“I have some news.”
The phone is pressed between my pillow and ear, and even as Greta speaks, I feel myself tugged toward sleep. Since Mom’s confession yesterday, I’ve been incurably drowsy, as if a sedative swirls in my bloodstream, too potent to resist. And I don’t want to resist it, because if I do, I’ll have to be awake in this unnerving truth: for all our lives, our mother lied to us as effortlessly as dreaming.
I hear the floorboards creak in Andy’s room. It’s quick, just a splinter of sound, but as soon as it happens, my stomach sours. It’s not the creak itself, achingly familiar, reaching me through the wall we shared; it’s that I don’t imagine, even for a second, that it might be him. Already I’m growing used to Andy’s absence, my heart settling like a house around the empty space he’s left.
“Dahlia? Are you there?”
“Mmm,” I mumble.
“I found some info on Lyle.”
I sit up in bed, blankets pooling around my waist, cool air rushing in to replace their warmth. “What is it?”
“Well,” Greta starts, “it’s a couple things. First, you know me: I went down some rabbit holes—but I ended up getting my hands on his high school yearbook. Apparently, he grew up here, not on the island.”
“Okay?” That isn’t particularly newsworthy. Many of the islanders grew up on the mainland before settling here as adults.
“Anyway, there’s a picture of him,” Greta continues. “With your groundskeeper.”
Surprise twangs against my ribs. “With Fritz?”
“Here, I’m texting it to you.”
In a moment, the picture comes through. I zoom in with my fingers, first on the caption—John Fritz and Lyle Decker, cocaptains of the boys’ lacrosse team—and then on the image itself: two skinny teenagers, each with an arm slung over the other. At first, I don’t see the men I know in those faces; they’re too smooth, too slender, too smiling. But as I squint closer, I recognize Fritz’s eyes, mirthful but mild.
“They were friends?” I say.
It’s difficult to imagine. Back when we were kids, we knew Lyle Decker as the cranky man across the woods, the man who offered us little more than a growl of acknowledgment on the rare occasions we saw him. Fritz, on the other hand, has always been playful and polite.
“I’ve never seen them together,” I add.
“Yeah, well, Fritz was always working when you saw him, right?”
“Still. He was friends with our neighbor, and that never came up? I guess they could have drifted apart…”
“But Lyle knew about your family’s shed,” Greta reminds me. “And he told Ruby to stay away from it. So it seems like he and Fritz kept in touch.” She pauses. “I’ve got theories, of course.”
I grip the phone. “Tell me.”
She draws in a breath like someone about to sink beneath water. “Okay, theory one: Fritz is the Blackburn Killer, like you originally thought. Lyle knows something is weird about the shed but isn’t sure what—just that his old friend gets really squirrelly about it. In this theory, it’s just a coincidence that Lyle got sick around the time the murders stopped.
“Theory two: Lyle is the Blackburn Killer, and he got access to the shed from Fritz. Maybe Lyle told him he needed storage space or something, and Fritz is just an innocent party.”
“But Fritz knew what was under the shed,” I say. “He asked me to help him get rid of it.”
“Right. Okay. Onto theory three: Fritz and Lyle were working together. Because it’s a lot for one person, don’t you think? Moving a body, cleaning it, dressing it, branding the ankle, taking the photographs, then carrying it down to the shore? That’s a lot of work for a limited window of darkness. All this time, the police have been looking for the Blackburn Killer, but what if it’s the Blackburn Killers?”
A shiver shoots through me, and for a moment, I’m speechless. I pull my blankets toward my chin. “Wow,” I mutter. “I never—”
“There’s more,” Greta says. “In researching Lyle, I found this old newspaper article: Judge dismisses trespassing complaint filed against chief of police.”
“Okay…” I say. “I don’t get it.”
“Chief Edmond Kraft—that’s the guy who always hung around your house, right?”
I straighten at the name. “Yes.”
“According to the article, Lyle saw Kraft ‘snooping around’ the woods one night, and he filed a trespassing complaint against him. The complaint never went anywhere, but still.”
She says that, but still, like her next conclusion should be obvious, but I shake my head, confused. “Edmond was always snooping around,” I say. “He’d walk around our property, checking everything out. Writing notes. Elijah Kraft says his dad had entire filing cabinets of notebooks, all about us.”
