The Unmissed

Elliot Marsh is a ghostwriter so good that, by his last page, a monster reads like a man you’d trust. Peter Lund, a courteous serial killer six weeks from execution, has refused every other writer and asked for Elliot by name to tell his story.

Peter confessed long ago. Now he wants something else. In a cold room, across a steel table, Peter names his price: “A page of mine for a page of yours.” Soon his calm, orderly voice begins to move into Elliot’s own, and lines Elliot can’t remember writing turn up on his legal pad, in his own hand.

Peter killed people no one would look for: runaways and drifters, the ones whose absence closes over like water over a dropped stone. Elliot calls them the unmissed. Only Peter knows where some of them lie. So Elliot can go on paying page for page until nothing of himself is left, or walk out and let that secret die with Peter.

Somewhere, a mother still sets a place at the table. This is the story of who she was waiting for.