three

On our thirteenth birthday, Andy carved his name into the wall beneath my bedroom window. Even then, he was thinking of leaving.

We should go, he said, concentrating on the knife. We’re old enough now to figure things out on our own.

But I didn’t feel old enough. We’d only just reached the age at which Mary Phagan was raped and strangled, her body found in the basement of the pencil factory where she worked. We were only just as old as Lisa Ann Millican had been when she was abducted by a disturbed couple, who, among other horrors, injected her with drain cleaner. At thirteen, I was still scared to venture too far beyond our door. It wasn’t until I was nineteen, living without Andy for three years already, that it became scarier to walk the halls of a house where I could only trail after his ghost.

I didn’t know, then, that “ghost” was not a metaphor. That whatever slip of energy that made him him had already detached from his skin, or that his skin itself was a disintegrating thing, a feast for grubs and worms. But how could I not have known? For ten years, I’ve watched for him, searched for him, worn out the letters of his name on my laptop keys—certain that he was out there, his heart still beating in sync with mine. I always thought that, if he died, I’d feel it, like a coffin snapping shut on my own body. But all this time, I’ve been breathing just fine; all this time, I’ve been wrong.

I’m sitting on my old beanbag chair, the twin to one in Andy’s room, and as I shift, I brace myself for pain. I had no idea how demanding grief is of the body. My eyes feel like they’ve been used as punching bags. I’m thirstier than I can ever remember being, but there’s a hundred-pound weight in my stomach, my chest, my throat, and I don’t know if I can make it to the kitchen for water. I hear footsteps down there, heavy ones that seem to shake the walls. For a moment, I think they must be Dad’s, but then I pause, and I remember. And though his loss is not the one that’s crushing me now, I wince about it anyway. It’s a terrible thing, forgetting someone is dead.

I should check on Mom. Even though she never looked for Andy, the way she gripped my hand last night, the way hope bled from her mouth as she insisted I knew where he’s been—that meant something to me. It meant she lost a piece of herself when she let him go, and all these years she’s been wishing he’d bring it back. But now she’s lost even more: Andy, for good, and her husband, too—a man she always seemed in awe of, a man whose mild attention was enough to make her blush.

As I stand up, I find I’m still in yesterday’s clothes: oversize sweater, dark gray leggings. My bag is in the corner of my room, but I don’t care enough to reach inside it and dig for another outfit. I step into the hall, legs shaky and sore, but I barely make it ten feet before Charlie, holding a large box, rounds a corner and crashes into me.

“Dolls,” he says as I stumble back. He sets the box on the floor and stands there, one shoulder lower than the other, dragged down by his usual slouch. I can smell the alcohol wafting off him, but it smells old, the residue of whatever was in his mug last night.

“What are you—” I try to ask, but he leaps forward, engulfing me in a hug so tight I gasp.

“You must be dying,” he says. “God, if anything ever happened to Tate, I’d just… I know she’s not my twin, but still. It always felt like it was me and her, and you and Andy, and now it’s just… you.”

I can’t breathe; my lungs feel pinned to my ribs. Then Charlie takes a step back, gripping my shoulders and shaking me in a way that jump-starts my breath.

“You’re going to get through this,” he says. He scans the hallway. “We all are. I’m making sure of that.”

I look at the box near my feet. “What is this?”

“It’s from the attic. Our old murder reports. We’re going to include them in the memorial.”

“In… Dad’s memorial?”

“Dad’s and Andy’s. We’re doing a joint one, I’ve decided.”

And there it is again, that pinned-lung feeling. Memorials are for saying goodbye, but I’ve only just discovered Andy’s gone. Really gone, I mean, not a runaway, not anonymous in some city—but gone. In the ground.

“But not only that!” Charlie adds. “We’re going to make it a museum of sorts. The Lighthouse Memorial Museum.” He splays his hands in the air, palms out, spreading them farther apart with each word, as if he’s seeing the name lit up on some theater marquee.

I manage a syllable: “What?”

He drops his hands. “The vultures are circling. The rest of the islanders—they know something’s happened. I got up early this morning, went for a walk into town to clear my head, and a mother accosted me with her baby. ‘Is it true?’ she asked. ‘Two Lighthouses are dead?’ I don’t even know how she knew who I was. Maybe she’s asking everyone. But the way she said our name… It was like we’re these dangerous, blood-sucking freaks, living in Murder Mansion, plotting our next move. But I’ve played Biff in Death of a Salesman, Dolls!”

