The way the “Police Report” ended caused a little criticism. Of the two Mrs. Vinters, the elder Brewster sisters, it was written: “They had no known illnesses.”

“That’s like saying the house killed them—or like saying there’s a ghost, without saying it,” the snowshoer said. Mr. Barlow still subscribed to the Exeter Town Crier, even in New York. The snowshoer showed the “Police Report” to Em and Nora; for Nora, the piece amounted to an obit for her mother and Aunt Martha.

Em immediately did a couple of death scenes; she acted out two deaths from unknown (or at least unrecognizable) illnesses. “It’s bullshit that those two had no known illnesses—they had sexual intolerance up the wazoo!” Nora was raving. “They had incurable hatred of sexual differences!” Nora shouted. This somewhat explained why I didn’t understand the cause of death in the death scenes Em was pantomiming.

Realtors must know how to read between the lines of an obituary. All but one of the agents lost interest in selling the Front Street house. The one who remained lowballed the asking price. My mother couldn’t have cared less; she wanted to be rid of the house, and she didn’t care if she didn’t make a killing. In fact, my mom had already removed herself from the inheritance. When my grandmother’s marbles were still intact, she’d granted power of attorney to Little Ray to act on her behalf. (It would have killed my aunts to know that Nana had done this.) Nana and my mom had long ago agreed that my grandmother’s estate would go, in equal parts, to Nora, Henrik, and me. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had been cut out of the picture some years before they saw the thing that appeared in my attic bedroom, under the nighttime skylight.

Fiction writers like what we call truthful exaggeration. When we write about something that really happened—or it almost happened, could have happened—we just enhance what happened. Essentially, the story remains real, but we make it better than it truly was, or we make it more awful—depending on our inclination.

I wrote, of a fictional grandmother, that she had died one day short of her hundredth birthday; I suggested she’d died “deliberately,” knowing the hullabaloo over her centenary would doubtless have killed her. This almost happened to Mildred Brewster, who would have wanted no part of her hundredth birthday. Once—this was at River Bend, when I was reading to her from her beloved Moby-Dick—my grandmother said, “I should have gone down with the Pequod, Adam.”

“Why, Nana?” I asked her.

“Because I’ve lived long enough, my dear boy,” my grandmother answered. “Who wouldn’t prefer to die at sea? Doesn’t that beat being surrounded by golfers?”