two

“When was the last time you spoke to your brother?”

A detective is here. He’s sitting across from me in the living room, and he’s got a notepad and a pen and a sympathetic smile I don’t need. Before this, people in white jumpsuits were shuffling back and forth between a van in the driveway and the woods in our backyard. They took samples from the bones, or something like that. Because it’s mostly just bones; it isn’t Andy.

“It’s not my brother in that grave,” I tell the detective.

“I hope you’re right,” he says. “And we’re working right now to identify the remains. Dental records, DNA. But in the meantime, your groundskeeper seemed sure it was Andy. Do you have any idea why that might be?”

“You questioned him, didn’t you?”

“I did. But I’d like to hear what you think.”

I squeeze my mug of hours-old tea. “It’s the ax. You talked to my siblings, so I’m sure they told you: Andy used to hack at the trees in our backyard.”

“He’d chop them down?”

“No, not chop. More like… chip. He’d chip away at them, when he was stressed or angry. It was a coping mechanism.”

He leans forward, repositions his pen. “Coping mechanism for what?”

“For… I don’t know. He’d get mad sometimes. But I guess—well, Fritz said—there was an ax in the… that that’s what…”

“The body was buried with an ax,” he finishes for me, “and the skull has fractures consistent with the blade of that ax, leading us to believe, at this point, that the person whose remains are in that grave was killed by the ax they were buried with. And the ax in question appears to belong to your brother. Apparently he carved his name into the handle?”

Andy had bitten his lip as he engraved it, slicing out the A, the N, struggling with the curve in the D. The skin around his eyes, which crinkled so easily, had crimped with concentration.

“That’s right,” I say. “But if the murder weapon was Andy’s ax, wouldn’t the assumption be that Andy was the killer—not the one killed?”

“You think your brother murdered someone?”

“Of course not. I’m just saying: it’s not my brother in that grave. My family told you he ran away, right? Ten years ago. Anyone could have used the ax after that. But not on him. He was already gone.”

“So you’ve spoken to him in the last decade?”

“Yes, I— Well, no. Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

The curtain behind him sways, a tiny shiver of movement. And even though the living room doors are closed and the windows are locked, I know it’s just a draft. I don’t think for a moment that it might be Andy’s ghost.

“No,” I say. “I haven’t spoken to him.”

I’ve learned that outsiders don’t understand the link between Andy and me. I tried explaining it to Greta once, but even she just scrunched up her nose. You mean, like, telepathy? she asked. And I stopped right there, didn’t bother to describe the time I was lying in bed, something like two a.m., rereading a book on the Black Dahlia. I had a flashlight under the covers, hand over my mouth as I got to the part about the cuts across her face, and I heard my door squeak open. I popped my head out from under the blankets to find Andy, who’d felt my horror in his sleep and had been wakened by it like an alarm. He whispered at me then to put the book away, allow my namesake to rest for once.

We knew things about each other, Andy and I, without ever having to utter a word. So if my brother were dead, I would feel it. I would know.

“What makes you think he ran away?” the detective asks.

I tap my fingernail against the mug. “He left a note. My mom told you that already.”

He nods, flipping back a few pages in his notebook. “The only way out is to never come back,” he reads. “What did he mean by that?”

I tap some more, and he looks at my finger, which instantly stops me.

“What did my family say it meant?” I ask.

“Your sister said to ask you. That you were closest with Andy.”

“I am closest with Andy,” I correct him—because, really, past tense? It’s just bones in a hole in the ground, and Andy’s out there, in Vegas maybe, where people spend thousands each night on the hope for a brighter tomorrow, where any shadows are chased away by flashing, exuberant lights. I bet no one talks about murder out there. I bet he loves it.

“He wanted something different,” I tell the detective, “from the way we were raised.”

“And how were you raised, exactly?”

I stare at him. “I think you know.”

With all the commotion before—the people in white jumpsuits; Fritz tracking dirt into the house, throwing condolences around as if he had any way of knowing it was Andy in that grave—I didn’t recognize the detective at first. He seemed a few years older than me, and he looked like anybody: thin, average height, dark hair that swooped at the top, like a cat had been licking him. But when we started this “interview,” he introduced himself to me again—Elijah Kraft—and I almost laughed. You’re Chief Kraft’s son, I said, and he had the decency, at least, to look a little sheepish. He’s not the chief anymore, he told me. My father’s in a nursing home. For dementia. I think I was supposed to feel sorry for him. But was Edmond Kraft sorry? Did he ever think of it all—his obsession with us back then; his slinking around our property, always with the intention to catch us in some dark, criminal act—and feel even a tinge of remorse? I doubt it. Chief Kraft was like everyone else: suspicious of us, monitoring us, believing himself entitled to his intrusions.

