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The Family Plot: A Novel - Softcover

Collins, Megan

 
9781668033586: The Family Plot: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1668033585 ISBN 13: 9781668033586
Verlag: Pocket Books, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A family obsessed with true crime gathers to bury their patriarch—only to find another body already in his grave in this “moody and atmospheric” (USA TODAY) thriller.

Raised in a secluded island mansion deep in the woods and kept isolated by her true crime-obsessed parents, twenty-six-year-old Dahlia Lighthouse is still haunted by her twin brother Andy’s disappearance a decade ago.

After several years away and following her father’s death, Dahlia returns home, where the family makes a gruesome discovery: buried in their father’s plot is another body—Andy’s, his skull split open with an ax.

Dahlia is quick to blame Andy’s murder on the serial killer who terrorized the island for decades, while the rest of her family reacts to the revelation in unsettling ways. Her brother, Charlie, pours his energy into creating a family memorial museum, highlighting their research into the lives of famous murder victims; her sister, Tate, forges ahead with her popular dioramas portraying crime scenes; and their mother affects a cheerfully domestic facade, becoming unrecognizable as the woman who performed murder reenactments for her children. As Dahlia grapples with her own grief and horror, she realizes that her eccentric family, and the mansion itself, may hold the answers to what happened to her twin in this “gorgeously wrought and deliciously creepy…twisted delight” (Kathleen Barber, author of Follow Me).

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Megan Collins is the author of Cross My Heart, Thicker Than Water, The Family Plot, Behind the Red Door, and The Winter Sister. She teaches and mentors authors through Jericho Writers and is the editor-in-chief of 3Elements Review. She lives in Connecticut, where she obsesses over dogs, miniatures, and cake.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One one
My parents named me Dahlia, after the Black Dahlia—that actress whose body was cleaved in half, left in grass as sharp as scalpels, a permanent smile sliced onto her face—and when I first learned her story at four years old, I assumed a knife would one day carve me up. My namesake was part of me, my future doomed by her violent death. That meant my oldest brother, Charlie, who had escaped the Lindbergh baby’s fate by living past age two, would still be abducted someday. My sister, Tate, would follow in her own namesake’s footsteps, become a movie star, then become a body in a pool of blood. And my twin brother, Andy, named for Lizzie Borden’s father—I was sure his head was destined for the ax.

It didn’t take me long to shed that belief, to understand that our names were just one of the many ways we honored victims of murder. But even after I stopped expecting us all to be killed, Andy insisted our family was “unnatural,” that the way we were raised wasn’t right.

I still don’t know where he got that idea; back then, the life we lived in our drafty, secluded mansion was the only kind of life we knew.

Now, I’m standing in front of it, the home he ran away from on our sixteenth birthday—two years before we were scheduled to get our inheritance (“Leaving Money,” as Charlie called it), and three before I left myself, having waited there, certain my twin would return, for as long as I could. I used to sit at the bottom of the stairs, gaze pinned to the door, hoping he’d walk through it again, tell me all my missing him was for nothing.

I was the only one who missed him. Mom read his note—The only way out is to never come back—and swallowed hard. “Your brother’s chosen his own path,” she said, swiping at her tears as if that was the end of it. Dad stomped around the house for a while, grumbling about the hunting trip Andy had skipped out on. “He’s a coward, that twin of yours,” Dad told me, as if Andy belonged to me alone. And then there was Charlie and Tate, who were visiting when we found the note. They’d come all this way for our sixteenth birthday, but they left without helping me look for him, Charlie claiming he had an audition, Tate trailing after him like always. Which left just me, alone in my anguish for years after that, lighting the candles with Mom and Dad, saying the Honoring prayer that I’ve since learned they created themselves.

Dad died the other day. That’s why I’ve come back. And I’m hoping this will be the thing that brings Andy back, too. Maybe he’s already inside, listening for my footsteps. Maybe I can stop my internet searches. Every week, I look for my brother on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. Greta, who runs the café beneath my tiny apartment, has taught me all the tricks on social media, but still, my searches come back each time with nothing.

