I got to know my grandfather more and more over the years. You know, I had a very late dinner

at his little house in the country one night. And afterwards we went on his back porch

and he smoked his pipe and we just talked. And it happened to ask him if he had any regrets

in life. And I expected him to talk about having never remarried or never opening his

own clinic. He'd been a doctor all his life. Instead he was quiet for a long moment and

then said that to that very day he held one very shameful secret inside. And he finally

felt safe enough to reveal it. He used that word specifically, safe. He said he regretted

never telling the police that he was almost certain of the identity of a killer. So needless

to say I begged him to tell me the story and with a lot of hesitation he did. It was the

year 1951. And my grandfather, his name is John, was working at a rehabilitation center in

Cumberland, Maryland. John woke up in bed one night in January and he felt his heart pounding

and he had a bizarre feeling of being very cold inside his skin, not on its surface,

inside it. He was alarmed. He got up and he started pacing back and forth across his bedroom,

trying to understand this feeling. It was like a panic attack but with more unusual symptoms.

Before fully subsided he happened to look out his window at his front yard and the little road

beyond it. There was someone standing out there at the curb. It was a little before two in the

morning and it had begun to snow very lightly. John put on his robe and his shoes and he opened his

front door. The woman out there, it was a woman, she didn't move. She was holding one arm up

at her side in a strange way. John called out but she didn't answer. And he moved closer to her

and as he did so he heard a small sound and he realized that the woman was wearing

little finger bells. On her left hand and she was clanging them softly as she stood there in the

snow. She wore a tattered shoes and a ragged brown dress. She looked very young in her 20s

...