Page 24 of The Ghostwriter

I’ve read and reread Poppy’s last entry.

June 10: Oh my god oh my god oh my god. I feel sick. No one will believe me and now I’ve lost the proof. I need to tell someone, but Danny will kill me if I tell.

This, plus the stories my father has told me over the last two weeks, paints an ominous portrait of Danny, and yet, Danny as the killer doesn’t make sense. If Danny killed Poppy, then who killed Danny? My father? It’s possible he’s building up to confessing just that; however, the idea feels too simple to me. And while I’m not comfortable presenting his stories as fact, the only thing I can do right now is write them down and try to see through them to whatever might be lurking below.

I spend several afternoons at the Ojai library, immersing myself in that era. I read through old issues of the Ojai Valley News . But I’m not only interested in articles about the murders. I read about city council meetings. About the sports teams at Nordhoff High. Ojai Valley School and Thacher, the local boarding schools. I read about new businesses. Local gossip. The weather. Politics at the time.

And I start to write. AirPods shoved into my ears, I listen to the hits of 1975. Aerosmith. Queen. The Eagles. Laptop open, trying to time travel back to Ojai, the summer of 1975. I lose myself, my own problems falling away. It’s a relief to shed my life and dip into another era.

I also spend hours in the grove behind my father’s old house, now the Ojai Meadows Preserve. When my father was young, this was nothing more than fifty acres filled with weeds, tall grasses, and small clusters of eucalyptus trees. But now, they’ve turned it into a nature preserve with walking trails, native oak trees, and a pond. I also explore the trails in the nearby oak grove where Danny used to camp alone. Where he’d buried the neighbor’s cat. Trying to imagine my parents, Poppy, and Danny, living in this stretch of land, using it as their backyard.

And between the conversations with my father, the time in the library doing background, and getting my sense of the setting, I look into the coroner. The man who’d possibly gotten the time of death wrong. Digging into that developing story in 1993 has been a distraction, but not a waste of time. I think about questions I might ask. The coroner himself is unfortunately deceased, but I have a list of names. The DA at the time of the inquest. The lead detective on the case, looking for links to people from my former life as a journalist. Any old favors I can call in to get confirmation that the coroner had been high the night of Poppy’s and Danny’s autopsies.

I’m in my element. This is a job I know how to do, and one that I’m exceptionally good at. I’ve managed to keep myself busy enough not to return to my father’s in-box, to see if Calder has responded, telling myself it doesn’t matter what he thinks or what he wants.

Ghostwriter is often a term men like Calder push back on. They fight to have their name on the cover alongside the subject of the book. However, I’m happy to disappear, letting my subject’s voice shine through. I love to inhabit their lives, their minds—and with everyone I start off easy. Tell me what you remember about that year. Tell me about your parents. Your siblings. What your school years were like. I build trust.

The work I’m doing with my father is a collaboration, like all the others I’ve done—the Olympic ice skater I spent three months shadowing on tour. Watching him rehearse in the mornings, perform in the evenings, then talking for several hours late into the night. Writing the book on a tour bus. In airports. Eating fast food and mainlining black coffee to make my deadline. Or the world-famous country star who’d lost her ability to sing, but who now spearheads funding for major medical research.

I force myself to forget that this particular job is personal. I try to stay objective, open to the stories my father is slowly unraveling for me—three siblings who loved each other and what happened when one of them suddenly became dangerous.

***

Near the end of my third week in Ojai, I’m back at Jack and Matt’s, drinking wine and talking about anything and everything other than why I’m still in town. Jack hasn’t pressed me again, though sometimes I can tell he wants to ask me a question about how exactly I’m helping my father when he’s got a perfectly capable caretaker in Alma. He doesn’t ask whether my father and I have arrived at some kind of mutual acceptance and forgiveness. He simply lets me be here, which is a gift.

“Tell Kamala that I want to see her in the Oval Office someday,” Matt says, setting down an artful charcuterie board on the table in front of us. He loves that I’m on texting terms with famous people.

“I don’t know Kamala, but I pitched AOC once for a book.” I take a cracker and break it in half. “I didn’t get it.”

Matt, with his loose jeans and floppy hair, is exactly who I imagined Jack would fall in love with. Whip-smart, sarcastic, and soft-hearted, he’s the opposite of Jack’s cowboy persona. He wears designer loafers without socks. He uses hair products.

Matt slides onto the bench next to me at their dining room table, nudging my shoulder. “How’s your dad doing?” he asks.

“He has his good days and bad days,” I tell him. “Alma has a lot of rules that supposedly keep him from getting too confused. But I’m not sure how well they’re working because a couple times, he’s mistaken me for my mother.”

“Jack told me she left when you were young,” Matt says. “Will you tell her he’s sick?”

My gaze locks with Jack’s before I say, “I doubt it.” If this were any other book, I wouldn’t hesitate to seek out the ex-wife of my subject. In fact, she would be the first person I’d want to talk with. To question her about her memory of that time. But my mother’s name sits on my list alongside Margot Gibson’s and Mark Randall’s like a bomb waiting to detonate.

“What was your mom like?” Matt asks.

Jack starts to speak, undoubtedly to tell Matt that my mother has always been a topic I don’t like to discuss, but I wave him off. Here, in Ojai, I can’t lie about my family. It’s not possible for me to tell people the stories I’ve created about two loving parents, how hard it was on my mom when my dad died, how she struggled to learn how to pay the bills and manage the house on her own. How she worked to hide her illness from me so I could finish college. And how devastated I was to lose her. Ojai exists as a bubble in my life. Everything and everyone who knows the truth lives inside of it, and I’m not afraid of speaking about it here. Confident I can keep it contained.

“I don’t remember much about her,” I say. “When I was young, I used to imagine I had one of those PTA moms who would bring in cupcakes for my birthday. Who would work at the book fair. In middle school I imagined her as a shop owner—maybe jewelry she made herself, or a bakery—and I would sit behind the counter, and everyone would comment on what a good assistant I was. Then my mother would say, ‘I couldn’t do any of this without Olivia!’ ” Matt’s gaze softens and Jack grows still, their silence allowing me to continue. I don’t let myself imagine what Tom would say if he were here, listening to this story. In this moment, he seems light-years away from who I am and what I’m working on. Almost as if I’ve imagined him altogether. “And later, when my father started actively drinking, I used to fantasize about my mother coming to get me. The two of us living in a small apartment or on a houseboat in Ventura. Heating up frozen dinners and eating them at a tiny table. Watching TV on the couch, just the two of us. Not a lot of money, but security. Consistency.”

For years, my mother was a dark hole into which I poured hours of wondering. Imagining. Dreaming. After I went abroad for high school, I tried not to think about her at all, other than to lay the blame for my father’s addictions and my subsequent exile squarely at her feet. It was because of her that I’d been sent away to boarding school, my father claiming I was too old for a babysitter but too young to be left home alone while he traveled. It was her fault that she was unable to withstand the rumors about my father, about what had happened in 1975. If both my father and I could deal with the whispers that swirled around us, why couldn’t she?

“A mother is supposed to love and protect you,” I say. “Mine chose to abandon me, and it’s something I’ve never been able to forgive her for doing.”

“There,” Jack says, his voice just above a whisper. Meant only for me to hear. “Was that so hard?”

I know he’s referring to my honesty, how willingly I opened up. A quiet criticism of who I am when I’m not being myself.