I turned the pages of Gran's diary. Here was the first section of the notebook where additional pages had been added. On the left page, Gran had used skinny, papery tape to affix a sketch of a young man to the notebook. I thought the sketch had been done in charcoal. I recognized him immediately as my grandfather, and I smiled as I gazed at the rendering. He was handsome, with horn-rimmed glasses and a neat haircut that suggested the likeness had been captured after his penny-pinching bachelor days. At the bottom right of the sketch was a signature: R. Carter 1959 "BURT."

On the right page was a piece of waxed paper, taped at the top to make a flap. When I lifted it, I found a pencil sketch of a girl. Her hair was in a loosely sketched braid over her shoulder. The drawing was just her face and collar, a rounded, Peter Pan style. She was smiling, gazing off to the left. At the bottom of the page was another signature: R HAAS '50 "ANNA."

I wondered why Gran had covered her with a flap of waxed paper.

Ana drew in a sharp breath and shifted on the couch. Porkie let out a long-suffering sigh that ended in a grumble, and I couldn't help but laugh.

"What?" Ana murmured.

"The dog." I spoke in a whisper. I wasn't sure what time it was, but it seemed late. "You disturbed her slumber. Rude."

"The poor thing hasn't slept in days." Amusement lightened the edges of Ana's words, which were soft with sleep. "You're lucky I haven't called the ASPCA."

"Ha, ha." I sat up, sliding my legs from underneath the afghan we'd been sharing, then closed Gran's notebook and set it aside. Patting Porkie's head, I asked, "Do you need anything while I'm up?"

"Mm mm," she said. She closed her eyes again.

I crept out of the living room. The dining room was shadowed, but I didn't want to turn on the light and blind Anabel. I hesitated, peering through the gloom for any strange shapes or movement.

Get ahold of yourself, Tab.

I hastened to the bathroom and managed to slip inside and flick the lights on without incident, chased by the same stomach-flipping fear I'd felt as a young teen, after we'd moved out from Gran's. We'd lived in this old rental with Mom's husband at the time, and the washer and dryer were in the damp, unfinished basement, illuminated by a single naked bulb hanging from the cobwebbed ceiling. Every time I'd walked down the plank stairs I'd felt like something was going to reach out from beneath them and grab my ankles.

Maybe something will grab your ankle here.

Shut up. Shut up. Shut the—shut it.

I peed, willing my mind not to stray. I washed my hands and checked my face in the mirror, taking a moment to smooth my eyebrows and my couch nap hair.

I left the bathroom even more quickly than I'd gone in, aware that on my way back to the living room, the stairs were behind me: the stairs where I had sensed that presence earlier in the day. But they were good, decent, solid stairs, stairs monsters couldn't reach through to grab ankles, and besides, I wasn't alone and I was thirty two years old and even though I wasn't so sure about ghosts, monsters didn't exist.

Though it had seemed like she might drift back to sleep, Ana was lying awake when I came back into the living room, her face illuminated by the pale blue glow of her phone screen.

"Sorry. Is it really late?" I asked.

"Hmm?" She lowered her phone to rest on her chest. "Just about 11:30. Why?"

"I just realize you're kind of stuck here."

"I'm not dignifying that with a response, you idiot."

"Oh. Wow. We're already at the insults phase of the friendship?"

She tucked one arm behind her head and smirked at me. "I move fast."

I gave a breathless laugh, flopping back down on my side of the couch. "You certainly seem to. We're already at the sleepover phase. I can't remember the last time I had a friend sleep over."

"What were you writing?" she asked, nodding toward Gran's notebook.

"Nothing." I reached for the book again and turned it over in my hands. "Gran decided to start keeping a diary. I found it when I was cleaning the other day."

"Seriously?" She sat up, her expression opening with interest and warmth. "Oh, Tabitha!"

"I know." I passed the notebook to her.

She took it with gentle fingers, turning it to see the cover, although it was nothing but blank green card stock. "You've been reading it?"

"Do you think that's weird?"

"Not at all. God, I would give anything to have something written by Dad. He was never the diary type. I have a couple of birthday cards and a grocery list. That's all. When I'm really missing him, I just stare at chicken fingers in his handwriting."

I smiled at her sadly. "It just started at the beginning of the year. A New Year's resolution. I'm pacing myself. Or trying, at least. It's funny, though: in her first entry, she says she was never good at keeping diaries, and she'd only tried once before, when she was a little girl. Then, guess what I found in that sentimental box?"

"No way!"

"Yeah." Her excitement had buoyed me. "She might not have written about every day of her life, but there are two diaries. Two little glimpses into her day-to-day. I can't believe how lucky I am."

"I'm so happy for you." Ana passed the diary back to me. "Wow—if she was a kid, that must have been from...what, the '60s?"

"'50s. I didn't read much of it, just the first entry, but she said she was 13."

"I'm so curious."

"If you really are curious, I'd be glad to let you read them once I get through them."

"Really?"

"Definitely. I just want to make sure there's nothing weird...all grandmothers take pictures of their grandkids in the bathtub at some point. She might have pasted one onto one of the pages."

Ana laughed. Porkie glanced up at her disapprovingly, her wrinkled eyebrows twitching. "Well, your grandma was an artist, so they're probably pencil sketches or chalk pastels."

I grimaced with pretended dismay, but I couldn't hold back my amusement. "Speaking of which, there were a couple of sketches in the part I was just reading." I opened the diary to the page where I'd left off and turned it so Ana could see. "Apparently, Gran had a friend named Anna."

"She wrote about me? Ruth, you better not have dished all our secrets." Ana leaned in, grinning playfully, to examine the sketch of my grandfather. She then lifted the flap of waxed paper to see the sketch of Anna. "These are amazing."

"They are, aren't they? I'm not sure why Gran covered Anna's face, though."

"To keep it from smearing. Especially if she was going to handle this notebook a lot, pencil or charcoal smears so easily. You can spray it with a fixative, but even still, better to be safe."

"Wow. I never would have guessed that."

"She didn't capture my likeness very well."

"Ha. Check the date. What was it, again?"

"1950." Ana's voice had softened with something like reverence. "Just incredible."

"I thought it was interesting that Gran ended up with two friends named Ana in her life."

I could tell that this pleased Anabel from the slow smile that crossed her features, but she tilted her head with a half-shrug. "It's a pretty common name. More common than Tabitha by a mile."

"I suppose." I closed the diary again and set it aside. "We'll just have to keep our minds open and uncover the truth."

"The truth about what?"

"About which Ana she thought was the best."

She laughed, and before I had a chance to say anything more, she had lobbed a throw pillow at me. I raised an arm to deflect it and the pillow bounced off of Porkie's back. Giving me a wounded look, she got up and waddled to the edge of the cushion, leapt down, landed heavily on the stubs that passed for her legs. She trundled away from the couch, leaving us to tomfoolery of which she heartily disapproved.