My Sweet Annie

44

"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.