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I see it all with clarity now. And everything looks different.
This isn’t just a memoir. It’s a treasure hunt—our last one—and every story is a clue. I’d be impressed if I weren’t so angry. The book is due in July—less than three months from now—and we don’t have time for games. And that’s when I started to wonder if everything so far has been part of the hunt. The delusions, his inability to read, which so conveniently necessitates my presence here. But I discarded that possibility pretty quickly. If that were true, it would require Alma to be a part of it, and she has zero tolerance for games.
My father is an excellent writer, but he’s not an actor. The sweat on his forehead and panic in his eyes when he had that first night terror. His anxiety when he thinks I’m my mother. He must know he’s revealing things he might not otherwise, that this is the first treasure hunt he’s not controlling. That has to be terrifying. And thrilling, for a man who’s always looking to raise the stakes.
My father either killed them and wants to admit it, or he didn’t and he wants me to figure out who did.
And like during so much of my childhood, my father never just comes out and tells me what he wants me to know. He expects me to figure it out on my own.
If he’s leaving me clues, it’s time I start to tell him what I know.
***
“I’ve been to the house,” I say at the start of our next session.
He looks at me now, confused.
“The house on Van Buren. I know you still own it.” When he doesn’t respond, I say, “Why didn’t you just tell me the first day I got here? Why let me skulk around, looking in windows?”
“You have no reason to go there. You’re here to write a book, not become Nancy Drew.”
“This is another one of your hunts,” I say.
But he shakes his head. “Be serious, Olivia.”
I brush off his deflection. “I’d like your permission to go there to write,” I tell him. “It’ll help me get into the time and place, and I’d like to not have to break in again to do it.”
He gives me a sharp look. “You broke in?” he asks. “How?”
“Through the window on the back door.”
A small smile. “Danny and I used to do that.”
“I know. You told me,” I say.
His surprise seems genuine. “I did?”
“Why did you keep the house?” I ask. “Why not sell it?”
“After the murders, we lived there for a while.” He shakes his head, remembering. “It was awful. But my parents couldn’t afford to move, and no one would buy it anyway. After I moved out, they were finally able to rent it and move into a small apartment. Neither of them lasted much longer. As you know, my father died of a heart attack in 1978 and my mother died of breast cancer two years later. At that point, selling itseemed foolish. We had a great tenant—a German woman named Frieda who didn’t care what had happened there and didn’t need anything fancy. It’s a miracle she stayed all these years.” He gives a small shrug, as if that should explain everything. “Feel free to go there as much as you want,” he says. “If anyone asks, tell them you’re the new tenant.”
I think about the neighbor, the one who seems to keep tabs on the house, and wonder if he’ll believe that. He seems the type who would notice no furniture ever arriving. Just a strange woman, entering and exiting with a laptop.
It occurs to me that if I can’t get out from under my debt, living in that house might be my only option. I imagine packing up the Topanga house, forwarding my mail, and living inside my father’s childhood home. What ghosts might come to me—not just those of my aunt and uncle, but of the person I might have been had none of this happened? What kind of friend could I have been? What kind of partner to Tom? I brush away the thought.
“When I was in the house, I found Poppy’s hiding place inside the window.” For now I stay quiet about the other space, under the floorboards of her closet. “So your hallucination wasn’t really a hallucination. That space exists.”
He stiffens. “So what? Poppy knew my secrets. I knew hers.”
He’s evading. Deflecting. It’s time to push him a little bit, Alma’s rules be damned. “I want to show you something. See what you remember about it.”
I pick up my phone, still recording, and toggle over to my photos, pulling up the picture I took inside Poppy’s closet. “‘Someday soon, you’ll be dead,’” I read aloud to him, holding out the phone so he can see it himself. “When I was at the house, I found this written on the inside of Poppy’s closet. It’s your handwriting.”
I expect him to look scared. Worried. If this is a clue, it’s a pretty damning one.
But instead, he laughs.
Poppy