I follow Ruby out. Part of me wants to make sure she actually leaves, that she doesn’t crouch between trees, waiting for us to walk by the windows and perform our misery for her. The rest of me is on a mission: find Fritz.
From the side yard, I watch Ruby amble through the woods in the back—slowgoing, but going nonetheless. Then I scan the landscaping out front, the evergreen hedges, the dormant rhododendrons, the hydrangeas whose petals are dead. I don’t see Fritz, or any of his tools, anywhere. I’m about to turn toward the backyard when a voice calls out to me.
“Hey.”
I don’t recognize the boy who’s climbing over the crest in our driveway. He looks about eleven or twelve, so he would have been a toddler when I lived here, if he’s even an islander at all.
“Hi…?” I say.
He juts a chin toward the house. “My mom says they found a body in your backyard.” I hear snickering behind him, and he glances down the driveway toward a part hidden from me by the pavement’s curve. “Can I see?”
“Yeah, can we see?” another voice, bodiless as a ghost, pipes up.
More snickering. A whisper of Murder Mansion carried on the wind.
“My brother is dead,” I tell him, and I wish my voice didn’t quiver.
The boy checks over his shoulder again before taking a step forward, a mean little smile warping his face. “Isn’t that, like, a party for you guys?”
I hesitate only a moment before running toward him, a growl rising up from somewhere in my body, an animal part of me I didn’t know I had. I make it just a few yards before the boy’s eyes widen. “Go! Go!” he yells to his friends, his sneakers already slapping against the pavement.
In the quiet that follows, I pant out the energy that surged through me like electricity. Boys like that, their gossiping parents—those are the people Charlie would have us open our house to. And if he wants to play docent to our dad’s death, our brother’s murder, the parts of our childhood that are none of their business, then fine—but I don’t want to be here to see it.
I have to find out what happened to Andy. Then I have to leave this place for good.
But first, I need to talk to Fritz. I need to know what happened in the shed a week before our birthday, because there’s a rotten, slithering thing in my gut telling me it’s somehow connected to that ax in Andy’s skull. And I need to disprove that theory. Because wouldn’t it mean that Fritz is connected too?
The backyard is empty when I round the corner of the house. Once again, no Fritz, no tools. Just a handful of leaves tumbling across the grass. As I step into the woods, I see the police tape, a yellow smudge bouncing in the breeze, and I force myself to focus on other things. The trees with scars from Andy’s ax. The nearly naked branches.
Fritz’s shed.
Its brick walls are as dirty as I remember. Ivy hugs the corners, threatening to fill in all four sides, transform this shed into a living thing. I asked Fritz once why he didn’t scrape the ivy off—or do whatever it is that keeps climbing plants at bay. Who am I to take away its home? he had answered, and he’d stroked the side of the shed like it was a pet in need of soothing.
“Fritz?” I call from just outside. Only the wind answers back. As I open the door, its hinges creak, and within the sound, I hear an old warning: You’re not supposed to be here.
Inside, shadows splay against the walls, dowsing the equipment in darkness. I blink a few times, letting my eyes adjust, and when I see that Fritz isn’t here, I almost turn to leave.
But something about Ruby’s story keeps my feet on the floor. She said Andy seemed to be following Fritz in secret, trying to remain unseen. But this shed is only so big; I can stand in its center and see every corner, every scrap of unused space. Fritz’s equipment is lined up neat and tidy along the perimeter of the room, leaving the middle of the floor, a large square covered in gray outdoor carpeting, wide open. So if Andy really was sneaking behind Fritz that night, how would he have remained undetected once he entered the shed?
Feeling like a trespasser, I study the unfamiliar space. I run my palm along the handle of the push mower, touch a leaf still stuck in the tines of a rake. From the wooden counter along the back wall, I pick up bottles of chemicals and packets of seeds. I have no idea what I’m looking for, but my fingers itch to search.
Crouching beneath the counter, I pull out a bucket, rummage through the gardening gloves inside it, then push it back in place. When I reach for another one, I tug too hard and tip the bucket over. Hundreds of nails spill out.
“Shit,” I breathe.
I sweep up the nails with my hands. Some have scattered, as far as the middle of the carpet, and as I crawl toward them, something jabs into my knee. I lift up my leg, expecting to find a nail on the floor beneath it, but all that’s there is a patch of bare carpet. Except—there’s a bulge in it, a few inches long, unnoticeable unless you’re down this close. I run my hand along it and feel something hard beneath the rug.
It could be anything. A skinny rock. A pencil nub. More than likely, it’s nothing worth discovering. But that itch in my fingers—it has me reaching for the corner of the carpet, and now I’m pulling at the edge, which resists my grip. I yank harder until it slowly peels away, making a ripping sound as it goes.
