Page 58 of The Ghostwriter

June 2025

“This is Jessica Schwartz, and you’re listening to Secrets and Lies , the podcast where secrets are exposed, lies are revealed, and the truth is all that’s left. Today I’m talking with author Olivia Dumont. You may recognize the titles of many of the books she’s collaborated on, high-profile celebrities, politicians, scientists, and musicians. You might also remember her from that very public standoff she had with John Calder, who’s now in a lot of hot water of his own. But that’s not why we’re talking to her today. Olivia is also the ghostwriter of Vincent Taylor’s memoir, All Her Beautiful Days , the blockbuster book that finally answers the questions that have swirled around the bestselling horror author for decades. But what you might not know is that Olivia is also Vincent Taylor’s daughter, and to say that she grew up with secrets and lies is an understatement. Welcome to the show, Olivia. Before we get started, I’d like to offer my condolences on the death of your father.” Jessica’s voice is smooth, and as my car rolls to a stop in front of my father’s house, I switch over to my earbuds.

After his revelation about who really killed Danny, it was as if the logjam in my father’s memory had finally been cleared. He gave me permission to go back to Margot and Mark and interview them again—solidifying dates, times, and events. Making sure we nailed the version we wanted to tell to as many verifiable facts as possible, protecting my mother until it was my mother he’d see during our work sessions instead of me. You did what you had to do, Lydia , he’d say to me, over and over again.

Shortly after I finished the draft, I emailed it to Tom with a note. I won’t make excuses for myself, but this book will tell you everything you need to know about me and about my family. No matter what happens with us, I want you to know who I really am. After a week of silence, I started to wonder if he’d even bothered to open the email. Perhaps he just deleted it. But then he texted. I had no idea.

From there, we started slowly. Texts at first—cautious apologies that turned into late-night calls. Whispered conversations in the dark, fragments that would float through my dreams.

I never knew…

I wasn’t able to acknowledge…

I wish I could have…

And during the day, I worked on revising the book. Frantic hours—sometimes with my father. Later, as his conditioned worsened, alone.

But not alone. Not anymore.

A month after I turned the book in to Monarch, it became clear that taking care of my father at home had become too much for Alma to manage. I visited him at his care facility in Ventura, driving up from Topanga or from Ojai, where I was responsible for cleaning out the house. Boxing up a lifetime that was both tragic and extraordinary. My father was a complicated man with many facets, but together they created someone I wished I’d had more time with. Especially just as I was beginning to understand him better.

“Thank you for having me on the show.” My voice sounds odd to me, smoother than I imagine it sounds on a regular day, and I’m appreciative of the quality of the production team. We’d recorded it several weeks after the book was released and I was still in a state of grief, having lost my father in late April. And yet I’d also been energized by my comeback. All Her Beautiful Days had released on the fiftieth anniversary of Poppy’s and Danny’s deaths, and just as Nicole had predicted, it has been at the top of the New York Times nonfiction list ever since. I’ve paid off Calder and my attorneys, and Nicole has been busy fielding requests for my next project.

I walk up the front steps of my father’s house for the last time and unlock the door, stepping through the threshold and into a mostly empty space, with only about fifteen boxes of my father’s things left to take. My footsteps echo on the terra-cotta tiles, swept clean and mopped by the cleaning crew I’d hired. Jack is coming later this morning to take these last boxes to the storage unit I’ve rented. But that’s not why I’m here.

“What was life like, growing up with the famous Vincent Taylor?” Jessica asks. “What kind of baggage did that create for you—not just as a young girl, but also as an adult?”

“It wasn’t easy.” I listen to my voice tell the story, of how my mother left and what it was like to navigate a world where everyone believed my father to be a murderer. How I’d spent the rest of my childhood abroad, only returning to the United States once I was sure I could live as someone else. “Loving my father was a complicated algorithm. It meant accepting there were things about him I’d never understand. It meant not asking questions I didn’t want to know the answers to. It meant accepting possibilities too horrific to contemplate. For a long time, I wasn’t able to do that, so I chose not to.”

