters to wash up onto the rocks. Melinda was the only presumed victim of the Blackburn Killer who wasn’t branded, wasn’t dressed in an ice-blue gown. She was, however, found with a light blue scarf wrapped around her neck. This inconsistency with the next murder, two years after Melinda’s—when Stephanie Kepler was found with a B burned into her ankle, wearing a dress different from the one she’d left her house in—kept police from connecting the murders initially. It wasn’t until three years later, when Erica Shipp was discovered branded and dressed identically to Stephanie, that the term serial killer was used on the island at all.
It haunted me, of course, all those strangled women; whenever another washed up, there was always the question of who would be next—but unlike Ruby, it never made me want to leave. The world Mom taught us about was teeming with murderers; I believed that if I went somewhere else, I’d only live beside a different killer.
My parents could have taken us away, like the people who fled after the third or fourth woman was discovered, but Dad just grumbled about cowards, insisting that he refused to be driven away from the first place he’d ever called home. His mother had left him, a baby in a car seat, on a crowded beach in Maine, and for his entire childhood, he ping-ponged to different foster homes in New England until he finally landed on Blackburn at nineteen. For a couple years, he worked at the market in town, rented a room over someone’s garage, and was about to move on to someplace bigger when he ended up meeting Mom.
She’d just returned to the island, raw with grief, after selling her parents’ Connecticut estate, which she’d had to scrub clean of their blood. She’d sold their company, too—a generations-old gun manufacturer—largely because of a fact that would forever haunt her, one that, later, she would tell us only once before never speaking of it again.
The gun that killed her parents had been their very own brand.
With the Blackburn house all she had left of them, Mom willed herself to grow roots in the island’s soil. She buried her mother and father in the woods, and she married the market clerk who whipped out an arm to save her from slipping on spilled milk. When she saw Dad, that first time, she actually gasped, startled by his handsomeness.
Mom did keep us closer whenever another woman was found, cinching our boundaries like a belt around a waist, and she often peeked between curtains with a distrustful eye. But since Dad so adamantly scoffed at the thought of running off scared, she never suggested moving, content to seclude herself with the startlingly handsome man who could have gone anywhere, but decided to stay on this rocky, unpretty island with her.
“Andy talked all the time about leaving,” Ruby says now, lips quivering. “He said he’d make sure the Blackburn Killer never hurt me. I thought he meant we’d run away soon, before I was all grown-up, like those women, the victims, always were. But then later—when Andy was gone—and there were no more murders at all… I thought maybe he’d meant something else. Maybe he meant he’d take down the killer, stop him somehow. And then I thought maybe he actually had, and that’s why he had to go so suddenly.”
She swipes a hand across her nose. “But he was supposed to take me with him. Supposed to take both of us.” She gestures to the space between us, including me as part of that both. “That’s what he told me, anyway. ‘You, me, and Dahlia. We’ve got to get out of here.’ ”
I have to admit: she does a good impression of him. She even hunches her shoulders, speaks out the side of her mouth. It cuts a little to see it.
“He never mentioned you,” I say, “whenever he talked to me about leaving.”
It’s mean. I know it is. Her face buckles with the cruelty of it. “Oh,” is all she says, and then she picks at her shirt again, more vigorously than before, like she’s trying to reach past fabric and bone to soothe the heart beneath it.
I should say something. Apologize maybe. Tell her that I never learned how to share him; he was always so singularly mine. We knew each other best, loved each other most—but I didn’t even know he was dead. And I had no idea about her.
Ruby takes her palm off her ax, letting it thump to the ground at her feet. The sound, the swiftness of the movement, startles me, and I’m defenseless against the images that spring up: blood on metal, metal splitting skull.
“I need some tissues,” Ruby says. “You can come if you want.”
Walking past me toward the house, she sniffles, and when I catch my breath, I follow.
Inside, she disappears down a hall. I look around, taking stock of a living room decked out in brown: wood paneling, pine tables, a couch and loveseat the color of mud. Very little hangs on the walls—a crooked painting of the sea; a framed photo of teenaged Ruby; and situated near a lamp, illumi
nated like something holy, two embroideries in circular wooden frames, each stitched with a different phrase.
Home is a place you’ll never leave, says one, and beneath those words: a yellow house like the one I’m standing in.
The other has Ruby loves Grandpa scrawled in the center, surrounded by a wreath of purple and yellow hollyhocks.
