“Bunnies let you cuddle them, even if you’re wearing gloves lined with some other bunny’s fur.”
She looked at Gertie.
“Bunnies don’t matter, no matter how much people love them.”
Then she looked at me.
“Because I love my little Trotsky more than anything, and today she gets a specialtreat.”
With a sweep of her arm, Mary flung the ice axe away into the dark. It crashed somewhere in the brush beyond the chapel’s broken walls.
She showed us her empty hands.
Change of plan.
The darkness tipped around me.
Had she decided to fail? Would Mary, out of all my little cousins, become a school counselor? A lawyer? A fixer of cars?
When I didn’t speak up, Sebastian did. “Mary, what’s happening?”
She was still gazing at me. Her eyes flickered in the torchlight, full of certainty.
Change of plan—that’s what the first text had read, in that small room in the Catskills. Then, while I was still staring at my phone, another:
She knows your last name.
Yes, that was the problem. My last name. My connection to Garrett, to Helshire, to the estate.
I had to snip that string.
“Whatever you decide is okay, Mary,” Sebastian said. He sounded relieved.
But another twist was coming, I could see it in her eyes.
“Averyspecial treat for Trotsky,” Mary said, reaching beneath Edwin’s phonograph table.
A ripping sound as she pulled a larger axe into the light, adhesive trailing from its handle—it had been taped to the bottom of the table. A felling axe.
The kind that hangs on the wall of a woodshed.
Tom made a sound, and so did Gertie’s cat, two moaning cries that wound together in the dark. The rabbit looked up from its food at last, whiskers twitching in the firelight.
“Fuck,” Gertie said. “Tobias, Ruby, Olive, Tillie, Zachary, Katie, Yvonne.”
“Trotsky,” Sebastian said. “TROTZKY.”
Both of them turned pleading stares at me. I was the auntie here.
But I was helpless—like when Grandmother’s orders had come.
Mutual kills are difficult to stage, she’d written, before I’d even grasped the other texts.Murder-suicide is simpler.
“This is our big day,” Mary cried, raising the axe high. “So I want it to be amazing!”
The moonlit axe came down. Not a squeak, not a squelch from the rabbit, just thethunkof metal biting wood. A gasp from Tom.
The blade stuck fast into the wood; the handle quivered with glee.
