Page 8 of The Ghostwriter

I find myself back in the guesthouse, the door locked and the lights out, staring out the window toward the house. The lamp in my father’s room is on for a little while longer and then that, too, goes dark.

The knife, Lydia.

The knife.

The knife.

The words swirl around inside of me, my emotions wrestling with my intellect. I’d looked at Alma after he’d said those words, expecting to see shock. Fear. But all I saw was a calm steadiness, as if she either hadn’t heard him or she didn’t care.

While I was in the house, Tom must have called because I have a voicemail from him. If you’re still awake, give me a call. I couldn’t sleep and just want to hear your voice one more time. There’s no way I can call him back; I’m too rattled and he’d hear it in my voice and press for answers. I click my phone asleep and turn it upside down on the nightstand, sliding deeper under the covers. But my eyes refuse to close. Afraid of what I’ll dream when I do. What stories my subconscious might want to tell me. Less than twenty-four hours after arriving, I’ve shifted from thinking I know who my father was to thinking perhaps I didn’t know him at all.

***

I must have slept because I wake the following morning with a start, my eyes gritty, my neck stiff. I find an email from our editor, Neil, in my in-box. It’s short. We can’t use this. There’s nothing happening here.

I stare at the message, taking a moment to figure out what he’s talking about before I remember. The chapter I’d sent yesterday.

I text Nicole, even though it’s a Saturday. Neil hates the chapter. I did the best I could, revising a mostly coherent scene. I haven’t been through the rest of it yet, but I’m not hopeful of finding anything better.

Her response comes almost immediately. I’m at the gym, but I had my assistant set up a Zoom with the team Monday morning at 7 AM your time. Let’s get an idea of their vision for the book so you can do what you do best.

I don’t respond because I don’t know how to tell her that a bigger revelation, perhaps a memory my father has kept hidden for fifty years, has slipped out and into the open. Taunting me, forcing me to question everything.

***

I enter the house, careful not to startle my father eating breakfast at the table. “How are you feeling?” I ask him. Alma is in the kitchen behind us, flipping through a catalog.

He looks at me, his expression blank. “Fine.”

I slide onto the chair next to him and Alma brings me a cup of coffee. I take a sip, savoring the heat and the caffeine soon to hit my system. “Can we talk about what happened last night?”

He holds a triangle of toast and stares at it, as if he’s not entirely sure what to do with it. Then he takes a tentative bite and says, “I had a bad dream. It happens.”

“It wasn’t a dream. You were awake.”

“Hallucinations are very common,” Alma says from behind us. “They happen pretty early in the disease, but it’s usually a tipping point toward progression. The best thing to do is to validate him when he’s having one and help him move through it.”

“Thank you, doctor,” my father says, his voice tight with sarcasm.

“This wasn’t some fantasy about you being a Broadway singer or seeing bugs that aren’t there. This was specific, about something that actually happened.”

“I’m not sure there’s much to discuss.”

“You’re kidding, right?” When he doesn’t say anything, I press on. “You basically said the knife wasn’t where you left it. You were panicked. Like something bad would happen if you couldn’t locate it.” I lower my voice, aware of Alma behind us. “Were you talking about the murder weapon?”

He pushes his plate away and drops his napkin over the remains of his breakfast. “My doctor has told me that my mind will play tricks on me. I will believe things that are outrageously false.”

“I don’t know, Dad. This seemed like more than that.”

“Olivia,” Alma says, her voice carrying a warning.

My father shakes his head, as if ridding it of voices. His fingers pluck the used napkin from the top of his nearly empty plate, and he smooths it out, spreading it on his lap again, pulling his food closer and poking at it with his fork. He takes a bite and says, “These eggs are cold.”

“You’ve already finished eating,” I tell him. Anxiety blooms inside of me, at how fragile he is. He seemed fine when I arrived yesterday, and I wonder how hard he had to work to hide it from me. How difficult me being here might be on the equilibrium that now seems so precarious.

My father’s eyes dart from me to Alma to the door, but before he can say anything, Alma says, “Enough. It was a hallucination. Not real. Your presence is dredging up things for him that are painful. I told you this is a mistake. Your father can’t handle it.”

But he bristles. “Don’t tell me what I can or cannot handle.”

Alma looks between the two of us, her stare challenging me to argue. “We have to leave at noon sharp.” Then she leaves the room.

