Laura Bickle has worked in the unholy trinity of politics, criminology, and technology for several years. She and her chief muse live in the Midwest, owned by four mostly-reformed feral cats. Her work has been published in Midnight Times, Down in the Cellar, MicroHorror, and Theaker's Quarterly Fiction. She was also the subject of an author interview in Midnight Times, and has forthcoming work appearing in Ballista, Aoife's Kiss, and Fresh New Voices in Horror Fiction. She maintains a website at salamanderstales.angelfire.com

“What did I hit..?”

Pepper released the throttle, and the lawnmower cut off with a ka-thunk. She’d run over something, something big enough to nick the blade. There weren’t any rocks in this part of the yard, and she hoped that she hadn’t struck a rabbit. At the thought, her stomach lurched.

As the roar of the lawnmower engine faded to a ringing in her ears, a high-pitched squeal rattled the blades under the mower deck. Pepper squeezed her eyes shut, and shoved sweaty hair from her eyes. Jesus, it was a rabbit.

“Mrrr?”

She looked down, blowing out her breath. A grey and black tabby cat sneaked up in the neatly-shorn wake of the lawnmower, striped tail lashing. He regarded the fearsome machine with interest.

“Oscar,” Pepper threatened.

Oscar ignored her, sliding his paws under the mower deck.

“Oscar, leave it alone.”

He blinked up at her, all predatory innocence.

What was she going to do with it? Pepper looked back at the empty house, then down at her grass-stained boots. They were heavy enough to crush cans for the trash bin – a rabbit wasn’t a far stretch. If the rabbit was hurt, she’d have to finish it off. It would be cruel to let it suffer.

She glanced at the cat. Or she could give it to Oscar. He certainly had plans for the poor creature under the mower.

She had no stomach for this.

Unbidden, she heard her grandmother’s voice in her head: “It’s useless to struggle against the natural order of things. Still, it’s best to keep cats in at night…keeps them from developing a taste for blood.”

Timidly, she shoved the lawnmower forward and peered into the tangle of grass. At first, she thought she’d run over some forgotten child’s toy. Black and orange twitched in the grass. Her mind shifted to the taxonomy of birds, seeing some structures that looked like wings. But the pattern matched no birds she recognized: not the redwing blackbirds, not the phoebes, nor the finches. The pattern was like that of a monarch butterfly: orange and jet and white eyes stirred by the slight breeze. But it was too big to be a butterfly; the bent wings stretched as large as a bird’s. A kite?

Oscar growled, slunk forward and batted it with a paw. The fur on his back stood up, his tail puffed out like a chimney-cleaning brush.

Pepper shoved it with the toe of her boot. It was…a doll? A small body, attached to those wings, turned its bloody and spidery wings upward.

But it moved. It squeaked and rustled.

Oscar pounced. Pepper caught his barrel chest in mid-leap. Bet you didn’t think that I could do that, did you? she thought at him. She set the churning flurry of claws down in the tall grass.

She scooped up the creature in her thick gardening cloves before Oscar could regain his bearings. Gingerly, she plucked at the bloody mass. Coal-black eyes glared at her, the tattered wings wrapping doll-like limbs.

“What are you?” Pepper wondered, walking through the knee-high brush back to the house.

Looking at its distant façade, she still couldn’t think of it as anything other than Gran’s house. When she was a child, Pepper had thought of it as Gran’s Gingerbread House, tucked away in a hidden meadow, studded with hay bales. Now that Gran was gone, the place seemed tattered at the edges, overgrown. Worn out. The yellow paint on the wood siding had begun to peel, and she detected unevenness in the roofline of curled shingles.

She’d returned to the farmhouse when Gran had died. One of Gran’s neighbors, summoned to the doorstep by a howling tomcat on his front porch, had followed Oscar a mile down the road to find Gran dead in her recliner, television still on. The neighbor had found Pepper’s phone number scribbled on the bottom of her calendar. Pepper could still hear the droning of the game show in the background when he told her Gran was dead. The static-punctuated voice of the game-show host leaked from the phone and pooled around her as she sat, stunned, on the floor of her tiny city flat. Miles distant, canned applause pattered in the background.

