The doorbell won’t stop ringing. I try to block it out, burrowing deeper into my beanbag chair, but it shrieks through the air, cutting through my walls. I curl up tighter, fetal and aching.
It’s been a day since those women stood in our driveway, but now, from the sound of it, people have gotten bolder. Charlie’s voice booms up the stairs—“Well, hello!”—every time he opens the door, and it makes my head, already pounding from a second night of too many tears, feel like it’s splitting wide open.
Another chime rings out, quieter than the bell downstairs, and it takes me a moment to recognize it as the sound of a text. I fumble for my phone, lost in a fold of the beanbag chair, and when I finally find it, I stare at a message from Greta.
Just checking in. Here whenever you need me. Police are saying there’s no apparent connection between the Blackburn killings and Andy’s death, but it’s hard not to go there, right? Let me know if you want my help, or a blueberry muffin, and I’ll be on the next ferry.
I know what she means by help. I can imagine her, ravenously reading the news, typing notes into her “Thoughts & Theories” document, which has grown a hundred pages since I met her. I don’t doubt she wants to be here for me, that she’s genuine in her offer of support. But I know a part of her must be tingling at the knowledge of another murder on Blackburn Island. It’s the same part of her that showed me, one Halloween, a picture she’d found in which someone had dressed as a Blackburn Killer victim. They were wearing a light blue—not ice-blue—dress, and they were grinning like a jack-o’-lantern, pointing to the cursive B they’d drawn on their ankle. People are sick, Greta said, but her eyes, bright and gleaming, lingered on the photo.
I don’t want that for Andy. For him to be a thought or theory in someone’s obsession with a killer—even if Greta’s right: it is hard not to go there.
I shove the phone into my pocket. Later. I’ll find words for Greta later. Right now, I need something for my headache—ibuprofen, or a sleeping pill even, something to knock me into a state of blank unconsciousness.
The doorbell rings again before I make it down the stairs. I hover on the landing as Charlie, unaware of my presence, arranges his face into a look of cheerfulness and thrusts open the door. “Well, hello!”
From here, I can’t see who’s on the other side, but I watch as Charlie receives a casserole dish covered in aluminum foil.
“Thank you so much,” he says, cradling it like a baby. “That’s incredibly kind of you. My mother’s all but banned us from the kitchen while she auditions for America’s Next Top Cookie Chef, so this is much appreciated.”
There’s a murmur I can’t make out as the casserole bringer replies.
“No, no, it wasn’t like that,” Charlie says, “but have you heard about the memorial we’re holding? I think you’ll find that all your questions will be answered then.”
He runs through the details of his grotesque museum, words I’m already tired of hearing—artifacts, exhibits—before thanking the visitor again, smiling and unhurried. When he closes the door, his smile slips off his face and he puts the casserole on top of the credenza, where, I see now, others have already been placed.
He looks up as I walk down the stairs. “It’s like a food bank in here,” he says.
“Why are you even answering?” I ask. “You know they just want to gawk.”
Charlie studies my face as I reach the first floor. “Your eyes are puffy,” he says, lip curled in distaste. “I have a cream for that, you know. Remind me later to give it to you.”
He heads toward the living room, but he’s stopped midstep by the bell once again. He tries to nudge me aside as he lurches for the knob.
“Hey.” I slap a palm against the door. “You don’t have to answer it.”
Charlie pinches his lips together, looking at my hand as if it’s a spider splayed on the wood. Then he plucks it off.
“Of course I do,” he says. “Don’t you get it? The PR team is coming to us. They’ll spread the word to the rest of the island and we won’t have to lift a finger. Well, except to…” He nods toward the casserole dishes on the credenza. “Why don’t you go deal with those? And maybe check on Mom? I think I smell burning again.”
I smell burning, too. Last night, Mom thrust a pan of too-dark cookies at us. “Snickerdoodles!” she proclaimed proudly. But Tate was the only person to take one, nibbling politely at its crispy edges.
Again, the bell, piercing and insistent, and when Charlie opens the door, it’s to a trio of girls, each one ponytailed and smiling.
“Well, hello!” he says, and then, turning to wink at me, “No casserole?”
“What?” One of them laughs. “No, we’re, uh… Is Tate Lighthouse here?”
