The Shadow Writer

by Maxwell, Eliza

  “I chose to see it as God’s will. His granting me a chance for redemption. Thinking of it any other way would have driven me mad.”

  She sighs. “But then my sister was murdered. My mother was already gone by that time. My own daughter had no one left.”

  Margaret leans forward and takes another long drink from her water.

  “I called in favors and pulled strings and petitioned the courts and the foster system to have her sent to St. Sebastian’s. For her own safety, and a chance at a seminormal life, Grace became Graye, and I became her guardian in the only way I could.”

  “You never told her?” Laura asks, though she suspects she knows the answer to that.

  A darkness settles over Margaret. “I prayed time and again for guidance. I begged God to show me the way forward. But, in this instance, he was stubbornly silent. Perhaps he was waiting for me to make the right decision on my own. But I failed his test.”

  Margaret rises and hugs her arms around her middle. She walks to the window to get a closer look at the view, perhaps pulling some of the ocean’s calming presence into her heart.

  “When Graye was twelve, I gave her what I hoped was a gift. She was enamored of words. She read voraciously, and when she wasn’t reading she was filling page after page with her own writing. It was a novel, newly released to great acclaim, written by an author named David West.”

  Margaret turns, and Laura stares into the face of a woman aged by her own choices and the repercussions of those.

  “She fell in love with his prose, with the beauty of his words. I never told her he was also her father.”

  The glass in Laura’s hand falls to the ground, shattering between them.

  48

  LAURA

  Laura jumps from the couch and grabs the broom from the kitchen, stopping for a moment to lean against the pantry door and catch her breath.

  The broken glass gives her the opportunity to step away for a moment from the extraordinary story Margaret has just placed in her hands.

  Thoughts are whirling unchecked. It’s almost too much to believe. An underage girl forced to give her child away, a child who later becomes unknowingly obsessed with her own father’s words? A child who will eventually grow into the woman who is now facing trial for the murder of that same man?

  Briefly, Laura wonders if Margaret might be deranged. What does she really know about her anyway? And she just opened the door to her, invited her in.

  But that line of thinking quickly loses steam. The woman in her living room has been buffeted by life, battered by abhorrent circumstances, most of which were out of her control. But no matter how implausible the things she’s saying, Margaret seems perfectly, unfortunately, sane.

  Laura avoids Margaret’s eyes as she returns to the living room with the dustpan. She sweeps up the wet glass, the actions achingly reminding her of David’s final few years. The wife of an alcoholic becomes proficient at such things.

  She stands and finds Margaret studying her.

  “Are you okay?” the woman asks.

  Laura thinks about it for a moment. “It’s a lot to take in.”

  Margaret nods and takes the dustpan with the broken glass from her hands.

  “And an unfair way to tell someone, really. For myself, it’s been a lifetime of poor decisions, separated by years to accept the consequences of each. To see them together, lined up in a row like dominoes falling into one another, must be overwhelming.”

  Margaret takes the dustpan toward the kitchen, giving Laura a few more moments alone to digest everything.

  When she returns, she sits once more on the edge of the sofa, her posture straight, and she takes a deep breath.

  Laura realizes Margaret’s not done. Incredibly, there’s more to come.

  “I’ve made mistakes. So many, many mistakes in trying to protect Grace from the truth. She’s lived a life full of loss. She lost her real mother before she was a full day old, and my leaving allowed my mother and sister to forget I existed. I doubt I was missed, even for a moment. As far as I’m aware, my name was never mentioned in my family again, and certainly not to Grace, even in the role of an aunt who’d run away from home.”

  Laura shakes her head. “That’s crazy. What kind of people would do that?” she asks. She’s not so naive that she doesn’t realize there are dysfunctional families in the world, but her own experiences are so far removed that it’s like examining an alien life-form.