“I know the rumors,” Elijah says.

“Ones your father probably started.”

“I know they call this place Murder Mansion.”

“They’re idiots,” I say.

“I know your family worships the dead.”

And at this, I actually do laugh.

“No?” Elijah asks, jotting something down. “Is that incorrect?”

“We honor the dead,” I tell him. “Specifically, victims of murder.”

Which Andy isn’t. He isn’t.

“And what does that mean exactly?” Elijah asks. “To honor them?”

I glance at the living room doors, slid together, shut tight. It feels so odd, to talk about this with a stranger, especially Chief Kraft’s son. I can picture Mom, listening at the door, bristling as I speak. But this man is a detective, he’s seen bones in our backyard, and I know what he’s thinking.

“On the anniversaries of their murders,” I say, “we would light candles for them. Say their name, say a prayer. The idea was to meditate on their death—but more important, their life.”

“A prayer to whom?” he asks, eyes stuck to whatever he’s writing. “You said you didn’t worship them, but prayer is a means of worship, right?”

His pen races across the page, moving too much for the little I’ve said. “A prayer on their behalf,” I reply.

“To God?”

“No, not to God. To… I don’t know.”

My siblings and I never took the Honorings as seriously as our parents did. Charlie made faces as we lit the candles, shimmied his shoulders as we chanted the words, and the rest of us smothered our smiles so Mom wouldn’t see. It was never the murders we were mocking, or the victims themselves—we respected every story we learned. It was just the “silly, incessant ritual” of it all, as Charlie once said, the idea that candles and a sentence could do anything for the dead.

“You don’t know,” Elijah repeats.

“God wasn’t part of our homeschool curriculum.”

Now he looks at me. His eyes, shadowed by dark brows, narrow. “I’ve heard it referred to as ‘the murder curriculum.’ Is it true that’s all you learned about? Murder?”

“We learned about mur-ders,” I correct him.

“And that was your whole education? Just… murder?”

“Mur-ders,” I say again, because there’s a world of difference. “We learned plenty of other things, too. I know math up to trigonometry. I know supernovas and black holes. I know the Gettysburg Address. I just also know Rachel Nickell.”

Forty-nine stab wounds; killed in broad daylight; her two-year-old son covered in her blood.

“And she is?” Elijah prompts.

I remember Mom’s reenactment. This was something she did to illustrate the brutality of a crime—and to protect us against it. She believed that if we witnessed the horrors that others had experienced, we’d recognize the same danger if it ever came our way. For Rachel Nickell’s reenactment, she wore an outfit of all white, and jabbed herself with a red marker, scribbling on her shirt to indicate blood. Forty-nine times she struck herself. Forty-nine times I flinched.

“She was murdered,” I say.

He bites the inside of his cheek, but it feels like he’s biting his tongue. “I see.” He looks at his notebook again. “So you say Andy left ten years ago, when the two of you were sixteen.”

“The night of our sixteenth birthday. Yes.”

“And what was he like that day? The last time you saw him.”

“He was fine,” I say. “Our siblings had come back for the first time since they’d left home. It’d been eight years since we’d seen Charlie, seven since Tate. So he was excited.”

Excited is not the right word, but I’m certain that the real ones—moody, jittery—would only keep the detective jotting in his notebook. I remember it well, though: the way Andy’s leg shook beneath the table like a jackhammer. I remember, later, Charlie staring at us from across the candles as we said the prayers for our namesakes. He seemed astonished by us, almost unsettled, like he’d only now remembered we existed. I glanced at Andy to see if he’d noticed our brother’s stare, but he was scowling at his candle as if he could blow out its flame with only his gaze.

He’d been stormy for days, spending more time with the trees, his ax. Whenever I asked him what was wrong, he snapped away from me like a startled animal. Nothing, I’m just tired, I haven’t been sleeping well—and he did have bags beneath his eyes, dark as bruises. On our birthday, he went to bed soon after the Honoring, grumbling about Tate and Charlie, how they scurried away together into one of their rooms before the smoke from the candles had even cleared. He’d been planning to ask them about “out,” he said. That’s what he called it. Out.

“Excited,” Elijah echoes. “So excited he ran away that night? So excited he said, The only way out is to never come back?”