Charlie crosses his arms over his chest. “Tate Lighthouse,” he repeats, as if the name is unfamiliar. “You don’t look like islanders.”
And they’re not. I know it before the one in front responds. They’re tourists, lured by Tate’s Instagram toward an island with nothing to offer them. No cutesy shops. No soft, sandy beaches that, even in November, might provide a relaxing place to stroll. All that’s here—all they care about being here—are the dark, jagged rocks on which the Blackburn Killer’s victims were found.
“We go to University of Rhode Island,” the girl chirps. “We read online that… Sorry, is Tate here? We figured she’d be back.”
Charlie chuckles, clearly entertained. “You know my sister?”
“Your sister. Wow.” She turns to her two friends and the three of them laugh, nervous but giddy. “No, sorry—not personally, but—”
“Tate!” Charlie yells up the stairs. I jump at his sudden interruption. “You have visitors!”
A few seconds of silence, then footsteps from above, followed by the creak of a door. When Tate descends the stairs, I’m surprised to see her looking disheveled. Well—her version of disheveled, anyway: a smudge of mascara beneath one eye, hair more limp than wavy. Even her lavender sweater looks rumpled.
“Friends of yours,” Charlie says, opening the door wider to reveal the three suddenly bashful girls.
“No, no,” the girl in front says. “God, we wish, but”—she blurts out a giggle—“No. We’re just really big fans, and we… we heard about your brother.” She sobers, mouth flattening. “We’re really sorry.”
The girls’ eyes are stapled to Tate, their sympathy directed only at her. And I don’t need strangers and gawkers to tell me they’re sorry, but it would be nice, maybe, to get some acknowledgment—that the person here with the biggest hole in them is me.
“Thank you,” Tate says, her lashes lowered, appearing more demure than I know her to be. “That’s really kind of you.”
“Oh, you’re welcome!” the girl says. “And we were wondering”—she looks back at her friends, who reply with the tiniest nods—“could we get a selfie with you?”
“Oh,” Tate says. She edges toward Charlie, who quickly steps in.
“Sorry, no,” he says. “She’s not really dressed to impress right now, as you can see. Yuck, right? She hardly slept last night. She’s been working ’round the clock on a new diorama.”
The girls, who’d slumped a little at Charlie’s refusal, perk back up.
“Really?” two of them say in unison.
“Can we… can we see it?” the other one asks—and though I’ve never interacted with Blackburn’s tourists before, it’s clear these girls feel they have as much a right to our lives as the residents do. My skin crawls with their audacity, their fervor.
“Absolutely!” Charlie says, closing the door just a little, concealing Tate as she tiptoes back up the stairs. “My sister will be debuting it in four days, at three o’clock, at an event we’re calling the Lighthouse Memorial Museum. LMM, for those acronym lovers among us.” He points to one of the girls’ sweatshirts, where URI is stitched across the chest. The tourists giggle again.
“We’ll see you there?” Charlie asks.
They nod, seemingly starstruck at the thought.
“Great,” Charlie says. “See you soon. Tell your friends!”
The second he shuts the door, his grin goes slack. Without his theatrical brightness, he’s visibly tired. His sweater hangs off his shoulders, too big on his lanky frame.
“Well,” he says, looking with heavy eyelids toward the boxes he’s piled in the living room, “back to work.”
“Charlie, why are you doing this?”
“I told you,” he says, weary and annoyed. “We’re setting the record straight, proving to the islanders that we’re not the monsters they think we are. We’re just…”—the last word comes out on a sigh—“people.”
“But those weren’t islanders. They were tourists.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose like he, too, is battling a headache. “Things have changed since we lived here, Dolls. The tourists basically are the islanders. They come for the stories of the Blackburn Killer, and by the time they leave, they’ve heard all those rumors about us; they’re tweeting about Murder Mansion before the ferry’s even docked.” He looks at me, the whites of his eyes zigzagged with red. “That’s not the legacy Andy would have wanted for us.” He clears his throat, gaze sinking toward his feet. “Neither would Dad.”