He shakes his head, indignant. “My instinct was to get away from her,” he adds, “just like we always did.”

Mom encouraged us to steer clear of the islanders. She said they wouldn’t understand our way of life, and with their murmurs of “Murder Mansion,” their gazes that followed us whenever we left the house, it was clear she was right.

“But look where that division got us,” Charlie says. “Andy was axed to death!”

“You think one of the islanders did it?” I ask, even though axed to death makes the hallway spin around me.

Charlie stares at me, his eyes opaque. Unreadable. “Yes,” he says. “Someone on this island did it.”

“The Blackburn Killer?”

Charlie hesitates before he shakes his head again, this time like a dog shaking off rain. “They don’t— Nobody knows, Dahlia. But my point is: I’m not hiding anymore. We’re not hiding anymore. The idea came to me this morning like a lightning strike. In five days, we’re going to open our doors to everyone, for one day only—limited viewings draw the best crowds—and we’re going to let them witness it all. I’m collecting artifacts—papers, candles, items from the victim room—anything that tells the story of who we’ve been. It’s time for everyone to see we’re not some freaks on top of the hill. We’re people. We were brought up differently, sure, but we’re human beings, for fuck’s sake.”

He picks up the box and stomps toward the stairs—as if that’s the end of it. As if it’s his decision alone as to who can enter our house or snoop through our things.

“Wait.” I follow him downstairs. Our footsteps rattle the frames along the staircase, and I glance at Mom’s parents—smiling in birthday hats, blowing smoke rings at each other in lieu of a kiss, oblivious to the guns that were coming for their heads.

Charlie carries his box to the living room, dumping it on a stack of others teetering on top of the coffee table. “Find anything, Tate?” he asks, and now I see our sister crouched in the corner, rummaging through the bottom shelf of a cabinet. She’s pointedly not in yesterday’s clothes. Her sweater is a too-cheerful yellow, and her hair, freshly showered, cascades down her back in glossy waves.

“Sort of,” she says, words muffled. She jolts when she sees me. Clamped between her teeth is a paintbrush, but she yanks it out to say my name, her lips an unnatural red.

“How are you doing?” she asks, walking toward me, arms outstretched—and again, what is with these hugs? Doesn’t she remember how, as kids, she literally shooed me and Andy—Shoo, little ones, shoo!—whenever we’d ask what she and Charlie were whispering about? Doesn’t she remember how, the last time I saw her, she read Andy’s note like it might accuse her of something, her eyes squinty with caution but not concern?

As she pulls me in, the end of her paintbrush stabs my shoulder blade. “Oops,” she says. “I’ve been gathering supplies.” She turns back to Charlie but keeps her hand on my arm. “There’s not much here; I’ll have to go into town. I can pick up whatever you need while I’m there.”

“So you’re on board,” I say, “with this… Lighthouse Museum thing?”

“Lighthouse Memorial Museum,” 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 wants to do,” Tate says. “It’s not my preferred 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 one now?”

“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 of Andy?”

“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, how unnatural it 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, cheer each 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 a very popular 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.

I wait for Mom to protest his plans for the memorial. She was the one who made us live this way—shuttered and shut in, protected from people like the ones who killed her parents, our boundaries shrinking smaller each time the Blackburn Killer struck. I can’t imagine her welcoming islanders into our home, offering them dessert as they gawk at our grief. But she only sighs.

“The cookies were for you kids,” she says. “These are chocolate chip. Tate’s favorite.”

I bite back my bitterness. Is Mom aware that Tate is going to minimize Andy’s death to an eight-by-ten display? Does she know that, right now, the daughter she’s baking cookies for is “gathering supplies” to turn him into an exhibit? A post?

“And then I’m going to make snickerdoodles for Dahlia, and peanut butter for you, Charlie. And then who knows what else—sugar, or oatmeal raisin, or, oh! My mother used to make these raspberry almond cookies that would melt in your mouth. Except—we’d need jam, raspberry jam, and I don’t know if…”

She trails off as she darts toward the pantry. Charlie crosses his arms, amused, and I look closer at Mom. Grains of brown sugar freckle her cheek; clumps of flour whiten her hair.

“You don’t need to make us cookies,” I say. “It seems like a lot of trouble.”

