"That's the last one," I said. I turned a few more pages of Gran's green notebook, finding them blank, before turning back to what we had just read. "That's the last entry."

"May 28th," Ana said.

"That's two days before she died. ...It might be less. We don't...I don't know for certain. Anabel..."

"What?"

"He killed her."

"It seems like it. Ruth calls him a murderer. She said—"

"No, I mean Gran. Royal killed Gran."

Anabel looked at me sharply, her eyes wide. "What?"

"Look. She went to confront him about what he did to Anna Elvers. The same day, she started feeling sick and woozy out of the blue, and within two days, her friend finds her dead in her own bed out here on the farm? I know that she was old, but she wasn't having any medical problems that we knew about, and suddenly, she was just gone? The day that she confronted her brother for murdering her best friend when they were kids..."

"Oh, my God, Tabitha."

"They didn't even look too much into Gran's cause of death, because she was in her eighties!" I raked my hair back from my face, knotting my trembling fingers at the nape of my neck. "They just assumed that it was a stroke or something—natural causes—and they didn't do an autopsy or anything. Mom didn't see any reason to have one done and it made sense, like, why would you want to have strangers cutting into her like that if there isn't a need?"

"What do you think they would have found?"

"I don't know. Poison of some kind. He made them drinks. Then she got sick. It sounds like poison."

She pressed her lips together, staring at me. I couldn't tell what she was thinking. Was she as alarmed and suspicious as I was, or was she trying to figure out how to bring me out of it?

"We need to investigate," I said. "The police need to investigate. They need to do an autopsy."

"Hey." Ana reached for me, linking her fingers around my wrists and drawing my hands away from my hair. She folded my hands between hers, pressing them firmly. "Okay. This is...pretty terrifying. Let's figure out what makes sense to do first. One step at a time. We might not be ready to call the police."

"I have to call the police!"

"Yet, Tabitha. We might not be ready to call the police yet. I have no idea how any of this works, and Ruth wasn't my family, so like, obviously I don't even get half of an opinion, but I feel like there's probably a process to getting an autopsy done after somebody's been buried, and it's probably not easy. And you're...you're probably not the next of kin, right? That's probably your mom, so..."

"Oh my God." I tried to tug my hands away from Ana, but she held tight and pulled me toward her instead, wrapping her arms around me and drawing me into a firm hug. The tears burst out of me, panicked, shocked, horrified. "Oh my God, what am I going to tell my mother?"

Anabel held me tightly, rubbing my back. "You don't have to tell her anything yet. Shh...We'll figure this out. I promise, we're going to figure this out."

I clung to her for an eternity with Gran's diary in my lap, crying, struggling to fit the puzzle pieces together in my mind. I was confident now that my uncle had killed a girl back in the 1950s. And I knew, with a dreadful, heartbreaking certainty, that he'd had something to do with my grandmother's death. It was too much coincidence.

It was too much. It was just altogether too much. This was too big, too impossible to fit inside my mind or my heart. The only thing I could think to do was focus on the facts. That was what the police would need, wasn't it? To prove that something had happened, they would need evidence, and we had evidence. I had to make a list.

We had Gran's diary, and we had—

"Her phone," I said. Ana released me. I straightened. "We have to find Gran's phone."

"Do you still have it?" she asked. She was already on her feet.

"I don't know. It has to be here somewhere." I set Gran's diary aside and stood up, too, feeling sluggish, my head and face sore from crying.

"She was never great about keeping it on her. Was it in the bedroom?"

I shook my head. "I think she used to keep it plugged in in the kitchen, but it wasn't there, either, I don't think. I don't remember seeing it when I cleaned the other day, and I've been charging my phone in there on her cord."

"Well, what about her purse?" Ana asked. "If she had just come back from seeing Royal, she would have had her phone with her. She says as much—she used it—so maybe it's in her purse."

I nodded, turning around, casting my eyes around the living room as if Gran's purse would be there, waiting to hop out at me. Then I moved around the couch and went into the dining room, where my eyes immediately snagged on the coat tree next to the door.

Beneath it was the shoe rack, and on the shoe rack was Gran's purse, untouched since my arrival. "There it is!"