“Exactly,” Greta says. “So. Theory four: the chief went a little deeper into the woods than usual, Lyle saw him, freaked out that Kraft might discover something about the shed, and then tried to make sure he couldn’t go snooping there again.”
I hear the smile in her voice, which is higher than usual. It gets this way whenever she’s forging a new path through a case, following clues like breadcrumbs, invigorated by the search.
“Of course,” she adds, “that just makes theory four an addendum to theory three. Or two. But then there’s theory five.”
“Five?” I close my eyes against a whirl of dizziness.
“Last one,” Greta promises. Then she does it again, that presubmerging breath. “I’ve been thinking about my message boards, all the theories that have been kicked around over the years about the Blackburn Killer. And one that comes up a lot is that he might have been someone in law enforcement.”
My eyes jerk open. “A cop?”
“It’s actually not an uncommon theory for cases like this, especially when there’s a lack of evidence. Whoever killed those women knew how to make sure it couldn’t be traced back to him. And then there’s the idea that he could have used his uniform to get the women’s guards down before he strangled them. Or he could have approached them under the guise of questioning them: ‘Hey, miss, what’re you doing out so late?’ That kind of thing.”
I clench my jaw, picturing that scene: someone abusing the trust stitched into their uniform, using their power to inflict unimaginable pain. Greta’s right; it’s not uncommon. I know the stories, the names: Gerard Schaefer was fired from his teaching job, rejected from the priesthood, and finally landed as a police officer in Florida, where he murdered Susan Place, Georgia Jessup, and buried them in a park. John Christie, another officer, stowed his victims’ bodies under floorboards, in his garden, behind the walls in his kitchen.
And now I’m thinking of Edmond. How he strutted so noticeably around our lawn, never even attempting subtlety. How he sometimes announced his drop-ins with the flashing lights above his cruiser, a reassurance to the islanders that he had an eye on Murder Mansion.
But what if he was never actually investigating us? What if, instead, he was setting us up, laying the groundwork to make us seem suspicious? That way, if the room beneath the shed—his room?—were ever uncovered, people would easily believe that we were to blame. Well, yeah, they might say, I’m not surprised. Police have been looking at the Lighthouses for years.
The air compresses around me.
“Elijah said Edmond’s been in a nursing home,” I tell Greta. “Early onset dementia. I don’t know how long he’s had it, but—”
“That could explain why the murders stopped,” she finishes.
“It doesn’t explain Fritz, though. Or Lyle.”
“I know,” she agrees, and I hear the hunger in her words, the appetite that’s been whetted instead of cured. “That’s why they’re only theories right now. Something’s still missing for sure.”
We rehash her ideas for a few more minutes. Then Greta ends the call with a promise: “I’m going to try something.”
She won’t elaborate on what that something is, “just in case it doesn’t pan out,” but as she mentions it, her voice becomes tight, restrained, like she’s pinching back the excitement of whatever she has planned.
For an hour after that, I barely even move. The possibilities, the suspects, pin me down—Lyle at my wrists, his breath rasping in his throat; Fritz at my ankles, his long hair scraping my legs; and Edmond at my neck, his fingers squeezing my windpipe like a pen.
They stare at me, eyes dilated, daring me to decide which one is a killer.
“This is ridiculous!”
Charlie’s voice booms up from downstairs, disrupting the image of those men. Instantly, my body feels lighter, like I can actually feel them letting me go.
“It’s hysterical, how off base you are. Were you one of those color-outside-the-line sort of kids? That doesn’t mean you’re creative, you know; it means you’re wrong.”
I lift my head, pointing my ear toward the hall. The doorbell rang a while ago, but until now, I haven’t spared a thought for who might have arrived.
“Do you have one of your fancy little warrants? If not, I’ll have to see you out.”
Adrenaline sprints through me. I spring toward the doorway, trying to catch the other end of the conversation, but the person is too quiet. Creeping across the hall, I edge toward the top of the stairs until I’m able to identify the voice.
“It’s really just a question,” Elijah says.
“Hardly. It’s an insinuation.”
“It’s interesting you’d see it that way.”