Today, I took the long way up from the ferry, watching the rocky shore recede below me as I climbed higher toward the center of Blackburn Island, where our house looms stony and colorless in front of the woods. For minutes now, I’ve been staring at those skeletal trees, remembering how Andy used to whack at them, how he’d pick up his ax whenever something flared inside him—and how almost anything could set him off: Dad quizzing him about hunting rifles; Mom teaching us about Ted Bundy’s victims; Tate sketching her namesake, Sharon. For all the hours Andy and I spent locked to each other’s hips—hiding in the credenza to jump out at Mom; distracting our groundskeeper with leaf pile forts—I never understood why he’d spring out of the house sometimes and pick up the ax that leaned against the shed. And when he told me, over and over, that our family was unnatural, that we needed the outside world, needed to trust people beyond each other, I didn’t understand that, either.

The November wind is icy on the back of my neck, pushing me closer to the front door. Dead leaves skitter around my feet as if welcoming me home.

It’s been seven years since I last stepped foot on this porch, even though when I left at nineteen I didn’t go far. My apartment on the mainland is a quarter mile from the ferry, easy access should Andy ever return, but when I first moved there, Greta acted like I was from a distant, mythical place. I can’t believe you grew up on Blackburn Island, she said. I’m obsessed with the Blackburn Killer. I have every article that’s ever mentioned him, and I spend hours a day on message boards, discussing all the theories. Oh my god, did you know any of the victims?

I could recite their names in my sleep. Not just the victims of our island’s serial killer, who murdered seven women over two decades and was never caught, but the ones from quiet neighborhoods, the ones on city streets. We honored them each year on the anniversaries of their deaths. We uttered their names as we stood in a circle, lighting each other’s slim white candles. Then we whispered the prayer—we can’t restore your life, but we strive to restore your memory with this breath—before blowing out the flames. When I told Greta I didn’t know the victims personally, but that they were part of our Honoring calendar, her forehead wrinkled with confusion, and I wondered for the first time if Andy had been right, that there was something unnatural about us.

But is he here now, sitting on the stairs, watching the door from inside as I force myself to turn its knob and finally push it open?

I blink until my eyes adjust. The light outside was dazzling and real, but in here it’s dimmer than dusk. The foyer, I see now, is vacant and cavernous; the staircase holds nobody up. The chandelier sways a little, as if something has nudged it, and I have to focus on breathing until the pang of being wrong subsides.

“Look who finally showed up. Tate and I have been here since yesterday.”

I turn toward Charlie’s voice. Through the wide archway to the right, I see him sitting in the living room, in curtained, lampless dark. I can just make out the glass of amber liquid in his hand. He sips it now, barely ten a.m., before he stands and approaches, burgundy-sweatered and lanky as ever.

“What, you’re not a hugger?” he asks with a wink.

He embraces me before I can answer. When he lets go, he takes my bag off my shoulder and slings it over his own, the weight of it tipping him farther than his typical sideways slouch.

“You look good, Dolls,” he says. “What’s it been—nine years?”

I blink at him like he’s another dark room I have to get used to. How can he not know it’s been ten years, four months, and three days since we last saw each other? It’s easy to remember. You just take the time it’s been since we last saw Andy and subtract one day. I suppose, though, that Charlie’s tried to see me before now. He’s sent me texts over the years, inviting me to his shows—the off-Broadway ones and the really off-Broadway ones—but I’ve never gone. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stomach it, watching him pretend to be somebody else. To me, he’ll always be the man who read Andy’s note—The only way out is to never come back—and returned right away to New York. Greta likes to remind me that Charlie was twenty-six at the time, someone with a life already separate from us, but what she doesn’t get is that when I talk about Charlie, or Tate, or my parents, I’m not looking for perspective; I’m...

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Verlag
Pocket Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668033585
ISBN 13 
9781668033586
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande