Titles, titles. So important. So difficult to come up with just the right one. I'd value your reaction to these: 
   Daughter of the Stone
   People of the Stone
 Be honest. Be brutal. Would either of these titles make you pick up a book to peruse the back cover?

And here, finally, is another installation:

Chapter 11 (Untitled — so far)

I had been inspecting the kitchen I’d discovered behind Door Number One when my eye caught movement through the window. Leaning on the counter, I watched an old woman approach the cottage from the walled-in corner of the front yard — which would mean she must have climbed over the wall, an odd thing for a woman of her obviously advanced years to do.

Rushing back to the vestibule, I opened the outside door just as she came even with it. She looked as ancient as the hill on which we both stood. Crone, was the word that came to mind. And tiny, even tinier than my Gran, who’d stood about four feet ten when I’d last seen her. She wore sturdy walking shoes and a stone-colored wool coat that reached almost to her ankles. Her head was bent, her mouth moving without making any sound. Through her thinning white hair, I could see the pink skin of her scalp.

Probably a friend of Gran’s, come to pay her respects.

I smiled.

“Hello,” I said, putting out my hand.

She lifted her chin and her eyes didn’t so much meet mine as look through them, beyond them. Something stirred in my memory, but not in the way we usually understand that to happen. Not like that at all. No, I had the oddest feeling that it was she, this old woman, who was in there, rummaging about in my memories looking for something as methodically as I might flip through the pages of a photo album searching for an old snapshot I knew was in there somewhere.

A disquieting sensation, to say the least.

I had to quell an urge to step back from her.

“I’m Gloria Davidson,” I explained, grasping for at least the illusion of control. “Molly Faley’s grand-daughter.”

She said nothing, although her lips moved again as if she was trying to speak.

It dawned on me that she might not know my Gran had died. Might be stopping in for a weekly blether and be stunned to see a stranger in the cottage and a young man in the yard.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t know that my Gran — Molly, that is — had passed away?”

She looked amused then. Amused!

A chuckle actually shook her scrawny old shoulders.

Nodding her head, she turned away from me and my invitingly opened door, disappearing around the corner of the cottage.

“What the hell?” I muttered.

Dashing after her, I peered around the corner.

Moving with surprisingly briskness for a woman of her age, she kept within arm’s range of the cottage wall, all the way to the back corner, and disappeared around that. I followed, and within a few moments she had made a complete circuit of the building, ending at the front door. There she stopped and so did I, thinking that if I came too close I might spook her. Facing the door, she pulled a small, solid-looking bottle from her pocket, pulled the cork , and poured a splash of golden liquid onto the stone step. Her mouth never stopped moving.

It seemed she was giving the cottage some kind of blessing.

Or curse.

Whatever it was, she was long-winded (in a silent kind of way), and I hadn’t even looked behind Doors Number Two and Three yet. I had things to do. Did she intend to stand on my doorstep all day? 

Abruptly, she stopped and gave me a sharp look.

I had the eerie feeling that she’d heard my mental complaint.

I made an attempt to smile.

She made no such attempt.

Instead, without any sign of farewell, she turned and strode away.

Dumbfounded, I stared after her.

And so it happened I was watching as she passed between Charles and the Vauxhall. This wouldn’t have seemed so odd except that there was scant room between Charles and his car. He stood maybe two feet back, one hand holding a wrench, the other scratching his head as he contemplated the engine. Tiny as the crone was, the skirt of her voluminous coat brushed against both Charles and his car. Yet Charles neither stepped back nor spoke nor turned to stare after her in indignation.

Instead, he absently rubbed his knee with the wrench, as if he felt a minor itch there, right about where the old woman’s coat had touched him. Then he stepped forward and leaned over the engine again.

You’ve got to be kidding! I thought.

I had to know for sure.

Trying to be casual, I sauntered over to stand beside him.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“I suspect,” he murmured, still studying the engine, “that the dehydrator lost its defibrillator and that’s why the aperture is so porous. I’ll probably have to corrugate the fusillade to get it back in tempo.”

Okay, that’s not really what he said, but it was something equally unintelligible to my ears.

“Ah,” I commiserated. “Sounds like a good approach.”

I glanced after the crone. Not surprisingly, she had vanished.

So, I thought. Another ghost.

Nevertheless, just to be sure, I asked Charles whether anyone had come by.

He shook his head without looking up.

“Not a soul. Just been me and the Vauxhall.”

I couldn’t let it go. I’m stubborn that way.

“Oh,” I murmured, “I thought I heard voices.”

Now he glanced at me.

“The only voice I heard was yours,” he said. “I thought somebody had come but then I saw you were alone. Talking to yourself.”

He grinned.

“My mam does that as well. All the time. I guess it’s a woman thing. No worries, I’ll not tell a soul.”