I stand up straighter, surprised to hear him mention Dad. I know he’s why we came here to begin with, but when there’s a hole blown open inside you, bubbling with acid at the edges, burning through you more and more each moment, it’s hard to notice the pain of a paper cut. And honestly, I have no idea what Dad would have wanted for us. By his own admission, he didn’t know what to do with girls; Tate and I weren’t invited to be part of his legacy.
“Sorry,” I say, “I know you—”
I’m cut off by a noise at the door—a knock this time instead of the bell—and it’s as if someone’s pulled a string at Charlie’s back; he lights up and breaks into motion.
“Well, hello!” he says, tearing open the door.
“Hi,” a voice says, husky and unsure.
“Can I help you?” Charlie prompts.
I crane my neck over his shoulder to find Ruby Decker standing on the porch. The moment she sees me, a wrinkle in her forehead relaxes. “Hi,” she says again.
Charlie looks back and forth between the two of us. “This a friend of yours, Dolls?”
He doesn’t recognize her. Which makes sense. She would have been only seven when he left at eighteen, and I don’t remember her being the Watcher until Andy and I were ten.
“This is Ruby,” I tell him, “Lyle Decker’s granddaughter.”
“Hello, Lyle Decker’s granddaughter. How can we help you?”
Ruby ignores Charlie, gaze pointed at me. “I remembered something.”
“You remembered something,” Charlie repeats. “How satisfyingly specific. Would you care to—”
“Come in,” I say, and Ruby slips through the door, not even glancing at Charlie.
“Sure, yeah, come inside,” he says. “Oh, and you’ve tracked some dirt in on the floor, that’s good. I wanted the house to be clean for the LMM, but this is better.”
He crosses his arms, leering at Ruby, who peers up at him with wide, unblinking eyes. “What?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “We can talk upstairs.”
“What’s the LMM?” she asks, following behind me, but when I turn to answer her, I see she’s already forgotten the question. She’s studying the photographs along the staircase, mouth ajar.
“Andy told me about these,” she says, so reverentially, like she’s finally seeing a masterpiece in person she’d previously only read about in a textbook. She leans toward one in particular, where Mom’s parents smile in front of a wall of mounted guns, arms stretched wide as if in awe of their company’s success: all of this is ours.
It’s a photo I’ve often wondered about, given that Mom hates to even think of her parents’ work. After she told us the most chilling detail of their murder—that the gun that killed them had been one they’d manufactured—she never let us ask about it again. I don’t want anyone to think, she said firmly whenever we tried, that because they created something that killed so many people, it was karma that they were killed by that thing in return.
But wasn’t this picture just a reminder of that, with the guns lurking behind them, almost taunting their proud, carefree smiles? Sometimes I think Mom overcompensates, that maybe she’s the one who believes their deaths were karma, and the guilt about that is what keeps her insisting that victims of murder must be honored.
At the bottom of the stairs, Charlie watches us, interest and irritation battling on his face. A few moments pass before he plods off toward the living room. “Well, hello there!” he says to one of the boxes.
“Come on,” I tell Ruby, and she trails me reluctantly to the second floor.
“Which one is Andy’s room?” she asks, following me down the hall.
I nod toward a closed door near mine. Ever since I arrived, I’ve tried not to look at it, and now, even just gesturing to it sends a jolt of pain ricocheting through me. What ghosts are trapped inside that room? What dust of Andy and me? I stop abruptly, causing Ruby to crash into me from behind.
“Whoa,” she says. “Are you okay?”
My lungs are hot and tight. “Sorry,” I manage, and I lead her toward my room, turning my face from Andy’s.
After we enter, I close the door behind us and make my way to the bed. The old mattress groans as I sit, and if Ruby’s notices the tissues littered across my blankets, she doesn’t mention them. Instead, she walks toward the window near the corner of the room, hunches down, and rubs her hand along the wall.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
Without answering, she approaches the window closest to me, mere feet from the bed, and repeats the hunching and rubbing until her fingers find the grooves Andy carved into the wall.
“Here it is,” she says, smiling at me. “I’ve always wanted to see it.”
And for a moment, it feels like I’m breathing through a straw, like I’m only allowed a sip of air.
“He told you he carved his name here?” I ask.
She nods, tracing the letters of his name, letters I stared at for years while I waited for him to come home.
“Why?” I say.
She looks at me, lifts one shoulder and drops it. “He told me lots of stories about you.”