I fidget with my mug. “We were very sheltered growing up. We really only left the island a handful of times. And I think Andy saw Charlie and Tate that night, back from a big city, and got inspired to leave early. Be out in the world like them.”

That’s what I’ve been telling myself, for all these years. But inspired or not, Andy broke something that night when he left. I always pictured our connection like a silver cord between us, a taut wire, but when he wrote that note, snuck into the darkness to wait for the ferry, he might as well have cut it in two. Hacked it apart with his ax.

“Inspired to leave early,” Elijah mumbles, reading back his notes. “Earlier than what?”

“Eighteen. When we were supposed to leave.”

His expression darkens. “You were forced to leave at eighteen?”

“No, not forced, just— Our siblings did it first, when they each gained control of their trust funds. And Andy and I planned to do the same.”

The trust fund is how I manage the way I do—jobless, hunched over my laptop, scouring photos of any crowd on social media, looking for crinkly eyes, for the cowlick on the back of Andy’s head.

Elijah nods, writing down my answer.

“And once someone in your family left home,” he says, “they just… never returned? Until now, anyway?” He pauses. “I was sorry to hear about your father.”

But he doesn’t sound sorry. He sounds suspicious. His gaze creeps around my head to the wall behind me, where Honoring candles are stacked like skinny firewood on the shelves.

“Like I said,” I tell him, “Charlie and Tate came back one time.”

“That’s right. On the night before you noticed Andy was gone. Ten years ago. Why did they come back on that night in particular?”

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 porch steps, 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 to be here—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 it good 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.”

As he slides apart the living room doors, the darkness of the foyer gapes like the mouth of a cave. Strange that nobody’s turned on the chandelier, that the eight p.m. sky seems brighter than the inside of our house. Elijah steps outside to answer his phone, and I feel my way along the walls, following the voices coming from the kitchen.

The swinging door is closed, but when I open it, there’s finally light—a little, at least, from the bulb above the stove. Tate and Charlie sit at the counter, legs dangling from stools, palms circling mugs. Mom paces back and forth between the sink and the oven.

“Is Detective Good Boy done with you?” Charlie slurs, and I don’t think it’s tea in his mug.

“He got a call.”

“From the bone people?” Tate asks, her spine straightening.

“Is that what we’re calling them?” Charlie says. “I’m fine with it if we are. Did you see that one guy, the really tall one? He can bone me whenever he wants.”

“Charles!” Mom says, voice like a whip.

“Sorry, Mom. Sorry. Not my fault—it’s the city. It’s made me so crass.”

“It’s made you an ass,” Tate mumbles, and Charlie slaps his hand over his heart, pretending to reel from a stab.

“Stop,” Tate whines. She puts her elbows on the counter, massaging her temples. “You’re acting like we’re hanging out at a bar or something, when really—”

“Oh,” Charlie cuts her off, looking around as if taking in his surroundings for the first time. “This isn’t a bar? No wonder the service sucks.”

“—when really,” Tate continues, “we’re waiting to hear if it was our brother out there.”

“It wasn’t Andy,” I say.

Charlie turns so sharply I almost jump.

“Is that what Kraft said?” he asks.

“No. I just know. He’s not dead.”

Mom makes it over to me in two quick strides. “You’ve spoken to him, haven’t you—your brother?” She picks up my hand, stroking the back of it with a firm, insistent touch. “In these last ten years, you’ve heard from him, right? And maybe you didn’t tell me because he needed more time away, but… you know where he is, don’t you?”

Her eyes are frantic, flicking like a too-fast metronome.

“I…” I start to say, but the kitchen door swings open behind me, and I look back to find Elijah Kraft. In one hand, he holds his cell phone, and in the other, dangling at his side, is the notepad where he’s been writing down our lives.

Mom’s grip on my hand tightens. Tate and Charlie perk up on their stools.

“Is there news?” Tate asks, just as Mom says, “What is it?”

Elijah glances at his feet, and when he looks up, he looks around—at the clock that’s always broken, at the Honoring calendar pinned to the wall, at the butcher block and all its knives.

“I’m afraid,” he begins—and right away, it’s like someone turns down the volume, “that we’ve been able to confirm it.”

And this, as he continues, comes to me as only a whisper: “The remains in that grave, they belong to…”

And this—like a blade thrusting toward me—comes to me in silence (but I’d know the shape of his name anywhere; I can see it on Elijah’s lips): “Andy.”

Mom screams. I see her mouth split open, her face go red, but I don’t hear it. I don’t hear anything at all.