Ana hurried into the dining room after me, the clatter of Porkie's toenails on the wooden floor following her. I was already on my knees next to the shoe rack when they joined me, crowding close. I pulled Gran's purse into my lap and yanked it open, pawing through the contents with much less reverence than I should have shown, sorting through the contents: her huge, zippered wallet, a granola bar, a compact, a bottle of Aleve, a small umbrella, and an actual mini first aid kit.

I huffed a laugh, holding up the kit to Ana. "Need a Band-Aid?"

She laughed, dropping to a knee beside me. "Oh, Ruth. I love you."

"Here it is!"

It had slipped to the bottom of Gran's bag, hiding beneath everything else. She had a smartphone, which she kept in a protective folding case complete with a stylus slipped into the spine. My palms were sweating as I pulled the phone out, plopping Gran's purse back into its resting place.

It was dead. "Damn it!"

"It's okay. We can charge it."

"What if the service has been cut off?"

"It shouldn't matter, right? You can still use a phone on WiFi, even if it's not connected. If she really used her recording app, it should have saved the file somewhere."

"Maybe in the Cloud. We won't be able to get in."

"But maybe it's just saved locally on the phone. Let's not panic yet. We'll charge it, have a very large mug of wine, and then we'll figure it out." She folded her hands around mine, the phone clasped between them.

I looked up at her, catching her smile, the faint shadow of worry in her eyes. Although my hands were gross and sweating, I turned them beneath hers, letting the phone slip into my lap. She responded to my silent invitation, linking her fingers with mine.

"You're kind of the best," I said.

Her smile turned impish. "I know."

We laughed. I stood up, helping her up after me. "Wine."

I let her hand go, although I didn't really want to. We went into the kitchen, Porkie at our heels. I handed Ana the phone and pointed at the charger that had been left plugged in on Gran's counter, and she leaned over to plug the phone in while I grabbed the remaining bottle of wine I had bought at the grocery store.

When my phone rang, it startled me nearly out of my skin. I glanced up to see Ana slipping into the dining room. She was back a moment later, holding out my phone, looking terrified.

It was Royal.

I took the phone, staring at his name on the screen, and at the time: 9:04 PM.

Ana and I stared at each other.

I tapped to answer it. I had to act like everything was normal, right?

"Hey." My voice sounded thick and raspy because I'd been crying.

"Hello, Tabitha. It's Uncle Royal. You know, we always told our children that hay is for horses." He chuckled. "How are you doing?"

My stomach clenched with revulsion. This was the worst feeling in the world: knowing he had secrets, such awful secrets. His kindness to me since the beginning felt false now, turned dark and cold as easily as the light in a room winks out with a flip of a switch. He had cried at my grandmother's funeral. He had cried for her. "I'm doing okay."

"You don't sound very good."

I swallowed down a slightly hysteric laugh, yanking open Gran's silverware drawer and snatching out the corkscrew. "Just...Just a very hard day."

"I'm sorry, dear. I cannot imagine how difficult it is for you out there, all by yourself, going through all of Ruthie's things."

"I'll manage. Is there something that I can do for you?"

"Well, I was just calling to check up on you—"

Bullshit. This lying, manipulative piece of shit.

"—and see if you might have a chance to bring those diaries by tomorrow."

There it is.

"I don't think so. I'm really busy out here taking care of things. My goal is to have the estate sale people come by early next week, so I just have way too much to do to get ready for that."

"I understand. I understand that perfectly. It would only take a few minutes for you to—"

"Besides that, I spoke with my mom and she said she wants the diaries. I'm sorry, but I think it's right for her to have them."

"Tab—"

"Don't worry. I'll have her make some copies of the pages and send them to you. You know, when she gets a chance."

"Tabitha, I thought we had decided—"

"You seem awfully interested in the diaries, though." I couldn't help myself. I was so angry that my hands were shaking. Ana stood across from me, her arms folded around her belly, watching me with worried warning in her eyes. She shook her head at me, but I pushed on. "It's like there's something in there you don't want somebody else to read."

There was dead silence from the other side of the line.

"Tabitha," Ana whispered. She reached for me, catching my elbow, and her touch pulled me back into the moment, giving me a way to swallow back the rage building inside of me.

"Stop calling me." I pulled the phone away from my ear and tapped to end the call.