It’s not the answer I was expecting. My eyes sting with a warning, and I reach for one of the tissues on my bed.
Ruby stands from her crouching position, scanning the rest of the room. There isn’t much here. My bed. An old dresser. A desk with a drawer that’s always jammed. The beanbag chair that’s identical to Andy’s. He’d often drag his into my room, and we’d flop onto the chairs in sync, waving our arms and legs to make “bean angels.” With Andy right next door, spending as much time in my room as he did in his, I never felt the need to adorn my walls with pictures or to pretty the hardwood floor with a rug. For years, Andy and I filled the room with laughter, with stories, with silence we sometimes wrapped ourselves in like a blanket—and afterward, when he was gone, the emptiness felt like a promise: he’d come back for me; he’d never leave me so unfinished.
“You and I could be friends, you know,” Ruby says. “Like Andy and I were. I’d really like that. It gets so lonely here, up on this island.”
She stares at me so intensely I have to look away.
“I don’t live here anymore,” I say toward the wall. “I’m leaving as soon as I know what happened to Andy. You said you remembered something. What was it?”
“I could visit you,” she pushes. “Wherever you live. Grandpa will be dead soon anyway.”
My eyes slingshot back toward her face. “Whoa. That’s—”
“It’s just the truth. He’s been sick for so long—basically as long as Andy’s been gone—and that’s felt like forever to me. Haven’t the last ten years felt like forever to you?”
When I don’t respond, she takes a step forward.
“So I’ve been thinking: when Grandpa does die, it’s time for me to move on. Leave the island like I always wanted. I’ll sell the house, and… maybe I could stay with you for a while.”
She moves even closer, her thigh touching the edge of the bed.
“My place is tiny,” I tell her, scooting back an inch.
“That’s okay. I don’t take up much space.”
“No, it’s… barely bigger than this room.”
“Well, we could always get a new place. Something we pick out together. We could go to…” She trails off, examining my face. “Oh,” she says. “I’m freaking you out.” She slumps onto the bed, plunks her elbows on her knees, her forehead on the heels of her hands. “Andy always told me I come on a little strong. And I don’t mean to, I never…” She lifts her head to look at me. “I’m just nervous I won’t have anyone, once Grandpa goes. It would be nice to have a friend to live with. After.”
Tears shine in the corners of her eyes, threatening to spill.
“You don’t even know me,” I say.
“But I knew your brother.”
As if knowing Andy is the same as knowing me. Which, maybe it is, but still: how bold of her to assume she knew him that well in the first place. So they hung out sometimes. So they talked and wrote down silly phrases. What bean angels did the two of them ever make? Where in her room did he sign his name?
Shaking my head, I stand from the bed and take a step back, putting some distance between us. “What did you remember, Ruby?”
She looks at her hands, knotted together in her lap, and nods as she sighs. It’s as if she was expecting my impatience, but is still disappointed to hear it.
“It was a week before Andy… died,” she begins. “We were supposed to meet up the next night; that’s what we’d planned, anyway—but I was too excited to see him.” She shrugs. “So I decided to watch your house.”
She stands up and leans against the wall and peers through the sheer curtain hanging over the window.
“Andy’s room didn’t have any curtains like this,” she says, skimming her fingers along the fabric. “And since it faced the backyard, I could see in a bit, whenever the light was on.”
I swallow as she caresses the curtain. It isn’t lost on me that she asked which room was Andy’s, but she seems to have already known.
“But his window was dark that night,” she says, shooting a glance my way. “And it seemed strange to me. I’d started watching around eleven thirty, and I stayed there, hoping I’d catch a glimpse of him when he got ready for bed. But the room just kept being dark.”
She pulls one end of the curtain aside, staring out the glass. “I waited for so long. And it was hours—the middle of the night, really—before I saw anything at all.”
My heart thrusts against my ribs. “What did you see?”
“Your groundskeeper,” she says.
“Fritz? In the middle of the night? That can’t be right.”
My entire childhood, Fritz always left at six p.m. on the dot. He’d take the last ferry back to the mainland, head off to a home I still find difficult to picture. I glimpsed him often, over the last seven years, as I watched the ferry from my window, and it took seeing him in that context, off Blackburn Island, to realize I knew nothing of his life beyond our house.
