She said we couldn’t afford our house anymore. Gramma lived in a big, old house in a far off village I had never heard of called Orchard Hills. Gray—just like in an old photograph—two stories tall, big windows that looked like giant eyes, and a foundation of mortar and stone, it was the creepiest house I had ever seen. Just something about it made me think there was something strange lurking behind every window, things even older and creepier than Gramma herself. We weren’t that close to Gramma. In fact, my six-year-old sister, Lori, and I had never even met her. Mom always said she had a few screws loose, that maybe she wasn’t all there in the head, perhaps suffering from dementia and was possibly dangerous. But we had nowhere else to go. Coming into Orchard Hills on our moving day, the first thing I noticed was there didn’t seem to be anything in this village that was separate from the cemetery.
