I was looking at Em while I shook my head. “I thought you might have already told them,” I lied to Nora, speaking as slowly as possible. Em was shaking her head emphatically. You would be crazier than batshit to try to tell those two anything, Em was saying.

“Who would try to stop those two from sleeping in that attic?” Nora asked me. “Not me, kiddo,” my cousin answered herself. Em was pantomiming something inexplicable. “Em says those two wouldn’t have listened to me, anyway,” Nora said.

All Dottie did was leave a light on in the kitchen. Dottie’s bedroom, in the back of the Front Street house, was above the kitchen. My aunts left another light on, in the upstairs hall; it shed some light on the attic stairs and dimly lit the attic bedroom, enough for my aunts to find their way to the bathroom. Abigail and Martha were in their late sixties; maybe they needed to get up at night.

“Them two didn’t get up that night,” Dottie would tell me later. As always, when anyone was sleeping in the attic, Dottie left her bedroom door open—“just a crack,” Dottie said, “just enough to hear somethin’, if somethin’ happens.” According to Dottie, “There was nowhere near as much yellin’ as the racket Jasmine made, and no shittin’ whatsoever—them two were scared shitless before they could shit,” as Dottie put it.

“Not Little Ray!” my aunts screamed; they were in chorus, but Dottie heard them scream only once. By the time Dottie clomped upstairs, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had stopped breathing. They were hugging each other in my bed, their eyes wide open and staring. I knew where they would have been staring—at a spot on the floor, at the foot of my bed, under the skylight. It was the spot where the principal emeritus chose to appear—in my experience, when the tyrannical infant was in no mood to listen. What else could have frightened those two to death? It had to be Granddaddy’s ghost, in his enfant-terrible phase.

“It sure as shit looks like somethin’ scared ’em to death,” was all Dottie would say to the police about it.

Not surprisingly, Dottie wasn’t quoted in the Exeter Town Crier. “Two Sisters Pass Away Together” was the headline in the “Police Report.” There was mention of their dying “in the house where they were born”—even more comforting, “in their sleep”—which made my aunts’ deaths sound enviable.

“Them two didn’t die when they were sleepin’!” Dottie exclaimed, when she read the “Police Report.”

Mr. Barlow, as usual, disparaged the writing. “The words scared or frightened are avoided—the piece seems willfully unclear,” the little English teacher observed.

“The cause of death was not immediately apparent,” the Exeter Town Crier stated.

“As apparent as a turd in your beer!” Dottie had shouted. She had no doubt—those two had sure as shit seen somethin’.