  “I was a late baby,” Margaret says. “One my mother didn’t want. Nor apparently my father, as he abandoned my mother before I was born. I’d always known my mother despised me, but it wasn’t until I was five that my sister explained why. I was the result of an affair Mother had had, an affair that ended up costing her the security of a husband, who was a successful bank manager, and her upper-middle-class lifestyle.

  “We lived in a small town. Mother was ostracized, thrown into poverty, shunned.”

  “But that wasn’t your fault!” Laura says.

  “No, but I was a living reminder of all she’d lost. They blamed me, both my mother and my sister. Her husband moved on, marrying someone else and starting a new family. He hardly had time for my sister. As for me, he never acknowledged my existence.”

  Laura can’t imagine the isolation, the loneliness, of a child forced to bear the brunt of an adult’s mistakes. And yet, they do. All the time.

  “When I left, I have no doubt my family was relieved to see the back of me. And I’ll admit, the feeling was mutual. But my deepest regret, in a life filled with regrets, is leaving Grace behind to become their surrogate whipping boy.”

  Laura knows the basics of what happened after that. She’s read the reports that threw the national press into a feeding frenzy of sensationalism. Once the news broke that Graye Templeton, the young woman accused of murdering renowned novelist David West, was actually the long-lost darling of the Thacker case that held the nation in thrall fifteen years before, Laura hadn’t been able to go anywhere without seeing Graye’s face splashed across a front page.

  It was often placed side by side with a photograph of Grace at nine, an iconic shot of the little girl looking back over her shoulder on the steps of a Missouri courthouse. There’s fear in her face, and sadness in her eyes.

  There was even a documentary, though Laura couldn’t watch more than twenty minutes before she shut off the television and went for a run along the beach. She ran miles farther than usual that day, past the point of her endurance. She circled the entire island, then managed to drag herself, exhausted, into her bed.

  “Grace had so much loss in her life,” Margaret continues. “Witnessing Crystal’s murder, the only mother she’d ever known. Alexis and her boyfriend Nick jailed for the crime.

  “I couldn’t give her David. Not in any real way. He didn’t know she existed, and I couldn’t risk telling her in case she tried to contact him. We’d tried so hard to hide Grace from the press, to give her some chance at a normal life, and I couldn’t put that at risk. I thought I could be enough.”

  Margaret’s shoulders drop.

  “I was wrong.”

  She glances around the room, her eyes sliding over things, searching for someplace to land, and Laura’s stomach begins to knot. She can sense there’s more to come, and she braces herself for it.

  “Grace was an exceptional student. Scholarships would have allowed her to go to a number of different universities. She chose Cornell because it was David’s alma mater. She had dreams, such big dreams, of following in her literary hero’s footsteps.”

  Margaret’s face tightens.

  “I told myself it was harmless. There was no cause for concern. Young girls often fixate on idols. But then David took a job as a guest professor and Graye was over the moon. Then this, here, working for you, living in your guesthouse. It was a snowball barreling down a hill, and I couldn’t stand by and watch it happen.”

  The tension inside of Laura is at a breaking point, and she fights an urge to sho
ut at Margaret to stop, to put her hands over her ears and throw the woman out in the street. She’s tried so hard to heal. Her body, her heart, her mind were all left in tatters after the events of last summer.

  Yet here she is again, following the white rabbit with a pocket watch, wherever it leads. She’s falling, and she knows it’s too late to stop.

  “I traveled here, to Port Mary, to tell David the truth,” Margaret says. Her hands are picking at a corner of her secondhand sweater.

  “I came to this house and rang the doorbell the day before . . . the day before he died. He didn’t recognize me. Refused to allow me inside to explain. He tried to shut the door in my face, and I was forced to tell him there on the doorstep, through a crack in the door with my foot wedged inside to keep him from shutting it. I told him he had a daughter.”

  Laura’s heart drops. “David knew?” she whispered.

  Margaret nods, and swallows visibly. “I could see the moment he recognized me.”

  Laura raises a hand to her mouth, biting her lip. Margaret meets her eyes.