There’s some kind of tape on the bottom, keeping it from coming free. But now I stand and jerk my arms backward and a bigger section of the carpet pulls up. I examine the uncovered floor, part of me expecting that skinny rock, or that pencil nub. But what I find instead is a hinge.
A trapdoor.
My fingers latch around its handle, a metal ring in a recessed hole. I lift the ring so it swings outward, and I give it a good pull.
The door doesn’t budge.
Above the handle, there’s a keyhole, the kind for an old skeleton key. It glares at me defiantly, a dark unblinking eye.
I yank on the handle again, with more force this time, as if the problem is my strength and not the fact that the door is locked.
What could be down there? What could Fritz need to lock away, then cover over with a carpet? I think of his warnings about this shed: There’s too much that’s too sharp in there. It’s a dangerous place for kids like you. Only, looking around again, I see that everything dangerous—pruning shears, pointed trowels, an ax that isn’t Andy’s—hangs from hooks on the wall, too high for a child to reach.
I return my attention to the handle. Was this door the real reason Fritz told us to keep out?
And when Ruby saw him carrying something through the woods that night—something in a big, black bag—is this where he brought it, to the space beneath the floor?
And did Andy, creeping behind him, see something he shouldn’t have? Something that rattled him, darkened his mood, turned him sleepless and fidgety until the night he was killed?
As I stare at the door, the lock stares back, daring me to find its key.
“Do you know there’s a trapdoor in the shed?”
Mom spins around at the sound of my voice. She’s at the kitchen sink, wiping flour off her face, and the room smells like vanilla and char—a meager improvement from just the char. Cooling on the stove is a pan of peanut butter cookies, but I only identify them as such from the jar of Jif on the counter.
“Dahlia!” Mom says. “Here, have one!”
She picks up a cookie with a spatula and holds it toward my mouth.
“No, I’m—” She pushes it closer. “I’m fine, just—”
“No one’s eating my cookies,” she pouts, and she looks so dejected, so unlike the woman who staged crime scenes in the victim room, stretching out on the floor with her feet together, hand on her stomach—the exact position in which Elva Zona Heaster was found.
“I know they’re a little… dark,” she continues. “But I’m getting better, I swear.”
“Why don’t you take a break?” I suggest. “You’ve been baking nonstop.”
“I don’t need a break,” Mom snaps, and the cookie drops to the floor. We look at it there, split into three chunks. Mom closes her eyes and takes a slow breath.
“I don’t need a break,” she repeats, calmer now. “I want to do this for you. You’re all going through so much. You’ve lost your father, your—” She thrusts out her hand to cup my face. Instinctively, I back away, but she catches my cheek in time. “Andy!” she continues. “Oh, Dahlia, you’ve lost Andy.”
The stroke of her thumb feels like a scrape.
“So have you,” I say.
She nods, face pinched, as if she’s concentrating on holding something in. Tears, maybe. Or words.
“Yes,” she says after a moment, hand slipping from my face. “Yes, I lost him, too.”
She inhales shakily and points her gaze away from me. “I just want to do something to comfort my children. I’ve never made you cookies before. What kind of life is that? Going without cookies from your mother. My mother made me cookies all the time, and I…”
Her lower lip trembles, but she sinks her teeth into it, biting hard.
“Hey,” I say, “we did all right. And anyway, Andy and I were more into pie.”
I mean to make her smile, but instead, she lifts her eyes to mine, horrified.
“I don’t know how to make pie,” she says. “I can barely make these goddamn cookies!”
I flinch in surprise. I’ve never heard her curse.
Andy was the one to teach me swear words, which he learned while hunting with Dad. He said “fuck” when the deer got away, Andy relayed one day. And he warned me not to repeat it. Especially around Mom.
Fuck, I said quietly, cross-legged on my bed.
Fuck, Andy parroted. He shifted his body so it mirrored my own.
Fuck, we said together, clapping hands over our mouths, catching the laughter that frothed from our lips.
Now I blink. I do it again and again—until I don’t see him in front of me anymore, until there’s only Mom, and the kitchen, and this gutting absence that will never be gone.
“I was kidding,” I say. “Cookies are great. I’m just not hungry right now.”
Mom pushes strands of brown hair back toward her floppy ponytail. “Oh,” she says. “Well, I’ve been putting them in Tupperware when they’re done. You can have your pick, once you’re ready.”
“Thanks.” I attempt a smile. “But— Did you hear my question when I came in? About the trapdoor?”
Mom turns back to the stove, using the spatula to transfer the cookies to a cooling rack. “A trapdoor? Where?”
“In Fritz’s shed. Under the carpet.”
