Page 41 of The Ghostwriter

Motherfucker.

Chapter 18

I approach my father’s childhood home from the back, following a path through the preserve that leads to a small grove of trees, a mixture of oak and eucalyptus. Beyond it is my father’s backyard, a long expanse of unfenced land that meets the edge of the preserve.

Above me, a canopy hangs, the sky only a patchwork behind the layer of green. Birds call, insects buzz, and a squirrel watches me from a nearby tree.

I imagine my father, skinny and awkward, walking alongside my mother and their teacher, looking for a quiet place to hash out their argument. The smell of eucalyptus in the evening air as the sun’s heat faded away. Maybe the faint sound of music from the carnival, laughter and voices a background to their conversation.

I hear a car pull into the neighbor’s driveway and I watch him get out, tugging a gym bag over his shoulder. Apprehension grips me, and I wonder if I should have talked to my father first. Confronted him with what I’ve learned and demanded access to the house. I’m pretty sure aninterview with the local police will violate my contract in some way. His front door closes, and I wait a few minutes more before approaching my father’s back door.

It’s the kind you find on a service porch, with a window on the top half. I jiggle the knob, but it holds firm. Peering through the window, I can make out the kitchen to my left, the central hallway straight ahead, and the door to what I believe is Poppy’s room on my right. I press my hands against the cheap aluminum frame of the window and push up. At first, nothing happens, which is what I expected. Surely someone at some point would have noticed the lock had been disabled.

But how often does anyone check whether their windows are really latched? I think back to my own, trying to remember. You flip the lock, watch it engage, and walk away. I give the frame a few sharp taps, the noise louder than I want, and I glance to my right again to see if the neighbor heard anything. But all is quiet. When I wiggle the window again, it’s looser. Dark, damp dust, compacted over years along the bottom edge, loosens, and the right side lifts enough for me to get my fingers under it and jimmy it so that it’s open a few inches. I glance over my shoulder again before reaching inside and turning the knob. Just as my father said he and Danny used to do.

I stand with my back pressed against the closed door, listening. For footsteps outside, a voice calling, demanding to know who I am and what I’m doing. But all I hear is the distant buzz of a plane and the sound of birds.

The house smells dusty, the air stale after being closed up for so long. I enter the kitchen, which still has the original dark cabinets. A dingy white refrigerator is in the space where the old one used to be, but the range appears to be the same harvest-gold one that was in the photographs.

I try to imagine my grandmother in this spot, watching her three kids eating breakfast on that last day, not knowing it would be the final time they would sit there together.

I look out the window over the sink, a straight view toward the preserve in the distance. Had the killer—perhaps Danny?—stood here, waiting for Poppy? I imagine him, watching her run toward the house, entering the unlocked back door and going straight to her bedroom, where she’d been trapped.

A swinging door leads to the dining room, and connected to that is the living room. It’s smaller than I imagined. The fireplace is outlined in red brick with a floating mantel over it, a barrel ceiling arching overhead. A central hallway leads to the back of the house and the three bedrooms.

Brown carpet covers the floor, outlines where heavy furniture once sat still visible. I feel like I’m on a broken-down movie set. Just the background remains, empty spaces where my father and his family once lived their lives.

I walk down the hallway, which is dark, so I flip a switch and a single fixture overhead illuminates the space in a dim light. I gather my courage and move toward the end of it. Danny had been found, right about where I stand now. I crouch down and brush my fingers over the surface of the carpet, wondering about the young boy who died here, who’d never had the chance to grow up. Live on his own. Get married and have children. For many years, I imagined that he’d been terrified, forced to listen to his sister suffer in the next room, knowing he was powerless to help her. But these past few weeks with my father have me imagining it differently. Seeing Danny in a more sinister light based on my father’s stories. And I wonder if Danny hadn’t been running toward Poppy, but away from her. Leaving her to bleed out and finish what he’d started.

If I lift a corner of the carpet, I’d likely see the black stain of blood. Perhaps now only a faint shadow, but surely it would still be there. It had been several hours before the bodies were found. How much blood would that be, seeping into the wood?

In the kitchen, the refrigerator motor clicks off and I’m left with silence that feels heavy. I glance over my shoulder, shaking off the chillthat’s come over me. I don’t believe in ghosts, but if I did, I’m certain they’d be here.