I look at my father. “Where are you going on a Saturday?” I ask.

He gives a defeated look. “Life is easier if you don’t ask questions.”

***

“Are you sure you’re feeling up to this?” I ask him before we start. We’re in our old positions from when I was young—him at his desk, his chair turned away from the windows and facing me, and me in my chair by the door.

He gives a tiny shake of his head. “Evenings are rough,” he explains. “It’s sort of like sundowner’s syndrome. I lose my sense of time and place. But it typically doesn’t mean anything. Alma knows what to do.”

“It just seemed significant,” I say.

“I can assure you, it wasn’t.”

I have a colleague who once worked on a book about a serial killer. I remember her talking about what it was like to interview him in prison. “Everyone is an unreliable narrator,” she’d said. “But someone who has killed another person? They are the ultimate gaslighters. You begin to question everything—even the things you can see to be true.”

Could my father be a killer? It’s always been a possibility that’s lived in my peripheral vision. Shortly after I learned what had happened to Danny and Poppy, I asked him outright. “Did you do it?”

He’d scoffed at me in that arrogant way he had, as if he was above such a ridiculous and juvenile question. “I don’t have time for this, Olivia.”

He’d been packing for a trip, his assistant, Melinda, downstairs in the kitchen making me a dinner of hot dogs and tomato soup, her overnight bag sitting in the entry. I watched my father fold sweaters and pants, stacking them carefully in his suitcase, and I tried to imagine him with a knife, slashing at the bodies of his brother and sister. The rage that might have pushed him to commit something so violent. I tried a different tack. “I won’t tell anyone,” I promised. “You can trust me.”

He started to laugh as he snapped his suitcase shut, lifting it by its handle. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, brushing past me, his footsteps echoing as he descended the stairs.

I push the memory away. “I started reading the manuscript,” I say now. My father looks at me, searching my expression for a hint of what I might have thought, but I’m having a hard time meeting his gaze. “There’s not a lot I can work with.”

I wait for him to get angry or defensive. But he seems to collapse into himself. “I was afraid of that,” he says. “This illness, it’s deceptive. It tricks you into thinking you have a grasp on reality, on events of the past. You believe them, fully and completely.” He sighs. “But then you find out that nothing you believed is real. None of it happened the way you think it did.” He sits forward, his expression intense. “I need you to remember the good things. The treasure hunts I used to design for you. The way everything came together at the end—the clues, the prize. The fun.”

I’m confused, and a little worried about this sudden segue, wondering if this is how our conversations will go—on topic for a few minutes and then veering off into some other lane, some other memory that has nothing to do with the memoir. “Dad, we need to stay focused on the book. I tried doing what you asked—I revised a chapter and sent it to your editor. He said it didn’t work.” I wait to see if he’ll be the one to suggest what needs to happen next. When he doesn’t, I say, “That’s why I need to talk to other people. I have to be able to make sense of this narrative.”

He sits back again, resigned. “I don’t think we need to do that,” he says. “I’m at my best in the mornings and I haven’t completely lost the thread yet so I can still tell you what you need to know. To make sense of whatever mess I’ve created.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I explain. “A memoir is your recounting of your life, but it’s stronger with voices of the others who were there.”

Downstairs I can hear Alma in the kitchen, the clatter of pots and pans faint through the closed door.

“I can’t let you do that,” he says. “No one can know about the book until it’s ready to release.”

“Why?” I ask. “Early buzz can only help you.”

He looks at me, his watery blue eyes latching onto mine. “Because there are things I never told the police. I want to be very mindful of what we say, how we say it, and most importantly when we say it. You have to trust me on this, Olivia.”

I stare at him, thinking again of last night. The knife, Lydia. Thinking about the jotted notes in the manuscript.

She shouldn’t have gone.

I wanted to kill Danny.

Finally I say, “Well, let’s start there. Did you hide the murder weapon in Poppy’s window?”

He looks as if I’ve slapped him. “Is this how you work with all your subjects? Corner them at the start and accuse them of murder?”

“You just said—”

“This isn’t easy for me. I’ve spent fifty years staying silent—at my own peril. It’s not a matter of what needs to be said, but how the story should be told.”

I fight down my impatience, reminding myself that if this were anyone else, I wouldn’t have phrased my question that way. Interviewing a subject—especially at the beginning—is a delicate balance of building trust and looking for openings. There are no rules, only instinct. “You’re right. I apologize. Why don’t you start by telling me about Poppy and Danny. Whatever memories come first.”