“Oh,” she says. “That.” She lifts another cookie and slides it into place with the rest.
“What’s it lead to?” I ask.
“Just a little basement area. My family used to use it for storage. But the shed’s been Fritz’s domain for decades now, basically since I was a teenager. I imagine it’s still just storage. Old tools and such.”
“Do you have a key for it?” I ask. Because her answer doesn’t satisfy me. If Andy had seen Fritz with old tools and such, it wouldn’t have left him so unsettled.
She tilts her head, considering. “I don’t know,” she says again. “It’s possible your father made a copy of Fritz’s—but I doubt it. It’s Fritz’s space. We’ve always trusted him to use it right.”
“Where is Fritz? I didn’t see him outside.”
“Oh.” Mom waves a hand through the air, casually dismissing his absence. “He needed some time off after—” Her hand jerks to a stop. “After the other day,” she finishes a moment later. “He’s understandably shaken.”
“When will he be back?”
“I’m not sure. I told him to take all the time he needs. But you know Fritz. He never stays away for long.”
I nod. Even on days he designated for time off, we’d see him sometimes, lumbering around our lawn. All this sun, he explained once, pointing toward a hot August sky. I was worried about the peonies.
“Why are you so curious about the trapdoor?” Mom asks. She’s set her spatula down, and now she’s regarding me with a tilt of her head.
I respond to her question with another. “Are you sure you don’t have the key?”
She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
It seems there’s a lot you don’t know. I hear Elijah’s words, gently accusing me of something, when he last brought up the note.
“What about Andy’s note?” I try, and Mom startles a little, her lips parting. After a moment, she closes her mouth, then turns away to grab a binder from the counter behind her. She opens it to a seemingly random page, running her finger down a handwritten recipe.
“I found my mother’s baking book,” she says quietly. “So now I can make those raspberry cookies.”
“Mom,” I say. She doesn’t turn back to face me, but her finger goes still. “Andy’s note. Do you know where it went? Elijah Kraft thinks it might be evidence. That whoever did this to Andy”—even from behind, I see Mom wince—“might have written it to make us think he ran away.”
“I don’t have it,” she mumbles. “I already told him that.”
“Well, somebody must. Do you think maybe Dad—”
“I don’t know!” she cries, spinning around. “Don’t you think I wish I knew? I never saw it after that day. It just— The note just disappeared!”
Tears overwhelm her eyes, and she clears them away with furious blinks. Then she smiles, a ghastly slash of teeth across her face.
“Now, please,” she says. “Let me make these cookies for you. Please, Dahlia. I have to.”
Mom’s unraveling. And she’s wrong, too. The note has to be somewhere. It didn’t just disappear into thin air, unwriting Andy’s—or the killer’s—words. That terrible morning, we passed it around, hand to hand to hand, and someone had to be the last to hold it. And then what did they do—just toss it in the trash?
Maybe, actually. It fits with the rest of my family’s carelessness, the way they treated Andy’s absence like it wasn’t worthy of concern. But I can’t bring myself to imagine it: this solid piece of evidence, gone, destroyed. Long since decomposed.
I try Charlie next. I find him in the living room, kneeling in front of the coffee table, writing with black Sharpie on a small piece of white cardboard. He’s got another Sharpie gripped between his teeth, and he squints in concentration.
The room is a mess. Empty boxes are tossed into one corner, heaped into crooked towers, and there are piles of stuff—candles, DVDs, papers, portraits I recognize as ones taken from the victim room—spread throughout the space. I step over a heap of murder documentaries and find myself inches away from a collection of guns—five or six, at least, stacked together like logs in a fire. I read the card that Charlie has placed beside it: Daniel Lighthouse’s Hunting Rifles.
“What is this?” I ask.
Charlie cranes his neck to see past the piles and down at my feet. Speaking around the Sharpie in his mouth, he says, “An exhibit.”
“You’re displaying Dad’s guns?”
He pulls the marker from between his teeth. “That’s usually what an exhibit means, yes.”
Mom will hate that. She always turned away from Dad’s rifles, stung by the sharp reminder of her parents’ deaths.
“But why?” I ask. “I thought the whole point was to have the islanders see us as humans instead of… violent and dangerous.”
“That’s right,” Charlie says. “And what’s more human than killing animals for sport? Or, in our case, for dinner?” He smiles at me, but when I don’t return his grin, he leans back against the couch and huffs. “Don’t tell me you’re some kind of vegetarian or something.” I cross my arms and don’t respond. “Oh god. Vegan?”
“No. Stop. I’m not anything. I just think you could be doing something a lot more useful with your time.”
“Like what? Baking cookies?”
“Like helping me figure out who murdered my brother.”
