“Actually, she was alone. I was the one who found her. But if it’s any comfort, I think she died in her sleep.”
Something about that doesn’t quite add up no matter which way I do the sums.
“How comeyoufound her if she had a live-in carer?”
“The carer was on holiday for a couple of days and your grandmother wouldn’t accept any replacement. Insisted she could cope for forty-eight hours on her own.”
“Then how didyouknow she was dead?”
“She wrote me a letter.”
I can’t tell if he’s yanking my chain.
“What do you mean, she wrote you a letter?”
“Three days before she died, your grandmother sent a note addressed to me to the police station. Her carer said she couldn’t walk very far on her own, but she could clearly walk far enough,” he says, nodding toward the red post box built into the dry stone wall in front of the house. “She wrote that she knew she was going to die, and when, and that she had sent her carer away because she wanted to die with dignity and in privacy. The letter said that she had left the back door open so I could let myself in, and that she would be dead when I did. Obviously I didn’t believe any of it when I read the letter. I thought perhaps she’d had too much Cornish gin, but sure enough, when I did come to check on her, the door was open and she was dead in her armchair. She’d sent the letter second class or I’d have come up here sooner.”
“Evidence of foul play?” I ask.
“None. The coroner concluded natural causes.”
Well, that’s clearly bullshit.
“Obviously she can’t have known the exact day she was goingto die from natural causes,” I say, suddenly feeling protective of an elderly woman I didn’t even know had existed until recently. “Are you sure it wasn’t suicide?” I ask, aware of that dark river running in the family.
He shakes his head. “That’s what I thought, but the coroner insisted no. She died peacefully, in her sleep, in her library, wearing her reading glasses and with a book in her lap.”
“Which book?”
He stares at me as though that is a strange question.
“Frankenstein.I remember because her story choice surprised me. I’m sorry, I don’t know how your grandmother knew it was her time, but she did and she was right.”
I remember the letter I found claiming to predict the day a person will die.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he says, and turns to leave again.
I retreat inside myself a little bit when he says that. It’s what people said when my mother died and it used to make me so angry. I didn’tloseher. The wordlosssuggests I mislaid her, forgot where I left her, as though perhaps if I went to a lost-and-found desk she’d be there waiting for me. What my mother did dismantled me. I didn’tloseher, but I have felt lost since she died. Untethered. Alone. This is not the same as that.
“Thank you, but I didn’t really know my grandmother. Sounds like the people in Hope Falls didn’t either.”
“We might not have knownher, but everyone in the village knew the stories about her. The mysterious old woman living at Spyglass has always been a bit of a local legend.”
“What stories?”
“I don’t want to upset you—”
And I don’t want to rearrange your face.
“Tell me.”
“Your grandmother was the woman who died twice.”
13EDEN
October 30
I dream I am dead.
