that hadn’t been there before that the Abenaki named the Sisters. The standing stone they named the Maiden. When the tide comes in, they said, the Sister Stones shift and the drowned girls pull the lost girls down into the sand where they either drown or, if they follow the ghostly light to the Maiden Stone, vanish. Luther had told us that the legend persisted into the early eighteenth century.
Fourteen-year-old Abigail Sumner crossed the causeway to the island to collect plover eggs and vanished. The settlers combed the island for her but she was never found—but a red ribbon from her hair was discovered caught on the Maiden Stone.
Some people believed that Abigail had run away to Boston and become a prostitute. After all, look at that red ribbon. What self-respecting Puritan girl wore a red ribbon? But then Martha Hubbard, a fifty-three-year-old spinster, crossed the causeway to dig for clams and she too disappeared, leaving behind a scrap of red cloth torn from her flannel petticoat on the Maiden Stone. “Serves her right,” the settlers muttered, “drawing attention to herself by wearing a red petticoat!”
When the minister’s niece, an eleven-year-old girl of unquestionable virtue, vanished, though, the settlers began whispering that the Maiden Stone demanded a virgin sacrifice. At night they thought they heard the cries of voices in the wind crying, I’m lost, I’m lost, or sometimes, Come find me.
When you go to sleep tonight, Luther had slyly concluded, listen for them.
I hadn’t been scared that night. I wasn’t a virgin. I’d lost my virginity to Jeff Schlotnick six months before on his parents’ living room couch. I had proceeded to sleep with three more boys in quick succession, and when my parents found out they sent me to Haywood. I had nothing to fear from the Maiden Stone.
Nor was I afraid on the second night when Luther told the story about the girls who went missing from the Refuge in the 1890s. They, like me, had been sent north for crimes of sexual misconduct. These were girls from Boston or Lowell or Providence—or one of the many mill towns in New England—picked up by the police for prostitution and sent to the Haywood Refuge for Wayward Girls. Three of them went missing in the 1950s, but there was no hue and cry, no public demand to solve the mystery of their disappearances. They were wayward girls, after all. Hadn’t they already gone astray?
On the third night Luther told the story of Noreen Bagley, the sixteen-year-old Haywood junior who vanished in 1963. Noreen was not a prostitute or a wayward girl but she was very alone. Her mother had been killed in a hunting accident and when her father, a well-to-do Boston doctor, had remarried, Noreen was sent away to boarding school. Awkward and unpopular, she’d made few friends at Haywood, so no one noticed at first when she vanished after a holiday break. Even when school resumed her teachers assumed she’d gone home to Boston and simply stayed over. She’d been missing three days before the headmistress realized her mistake and reported Noreen’s absence to the police. A search was mounted, but the only traces of Noreen Bagley ever found were her coat, a glove, and a red knit cap perched on top of the Maiden Stone, which was largely suspected of being a student prank.
That story scared me. Not because of the cap on the Maiden Stone or any of the ghostly pretensions. What I understood from the story was that Noreen Bagley just stepped out of her life one day and no one cared enough to find her. When Luther Gunn came to my tent that night (Ashley Burton was supposed to be my tentmate but she’d squeezed in with two girls who were more fun and popular than me) he found me sobbing in my down sleeping bag.
I knew that one got to you, he’d said. Then he’d crawled into my sleeping bag and held me. That’s all he did that night—he didn’t even stroke my hair like in Ashley’s story. But he did listen to me talk about how, when my mother was diagnosed with cancer the year before, instead of dutifully sitting with her through chemo and radiation and surgery and chemo again, I’d started drinking and smoking pot and sleeping with boys until my parents had no choice but to send me away to a girls school—and not just any girls school but one that started out as a home for