The Ghostwriter

by Julie Clark

To shatter my childhood right there in the school cafeteria. “Your dad killed his brother and sister. Murdered them in their own home.”

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. Preparing for it. Waiting for it to surface.

I try to think about this not just as an opportunity, but a necessity. My father used to always say No regrets, no looking back. I make a promise to not let myself get sucked into whatever plan he’s got for me.

“You misunderstand,” he says. “The memoir isn’t about my career. It’s about my childhood. Specifically, it’s about my family and the months leading up to the murders of Danny and Poppy.”

The piece I’m most intrigued by is the full page of the same sentence, over and over. She shouldn’t have gone. A rumination. But on what?

I finally find my voice. “Check on what?” I ask. “What did you hide in there?” He gives me a withering look I know well. As if he can’t believe he has to spell it out for me. “The knife, Lydia.”

I don’t respond because I don’t know how to tell her that a bigger revelation, perhaps a memory my father has kept hidden for fifty years, has slipped out and into the open. Taunting me, forcing me to question everything.

Interviewing a subject—especially at the beginning—is a delicate balance of building trust and looking for openings. There are no rules, only instinct.

I can’t think of Poppy, about what she must have been thinking in her final moments. It’s easier to think about Danny, how hard he fought. How I was almost the one who’d died in that hallway. The truth I can never say aloud is that I’m not sad about Danny. I’m glad he’s dead.

This is the consequence of speaking out as a woman. We are labeled hysterical, emotional, unreliable, and finally, incompetent. I consider refusing, telling him I won’t work that way. But I don’t think I have room to argue, since they’re just as inclined to cancel the whole thing.

I’m wary of letting this memoir turn into one of petty grievances and sibling rivalries. I want to get to the core of my family. Figure out who each of them really was—separate from one another, but also because of each other.

Most people have a set of stories—tried and true anecdotes they return to again and again. Moments—big or small, happy or sad—that have rooted inside of them, for whatever reason.

I sit with that image for a moment, my mind puzzling through different scenarios with Danny as the perpetrator and not my father, as I’d always believed. I stare at Danny’s grinning face, wondering if what my father says is true.

How often do you have the chance to speak with someone you despise under the pretense of being someone else?

So many threads are tangled in my mind—my mother’s abortion. Danny’s temper. Poppy’s last diary entry, her fear palpable on the page. I can’t figure out how it all fits together.

But light casts shadows. And it’s always been the shadows that interest me the most. The idea that certain things thrive there, that the dark is where secrets live, and I want to understand them. To seek them out. To peer into people’s darkest places and bring the truth out into the open.

“Besides, when you can’t hear the words people use to distract you, you focus on what they’re doing instead. The truth lives in people’s actions, their unguarded moments, not in the lies they tell.”

There are ten film reels in all. Three from March, two from April, four from May, and one from June. Such a short period of time. And such a consequential one.

There’s a reason historians rely so heavily on primary sources. Because human memory is flawed.

As a ghostwriter, it’s never my name on the cover, never my photo on the book jacket. Olivia Dumont is simply the name on the contract and one of the many people thanked in the acknowledgments.

I’m beginning to realize that once you lie about your past, you wall yourself off from the present. From the people who care about you. And now that I’m tasked with tunneling through my father’s lies—hardened and calcified by time—I wonder who will stick around to tunnel through my walls and find me.

A desire for answers weighing heavy on top of the sickening sense that once I know something, I can never unknow it. And the fear that whatever I learn next might change everything I believe to be true.

In a quieter voice, he continues. “Now let’s say you find out he didn’t do it. He’s irrefutably innocent. Then what?” This is what’s been nagging at me ever since I left the coffee shop. The weight that’s been hanging around my neck, threatening to choke me. “Then he spent decades being the villain in other people’s stories. And I went along with it.”

“Every chapter has to have a point. Even if the reader can’t yet see it. Every story told must serve two purposes—to allow your reader to know your characters better, and to push the narrative toward the conclusion.”

This isn’t just a memoir. It’s a treasure hunt—our last one—and every story is a clue. I’d be impressed if I weren’t so angry.

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.

Behind me, I can hear my brother coming after me. The rasp of his breath, a grunt as he leaps over a log in his quest to reach me. To punish me for what I’ve just seen.

Determined to put that film somewhere safe until I can convince Danny to tell the truth.

I can’t find the words to tell Vince the truth, but I can offer him a warning. “Lydia needs to stay away from Mr. Stewart.” I roll over and look at my brother standing over me.

“I know you cheated on me. I know you got pregnant and had an abortion.” The words rushed out of me, hot and fast, making my stomach feel hollow.

I need Lydia to tell me the fucking truth. But I also need to know what, exactly, Danny had told Poppy. Why Poppy had said, You have to tell, before bursting out of the room she’d been in with Danny and looking at me like she knew something I didn’t.

I need to know how it ties in with her departure, because I’m certain the reason I grew up without a mother is directly connected to the murders of Poppy and Danny.

That you can make up whatever you want to be the truth and you can live your life as if you’ve sealed it off forever. But, like a heartbeat behind a wall, the truth is always there, holding you hostage.

“I’m sure that’s the story your father wants to tell. But he walked into something he had no business being in the middle of.” She presses her lips together, her hands beginning to shake. “Whatever is on that film is why Danny killed Poppy and why Danny almost killed your father.”

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

Mr. Stewart grabs Danny’s wrist and pulls Danny toward him. Gripping Danny’s hand, he guides it lower, then reaches out with his other to caress Danny’s cheek. He leans in to kiss Danny on the lips, which seems to wake Danny up.

Mr. Stewart crashed in after me. Too big. Too strong. He’d grabbed my wrist and twisted it, angling the knife away from himself and plunging it into my stomach.

Lydia’s voice, shouting, “What did you do to him, Danny?”

Somewhere in my mind, I must have noticed the blood on her arms. Her shirt. A smudge of it across her forehead. But it doesn’t yet register what that means.

And then it all clicks into place. I look up at her, our eyes locking. Understanding passing between us, at what she’d done for me. For us. For Poppy. What we can never reveal. An unspoken promise I will keep for the next fifty years.

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.