“Don’t be silly,” Mom replies. “I just… I got distracted down the hall for a minute. Forgot to keep watch.” She laughs, high and girlish. “I can handle cookies, Dahlia. Cookies are easy.”

Except I’ve never seen her bake them before. Or anything else for that matter.

“Odd that the smoke detectors didn’t go off,” Mom muses, shoving aside boxes of pasta, cans of beans. “I’ll have to call someone about that.” She swallows, and it’s the first moment since we’ve walked in that she seems even remotely sad. “I suppose that’s something Daniel would have done.”

Her voice hitches on Dad’s name. Her face crumples, and in the creases of her skin, there’s the weight of what she’s lost. My eyes sting with tears, but before my vision can blur, the moment is over. Mom smiles so wide it scares me.

“First!” she chirps. “We’ll need these cookies. I’ll have to redo the chocolate chip, start again from scratch.”

As she dives back into the pantry, I can only stare. This bustling, beaming version of my mother is so unlike the one I know. That mother smiled thinly, when she smiled at all. That mother couldn’t make it up or down the stairs without stopping to gape, for minutes sometimes, at her parents, no doubt remembering their gruesome end.

Now, Mom mumbles as she runs her hands over rows of spices, canisters of sugar and flour. Then she spins around.

“We’re out of baking powder!” she cries. “I’ll need to go into town to get some.”

She reaches back to untie the waist of her apron and pulls it over her head, revealing the same sweats from yesterday.

“Tate’s going,” I say. “Why don’t you let her pick it up for you? I can tell her to—”

“No!” Mom shouts, and it shocks me, honestly, to hear her raise her voice. “I’m perfectly capable. I can get the baking powder. I can call about the smoke detectors. I can make my children’s favorite cookies!”

By the last syllable, she’s shrill as a teakettle. And now she’s twirling toward the door and shoving it open. Charlie and I watch the door swing hard in her wake.

“Well,” Charlie says. “That was… a thing that just happened.”

He picks up a burnt cookie from the pan on the stove, sniffs it, inspects it, and taps it against the counter. Black crumbs flake off the cookie’s surface.

“I think she forgot the chocolate chips,” he says. Then he looks at me. “Well. Now that we know the house isn’t burning down, I better get back to work. The LMM won’t curate itself.”

“Charlie,” I say, “don’t you think it’s a bad idea to—”

“Uh, uh, uh,” he interrupts, wagging a finger in the air. “Criticisms of the LMM will only be received after the LMM. Just like any other show. At that point, you can publish a full-page review in the Blackburn Gazette for all I care.”

He spins around with exaggerated grace, and then he leaves me alone.

They’ve all gone crazy. Charlie, Tate, Mom. They want to display Andy, exploit him—or bury their heads in a bowl of flour—so why should I stay here a minute longer? This memorial, this museum, won’t be about him. There’s no way I’ll stand there, in a room of gossip guzzlers, and tell them how he carved his name all over this house. How he always stubbed his toe on the fourth floorboard from the top of the stairs. How I thought that was the funniest thing.

My phone chirps with a text, muffled by the pocket of my sweater. When I pull it out, I see Greta’s name, and I close my eyes before I read her message, aching with nostalgia.

I want to go back. Back just a couple days, to the little apartment that always smells of cinnamon. Back to Greta’s knocks on my door, offering me search tips I hadn’t thought of yet: Have you checked assessor’s websites? Some nights, when she got off work, we’d set up our laptops side by side—her on her message boards, toggling between open tabs; me crossing one city off my list before moving on to the next—and I want to go back to that. Back to when I believed my twin was alive, and my biggest problem was that I couldn’t find him.

Oh my god, Greta’s written, I just saw your text, I can’t believe it. I’m so sorry. How are you doing? What can I do?

My fingers hover above the screen, unsure what to type. I know friends are supposed to support you in times of tragedy—but friendship remains an uncomfortable fit for me, like an itchy sweater, or a too-tight turtleneck. Back when we first met, Greta glommed on to me quickly, giddy that, most times, when she referenced a cold-case murder, I actually knew what she was talking about. It’s like we share a language, she said one time—but it’s a language I grew up speaking and therefore find no beauty in, whereas Greta labors over learning it, marveling at its every sound. We’re not as similar as she thinks we are. We’re not like me and Andy, who didn’t need language at all.

Call me when you’re ready, she texts now, but I slip the phone back into my pocket.

