The Ghost Writer

by Loreth Anne White

offering me a contract to ghostwrite the memoir of the elusive literary sensation who lives on that brooding West Coast island.

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Claudia has been variously described as Daphne du Maurier meets Shirley Jackson, a female Edgar Allan Poe melded with Stephen King.

“She’s the real deal—a murderess turned authoress

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She shoved Jacques down. He smashed his crown. She sent Jill tumbling after.

“She says she finally remembers, Grace. She recalls exactly what happened that day, and she’s ready to tell the world. She’s going to confess.”

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My ghostwriting niche is true crime. And I have a doctorate in abnormal psychology. My lifelong fascination is with deviant minds, those who kill, and specifically those who feel no remorse in doing so.

Grief is a dark mistress. She makes me second-guess, blindsides me at the most unexpected moments, slices my heart open and renders me vulnerable to all the emotions that roil over the loss of a loved one: hurt, anger, remorse, guilt, fear, loneliness.

I feel as though he’s some kind of shapeshifting threshold guardian, ferrying me across this channel from the mainland to an unearthly, dark realm on the other side, hidden by mist in the sea.

Help! Someone on island trying to kill me. Doesn’t want her to tell Secret. Wants to silence me. Trapped! Nora

In the art of battle, the first move is to throw your opponent off balance, both physically and mentally.

“That’s the thing about a terrible secret, Grace. You think you’re keeping it, but really, it’s the secret that keeps you.”

“Nothing in nature is intrinsically evil. Nature just is, and does what it does for survival. Good, bad, evil—those are human value judgments we bestow on things, depending on our cultures, traditions, history. And we use this to keep our communities, tribes, societies in check and functioning as a whole because, really, we are just herd animals.”

“People justify what they do in this way all the time. By changing their inner narrative of things. The bigger worry becomes whether they’ll get caught, not that what they’re doing is bad.”

“Everything is narrative, Grace, even memories and the so-called ‘truth.’ We can only see the world through our own eyes and within the context of our own biology and our own pasts.”

The events of that day inspired me to study minds like mine—those who kill.