“Yes. And he was lonely in the grave, so one night his ghost got up, walked back to the house, and whispered, ‘boo,’ in his wife’s ear. Scared her right to death.”

“And now they’re even.”

The minister clears his throat, and the image of Gram fades away. I realize that a smile has snuck onto my face and wrestle it off.

Most people follow us back to Gram’s house once we’re done in the graveyard, although some of them go their separate ways.

Lanternwood has only one main street, High Street, which curves in a slow horseshoe, sandwiched by the river on one side and farmland on the other. From Gram’s front yard, you can see the church—with its wobbly steeple and ancient bell—to the left, and the village hall—with its cheery red brick and bulletin board—to the right. In between the two are old, pretty houses that seem to shine in the sunlight like charms on a giant bracelet, linked together by the flower gardens that spill over their neat picket fences.

And Gram’s house is the best of them all.

Actually, it’s called a cottage—kind of like how Lanternwood is technically a town, but everyone calls it the village. There’s even a white sign that hangs just over the fence outside the house that says “Morning Glory Cottage” in big handwritten letters. It’s named for the morning glory vines (I know, big surprise) that have climbed around the door, all the way up the white walls to the sloping roof.

Mom, Dad, Lily, and I officially moved in at the beginning of the summer, when Gram finally told us how sick she was. We used to live forty miles away, but Gram needed to be taken care of, and Mom wanted a bigger house. So now we live here, in Morning Glory Cottage, where six generations of my family have lived before us, including Gram’s father, who was once the mayor of the village.

Six might sound like a lot of generations to you, but Lanternwood is old. Like, really old. It was founded in 1747, and not much has changed since then. The church is the original one. People come to take pictures of it and of the village hall. They pick apples and have lunch in the old apple orchard, where there’s a little café now, or they take picnics down to the meadow beside the river. They say coming to Lanternwood is like stepping back in time. Like something out of a fairy tale.

Dad used to drive me here pretty much every weekend to stay with Gram, so I’ve always had my own bedroom, and I’ve explored every corner of the village.