Page 15 of The Ghostwriter

“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 amoment. “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. Athump thump thumpand 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 withrage. 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.

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