I stand again and peek into the primary bedroom, which is small and only has a sliding-door closet on one end. In our conversations, my father has talked about his parents some. They showed up for award ceremonies and when the school needed them to intervene, but there were no heart-to-heart conversations about feelings or dreams. No conflict-resolution discussions between the three siblings. Just aget over it and get on with itmentality.

Much like my own childhood.No regrets, no looking back.

Next, I stand in the doorway of the middle bedroom. The one once shared by my father and Danny. Twin beds on that wall over there, across from two windows overlooking the side yard and the neighbor’s house. I wonder what it had been like for my father to live in this room for three years after the murders. To go to bed every night next to the empty bed of his brother, who’d been slaughtered just fifteen feet away. My father told me that his mother refused to get rid of Danny’s bed, insisting it remain, with the same sheets that had been on it the day Danny died.

Finally I move into Poppy’s room. In the photographs, the walls were pink with a rosebud-trim wallpaper. But now they’re just a dingy white, scuffed in places, the ugly brown carpet showing me where a desk once sat, a discarded and outdated modem still on the floor in the corner. Afternoon sunlight slants through the windows, splashing bright light onto the carpet near the closet.

I think back to my father’s night terror, the way he threw open his bedroom window, convinced that he was somewhere else instead, desperate to find a knife he’d hidden there. It’s ridiculous, but I have to look, to see for myself that it was just a delusion.

I start with the window on the left, opening the sash and inspecting the sill below, tapping on the wooden frame. Gripping it in the same way my father had, trying to wiggle something loose. Then I slide myhands up the sides, all the way to the bottom of the window. I trace the corners, looking for a place where my fingernails can find purchase, but the seam is solid.

I lower and lock it again, then move to the other one. I start to pull up the sash, but it sticks. I have to wiggle it as I did the back door window, one inch at a time on each side, and notice water damage around the edges. When it’s finally open, I trace my fingers again along the center, gripping the wood to see if it moves. It feels solid enough, but when I look at the seam in the corner, there’s a tiny hole. I try to fit my fingernail into it, but it’s too small, so I retrace my steps to the back door where I’d dropped my purse and carry it into Poppy’s room, searching the bottom detritus of pens, notebooks, and an old gallon-size baggie, searching for a paper clip.

I find one and unfold it partway so that it looks like an inverted L. Then I slip the tip into the hole, feeling the wood release.

The sill lifts out in one piece, about two feet long and four inches wide. I use the flashlight on my phone and shine it into the opening. The space where there should have been insulation is empty, just the exterior frame about a palm’s width away from the interior drywall. I imagine Poppy pulling it out, piece by piece, maybe using a sock or a glove to protect her fingers from whatever material they used when the house was built, dropping them outside the window to be collected later. Hiding her most private things in here—magazines she wasn’t supposed to read, notes from a boy she liked. The diary, encased in its metal canister.

The space is pitch-black and riddled with cobwebs, but the narrow beam of my flashlight catches on something metallic tucked deep inside. I reach my arm down, trying to angle my body to get maximum stretch, and my fingers brush over a serrated edge. I’m on my tiptoes now, my mind racing ahead to what I might do if I pull out a knife. Confront my father with it, or go straight to the police?

My fingers finally gain purchase on the object, and I can tell right awayby the weight and shape that it’s not a knife. I pull out a button about four inches in diameter, its edges rough with rust, that readsPro Roe 1973.

All the decisions I might have been faced with evaporate into the air around me. Of course, Poppy had hidden this button in her window, away from her mother’s judgmental eyes. I spin it around in my palm, imagining Poppy as the young activist my father had described, then slide the button into my purse, glad to have an artifact that I can keep. One without a confusing narrative like her diary. Just a simple button, proclaiming something that mattered to her. That matters to me as well.

I stand in the middle of the room and stretch my mind back fifty years and feel Poppy’s presence here. Not a ghost, but the vibrations of a young girl gone too soon. This was her sanctuary. And even though it looks like a generic spare bedroom in a run-down house, my mind is layering over the space with the images I saw in the photo album. Her bed over there, against the wall. Her desk under the windows. Clothes scattered across the floor leading to her closet.

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