“And yet, you returned to Ojai to help him write his last book,” she says.

“It wasn’t my first choice of a job, but my options were limited at the time.” I hear myself give a small laugh and remember where I was when we recorded this, a dark studio in Hollywood, a producer sitting across from me, separated by a wall of glass. “It was definitely complicated,” I admit to Jessica. “At first, he seemed normal. But it soon became clear his mind and memory were failing. He’d get confused and start thinking I was my mother. The more confused he became, the more he revealed. Facets of his life with Poppy and Danny that didn’t add up. That required further digging.”

After we’d decided on the story we’d tell the public, after we’d finished the book and it was just the two of us, trying to piece the rest of the puzzle together, I’d asked my father, “Do you really think Mr. Stewart killed Poppy?”

“I don’t know,” he’d said.

“What about Mr. Stewart’s cat? Poppy’s movies show you burying him, not Danny.”

“Danny killed the cat and wrapped it up in one of my T-shirts. He left it next to the shed where my mother would have found it and blamed me.” He rubbed his eyes and said, “I hate that Poppy died believing I was the one who killed Ricky Ricardo.”

“Could Danny have killed Poppy after all?” I asked him. A question we returned to again and again. Turning it over in our hands like an artifact we were trying to decipher.

And every time, he’d tell me he wanted to believe that he had, because that would justify how things turned out. It allowed him to live with himself, however flawed that life turned out to be.

The last time I asked him that question was in November, and at that point, my father had been in the care facility for several months. It was clear he was deteriorating fast. He became argumentative and angry. Accusing me, his care team—even the other patients—of outrageous behavior. It was painful to watch, but I kept showing up, because every now and then he’d be lucid, and we’d return again to the events of that day. To the things we still didn’t know. “The truth belongs to Danny and Poppy,” he’d told me once. “And it lives in the past, where we can no longer reach it.”

A few days before my father died, he turned to me, out of the blue, and said, “I should have never sent you away. It was a mistake.”

We were sitting in front of the care facility enjoying the first blue sky of April, me on a stone bench, him in a wheelchair next to me. His speech was slower. More labored, which he hated. “It’s fine,” I said.

He shook his head, a sharp, jerking motion. “No. It was selfish. I was a coward.”

“It would have been worse if I’d stayed,” I said. “And you were right. It opened a lot of doors for me.”

“It was never about that,” he said. “I lied.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked at me, his expression tired and sagging. “Every day, you were becoming more and more like Poppy. The way you looked. The way you moved. Your laugh. Your…” He paused, searching for the word he needed, and I waited for him to find it. “Beliefs,” he said, looking relieved. “I couldn’t bear to watch you age past her. You were a daily reminder of who she never got to become.”

I placed my hand over his and squeezed. “You did the best you could. No regrets. No looking back, remember?”

He gave a gruff laugh, more of a cough than anything else, and we sat there in a patch of sun, remembering.

That had been the last conversation we’d had.

Jessica’s voice pulls me back to the interview. “What was it like to finally learn the truth of what happened? Of the events surrounding that terrible day in 1975?”

“It was shattering,” I say. “There’s a weight to that kind of knowledge that bears down on you, becoming a part of you.”

“I doubt there’s anyone on earth who hasn’t read the vast coverage of what you learned in your research. Tell us about the moment you realized your father was truly innocent. That Danny and Poppy were victims of a predator who lived next door. Who still lived next door until just a few weeks ago.”

I trail my fingers along the railing as I head upstairs. Past my old bedroom, vacuum stripes on the carpet. My father’s room looks bright with a fresh coat of paint and polished windows. In my ears, I listen to myself tell the story of my parents, young and in love, grappling with their own enormous secret. Of Poppy, sharp and smart and determined to uncover the truth through filmmaking. And of Danny, shouldering the biggest secret of all, one that eventually destroyed him. I tell the story exactly as my father and I agreed upon. That he and my mother really had been in the oak grove all that time. That Mr. Stewart had been eager to supply an alibi for them, a lie to cover his own lack of one.