He inhales through his nose and closes his eyes, reminding me of a musician about to perform. When he opens them again, he says, “Danny loved to camp. When he was younger, he took an outdoor survival class and fell in love with the woods. With the solitude of nature.” He pauses, thinking. “But he could be scary at times. He’d get this look in his eyes that was terrifying. Like he was working hard not to hurt you.”

“Was he always that way?” I ask.

My father gives a faint smile and says, “No, when he was younger, he was vibrant.”

“That’s a really interesting word. What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. In elementary school, kids were drawn to him, to his energy. It was like he lived on a different plane than the rest of us. They’d do whatever it took to live inside his orbit. But things changed when he was a teenager. He used to read these survival books. You know…how to live in the woods eating only plants and bugs.”

“Did your family go camping a lot?”

“I can’t believe we never had any of these conversations,” he says. “I always thought we’d have more time, but…” he shrugs. “To answer your question, no. My family didn’t camp. My father wasn’t an outdoors kind of person. He worked and then he came home and watched the news with a cocktail. My mother would have died if she didn’t have access to her hot rollers and a telephone. But Danny loved sleeping out in the grove near our house. He’d take a tent and a sleeping bag and set up out there. Sometimes he’d be gone for the whole weekend.”

“Your parents let him camp out there alone?”

My father laughs. “It was the seventies. They didn’t care, so long as he didn’t interfere with their weekly bridge game or Walter Cronkite.”

“How old was Danny at this point?”

My father takes a moment to think. “The first time he went out there on his own was when he was about twelve,” he says. “Initially, just among the trees in the field behind our house if it was dry enough. Later, he’d venture into the oak grove.” The oak grove, an expanse of land just a few blocks from his childhood home. “He did it all the way up until he died. One time I asked him if he’d ever want to live like that, and he told me he thought about it all the time. That living at home felt constricting. He was going to apply to some tiny college up in Oregon, and I think the appeal for him wasn’t just the distance from Ojai and from our family, but because it was a place he could still find the outdoor space he needed.”

It feels as though my father and I are inside of a bubble. His voice is deep and melodic, and I find myself hypnotized. He’s never spoken so candidly about his siblings, and it feels like finally scratching an itch that has plagued me for decades. I want to sink into his words the way I used to when I was little, listening to him spin a tale about Lionel Foolhardy. I want to mute out everyone and everything and just listen to my father tell a good story.

“So Danny was unhappy?” I ask, reminding myself that I’m not the audience; I’m the author.

“I think we all were,” my father admits. “In our own way. I’d act out, but Danny would travel inward, to a place no one could reach. You have to understand, our family wasn’t an easy one. We had a father who was emotionally unavailable and a mother who was constantly complaining about us to others, often while we were standing right there. Well, not Danny so much. But me? My god, she’d bitch to anyone who would listen about how hard it was to be my mother. The calls from the school, the complaints from other parents, my grades, the clothes I wore. She was the same with Poppy, who in my mind was near perfect. Always moaning about how her hair was the wrong color or the wrong style, how boys wouldn’t like her if she didn’t wear dresses and skirts.” He pauses for a moment. “It was a strange time. We had a lot of freedom, but we also had a lot of rules. Which, of course, we broke.”

“Like what?”

“Our parents imposed a curfew of eleven o’clock. No room for negotiation. At eleven p.m., the doors were locked, and if you knew what was good for you, you’d be inside.” He gives a rueful smile and says, “We could sneak out through our bedroom window, but getting back inside was problematic without a boost. So Danny disabled the lock on the window in the back door. The latch would appear to be locked, but it would lift right up, and from there you could reach inside and unlock the door.”

“Didn’t you have a key to your own house?”

My father shakes his head. “We never needed one. No one locked their doors during the day.”

His eyes latch on to mine, both of us realizing what that could have meant, how events of that day could have turned out differently.

“You said Danny could be scary. Tell me more about that.”

My father’s voice grows low, and he stares down at his hands as he speaks. “I came across him once, in the grove.” He pauses, as if gathering the courage to continue. “It was shortly before he died. I was on my way to meet your mother and I heard this sound. A thump thump thump and a choking noise, like whoever it was couldn’t get enough air.”