“He was heading toward the shed,” Ruby says, ignoring my disbelief, “and he was carrying something—something large and… and heavy, it seemed. Something in a big, black bag. And then I—”
“What makes you think it was Fritz? It would’ve been dark, right? Difficult to see clearly?”
She gives a dismissive wave, annoyed to be interrupted. “His height,” she says. “His build. The way he was kind of”—she lurches across the floor a few feet, mimicking Fritz’s walk—“staggering. His limp is easy to recognize. Even at night.”
“Okay, but—”
“And then,” she says sharply, eyes latched to mine as she walks backward, returning to the window, “I saw Andy.” She leans against the wall. “He was creeping behind your groundskeeper—behind Fritz—like he was secretly following him. He was walking so slowly, so carefully, his feet didn’t make a sound.”
She angles her body to face the window again. “Fritz went into his shed. And a minute or so later—so quiet, so careful—Andy did, too.”
Andy in Fritz’s shed? I can’t imagine that. The shed has always been off-limits. There’s too much that’s too sharp in there, Fritz told us. It’s a dangerous place for kids like you—even though he was fine with Andy leaning his own too-sharp ax against the exterior. I was always so curious about that shed, curious about the part of Fritz that was closed off to us when the rest of him was wide open—but Andy never cared. When I asked what he thought was inside it, he said, Something unnatural, I’m sure.
“Could you see what they were doing in there—through the windows or anything?”
“Oh no,” Ruby says, shaking her head. “I didn’t get close enough for that. Grandpa always told me to stay away from the shed.”
“From… from our shed?” I frown at the echo of Fritz’s warnings.
“Yeah, it was one of his rules. He caught me near it one time when I was, like, five. I’d wandered off into the woods, I guess. And when he found me there, he got so mad. And it just became this thing after that: Don’t go anywhere near the Lighthouses’ shed.”
“But why?” I ask. Besides the obvious reason—people shouldn’t trespass—I can’t imagine why Lyle Decker would care about our shed.
Ruby shrugs. “I don’t know. Just Grandpa being Grandpa. He was always telling me where I could and couldn’t go.”
“Okay, well— What happened after,” I press, “when Andy and Fritz came out of the shed?”
“I never saw them come out. They were in there for so long, and it had already been so late to begin with, that I went back home. I was worried Grandpa might wake up and check on me, which he used to do a lot. But I asked Andy, the next day, what he’d been doing in the shed, and he denied it even happened.”
She lifts her hand, touches the space right over her heart, and begins to pick at her shirt. Squeezing and plucking—the same thing she was doing yesterday: a nervous tic, perhaps.
But why is she nervous?
“He got pretty mean about it,” she says, “insisting I was seeing things. So I dropped it. He was in such a mood after that—for days. I didn’t want to upset him even more.”
“So… wait. This happened a week before Andy…?”
She nods.
Cold coils through me. Is this why he was so wound up, the week before our birthday? I remember how taut he seemed, his back rigid at the dinner table, his eyes squinting and skittish. Did something happen in the shed to set him off? And why didn’t he tell me he went inside?
Without warning, Ruby whips her head my way. “But it was probably nothing, right?” she says, suddenly dismissive of this story she crossed the woods to tell me. “It wasn’t like your groundskeeper was breaking in somewhere he shouldn’t have been. I mean, the shed, it’s… it’s his shed. He has all sorts of reasons to go in there. No matter the hour, right? So maybe something was broken and needed to be fixed really fast. And maybe… maybe Andy wasn’t following Fritz or sneaking up on him, like it seemed; maybe he was just helping him with something. Or maybe…”
I stop hearing her. I see her mouth moving, releasing reasons into the air, but I’m snagged on the fact that pricked me the moment she mentioned the middle of the night.
Even two days ago, during the most extraordinary of circumstances, when Fritz dug up bones in our woods, he asked the police if they could finish questioning him by his “usual departure time,” so he wouldn’t get stuck on the island. Because Fritz has always left—always, always, always left—promptly at six p.m.
So why would he have still been here in the middle of the night?
Or if he left our house at six as usual, why didn’t he get on the ferry? Why did he return after dark?