But underneath it all lives my mother’s secret, the one she’s been trying to live with since 1975. One my father and I decided would never surface and why my father allowed the world to believe he’d killed both of his siblings. A man still protecting the young girl he’d once loved so much.

“There isn’t any proof that Paul Stewart killed Poppy or Danny,” I say. “No physical evidence linking him to the crime scene. A murder weapon that vanished fifty years ago and is unlikely to ever turn up.”

My mother had discarded the knife. For a time they’d kept it hidden inside Poppy’s windowsill. My father checking on it multiple times a week, making sure it was still there. Until one day it wasn’t. Only my mother knows where it went, and I have no intention of asking her.

I step into my father’s empty office and stand in front of the repaired windows, taking in the view one last time. Thinking of all the books he’d written here. Of all the sleepless nights, turning over events from his childhood. Believing the worst of a brother he’d once loved. The space that was both a sanctuary and a prison.

“Poppy had discovered the truth of what Paul Stewart was doing to kids inside the equipment shed at the high school,” I hear myself saying, “and what he’d done to Danny. She’d wanted to meet my father back at the house to tell him, but he didn’t get there in time.” My voice sounds steady, though my words rip through me, still wishing for a different ending. “One of Danny’s friends overheard them arguing about it and told Danny, who knew what she was going to reveal.” My voice grows quieter in my ears, and I turn away from the view and face the wall of empty bookshelves, waiting for someone else’s library. “We’re not sure what happened after that, but the result was the death of my aunt and uncle. Two young kids with their whole lives ahead of them.”

This is the story I tell Jessica. But my father and I aren’t so sure. We can assemble the pieces of the puzzle that we have, but the truth belongs to Poppy. To Danny. And of course, Mr. Stewart.

Jessica’s voice pulls me back again. “Several other victims of Paul Stewart—both men and women—have come forward since the memoir was published, with their own stories, spanning from the mid-seventies all the way through 2011. I hear he was indicted?”

“Yes, a couple weeks ago.” The police had arrived at Paul Stewart’s door with a search warrant, California’s laws allowing prosecutors to file multiple charges against him despite the many years and decades that have passed. Within hours, he was taken into custody.

“Does it bother you that he won’t be indicted for the murders? That the man who took your aunt and uncle’s lives won’t pay for that?” Jessica asks.

“Paul Stewart will still go to jail. He’ll pay for heinous crimes he committed against people who are still alive to suffer from the effects of those crimes. They’re the ones who need justice, more than my aunt and uncle need it.”

I stand in the doorway to my father’s office and take one last look at the place where I used to curl up and do my homework, just to be near him. Where I sat once again, not so long ago, and witnessed the beginning of the end of my father’s brilliant mind.

Then I turn away, closing the door behind me.

“I’d like to pivot to the house where the murders took place,” Jessica says. “Which your family still owned. You recently had it torn down. Why?”

“All my life, this story has lived inside of me. The pieces and the players, the questions. I spent a lot of time inside that house as I finished the memoir. In Poppy’s room, seeing what she saw, imagining who she dreamt of becoming. I stood in the spot where Danny died. Sat in the kitchen where they ate as a family.” I paused for a moment, then continued, saying the biggest truth I could at the time. “But after the book was done, I needed to close the loop. After the house was demolished, I sold the lot, and now someone is going to build something new there. Which feels like a metaphor for all of us, to build something better on top of the ashes of a painful history.”

“That’s a lovely way to put it,” Jessica says.

Downstairs again, I slide open the French doors and sit on my father’s wrought-iron bench to wait. In the distance, I see the motion of the electronic gates slide open and a car coming slowly down the driveway. It rolls to a stop, and I rise, making my way around the side of the house just as Tom steps from it, standing uncertainly next to the open car door.

Yesterday, I’d sent him the address and a time, with the words I need to show you where I came from .

And because he’s Tom, he came.