My father has always been a talented storyteller. He knows how to moderate his voice, how to slow his words down to build tension, and I find myself stilling my body, waiting for him to continue. “It was late afternoon,” he continues. “I remember the slightly decomposing smell of dead leaves and damp soil. I think I knew, instinctively, to be quiet. That it was Danny out there, and whatever he was doing… I wasn’t supposed to be witnessing it.”

He’s silent for a full minute, and I let him gather himself to tell this next part, my gaze landing briefly on my phone, making sure it’s still recording. “I found him digging a hole. His back heaving with effort, his face red with rage. He was stabbing at the ground with that shovel as if he was trying to attack it. Next to him was a bundle of something, wrapped up in a T-shirt. Spots on it were bloody, but from where I stood, concealed behind a tree, I could tell the blood wasn’t coming from Danny. I stared hard at that bundle, until my eyes started to water. Waiting to see what it was.”

He swipes his eyes as if they’re still burning, and I notice how his hand shakes. How he’s reliving this moment. Not a hallucination. Not a night terror, but a memory that he needs to get out. “It was the neighbor’s cat, who’d gone missing. Poppy had been head of the search committee, rallying all the kids to put up flyers and check everyone’s garage.” He shakes his head. “When he got the hole deep enough, he tossed the shovel aside and kicked the cat into the hole.”

“Did you say anything? Ask him what happened to the cat?”

He looks at me as if I’m insane. “No. I got the hell out of there as fast as I could.”

“Maybe he’d found the cat already dead,” I suggest. “Killed by a coyote and he was sparing Poppy and the others from finding it.”

My father shakes his head, resolute. “Danny killed that cat.”

I can’t help but feel skeptical. “Are you suggesting Danny was some kind of sociopath?” I ask. “No one, in all these years, has ever said anything like that about him.”

My father’s gaze is steady. His hands are no longer shaking, as if he’s detoxed himself in the retelling. “I know what I saw. I was always the volatile one, but Danny was something else. Something much more dangerous.”

I take a moment to imagine the scene. The smells, the shadows in that grove of trees. How my father must have felt; the fear I can still hear in his voice. What’s he trying to suggest, that Danny killed Poppy? The question is almost out of my mouth before I pull it back, remembering how angry he got when I’d asked him about the knife. Knowing, instinctively, that it’s too soon to ask him a question like that.

And then I take a step back. What he’s describing is disturbing, but I have no way of knowing if it’s true.

At the beginning of a book, I try not to let my subjects talk too linearly. I’d rather have them bounce around in time because that will reveal the touchstone moments around which the rest of their story will flow, so I decide to leave this line of questioning alone for now. “Talk to me about the aftermath of the murders,” I say. “You’d been in the oak grove with Mom and your teacher, emerging into a whole new reality. Tell me about that night.”

“To be honest, I don’t remember much. We had to stay in a motel since the house was a crime scene. But I was in shock, I think.” His expression is distant, trying to return to that time. “Some things are better not to remember.”

“I’m going to ask you to try,” I say.

He nods, thinking. “We weren’t allowed in the house to get anything,” he recalls. “So we slept in the clothes we had on. I remember the way the motel manager looked at us when we checked in. With a mix of pity and relief—like he was glad it was us on that side of the counter and not him. When my father tried to pay, he waved the money away. ‘No charge,’ he’d said.”

“Why a motel?” I ask. “Why not stay with friends?”

His honesty surprises me. “Aside from your mother, I didn’t really have any. And my mother’s friends didn’t like me very much. The last thing they wanted to do was to sleep under the same roof as me.” He chuckles. “I can’t say I blamed them. I was an odd bird and the whispers about the possibility that I’d killed them had already started.”

“Did you all share a room?” I can imagine them, huddled into a small motel room, his parents in one bed and him in the other, unable to let their last remaining child out of their sight for a single moment, considering what had just happened.

But he shakes his head. “No, they put me in the room next to theirs. The walls were really thin—they could have heard me burp if they’d wanted to.” He sighs. “But my mother’s crying drowned everything out.” He pauses, remembering. “It seemed like she would never stop crying.”

“And you? Were you crying?”

“Siblings define who you are at that age. I’d always been the middle child, measured against Danny and Poppy my entire life. Then suddenly they were gone and all that was left was this vast emptiness. Silence. Except for my mother’s crying.”

It’s not until later, when I’m transcribing this conversation, that I notice he didn’t answer my question.