I descend a few steps until I see them. In the living room, Elijah studies Charlie, whose shirt is rumpled, half untucked, hair sticking up and out, as if he’s been grabbing at it. In contrast, Elijah is pressed and put-together, a crisp green folder in one hand, a notebook in the other.
“What’s going on?” I ask, and they both look at me.
“Nothing,” Charlie says. But his eyes leap like a startled deer’s to Elijah’s folder.
“I heard something about a warrant,” I prompt.
Charlie ignores me, turning back to Elijah. “If you insist on badgering me with your embarrassingly transparent questions, let’s do it somewhere else, shall we?”
He takes off toward the back hall, and Elijah follows without another glance my way.
What was in that folder? Charlie’s eyes darted toward it the same way they darted toward Tate when the police were searching his room. He never answered my question about that, never explained the anxiety I saw. You have to trust us, is all he said. Me, Tate, Mom—we’re all you have left.
But Mom’s a liar. And Tate cares more about followers than family. And Charlie was nervous about that folder, nervous about the officers traipsing across his floor.
I want to lurk at the victim room door, listen to Elijah’s questions, Charlie’s answers, but my brother is clearly defensive right now, enough to be wary of an eavesdropper. I’ll need to speak to Elijah alone, after he’s talked to Charlie. And maybe I should be wary of an eavesdropper, too.
Slipping into my shoes near the door, I’m about to head outside to wait for Elijah when I register how the foyer’s been transformed. Small tables with white cloths dot the wide space. A typewritten card announcing the items that will be displayed sits on each table. The items themselves remain in piles in the living room, where more surfaces wait, draped in white.
It looks like a room full of ghosts.
I open the front door and walk into another gray day, clouds low and heavy in the sky. The wind carries the smell of the ocean, Andy’s least favorite scent, and I pull my chunky sweater closed. Elijah’s police cruiser sits at the end of our walkway, and as I approach it, voices drift up from the bottom of the driveway.
“… but that’s because it’s Murder Mansion. There was some kind of fuss there the other day. Tons of police.”
“Well, yeah. They found that boy.”
“No, this was after that. Susan said the driveway was packed with cruisers. There was even…”
The voices shrink and fade, belonging to walkers on the road. I take a few sips of air, trying to unhear how flippantly one of them spoke of Andy, how, just like Lyle Decker, she referred to him as that boy.
“Hey.”
Ruby emerges from the trees near the side yard, as if I’ve conjured her by thinking of her grandfather. Or as if she’s been lingering in the woods. Watching.
“Did you talk to the police about me?” Her question is unexpectedly forceful. She squeezes her lips together, waiting.
“I talked to them about your grandfather.”
“Why the hell would you do that?”
She flexes her fists at her sides, and as I answer, I watch her hands curl and uncurl.
“There were things you said that I wanted them to look into. Things that didn’t add up.”
Or added up too well, I keep myself from saying.
“That’s none of their business.” Ruby steps forward, shoving a finger into the air, so close I can see the dirt beneath her nails. “Grandpa and me—we’re just trying to get by. We don’t need the police coming over, riling him up, digging into my past with Andy.”
So Elijah did question Lyle. I feel a gush of relief, almost gratitude, even as Ruby’s finger jabs toward me.
“Your grandfather was riled up?”
“Of course he was! I told you how he gets when it comes to Andy. You saw it yourself the other day. The detective got him so upset, and— You had no right, absolutely no right, to accuse us of anything.”
“I didn’t accuse you,” I say, leaning away, my back against Elijah’s car. “Why are you so mad?”
For the first time, her eyes aren’t big at all; they’re narrowed to slits as thin as paper. Moments pass, the ocean throbbing in the distance, and it’s a while still before her stare loses its sharpness. When her hand falls back to her side, it’s stuck in a fist, knocking against her thigh.
“It’s just,” she starts. Then she sighs, finally relaxing her fingers. “I thought you and I… I thought we connected yesterday.”
“Connected?”
“Yeah. As friends.”
The wind circles us, and Ruby breaks my gaze to button her coat. I cross my arms, tightening against the cold.
“We’re not friends,” I tell her. I try to be gentle about it, but I want to be clear: I’m not her path back to Andy, her detour from loneliness.
“We’re something,” she insists. “We understand each other. We were closer to Andy than anyone else.” She sniffles loudly. “We feel the same loss.”
