Page 82 of The Ghostwriter

The video shows a group of kids sitting cross-legged in the dirt, the flames highlighting their features, making them seem otherworldly and immortal. But instead of looking at them, I’m looking beyond them. At first, it’s her legs I recognize—long and lean in a pair of jeans. My mother, sitting on a log in the top right corner of the screen. Leaning toward someone, laughing. Passing a can of beer back and forth. Someone nudges Poppy, or bumps into her, because the camera shifts, and I can see who it is next to my mother. His arm curving around her waist, his head tilted toward hers, the two of them oblivious.

Danny.

I pause the clip and look at my mother. “What happened?”

Her voice is robotic, as if the only way to get through it is to take all of the emotion out of it. “That night, Danny was so nice to me. I started to wonder if Vince had been exaggerating about how awful his brother was. Because to me, he was charming. Funny. I was sixteen…” Her voice trails off. “He was so popular. So handsome. He brought me drinks and talked to me all night long. Ignoring his friends, ignoring the other girls who were much prettier and much cooler than I was. After a while, he suggested we find a quiet place to talk more.” She looks away, ashamed. “I shouldn’t have gone with him. It was my fault.”

Her words echo the page my father wrote, the words scrawled again and again.She shouldn’t have gone.“Did he rape you?” I finally ask, my heart breaking for the young girl that lives, so fresh, in my mind. I thinkback to all the movies I’ve studied, now wondering if I’d missed something. Some silent shift, signifying what had been done to her.

She gives a tiny shrug. “When he kissed me, I liked it. It was exciting. But then I remembered about your father. About how much it would destroy him, and I pulled away. Danny didn’t like that. Said I was a tease.” She’s lost in the memory, reliving it somewhere in her mind. Then she seems to realize I’m still there, still listening. “You don’t need to hear the rest.”

“Why didn’t you tell someone?” I ask.

She gives me a shrewd look. “That’s not how things worked back then. I thought I could forget about it. Danny behaved as if nothing had happened. He barely acknowledged me, and I started to wonder if I’d imagined it. But then, I found out I was pregnant. I couldn’t tell your father. It would have devastated him.” She pauses, then adds, “It did.”

“Did Danny ever know it was him who had gotten you pregnant?”

My mother gives a tiny shrug. “No one knows what Danny knew or didn’t know. He let your father believe it was Mr. Stewart’s baby, which was ridiculous.”

“Mr. Stewart took you to get the abortion,” I say. “It’s not a big leap to assume he was the father. Was there anything going on between the two of you?”

My mother shakes her head, unable to look at me. “No.”

I’m struggling to make sense of this. Even in the 1970s, even despite Mr. Stewart’s righteous claim that he would do it again, it seems like an outrageous risk for a teacher to take. “Help me understand why a teacher would take a student to get an abortion. He could have gotten into a lot of trouble.”

My mother looks at me and says, “My mother wasn’t the best parent. She liked to say we were more like sisters than mother and daughter. But the truth was, she wasn’t even that to me. A sister is someone you can talk to. Confide your problems to. But my mother was only interested infinding a man to take care of her.” She pauses here, as if remembering that time. The horrible realization that she was pregnant and the helpless feeling it must have given her. Abortion had been recently legalized, but it would have been unlikely a sixteen-year-old girl could have figured out how to access it on her own. “I didn’t tell Mr. Stewart I was pregnant. He figured it out. When he offered to help me, I accepted. I was eight weeks pregnant and running out of time. He drove me to the clinic, pretended to be my older brother, and even filled out the paperwork when I couldn’t.”

“It’s one thing to drive a girl to get an abortion,” I say. “Quite another to lie to the police in a murder investigation.”

“Asking him for the alibi was your father’s idea. He used the abortion as leverage to get him to say he was with us.”

My voice lowers, though there isn’t anyone around who can hear me. “Do you know who killed them?” I ask. “Was it Dad?”

“Poppy had something she needed to tell your father,” my mother says. “She was really upset about it. We were both worried that she knew the truth about the baby and what Danny had done to me. She and Danny had been arguing about it, and your father wanted to get her to promise she wouldn’t tell anyone about the rape or the abortion.” She takes a shaking breath and says, “But your father didn’t kill Poppy. She was already dead when he got there.”

A part of me had been hoping it wasn’t true. That my father hadn’t been there, that his memory had been false. But now it’s confirmed. “So Danny killed Poppy to keep her from revealing the rape,” I say. “But who killed Danny? Dad?”

But my mother doesn’t answer the question. “Poppy was tenacious. She’d been following your father for months, filming him with her camera.”

“Until she lost it,” I say.

My mother doesn’t respond, seemingly trapped in a memory. Finally she says, “She didn’t lose it. I took it.”

“What? Why?”

“I was heading home when I saw Poppy and Danny come tearing out of the grove of trees in the field behind their house, fighting over the camera. I hid behind a tree and watched him tackle her. Wrestle the camera out of her hands, throwing it as far as he could. Then he grabbed her and dragged her into the house before she was able to go get it.” Her voice is low, remembering that day. “I was frozen to the spot, terrified Danny would see me and come after me next,” she says, swiping a strand of hair off her forehead. “I figured the least I could do was to get Poppy’s camera for her. Hold on to it until things calmed down. But shortly after that…” She shrugs. “Well, you know what happened.”

“What did you end up doing with it?”

She gives me a long, steady look. Then she stands and disappears into her room, returning with a shoebox. She hands it to me, and I lift the lid. Inside is an old Super 8 camera, dented on one side, the lens completely gone.

I lift it out and turn it over in my hands, hardly believing she kept it all these years. The compartment where the film is stored is badly damaged, and I look up at my mother. “Is there still film in it?”

“I assume so.”

The idea of sitting on that film is unfathomable to me. “Why didn’t you turn it over to the police?”

“You think answers will fix everything, but they don’t. Mr. Stewart used to always say that information is power. But it’s also a burden because once you know something, you can’t pretend you don’t.” She shakes her head. “I kept the camera out of respect for Poppy. But I’ve never been like her. I don’t need to see what’s on the film to know why Danny killed her. I thought it was better for everyone to just leave it behind.” She looks at me and says, “I’m sure there are things in your past you’d rather not speak of.”

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