“I made those,” Ruby says. I whirl around, find her dabbing her face with a tissue. “Andy loved them.”
Frowning, I return my gaze to the frames. I don’t see anything there that Andy would love. He didn’t care about flowers, not even our own hollyhocks, which bloomed each year in our yard. And the first phrase—Home is a place you’ll never leave—was the opposite of what he believed.
“He only came inside once,” Ruby says, stepping beside me to stare at the words’ navy thread. “But when he did, I caught him admiring them, like he was in awe. Like they were works of art or—”
“Why you talkin’ ’bout that boy?”
I jump at the sound of Lyle Decker’s voice. He’s in a wheelchair, blocking the entrance to the hall. Last time I saw him, on a rare trip into town, he towered over me, offering a grunt instead of a greeting. Now, he’s hooked to an oxygen tank, tubes sticking up his nose, and there are bruises like fingerprints up and down his arms. Beneath his eyes are bags as big as pockets.
“Grandpa,” Ruby says. “Something terrible happened. Andy Lighthouse—”
“That boy should’ve never come around here,” he cuts her off. And the way he says that boy straightens my spine.
Ruby squares her shoulders. “Yes, I know you— Yes. But Grandpa, he… he died.” She glances at me, and my throat stings as she continues. “He was murdered.”
Lyle leans forward, stretching the plastic tube linking him to oxygen, to life.
“Then he got what he deserved,” he says.
I gasp in chorus with Ruby—but she recovers quicker than me.
“Grandpa, you don’t—” She puts her hand on my shoulder, and even through the fog of my shock, I feel the instinct to shrug it off. “This is Dahlia Lighthouse. Andy’s sister.”
“I know who you are,” Lyle says, eyes like arrows aimed at my face. “And I know what I said. Your brother Andy got what he deserved.”
The air is sucked from the room. Lyle rasps, even with oxygen tubes.
“What—” I start, but Ruby clamps her hand on my arm and pulls me toward the door.
“That’s enough, Grandpa,” she says, and before I can stop her, she’s guiding me outside, depositing me on the crunchy, yellow lawn, shutting the door behind her with a decisive thud.
“What did he mean by that?” I demand. “Why would he… how could he say that?”
Ruby puts a finger to her lips, quick and sharp. Then she walks away, waving for me to follow, until we reach her backyard.
“Look,” she says, glancing at the house, “Grandpa is very protective of me. Always has been. His wife—my grandmother—left him when my mom was just a kid, and then—”
“What does that have to do with anything? He said Andy deserved to be murdered.”
“I’m getting to that,” she insists. “His wife left him when my mom was a kid, and then my mom left when I was a baby. She was only eighteen when she had me, and… well, she calls sometimes, but Grandpa doesn’t like me to answer the phone, and he never lets me speak to her. He tells her if she really wants to see me, she knows where to find me.” Ruby looks down, playing with the zipper on her puffy vest. “She’s never come back.”
“But why—”
“He raised me,” she cuts me off. “And homeschooled me, just like you and Andy were. Well”—she stops herself, a smirk seeping onto her face—“not just like you and Andy were.”
I shift beneath her gaze. Did Andy tell her about Mom’s curriculum? Or does she know about it the way everyone on Blackburn does: through things Chief Kraft spied when he dropped in at our house, warnings he handed out to islanders like flyers?
“Grandpa made sure I never wanted for anything,” Ruby says. “And I didn’t, really… except some company.”
She pokes some dried-up grass with her foot. This patchy, narrow backyard is nothing like our lawn, where each green blade has been lovingly tended to, Fritz using scissors in the summer to shape what the mower chopped.
“But Grandpa’s always been nervous about me interacting with other people. He’s fine with, like, Mrs. Baker at the market, or Mr. Ford at the bike shop, but he doesn’t like me hanging around people my own age. Especially boys. Or—men now, I guess.”
“That’s… controlling,” I say. Which might be unfair of me. I barely even know who Mrs. Baker or Mr. Ford are, seeing as Mom rarely allowed us to go into town.
“Maybe,” Ruby says. “But I get it. My grandmother left him for another man. Then my mom left with whoever my dad was. So I can’t really blame him. For seeing boys—men—as the things that take the people he loves. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to convince him I won’t leave him, too.” She shrugs. “You saw the embroidery.”
“Ruby loves Grandpa,” I recite dully. “Home is a place you’ll never leave.”