The house was to be hers: the small house; the uneven meadow studded with ironweed; the ashen, disintegrating barn covered in poison ivy. All of it. At least, that was what Gran had always told her. But those words meant nothing now, as Pepper couldn’t find the paper they were recorded on: Gran’s will was missing. Pepper swallowed the lump in her throat. She was fiercely determined not to lose this, the last tangible piece of Gran. If the will wasn’t found, it went to her father. He would auction it off, sight unseen. And Gran would be gone. She climbed the porch steps. Wind chimes sounded a crystalline alarm under the creak of her step on the porch boards, and the screen door slammed behind her. Her eyes, dazzled by the day, took a moment to adjust to the shade of the kitchen. Oscar plowed behind her legs.

“You’re not getting fed right now.”

The cat parked himself under the kitchen table, tail lashing.

Carefully, she set the creature down amid the stacks of Gran’s papers spread over the white-and-gold-flecked kitchen counter. It just lay there on the counter, twitching. It – no, she – looked like one of Pepper’s dolls from childhood: pale, long-limbed, with perfectly articulated fingers. But she wasn’t a doll. She was something else.

Oscar rattled his empty dish at the door, pushing at it with his paws. It was one of Gran’s tin pie plates, the one that she’d set outside, full of milk, each night since Pepper was a child.

“For the brownies,” she’d said, with a wink.

Pepper had never seen any brownies, only knew that the plate was empty each morning. As she grew older, she’d thought it a transplanted superstition from the Old Country, invoked to entertain a little girl.

But now…

Pepper stared at the mass of wings on the counter.

“I’m sure that you’re an endangered species of some kind, but I can’t imagine that anyone at the Department of Natural Resources would answer the phone.” It was Sunday, and everything in town would be closed, DNR included. And how could she explain this…fairy…without sounding as if she was on the sauce?

Pepper rummaged through Gran’s medicine cabinet to find a fistful of yellowed band-aids, gauze, some half-evaporated hydrogen peroxide, and cotton balls that were stiff with age. A half-empty plastic pillbox lay on the lowest shelf. Gran always had trouble sleeping; her doctor prescribed muscle relaxants powerful enough to drop a horse every six months. The compartments for Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday were empty. Gran had died on a Wednesday.

Beside the pillbox, Gran’s teeth rested at the bottom of an empty glass. Pepper stared at them, thinking that her grandmother had been buried with them, but the uppers grinned beatifically from the shallow juice glass. She couldn’t bring herself to touch Gran’s smile, or anything else, on that shelf.

Pepper did what she could for the fairy. Having patched Oscar up after fights and nursed orphaned squirrels, she applied what little skill she’d learned in wound care. The blood from the fairy’s body had ebbed to a slow trickle, seeming to clot. Dazed, the fairy let Pepper minister to her without resistance, watching her with eyes as flat as marbles.

The worst of it was on her right wing and back. The wing, composed of a scaly, papery substance, didn’t bleed, so Pepper taped it up. The gash on her back ran from her hairline to her knee. Pepper plucked strands of black hair the texture of cobwebs out of the wound and dressed it tightly. The limp fairy watched her, drowsing like a kitten, shivering. Her ruined dress was cut away and discarded.

When she was through, Pepper wrapped her in a clean dishtowel. By now, the sun was beginning to sink below the horizon; Pepper could barely make out the outline of the lawnmower in the brilliance of the yard. Carrying the fairy in the crook of her elbow, she ascended the noisy steps to the second floor, opened the door to the room that had been hers as a child.

Bleached gold in the sunset, dust motes drifted in the lazy light. A purple and yellow quilt lay, neatly folded, over the twin bed. Pepper had been sleeping here since Gran’s passing, unable to quite bring herself to sleep in Gran’s bed.

A dollhouse sat on the dresser, and Pepper blew dust from its scalloped roof shingles. It was a very elaborate dollhouse, one that Gran had brought with her from the Old Country. It had been painted many colors over the years, most recently yellow. As a child, Pepper had marveled at the details: the dozens of windows, round and rectangular; the snowflake lace of the moldings; the round turret-room built at the corner of the house.

The dollhouse opened on the side. Pepper’s fingers remembered the latch and the hidden hinges, opened it wide over the dresser. The mirror behind it creaked, and once opened, it spanned one side of the dresser top to the other.

