CHAPTER EIGHT
Friday night, Gram had been doing something—it wasn’t entirely clear what—in one of the upper cupboards, which meant she’d been standing on the top step of a folding ladder she kept for this purpose. The medical examiner decided that the most likely sequence of events was that she had a stroke, fell off the ladder, hit her head and broke her hip, and lay there unconscious until she died, sometime on Saturday. He said the stroke was massive, which was probably why he didn’t dwell on the possibility that she might have been conscious for at least part of those many hours, helpless, in pain, unable to call for help, and—worst of all—with no one to help even if she cried out. When she didn’t show up for church on Sunday, her neighbor and another friend came to see if she was all
