The Ghostwriter

by Julie Clark

But as a ghostwriter—a person who listens to other people’s stories and spins them into a narrative—I understand now how very hard it is to discover what someone has chosen to conceal. And when they die, their secrets get buried in time until there’s no one around to remember them.

My father is a talented novelist—a professional liar by trade and by instinct. I’m not naive enough to think that everything he’s told me is the absolute truth. I invite you to judge for yourself, as I’ve had to do.

When you grow up being told your father is a murderer, you learn how to compartmentalize danger in a way that allows you to ignore it most of the time, even though your subconscious is constantly alert.

Because this book has to be a ruse; my father has been churning out novels for decades, and he certainly doesn’t need my help to do it.

The truth lives far away, in a distant corner of my past that I have no intention of ever visiting.

There is so much to unravel, tangled not just by perspective, but by the passage of time. Nearly fifty years have gone by. Memories have faded. Innuendo and suspicion have calcified into something concrete. Everyone has a theory, but no one has any answers. And my father sits at the center, refusing to acknowledge any of it.

I don’t know if I’m ready to tackle this project, and yet I feel as if I’ve been waiting my entire life to write it.

“No one knew Poppy and Danny the way I did. Not their friends, not even our parents. When I die, they’ll die with me, without ever having gotten to live. This is the least I can do for them.”

When I finally returned to the United States at age twenty-five to attend journalism school in Chicago, I was a new person with a new name, forged from the flames of my father’s dysfunction.

The police will be looking for evidence. Trying to figure out who could have committed such a horrific crime—the brutal murder of two kids—a stabbing so much more personal than a gunshot. More barbaric than poison. They will find clues, but they will never see the truth.

This is the consequence of speaking out as a woman. We are labeled hysterical, emotional, unreliable, and finally, incompetent.

“Writing a memoir is challenging, even under normal circumstances. It requires you to face painful memories that have sometimes been buried for years. It’s a commitment to telling the truth, even if it’s hard.”

Sometimes, when you go looking for something, you might not like what you find.

But I’m also struck by the image of my father, sneaking out to check up on his girlfriend. Not trusting her. Following her. Obsessing over where she said she had been, and checking to make sure that was true.

But film won’t lie the way memories do. I want a record of things that happen so people can’t brush off my feelings and tell me I’m overreacting, or I don’t understand.

A homesickness rises inside of me—for Tom, for my space, my life in Los Angeles that I’m on the verge of losing. To a time before I owed John Calder close to $500,000 and my attorney another $200,000. Before my father decided he needed to share his secrets, yanking my childhood questions out of the past and into the present.

I wish I lived in a world like Tom’s. Where there are no secrets. No fictional backstories. No complicated traumas that make people behave in unexpected ways.

People’s recollections are tinted with their own biases. Their beliefs, layered over the top, sometimes rendering a completely different meaning. Red becomes purple. Yellow becomes green. I’d always believed my father had invented Lionel Foolhardy, until he’d presented me with evidence to the contrary. There’s a reason historians rely so heavily on primary sources. Because human memory is flawed.

“You can know something in your bones and not have any concrete evidence to prove that it’s true,”

I’m beginning

“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.”

“So Danny killed Poppy to keep her from revealing that he had raped you and gotten you pregnant. And then Dad walked in on it and killed Danny?”

The revelation that Danny had killed Poppy because of something she’d filmed would have shifted everything for my father—from sociopathic murderer to self-defense.

My heart breaks for my father. A boy who’d stumbled into a horrific scene and done the only thing he could to save himself.

Information is power, yes. But it’s also a burden because once you know something, you can’t pretend you don’t.

They say when you die, your life flashes before your eyes, but I only see pieces of it. My world, as if viewed through the lens of a camera. Moments in time, delivered out of order, like a movie cut and spliced together again.

“Because that’s not the way I work, and I think you knew that, which is why you hired me.” Then I touch his arm. “I know you didn’t think I was paying attention, but I was. I found everything you left for me.”

But underneath it all lives my mother’s secret, the one she’s been trying to live with since 1975. One my father and I decided would never surface and why my father allowed the world to believe he’d killed both of his siblings. A man still protecting the young girl he’d once loved so much.

“Poppy had discovered the truth of what Paul Stewart was doing to kids inside the equipment shed at the high school,” I hear myself saying, “and what he’d done to Danny. She’d wanted to meet my father back at the house to tell him, but he didn’t get there in time.” My voice sounds steady, though my words rip through me, still wishing for a different ending. “One of Danny’s friends overheard them arguing about it and told Danny, who knew what she was going to reveal.” My voice grows quieter in my ears, and I turn away from the view and face the wall of empty bookshelves, waiting for someone else’s library. “We’re not sure what happened after that, but the result was the death of my aunt and uncle. Two young kids with their whole lives ahead of them.”