Page 49 of The Ghostwriter
I find it in the last legal pad, just one short sentence tucked in near the end.
Danny watched her die.
I feel as though I’ve been punched. The matter-of-factness of the statement, the words, scrawled in the lower-left margin in black ballpoint pen. So easy to miss if you weren’t looking closely.
I’d finally returned to my father’s legal pads after several weeks away, slowly making my way through them. Trying to extract nuggets of information I could use—either specific events I could grow into a scene, or pieces of their lives that would make them come to life. The kind of music Danny listened to. The way Poppy liked to sit on the floor to do her homework.
Then I’d decided to collate all the margin notes, assigning meaning where I could.
I had to bury Ricky Ricardo quickly —the neighbor’s cat.
The darkest places to hide: storage shed, Poppy’s closet, attic, garage —the treasure hunt.
I wanted to kill Danny —the discovery of my mother’s abortion.
But this one— Danny watched her die —can only mean one thing. My father had been there too.
***
“What can you tell me about this line?” I ask the following morning, pulling the last legal pad out of my bag and flipping to the page I marked with the Post-it. I read it aloud to him. “‘Danny watched her die.’” Then I look up at him, waiting.
His face is a mask I can’t read. He’s not surprised, or angry. Surely, he expected me to find the clues eventually, just like I found the clues in my book so long ago.
When he doesn’t say anything, I continue. “You’ve given me a lot to work with. Lots of stories that will help me reshape what you’ve already written.” I speak carefully, not wanting to upset him, knowing how easily that could happen—even before his illness. “Lots of ways to help Danny and Poppy come alive again on the page. But at the start of this, you said there were things you never told the police.”
My father stares at me, waiting for me to go on. Perhaps knowing where I’m headed.
“Tell me what you meant by that line.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know.” But his voice is weak, as if he can’t muster enough force to speak at full volume. “I don’t remember.”
“You keep telling me that Danny had been the one escalating, but that’s not what I’m seeing in Poppy’s movies.” I gesture toward my computer, my voice rising. “A finished draft of this book is due in less than eight weeks and I’m not even close to being done. I can’t do my job if you’re not honest with me.”
Every project has this moment. When I have to push across the abyss—go from the easy stories to the harder ones. The ones that live inside all of us but don’t ever come out. “We’ve talked a lot about the dynamics in the house. The rising tensions between you and Danny in particular.” I breathe out slowly. “You brought me here to do a job, and part of that job is asking hard questions. So I’m going to ask you a hard one and I need you to trust me with the truth. And then together, we can decide what to do with it.”
He gives a tiny nod.
“Was your alibi a lie? Were you at the house that night?”
“Yes.” His voice is quiet. Steady. As if he’s been waiting for me to ask that question all this time. He looks at me, his cheeks sunken as if ravaged by grief. “But by the time I got there, it was too late.”