Page 65 of The Witch

Within a few minutes, I have checked every room on the second floor. There is absolutely no sign of my grandmother anywhere. The only place I haven’t checked is the attic, but it’s hard to imagine my grandmother making it up the witches’ stairs. If she tried, I’d surely have found her at the bottom of the stairwell with a broken hip. But even so, I grasp the railing and carefully climb to the heavy wooden door. Even though I’ve made the trip a few times now, it hasn’t gotten any easier. When I reach the top, I only hesitate a moment before I reach out and grip the doorknob in my right hand.

Naturally, it’s locked.

I rap on the door. “Gram?” I call out again. “Letty!”

Nothing. There are no sounds at all from behind that door.

Oh my God, what happened to my grandmother? It really never occurred to me she would wander off this way. I need to call 911 before anything happens to her.

I sprint downstairs, my heart pounding. If something happens to Gram, I will never, ever forgive myself. I try to tell myself it will be fine—Gram couldn’t have gone far, and the police will surely find her. It’s not like she had a set of car keys.

When I get to the first floor, I start to go for the landline, but before I do, I check the backyard one last time. I don’t expect to find her, so I have to blink a few times to make sure I’m not imagining the stooped figure walking through the yard.

Oh, thank God! It’s Gram. She’s not lost after all!

My body goes limp with relief. My grandmother is fine. She’s just walking around the backyard and must have been in a nook where I didn’t see her or maybe that shed at the other end of the yard. I was worried over nothing.

But as I watch her, I sense something is different. Gram isn’t walking in that same slightly aimless, carefree way she usually does. She’s taking halting steps, as if each movement pains her, until she finally drops to her knees.

What’s going on? Is she hurt?

I hurry through the back door into the yard. When I get closer, I see that Gram is clutching an object in her hands, tears running down her cheeks.

“Gram?” I crouch down beside her in the dirt. “What’s wrong?”

Gram raises her eyes to look at me. But somehow, the sight of me seems to set off a fresh wave of tears. “I’m sorry!” she sobs. “I’m so sorry, Ethel!”

I start to correct her, to tell her that I’m not her sister. But before I can, my gaze drops to the object she’s holding close to her chest. It takes me a second to realize what I’m looking at, and when I do, I feel like I’m going to throw up.

It’s a bone.

And it looks human.

47

“Gram,” I say slowly. “Can you give me that, um, bone?”

Reluctantly, she holds it out to me with her wrinkled fingers, although I have to pry it loose. It looks like a pelvic bone, although what do I know? Bones are supposed to be white, from what I learned in school, but this one has gone yellow with age. Parts of one side have eroded, and it’s caked with fresh dirt. Gram did not find this bone lying on the side of the road. She must have dug it up—recently.

“Where did you get this?” I ask her.

She shakes her head and buries her face in her hands.

It’s clear she’s too upset to talk to me. Instead, I sprint in the direction that she came from, following her footprints in the dirt. I pass that big oak tree where I saw the noose hanging the other night. Just walking past it sends a chill through me.

I keep walking until I reach a hole in the dirt, next to an abandoned shovel. My grandmother must have dug through the dirt until she found this bone. God knows what possessed her to do such a thing.

I look down at the pelvic bone still in my hand. Ethel told me that Caroline Eldridge is buried in an unmarked grave in this plot of land. Logically, I can infer that this bone must belong to Caroline. But of course, I have no idea. It could be fifty years old or five hundred years old.

And more importantly, how did my grandmother know exactly where to find it?

Somehow, I think of the EVP recorder in our living room, recording voices that I am unable to hear. What if Gram heard something that I couldn’t? What if Caroline told Gram to dig up that bone?

But why would she do such a thing?

Finding human remains on our property is probably a good reason to call the police. But I can’t bring myself to do it. If this pelvic bone belonged to Caroline, the last thing her ghost would want would be to have the police crawling all over Pemberton. If the presence of Alistair Dixon made her angry, this would make her furious.

But what can I do?