She felt Oscar leaning against her shin, watchful as she placed the small bundle in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She set down a teacup of milk that was not quite yet at the expiration date, then closed and latched the dollhouse. Peeking in through the dollhouse windows, she could see the dishtowel rising and falling with each breath the creature took.

She looked at Oscar. “You can’t get to her in there.”

Scooping him up, she closed the door behind her. In the background, the television buzzed; Pepper hadn’t been able to bring herself to turn it off since she arrived at the farm. Switching on the box had been the last thing Gran had done before she died.

“I haven’t found it, Dad.”

Pepper cradled the phone against her shoulder, gritting her teeth. Winding around her nylon-covered legs, Oscar seemed determined to coat her only good dress with a thick dusting of cat hair. She’d been the only family member at Gran’s funeral this afternoon. At least, Dad had called, though bitterness crackled through his voice. Pepper’s mom had died years ago when a beam from the barn had fallen on her. In Dad’s mind, this was all Gran’s fault. He’d never forgive her, even in her wooden box.

“I wish that you’d wait for me to find the will.” She frowned, flipping once again through the papers stacked on the counter.

“Dad, please.”

Her father wanted her as far away from the farm as possible. He wouldn’t wait. She slammed the phone back in its cradle so hard that its bells shivered and the dial shook.

Pepper’s gaze drifted to a felt kitchen witch suspended over the kitchen sink. The old hag with cornsilk hair danced merrily on wind chime-punctuated breeze from the open window. Pepper fingered a thin line of powder drawn at the perimeter of the sash. She sniffed it, thinking that it was Borax to keep out the bugs, touched it to her tongue. Not Borax, but salt.

She scanned the debris of paper kitchen, wishing that she could see through walls and cabinets. Pepper had emptied out all the cabinets, finding odd notes and cryptic recipes calling for birch bark tucked behind vitamin bottles. To Oscar’s delight, she’d startled a mouse living in Gran’s roll-top desk, found odd assortments of fishing lures with brightly-colored feathers and bells on the ends. She rolled one between her thumb and forefinger, wondering what fish could hear bells underwater.

Trinkets and eccentricities. Where had she hidden the damned will?

She padded upstairs in her stocking feet. Wedging her leg into the door to keep Oscar out, she slipped into her old room and shut the door. The drawn shades cast the room into a cool half-light. Oscar ran his paws under the door in frustration.

Pepper peered into the dollhouse. The fairy seemed to have made progress these past days: she drained a teacup of milk daily and had begun to move about. She had been building something…strands of an intricate spider web stretched from one side of the interior of the dollhouse to the other. Pepper had been careful not to disturb the web when she left milk for the fairy…perhaps her preferred food included insects?

Pepper stifled a yawn. The scratching coming from the dollhouse kept her awake at night. The sounds reminded her of a large yellow-and-black spider her father had caught for her as a child. It had been as large as her hand, and terrified her with the sounds of its movement inside the peanut butter jar standing on her nightstand. She’d begged her father to get rid of it. He took it away, but she never asked what he’d done with it. A guilty part of her hoped that he’d killed it, that it wasn’t crawling around the house’s foundations.

The fairy slept, now. Pepper had dressed her in old doll clothes: an orange ball gown was the only thing that permitted Pepper to dress her around those wings, which were gradually beginning to straighten. As she did so, the fairy only stared at her with limpid eyes. Pepper couldn’t tell if they seethed with lassitude or with anger.

Quietly, she slipped from the room. Across the hall, she peered into Gran’s bedroom, exactly as she’d left it: the yellow chenille bedspread trailing fringe along the floor; tall windows streaming sunlight across the bed, scarves and beads draped over the vanity mirror.

She sat down on the bed. Tears dribbled down her nose. Oscar appeared, rubbing against her chest. He purred with a deep bass thrumming. Pepper wrapped her arms around him.

“Oscar…I don’t know what to do, where to look. Maybe Dad’s right…maybe I just shouldn’t be here.”

Oscar stretched out in the sunshine, and she lay beside him on Gran’s bed. She listened to him rumble against her chest until she fell asleep.

There was a mouse in the web the next morning.

Pepper peered through the dollhouse window. The field mouse hung in the web, motionless. Specks of dark brown flecked its white ruff. The fairy slept across from it in a tangled mass of orange wing and taffeta. Light shimmered softly as the fairy’s sides rose and fell.