  “I’ve never seen rage like that in a human being. It had been a very long time since I’d seen David, but still, it shocked me.

  “I saw a flicker of fear in his eyes, just for the briefest moment, a spark that lit the fire of his anger. He was shouting, accusing me of lying, of attempting to blackmail him, of trying to ruin his life.”

  Chills run down Laura’s arms, and she pulls up her legs and wraps her arms around them. She remembers too clearly the incredible violence that had awoken from some sleeping place inside of David that day. She’d never known what triggered it. Blamed herself for not seeing his potential for hate, for hurt, prior to that night. There’d been hints, but never anything to the degree she witnessed.

  “He never even asked about her,” Margaret says, disbelief heavy in her words. “Not a single question about the daughter he never knew he had. The daughter living right under his nose. His only concern was the loss of his reputation if it became known that he’d impregnated an underage girl.”

  Margaret sighs and shakes herself from the place her mind has gone. “I knew then it would be an even bigger mistake to tell David who Graye was. And I’d already committed a grave error by telling him as much as I had, so I left. I went back to the hotel without ever telling Graye I was here. I planned to go back home the next day, but then . . .”

  “Then David was killed,” Laura says softly, completing her thought.

  “Yes. And Graye was discovered standing next to the body of the man she never knew was her father.”

  She sighs and the silence stretches between them. Laura’s mind is readjusting the perspective she’s always had of that night, but it’s a difficult shift to make.

  A horrifying thought occurs to her.

  “Have you told her yet?” she asks in a low voice.

  A look of pain crosses Margaret’s face, so great that the cracks in Laura’s heart open even wider.

  “Not yet,” she admits, shaking her head. “When I leave here, I’m traveling to Houston to be there for the trial. I’ve put it off for so long, but I have to try to speak with her before the trial begins. I don’t want her to find out that way.”

  Laura’s face goes white. The trial is scheduled to begin the day after tomorrow. Her parents and the Carons are flying in to be there with her. But Laura is dreading it.

  “But why would . . . ?” She trails off.

  “Graye cut her foot on a piece of glass,” Margaret says. “Her blood was at the scene along with David’s. The connection was inevitable. The prosecution is aware of the situation. Graye’s lawyer too, though we’ve had many discussions about whether Graye knew the truth. The attorney feels we should withhold the information from Graye for now, and wait and see if the prosecution chooses to use it as motive. It’s a risky move, but there’s a chance they feel it will weaken and complicate their case, and will leave it out. If not, Graye’s lawyer claims her sincere initial reaction to the news could work in her favor. I think she’s wrong.”

  The attorney’s cold-blooded reasoning behind denying Graye the truth of her parentage isn’t lost on Laura. Nor the high-stakes games lawyers are willing to play with people’s lives and emotions.

  “That’s . . . that’s disgusting,” Laura says, unable to hold back her unvarnished opinion.

  Margaret closes her eyes slowly and squeezes them shut for a moment.

  “It is quite vile, isn’t it? The defense attorney took Graye’s case free of charge, which is no small matter, but I’ve come to realize she did it with her own agenda.”

  “Is that why Graye is pleading not guilty?” Laura asks. She’s wondered time and again, given the supposed strength of the case against her, if the press can be believed, why Graye has chosen this path.

  “To some degree,” Margaret admits. “The attorney denies it, but I saw the glint in her eye when she heard Graye claim she wasn’t guilty. This trial is going to be a circus, and Graye’s attorney is going to be the one with the flashy coattails, holding the bullhorn and the whip. Even if Graye loses, the lawyer wins.”

  The horror of the situation isn’t lost on Laura. No wonder Margaret looks as if she hasn’t been sleeping.

  “Can I ask you a question, Margaret?”

  She meets Laura’s eyes and slowly nods. Laura has a feeling Margaret knows what she’s going to ask.

  “Do you believe she’s guilty?”

