Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - BOOCarz

and held it up, moving her lips as she read. “How
ungraceful! the way I practically beg him for a reply.”
She shook her head, wistful for a moment. “We were
always so desperate for news of Abe. I asked him
once if he should like to worry me to death, the way he
insisted on living out in the open like that. He could be
so deucedly stubborn!”
She refolded the letter into its envelope, and a dark
cloud seemed to pass over her. “He’s gone, isn’t he?”
I nodded. Haltingly, I told her what had happened—
that is, I told her the story the cops had settled on and
that, after a great deal of counseling, I, too, had come
to believe. To keep from crying, I gave her only the
broad strokes: He lived on the rural outskirts of town;
we’d just been through a drought and the woods were
full of starving, desperate animals; he was in the
wrong place at the wrong time. “He shouldn’t have
been living alone,” I explained, “but like you said, he
was stubborn.”
“I was afraid of this,” she said. “I warned him not to
leave.” She made tight fists around the knitting
needles in her lap, as if considering who to stab with
them. “And then to make his poor grandson bear the
awful news back to us.”
I could understand her anger. I’d been through it
myself. I tried to comfort her, reciting all the reassuring
half-truths my parents and Dr. Golan had spun during
my blackest moments last fall: “It was time for him to
go. He was lonely. My grandma had been dead a lot
of years already, and his mind wasn’t sharp anymore.
He was always forgetting things, getting mixed up.
That’s why he was out in the woods in the first place.”
Miss Peregrine nodded sadly. “He let himself grow
old.”
“He was lucky in a way. It wasn’t long and drawnout.
No months in a hospital hooked up to machines.”
That was ridiculous, of course—his death had been