Pepper swallowed. Carefully, she eased open the latch of the dollhouse. Her hand, wrapped safely in a plastic food baggie, crept up the stairs toward the mouse in the web.

Her hand had no sooner closed around the dead mouse, when the fairy exploded in a flurry of wings, hissing. Pepper stumbled back with a yelp, sending the mouse skidding across the floor. Black eyes flashed, the fairy grabbed the base of her thumb and bit. At the door to the room, she could hear Oscar flinging his body against the wood, yowling.

Pepper scrambled to her knees. She slammed the dollhouse shut with force that split the roof shingles…

…an instant too late. The fairy had slithered through the maw of the dollhouse. Like a mad moth, it fluttered blackly in a corner of the room, hissing.

Pepper shivered, cautiously backed to the window. With one hand behind her back, she fumbled with the latch, snapped it open. Struggling against decades of paint, she wrenched the window open. Summer felt like a hot breath against her back. The fairy flapped toward her. Pepper flung up an arm and ran to the door, feeling the hiss and rake of its claws and teeth in her hair. She struck it with the back of her hand, heard it fall to the floor.

Pepper yanked open the door and slid through, scooping Oscar up by the scruff of his neck. The cat howled in fury.

Slamming the door, Pepper pressed her back against it. She held Oscar under her chin in both arms, heart hammering against her spine.

Thunk.

Something struck the door.

Thunk.

She clutched Oscar tighter.

Oscar turned at the sound behind the door and uttered a low growl she could feel bubbling up between his ribs.

“Go away.” Pepper’s voice shook. Blood from her thumb dripped down to the hardwood floor in a soft tapping. She held her breath.

No more sound issued from the other side of the door. She reached out with her foot, dragged a scarred chair to the door, and jammed it under the doorknob.

Silence.

She choked down a sob.

Pepper rinsed the wound with peroxide, praying under her breath that the creature wasn’t rabid. Did fairies get rabies? There was no one to ask, no one who would believe her.

She rinsed the blood and the sting of the peroxide down the kitchen sink. Gran’s kitchen witch cast its shadow over her hands. Automatically, she scrubbed every last bit of it down the drain.

Gran had always been meticulous about blood. When she was eleven, Pepper had cut into her toes with a shovel while digging up potatoes in the garden. Gran had wrapped the wound up in a bath towel and drove her forty-five minutes to the nearest hospital. She had fifteen stitches, she remembered. She remembered sitting at the kitchen table, with her foot propped up on a pillow, watching Gran through the window. As the sun set, Gran was running the hose, carefully rinsing off the shovel and the soil over which she’d bled, diluting and rinsing it into the earth.

Pepper’s brows drew together. Gran’s words rung in her head: “It’s useless to struggle against the natural order of things. Still, it’s best to keep cats in at night…keeps them from developing a taste for blood.”

She looked down at Oscar, who pressed his little body against her calf, then at the empty pie plate by the door.

Maybe Gran knew that this was true for more than cats.

Pepper opened the door in the ceiling of Gran’s room to search for the will in the attic. Her thumb still throbbed a bit as she pulled on the rope to open it and drew down the squeaky folding ladder. A cloud of yellow dust puffed over her. Oscar scuttled away in a panic, peeking out from under the bedspread fringe. The dust settled on the bedspread.

Since the fairy arrived, Pepper had been sleeping in Gran’s room. She hadn’t slept any better in Gran’s bed than she had in her room – most nights, she watched the moonlight filter through the Battenberg lace curtains and listened to Oscar prowl. She assumed that the fairy was gone now. It had been three days since their altercation. Pepper had left the window ajar, and had peeked into the room a couple of times. There was no motion, no sign of the fairy. Still, Pepper had felt that getting snatches of sleep in Gran’s room was better than none at all in her own. Gran’s bed still smelled faintly of peppermint. She didn’t want to wash the bedspread just yet, afraid that this lingering bit of Gran would disappear.

Pepper carefully climbed the attic steps, flashlight in hand. She paused to scratch a bug bite on her bare foot. Perhaps Oscar had brought some fleas with him from outside. She’d have to wash the bedspread and give him a flea dip. Oscar zinged up before her, then stopped at the lip of the attic. His fur bristled.