  Margaret bites her lip and takes a few moments to consider her words before she speaks.

  “I believe that, in Graye’s mind, there is a difference between innocent and not guilty. And her attorney has encouraged that distinction for the sake of her own celebrity. But if you’re asking if I believe Graye killed David . . . then yes, I do.”

  Laura’s at a loss for words, her mouth falling open just a bit. Yes, the case appears to be strong, though they won’t know the full extent of it until the prosecution has a chance to lay out the evidence at the trial. But this woman is Graye’s mother. The woman who raised her for half her life.

  “Do you believe she killed the nurse as well?”

  Margaret takes a deep breath before she speaks again.

  “I think she must have. Graye became friends with an elderly woman named Eileen Ellis after the death of her roommate, the woman’s niece, her freshman year. They were very close, and Inez Jeffries, by all accounts, was rather a poor excuse for a caregiver. She was reportedly abusive, both emotionally and perhaps physically, to the residents under her care.”

  “My God, that’s terrible,” Laura exclaims.

  “Yes.”

  Something nags at her. Something Margaret said.

  “How did her roommate die?” she asks slowly.

  If possible, Margaret’s face grows even more drawn.

  “An overdose,” she says. “So they say. But . . .”

  She stops and takes a deep breath, perhaps searching for the strength to continue.

  “You don’t believe that?” Laura asks softly.

  “There was a little girl. A little girl at St. Sebastian’s who came to us after Graye had been there a few years. Autumn. Surprisingly, the two became friends. Graye hadn’t really connected with any of the girls before that. The two were inseparable, as close as sisters. They even called themselves sisters. They played games and made up stories in their own pretend world for hours on end.”

  Without realizing it, Laura is holding her breath.

  “But then a distant relative was discovered, and Autumn was leaving to go live with them in California.”

  Margaret’s face clouds, and she runs a hand across her forehead.

  “The night before they were set to arrive, there was an accident. Autumn was found at the bottom of a nearby ravine. Her neck was broken in the fall.”

  Laura stands suddenly and rushes out of the room. She manages to make it to the bathroom before she’s sick in the sink.

  49

  LAURA

  Once her
stomach is empty, Laura washes out the sink, then splashes cold water on her face. She sees herself in the mirror’s reflection, her skin a sickly shade of white, beads of water clinging to her cheeks.

  She backs up against the bathroom wall and slides down until she’s sitting on the floor.

  She can’t go back out there. Not yet.

  Perhaps not ever.

  Maybe if she hides in here long enough, Margaret will leave and Laura can open a bottle of wine and lose herself in it, drowning out the horrors the woman has brought into her home and into her mind.

  There is a very real possibility that Graye Templeton is a serial killer. David’s daughter. A woman she befriended, worked side by side with for months, depended on, and brought into her home.

  She sits, alone, and struggles to find a way to come to terms with that.

  Margaret came here for a reason. If it was to share insight into Graye’s past and her own, Laura can’t say she’s happy to know the things she does now, but it is true that she’s thankful for the privacy to process the revelations.

  She can’t fathom learning some of these things in court, with the cameras of the press pointed at her face.

  Once Laura manages to pull herself up from the bathroom floor, she washes and dries her face one more time, then tucks strands of wet hair behind her ears.

  Slowly, she walks back to the living room.

  She’s surprised, and honestly, a bit relieved to see that Margaret is nowhere in sight.

  Her gaze lands on a white sheet of paper lying on the coffee table she recognizes from the notepad that hangs on her refrigerator door.

  Slowly, Laura walks toward it and picks it up, then drops down into the place where Margaret had sat on the sofa not so long ago. Beneath the note, there’s a white envelope, fat with pages folded inside.

  Laura,

  I know you probably want me gone. I would, if I were you. But as much as it pains me to say so, there’s more you need to know.

  This letter is from Graye. She asked me to give it to you, and after much hesitation, I told her I would, but only if she allowed me to read it first.