We don’t, though. Whatever pain Ruby feels, it’s only residue from a teenage crush. It’s nothing compared to the crater I will harbor inside me forever. Someday, Ruby will find another boy to love, but a twin, my twin, Andy, is irreplaceable. I will only grow emptier, the older I grow without him.
Ruby moves some loose pebbles on the driveway with her foot, her bottom lip curling into a pout. “You didn’t change your mind, did you? About including the embroidery in the memorial?”
“No,” I assure her, even though I haven’t thought of it since yesterday, when I closed those words—Ruby loves Andy—inside a drawer.
“Good,” she says, punctuating the word with a choked and bitter chuckle. “It all went so wrong, you know.” She shakes her head, jaw tensing. When she speaks again, she shoves the sentence through gritted teeth. “That night I tried to give it to him, everything went so terribly wrong.”
Terribly wrong. Wrong. It echoes off the trees, her voice gusting around us like wind. Ruby doesn’t seem to notice. She squints at her shoe, still stabbing at gravel.
“I need to get back to Grandpa,” she adds. Her eyes harden, tiny and tight once again. “In the meantime, stop talking about me behind my back.”
“I wasn’t—” I start, but she’s already turned around, rushing toward the woods. I watch her go, hands shoved into her pockets, curls billowing out behind her, until she’s too far for me to distinguish her from the shadows cast by trees. I pull out my phone to check the screen.
No messages.
“Updates soon,” Greta promised me earlier. It hasn’t been long since we hung up, but as I wait for Elijah, arms taut across my chest, I hope for another call. I want to know what Greta would make of it—Ruby’s strange anger, prompted, it seems, by Lyle’s reaction to the police; Elijah questioning Lyle only to return, again, to question Charlie.
I look at my hand, scraping at Charlie’s “trademark flair” that he Sharpied across my skin. So far, it’s refused my attempts to scrub it away. It lingers defiantly, a day later, this tattoo I didn’t ask for. When my hand turns raw from rubbing, I turn my attention to the clouds growing thicker above me. Andy always struggled to find shapes in them. Me, I saw everything: cars, trees, deer. Look, it’s antlers, I said to him once. He scrunched up his face, followed my finger with his eyes, then kicked at the grass, giving up too soon. It’s just moisture, he replied. Just water and ice.
He was like that, always seeing what things were made of, instead of what they could be. Who knows what’s in my blood? he asked Ruby, as if the unnatural lifestyle he wanted to escape was woven into his DNA.
When I finally hear the front door, I leap off the car. Elijah clomps down the walkway, gripping his folder tightly.
“I was looking for you,” he says, stopping a few feet in front of me. “Inside.”
“I figured we should talk out here. Away from… everyone else.”
“Oh?”
“I wanted to know why you were talking to Charlie. But now I want to know what happened with Lyle. Ruby was here. She said you questioned him.”
Elijah leans forward, reaching past me to drop his green folder on top of his car. “I’m sure you know I can’t really say.”
The wind nudges the folder open, rustling the papers inside. I try to scan them quickly, but he slaps the folder closed before anything flies away. He pulls it back toward his side, eyeing me as he tucks it under his arm.
“I told you about Lyle,” I argue. “Don’t I have a right to know if you think he’s a suspect?”
“You know that’s not how this works.”
“What about Charlie then?” I try. “What were you talking to him about?”
He watches me for a few more seconds before he looks away. Shifting the folder to his other hand, he opens it to glance inside, then shuts it again before aiming his attention toward the woods.
“Will you take a walk with me?” he asks.
I blink at him. “A walk? I’m asking about Charlie.”
“I understand. But there’s something I want to show you.” He considers my crossed arms, quivering in the cold. “It’s a bit of a walk, so you might want to grab your coat.”
“A walk to where?”
The corners of his mouth quirk up. “It’s a surprise,” he says. Then his expression eases, flattening into something more earnest. “You’ll be safe, I promise. And when we get there, I’ll tell you exactly what I asked your brother.”
I study him, weighing his strange proposition, how he’s assuring my safety when I hadn’t even thought to be concerned for it. But that phrase—exactly what I asked your brother—hooks me more than I’d like. It feels so specific, significant, and swirling beneath the words, I hear Elijah’s suspicion.
“I’ll get my coat,” I say.