“Oscar?” Pepper had an immediate fear of finding bat guano, grabbed the cat. She shined the light into the attic. Sunshine burned through the gaps in the seams, and it smelled of old fiberglass insulation. Cardboard boxes and shoeboxes were stacked along the crossbeams. Some were open. Her fingers trickled over them and into them.

Such odd things…Her fingers closed around an hourglass not full of sand, but a material dark and light as coffee grounds when she shook it. A jar of glass beads shaped like eyes stared back at her. Strings of delicate ribbons tied into tight knots were tucked in the corners of boxes. Tiny bottles of viscous oils, with bits of stringy, dried plant matter stuck to the sides were lined up in precise rows. A stone with a hole in the center lay within a bird’s nest. The stone was tied with a long lock of brittle grey hair that smelled and like Gran’s. These things were not as dusty as the other boxes. They had been handled more recently. She swept her light over the other boxes. The light picked out thin, glittering filaments above her. With dread, she followed them.

Cobwebs, she told herself, just cobwebs…

Dozens of intricate spider webs laced over the attic. Dark silhouettes of mice dangled motionless in them. A wing dangled above her.

She jumped. Oscar’s claws dug into her shirt.

It was a dead sparrow, its eyes and beak frozen open.

She detected movement from the corner of her eye. Deliberately, she poured Oscar over the edge of the ladder to the floor, hefted the heavy flashlight in her hand. Her heart rattled in her ribcage.

It was a shrew, struggling in the web. Wild-eyed, it flipped and kicked. She reached out to tear the web with her flashlight, to free it.

She expected the web to tear as easily as a spider web. But it didn’t…her flashlight caught the edge of it and stuck. She pulled with two hands, succeeding in tearing it open enough to let the shrew wriggle free and drop to the insulation. It dove into the brittle pink and vanished.

Pepper shone the flashlight around once more, slowly backed down the ladder. She slammed the ladder back up and snapped the attic door shut.

Oscar followed her to the garage. She found nails and a hammer, climbed onto the dusty bed. She could just reach the ceiling. She spent the remainder of the afternoon putting every last nail she could find into that door, her tears streaming onto the yellow bedspread.

She hadn’t slept more than an hour in three days.

That damned fairy was somewhere in the ductwork. She could hear her rustling around the vents at night. Pepper covered her head with the bedspread, feeling Oscar pacing restlessly over her. She was starting to forget things, like leaving the kitchen stove on until her cream of wheat burned, and was tripping stupidly over obstacles on the floor that weren’t there.

She stared down at her thumb. The fairy bite was healing, but it had darkened to an ugly violet. She reached down to scratch another bug bite on her calf, but realized that it was turning the same purple. Swallowing, she propped her leg up on the kitchen chair, ran her fingers over it. She tried to convince itself that it was a mosquito bite, or a flea bite, but she imagined the fairy bent over her while she dozed, lapping at her blood.

She shuddered violently, ran into the bathroom. Stripping down, she examined every inch of her body in the mirror. Five bites. All purpling.

Pepper wrapped her arms around herself, sank to the linoleum floor. From the open medicine cabinet, Gran’s smile blared beatifically down at her. In the background, she could hear the television continuing to drone.

She ran her fingers over Gran’s pill box. No wonder Gran hadn’t been able to sleep in this place, with the things bumping in the night. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday were empty. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were full. Today was Saturday. It had been three days since Pepper had slept. She was behind. She needed some damned sleep, or she’d burn down the house the next time she tried to make toast. Fat lot of good that would do.

She dumped the pills out into her hand. It took three swallows of water to take them all. Gran’s teeth smiled at her from their glass. Pepper smiled back at them.

Pepper wrapped herself in Gran’s robe. It smelled of soap and mint. Gran’s slippers were a bit too small on her feet, and the back of her heels trailed off a bit, but the familiar slap-slap of the rubber soles on the floor was reassuring, as if Gran were right behind her as she climbed the stairs.

She snuggled down into Gran’s bed, pulled the covers over her shoulders. Oscar leaped up beside her. He folded his legs beneath his belly in a snail-like posture, wrapping his tail around himself.

“Gran knew all about this, didn’t she?” her voice slurred a bit. “This is why she couldn’t sleep.”

Oscar blinked his gold eyes.