“Exactly. I made those when I was twelve, and they’ve been hanging there ever since. He’s taken them as a promise. Which is fine. Back then, I intended them to be one.”
“But you did want to leave him,” I say. “With Andy.”
I’m queasy at the thought: Andy and Ruby slipping off into the night while I lay in bed, believing my brother would be there, would always be there, when I woke in the morning.
“I did,” Ruby says, “yeah.”
She rubs her arms, her sleeves unprotected by her vest. “I was fifteen,” she says. “And selfish. And I wanted a bigger, safer life than I thought this island could give me. But soon after Andy left—” Her sentence skids to a stop. “Soon after Andy died, Grandpa got sick. Turns out he had COPD. And that’s led to heart problems. Bad ones.”
She pauses, leaving space for me to respond, but I don’t know what she expects from me. My brother is dead, and sick or not, her grandfather just said he deserved it.
“So I gave up my dream of leaving,” she says. “Grandpa’s always taken good care of me, and what was I going to do? Hop on a ferry as soon as he needed my help? I’m all he has. And anyway, there hasn’t been a murdered woman on this island in over a decade. I don’t need to—”
“But what he said,” I interrupt. “Why would he say that about Andy?”
“Because Andy was a boy,” she replies. “He was a boy I spent time with, and Grandpa figured it was only a matter of time before he took the last girl in his life he had left to love.” She swallows, her lower lip trembling. “And he was right. I would have left with your brother. I truly believed I was going to.”
The wind sweeps her hair, slapping it like a gag over her mouth. She tears it away as she continues.
“Grandpa hated Andy. Or the concept of him, at least. So we started meeting up in secret, late at night. I told Grandpa we’d stopped hanging out altogether, but even still, he’d talk about Andy like he was this predator I’d escaped. Like he’d been sharpening his claws just for me, and I was lucky to have made it out alive.”
She’s too close to me now. Her breath crashes against my face, and it’s as if she’s been inching toward me as she speaks.
I move back a little, but she steps into the space I’ve created.
“It was so lonely,” she adds, “having to keep my only friend a secret. And I’d been starving for companionship—from someone my own age—for a really long time.”
There’s a rustle in the trees, and we both turn our heads, searching for the source of the sound. I half expect Lyle Decker to wheel himself out from the woods, reveal he’s been eavesdropping. But nothing moves, nothing appears. Even the wind has paused.
Ruby crosses her arms and points her magnified gaze back at me. “I guess that’s why I was so fascinated by your family. All those siblings. A father and a mo
ther. Even on nights when Andy and I weren’t meeting up, even before we officially met, I’d sneak out and just… watch your house. I’d see windows light up, or darken, and I’d pretend I was inside, just another Lighthouse kid.”
I picture her perched in a tree, her owly eyes observing what we thought nobody could see, and the image is enough to snap me out of her story, remind me why I crossed the woods to find her in the first place.
“Did you ever see anything?” I ask. “When you were watching us, did you see anything—anyone—who shouldn’t have been there? Around the time Andy disappeared?”
Right away, she moves back. Just a fraction of a step, but I notice it anyway: this space she’s put between us.
“No,” she says. “I’m sorry, I— No.”
A thump comes from inside the house. Ruby glances at one of the windows, and I look at it, too, its curtain swaying back and forth.
“I have to go,” she says, big eyes darkening. “But listen. I know the islanders have a lot to say about you all. But for all the rumors about your family, I never saw anything strange.”
She walks backward toward the house. “I know Andy thought you all were unnatural,” she adds. “But I would have given anything to be one of you.”
five
I hear voices.
I’m back near the front of the mansion, about to step along the cobbled walkway to the front door, when the conversation reaches my ears.
“How do you just… not notice, when a body’s been buried in your backyard?”
“I guess they found him in the woods. A little ways back.”
“I bet they killed him themselves. Some Satanic ritual.”
“They’re not Satanists, though, right?”
“Tomato, to-mah-to.”
I freeze, as if becoming immobile is the same as invisible. There are four of them, all women, standing on the part of our driveway that crests up from the road. That means they’re trespassing, clumped together on our property, though still fifty yards from me at least. Arms crossed, they squint at the imposing stone of our home.
How easily it comes back—that old inclination to duck from the islanders’ gaze. But if I duck, I move, and if I move, they’ll—
The Family Plot Page 5