Through the kitchen window, a flash of yellow catches my eye. It’s police tape, I see when I squint, and it’s fluttering in the wind. There’s a mound of dirt out there—in the woods, in the family plot—hunched like a tumor on top of the earth, and my muscles seize at the reminder: Andy didn’t just die; someone killed him. They picked up his ax, lifted it over their head, and they—

Afterward, they dug a hole for him. A hole.

They dug up the plot that waited for our father, marked by a stone that always chilled me with its prematurity. Daniel Lighthouse, it proclaimed—or warned—right beside another that waited for Mom, Lorraine Lighthouse, set into the ground beside her parents’ graves.

Somebody dropped Andy’s body into a plot that was never meant for him. They covered him in dirt. But how did they know we wouldn’t notice him back there? That we wouldn’t see the freshly turned earth and wonder what had been buried? They’d have to have known our patterns: that I gave the family plot as wide a berth as I could; that Charlie and Tate would be too self-involved to stick around; that Dad took a different path for his hunts; that even Mom only went there on the Honoring day for her parents—which occurred months after Andy’s disappearance.

And who would have wanted to hurt him? Elijah asked about Fritz last night, but it couldn’t have been him. Fritz has always been gentle, a man who gave us wildflower seeds and told us to think of them as food for fairies as we sprinkled them onto the grass. We never believed in magic or fairies, but we played along, as old as eleven or twelve the last time we did it, tossing those seeds around the edges of the yard because we knew that Fritz loved beauty, loved brightness, loved every growing thing.

Still, to bury Andy in our family plot, the killer would have had to know, first, that the plot was there at all.

I try to think of anyone, besides Fritz, I ever even saw in our woods. There was Chief Kraft, of course. He often did a sweep of our entire property before he knocked on our door for one of his “casual drop-ins,” as he called them. He claimed he was keeping us safe, making sure nobody was “up to mischief” on our expansive property, but we knew the truth. In his view, we were the threat.

Then there were the islanders. They usually kept to the side of the road, where they stood and stared, gossiped and judged. But I suppose they could have snuck into our woods easily enough.

And it’s that image—a person skulking between trees—that reminds me of something, someone, I haven’t thought of in years.

There was a girl, back when we were younger, who lived on the other side of the woods with her grandfather. She was around our age, with dark curly hair and the biggest eyes that Andy and I had ever seen. Her name was Ruby Decker. But that’s not what we called her.

We called her the Watcher.

We were ten the first time we noticed her. She was prowling our woods like a stray cat, gaze fastened to the back of our house, as if counting its every stone. At night, her flashlight beam bounced off branches and leaves. For years, we spied on her spying on us, using binoculars to see her more clearly through the trees. We talked about her enormous eyes, joking that they must have been surgically enlarged. The better to see us with, we guessed.

But then, when we were fifteen, Andy came inside one day and told me he’d spoken to her. She’d approached him while he was swinging his ax at a tree, and they’d talked for a while, and she was actually kind of cool.

Cool? I repeated. Are you friends now or something? I couldn’t imagine that, couldn’t even see the point. What use was some girl through the woods when Andy and I had each other?

He shrugged off my question. He said he’d been all riled up, but Ruby helped to calm him down. She made him laugh, he added, helped him pick a splinter from his palm.

After that day, he lost interest in spying on her. She’s just a girl, he said, pulling my binoculars away. She’s not a spectacle.

But we were one to her. And maybe she saw something the night Andy died. Maybe I should talk to her grandfather, ask him for Ruby’s number, see if she remembers the boy who hacked at trees.

Then again, there’s another option, one I think of as I hear a crash in the living room, followed by Charlie’s cursing. I could leave this place, before the museum, before Tate even begins her diorama. I could ditch the smell of burnt cookies, take tonight’s ferry, crawl into my bed above the café, and cry for Andy until I’m desiccated inside.

It’s a tempting thought—comforting, even, in a brutal sort of way. But I already left Blackburn Island once, back when I had no idea that my brother’s body was rotting in its soil. I cannot leave it again until I find out who buried him there.

All I know is how to search for Andy. That’s all I’ve done for years. And I could change my search terms, scour the web for the man who killed him instead. But I won’t find him on the internet, will I? Chances are, I’ll find Andy’s murderer here. On Blackburn Island. A place that has always been filled with people who want us gone.