“Why did she leave this mess to me?” Drowsiness washed over her. It was very hard to keep her eyes open. The sun had set, filling the room with a soft violet darkness. “Why won’t she leave it to me? Where’s the will..?”

Oscar leaned in very close, smelling her mouth. His whiskers tickled her cheek. She reached up to pat Oscar on the head, but nothing happened.

She tried again.

Her arm wouldn’t move.

Her brain felt like it was wrapped in a warm towel, fresh out of the dryer. She smelled Gran’s shampoo on the pillow, could hear Oscar’s toenails pacing on the floor somewhere behind her. She heard him walk down the steps and the jingle of his tags against his food dish.

Above, Pepper could hear the scrapings of the fairy in the ductwork.

She tried to swallow, couldn’t.

The soft scratchings grew louder.

A screw from a wall vent popped off, landed on the floor with a sharp plink. Paralyzed, Pepper watched as the vent opened an inch, then two. The fairy crawled out, down the wall, like a bat.

A dim sense of panic lanced over her. She’d wanted sleep, not this helpless paralysis. She tried to yell for Oscar, but her throat was glued shut.

The fairy spidered down over the headboard. Her obsidian eyes glittered in the dim light. Inwardly, Pepper shuddered as she crawled under the edge of the bedspread. Pepper watched in terror as a lump moved slowly under the blanket. A stabbing pain struck her thigh, then her belly. Sticky dark blood began to wick through the surface of the bedspread.

The fairy crawled over her shoulder, out from under the edge of the bedspread. This close, she could see that the fairy’s mouth was full of tiny, sharp teeth. Her hands scratched along her neck, feeling the artery that hammered there.

The fairy would bleed her out for spite, for revenge. Pepper couldn’t manage a whimper.

A black blur launched over the bed. The fairy squeaked and crumpled. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Oscar pick her up by the scruff of her neck and lash her back and forth, growling. The fairy flailed, hissing, teeth gnashing.

Oscar broke her neck with a sound like chicken bones crackling. The fairy lay limp in his jaws, wings spasming. With soft, nasal sounds, Pepper could hear Oscar chewing.

As she drifted off into blackness, Pepper heard her grandmother’s voice: “It’s useless to struggle against the natural order of things. Still, it’s best to keep cats in at night…keeps them from developing a taste for blood.”

Pepper blinked.

Sunshine streamed over her body. She felt warm and sore and muzzy, stretched out on Gran’s bed. Her throat ached, as if she’d been sleeping with her mouth open. Looking down, she saw specks of blood on Gran’s comforter. Beside her, Oscar dozed with a distended belly. The ruins of an orange doll dress lay beside him.

Nausea enveloped her. She stumbled from the bed downstairs to the bathroom. She retched for the better part of an hour, feeling the cold floor pressed against her cheek between bouts. Eventually, she brushed her teeth and dragged herself into the bathtub. Her hands shook as they moved over the new bites on her thigh and belly. She stayed in the tub until she’d wrinkled, dressed slowly. Oscar supervised her carefully from the bathroom vanity.

Gran’s teeth grinned at her from the medicine cabinet just over his ears. Gingerly, Pepper reached up for the glass.

A folded piece of paper slid out from behind the glass, nearly indistinguishable from the chipped white enamel on the back of the cabinet. Holding Gran’s smile in one hand, she reached for the paper. Heart hammering, she shook out the creases.

It was the will. She scanned the typewritten legalese and Gran’s spidery signature at the bottom. It was hers. The farm was hers.

She blinked back tears, crushed the teeth and the paper to her chest.

Oscar chirped merrily at her.

“Good boy,” she murmured, petting him from nose to tail. He squirmed in enjoyment, forgot himself, and nearly slipped into the sink.

She walked into the kitchen, filled Oscar’s dish with milk.

A redwing blackbird buzzed in a tree outside. She listened to it, realizing that something was missing: the incessant background burble of the television. It was off. Perhaps the picture tube had finally given out.

After what seemed like a long time standing under the shadow of Gran’s kitchen witch, she filled a second dish with the last of the milk. She set it on the porch, just outside the front door, and stared out at the barn. The barn would be a good place for a colony of barn cats.

She looked out over the field, the place that she had known since she was a little girl. Perhaps she had not known it as well as she thought. Perhaps…there was more to Gran that she had thought.

Gran was gone, but there were still things for Gran to tell her.