Page 63 of The Ghostwriter

A request? A threat? I run through the last two lines, plugging in words that rhyme withdead. “Someday soon, you’ll be dead, you’ll find your prize in the…bed?” I say, looking at him. Hopeful this game will be over soon.

My mother gasps. “Vincent,” she scolds. “What a terrible thing to say to your sister.”

“Relax, Mom. It’s not a fortune cookie,” he says. “It just has to rhyme.” To me he says, “Does a bed fit the theme?”

Our mother huffs and takes another sip of wine.

This is the first time a clue hasn’t been written on a piece of paper, but rather graffitied onto a wall, and I wonder if this is another clue to a different mystery. Whether Vince is trying to tell me something else.

I push the thought away and return to the puzzle at hand. “Someday soon, you’ll be dead. You’ll find your prize in the…shed?”

Vince looks pleased.

There’s no way I want to go out to the shed alone. But Vince is staring at me, waiting, and I don’t want to let on that I’m scared or do anything to make him angry. So I look at my father. “May I be excused?” I ask, hoping he’ll say no. Hoping he’ll put an end to our game.

He looks at my plate and says, “Finish your milk.”

I drink it slowly, then carry everything to the sink and walk to the back door. It’s dark outside, the shed just a faint shadow in the corner of the yard, the vast, empty field pitch-black behind it. It’s a tiny structure with only one window, the place where my mother keeps her gardening tools. I walk toward it, glancing over my shoulder to make sure Vince isn’t following me.

When I step inside, it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark space, and then I see it. The bright-yellow Kodak box. Air rushes out of me as relief floods in. This is typical Vince. Never able to talk about his feelings. Never able to apologize in words, he does things like this instead. He makes these gestures that show you all is okay.

I return to the house, holding it up, triumphant. “My eleventh roll of film, and it has sound!”

Danny rolls his eyes. “Great,” he says, rising from the table without asking permission. He carries his plate and cup to the sink and sets them down. “Now she can eavesdrop on us too.”

Chapter 28

“It’s not what you think,” my father says. I click my phone closed, the image of his handwritten threat on the wall of Poppy’s closet disappearing.

“And what would that be?” I ask.

“It was part of a complicated game Poppy and I played, our version of a treasure hunt. It could last days or even weeks. There was a written puzzle, divided into pieces. Often a poem, though not always. Once you pieced it all together, it would tell you where your prize was hidden.” He’s warming up to his subject now. “But the clues tofindthe pieces of the poem were spoken aloud. It required you to listen carefully to every word that person said. Each hunt was always around a theme. For example, if the theme wasred things, you had to listen for any reference to anything that could be red. If I said something about apples, you might look where the apples were kept and find another piece of the puzzle.”

I wait for him to allude to the game we seem to be playing now. A hint that I should be paying attention like Poppy needed to, butthere’s nothing. “Okay,” I finally say. “But why write something so threatening?”

He gives a tiny shake of his head. “I didn’t mean anything by it at the time. I was just looking for a word that rhymed with ‘shed.’”

“Head. Bed. Sled,” I suggest. “There are a lot of words that don’t threaten your sister.”

“You’re reading too much into it,” he says.

The suggestion makes me frustrated. Angry. Exhausted. Because that’s exactly what he wants me to do. “So what was the theme for this one?”

“Dark places, I think.” He grins, adjusting his thin frame in his chair. “She turned up a lot of secrets on that one. Danny’s pot stash. My father’sPlayboymagazines.”

“What about your mother? Did she have any secrets?”

The smile falls off his face, just a little bit. “All her dysfunction lived out in the open.”

“What do you mean?”

“We weren’t easy kids. She spent most of her days with some kind of a low-grade buzz. Alcohol, mostly. But later, after the murders, pills.” A wry smile. “I guess you could say I got my coping skills from her.”

I feel the shifting sands of being both a ghostwriter and a daughter. Fighting—and sometimes failing—to maintain an objective distance. Because my own memories are tied up in this tapestry that’s slowly appearing before me. Threads connecting my story to this one. It’s easy, in a way, to keep the focus on what happened to Poppy and Danny. But that doesn’t negate the trauma that came before.

It’s time to show him the fight with Danny. The way it really happened, not the version that lives inside his mind. Last night I’d gone back and rewatched the clip and then I wrote the scene. But in it, it’s not Danny attacking my father, it’s my father attacking Danny. Because I have to write the story I can see on film, not the one he’s telling.

I pull out my laptop, clicking through until I find the clip I want toshow him.May #4, Clip #9.The fight that, according to Poppy’s diary, changed everything. The fight my father described yesterday, proving he’s an unreliable narrator.

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