Grandpa had a box in the attic. Mark Miller found it one day when sneaking into Grandpa Carl’s domain. He could not resist checking it and did not expect what he found there.

Books.

They looked cheap, paper covers without even an illustration. He flipped the yellowed tomes, spotting handwritten notes in the margins. Sandwiched between the books were old newspaper sheets, which were all about some old crime stories.

He looked again at the book he was holding, and the book author’s name finally jumped at him. Karl Müller. Carl Miller.

“Wait, your grandpa wrote those books?” Ira asked.

“I guess so,” Mark said. “The notes were all about spelling errors. There’s even three of them written by hand, not printed.”

“Your grandpa is Karl Müller. He wrote the Ghostly series. He’s the one who coined the California Ghost name,” Gordon said, with wide eyes.

“I never heard of it?” Mark confessed, feeling lame.

“Dude. It was all over the West back in the day. Even today, people know about the biggest assassin in history. Karl Müller… well, your gran’ started writing those novels soon after the news started being all over the mysterious Ghost. He made it sort of heroic, despite the killing. All kinds of stuff, preparation, infiltration. Enemies, people looking for him, and stuff. People loved it. My dad has the entire series. I probably read it four times,” Gordon said.

“It was never ended, right?” Ira asked.

“He published two books after the Ghost disappeared. I think. The last book said the next would be titled ‘The Hardest Job’, but it never got published. Nobody knew what happened to the author.”

“He and dad moved here to Nedalshe nineteen years ago. Before dad met my mom.”

“Looks like that was just after the last book. So that’s why he stopped writing.”

“He was too busy with dad building the business, maybe? Wait… what was that title?”

“The Hardest Job?”

“There’s one with that name. But it was only handwritten.”

Both boys looked with even wider eyes.

“Dude. Your grandpa actually wrote it? Ask him about it! Why didn’t he publish?”

Carl laughed.

“The reason I never even sent it to the printer was that it was kind of lame. I was trying to rewrite it all the time.”

“How?” Mark asked.

“All of the books were always a mix of what people knew, what I found in the newspapers, and what I could fit in between the gaps. But for that one… well, nobody knew what happened. Newspapers were trying to guess, and I was trying to make up stuff, but it never worked right.”

“Gordon asked me how it ended.”

“Well, I was probably making it end with the Ghost dead. Everyone expected him to have been eliminated after he disappeared suddenly. I think the Red Eagle was going to.”

“Red Eagle?”

“Well, you never read my books? Of course, your dad had rolled his eyes when I showed them to him. So Red Eagle, that was the big guy I wrote who would always be the intermediary between the Ghost and people who would ask for a hit. He was going to try to silence him after botching that ‘hardest’ job. Or something. But it didn’t work. And, well, I didn’t want the series to end, but I didn’t have new jobs to write about. I always wrote about the actual ones, that’s what people liked to read. Making up stuff that had never happened wouldn't have been right.”

“Ah. So, can you write dedications…”

“No way. I never dedicated books, and I’m not going to start twenty years later.”

“Awww…”

“Don’t think about it. Not even for my grandson.”

Carl watched Mark descend, then looked back at the box. He should probably burn that draft. He had been honest, The Hardest Job was kind of lame. All his books had filled him with pride, but not that one. Trying to write it had made him realize how bad he was at that stuff. Making up a way to end the California Ghost plausibly was not easy. Being killed by a client trying to cover his tracks after a job was too easy, too expected. The Red Eagle doing it… why? The motivations he tried to imagine were also lame. The man was nothing but consistent, even across the series, so changing him abruptly never worked.

And saying that the Ghost's legendary stealth stopped working correctly, just before the job? Who would believe someone having a Talent suddenly be reduced to near uselessness? That had never happened in history.

At least, he got the dark flames working better out of it.