Charlie’s smile disintegrates. “He was my brother, too,” he says, voice cold. “And that’s the police’s job.”
“Then help them figure it out. They’re looking for Andy’s note, you know.”
Charlie twirls his Sharpie between his fingers. “I’m aware.”
“So? Do you know where it is?”
“I do not.”
“How is that possible? How can no one know?”
Charlie shrugs, hunching over the coffee table again. He squints at a piece of cardboard, holding it down at one edge as he drags the marker across it.
Portrait of Catherine Susan “Kitty” Genovese, he writes, painted by Tate Lighthouse, age fourteen.
And now, beneath those words, he’s drawing a line, about three inches long, and leaving an inch-wide space before adding a dot. It looks like a sideways lowercase i. Dropping my eyes toward the card for Dad’s guns, I see the same mark.
“What is that?” I ask.
“What’s what?”
“That.” I point toward the card beneath his fingers. “That weird i thing you’re doing.”
He stares at the card, brow furrowed, as if seeing the mark for the first time. “It’s not an i.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s… I don’t know, you’ve never seen it before? Tate calls it my trademark flair. It’s just what I do when I write things. Rent checks, grocery lists, whatever.” He shrugs. “Everything’s boring without it.”
At another moment, it might have struck me as sad—how I know Charlie so little that I don’t even recognize something he considers to be his “trademark flair.” But this is a moment too close to that other one: He was my brother, too. And that moment has only underscored how quickly Charlie left, so soon after we discovered that Andy was gone. I’ve got an audition, he said to me, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: Brutus in Julius Caesar. Andy will turn up, Dolls. Or else he won’t, and that’s the way he wanted it. But I’ve got to go for now.
Only it wasn’t for now; it was forever.
I remember thinking how appropriate the role was: Brutus—the man who stabbed in the back someone so close to him that his name became synonymous with betrayal. (I only knew the play in the first place because of the gruesomeness of Caesar’s murder; even the literature Mom taught us always ended with somebody lying in their own blood.) And though I know, now, that there’s nothing Charlie could have done, it still boils me up inside to recall how quickly he left.
He looks up at me, brows raised. “Is there something else I can help you with?”
“Maybe,” I say, tamping down my bitterness. “You know Fritz’s shed?”
“The thing that’s been on our property our entire lives?” Charlie asks, picking up another piece of cardboard and holding his Sharpie above it. “Nope, never seen it. What’s it like?”
“There’s a trapdoor inside it,” I say, ignoring his sarcasm. “Under the carpet. Do you know anything about that?”
He straightens.
“A trapdoor? No. But I’ve never been inside the shed. Don’t you remember it wasn’t allowed?” He rolls his eyes before continuing. “Why do you care about a trapdoor?”
“Ruby Decker said she saw Fritz and Andy go inside the shed in the middle of the night, about a week before Andy was murdered.”
“The middle of the night?” Charlie glares at his cardboard. “That can’t be right; Fritz—”
“Always leaves at six, I know. And when I went to ask him about it, he wasn’t in the shed, and I ended up finding the trapdoor. Which is locked, of course. And Mom isn’t sure what’s down there, but she said it’s like a basement or something.”
Charlie leans against the couch again, shrugging as he crosses his arms. “So? What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking, that’s the problem. But maybe Fritz is keeping something down there, something… illegal? Maybe he’s growing drugs! And maybe Andy found out by following him one night, and Fritz… Fritz…”
“… killed our brother?” he finishes for me. “To protect his drugs? Are we talking about the same Fritz here? The guy who worships at the altar of spiderwebs? The guy who sings to grass to make it grow?” He chuckles. “Actually, maybe Fritz has been on drugs this whole time. It would explain a lot.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“I’m sure that Fritz would agree! You’re all but accusing him of having a grow room under the shed and murdering a kid so… what? Dad never found out? You’re grasping at straws, Dolls. But, hey, if you’re so worked up about this door, why don’t you go ask Fritz to unlock it for you?”
“He isn’t here right now. And Mom doesn’t know where the key is.”
“Well, see? There you go.”
“There I go, what?”
“Dahlia, I need to concentrate. The LMM is only four days away, and I can’t have you buzzing around me like this with theories about how the mildest, meekest man in the world might have axed our br—”
He stops the second he looks at me. And I guess I’m grateful—that he has enough kindness in him to leave that image incomplete.
“Sorry,” he says, shifting his eyes back toward the cardboard. “Just let it go, Dolls, okay? You’re going to make yourself sick.”
He lifts his hand to continue writing. And he’s right, about one thing at least. It doesn’t make sense, the idea of Fritz—gentle, sweet, easygoing Fritz—killing someone he’d only ever been kind to before.
But still—
“I’m going to find that key,” I announce.