couldn’t keep all of the details straight in his head.
Or maybe he did share that detail, but only with his daughter, and she had held it back from me for reasons of her own. She didn’t know me, and it could be that she wanted to see what I’d do with the information she’d already given me before she entrusted me with that final, crucial element.
When I was finished telling my tale, Phineas nodded his approval. ‘That’s a good story,’ he said.
‘You’d know,’ I replied.
‘I would,’ he said. ‘Always have.’
His cigar had gone out, so engrossed had he been. He lit it again, taking his time with it.
‘What were you doing up there, Phineas?’
‘Poachin’,’ he replied, once the cigar was going again to his satisfaction. ‘Bear. And maybe mournin’ some.’
‘Abigail Ann Morrison,’ I said.
‘You got a memory almost as good as mine. I suppose you need to, given what you do.’
Now he told the story again, and it was more or less as he had told it before, but the location was changed to deep in the County, and he had a landmark to offer.
‘Through the woods, behind that girl, I thought I saw the ruins of a fort,’ he said. ‘It was all overgrown, more forest than fort, but there’s only one fort up in those woods. Wherever she hides, wherever that plane lies, it’s not far from Wolfe’s Folly.’
It was growing colder, but Phineas did not want to return to his room, not yet. He still had half a cigar left.
‘Your grandfather knew that I was lying about where I saw that girl,’ said Phineas. ‘I didn’t want to tell him that I’d been poachin’, and he didn’t want to be told, and it was none of his business if I was crying for Abigail Ann, but I wanted him to understand that I’d seen the girl. He was the only person I could tell who wouldn’t have laughed me away, or turned his face from me. Even back then, people in the County didn’t care to hear the fort being brought up in conversation. She still comes to me in my sleep, that girl. Once you’ve seen something like that, you don’t forget it.
‘But you were also part of the reason for changing the location. I didn’t want to be putting fool ideas into your head. We don’t talk about that part of the woods, not if we can help it, and we don’t go there. If it hadn’t been for that damned dog, I’d never have gone there.’
I had brought a copy of the Maine Gazetteer, and with Phineas’s help I marked the area in which Wolfe’s Folly lay. It was less than a day’s hike from Falls End.
‘Who do you think she is?’ I said.
‘Not ‘‘who’’,’ said Phineas, ‘but ‘‘what’’. I think she’s a remnant, a residue of anger and pain, all bound up in the form of a child. She might even have been a little girl once: they say there was a child in that fort, the daughter of the commanding officer. Her name was Charity Holcroft. That girl is long gone. Whatever’s left bears the same relation to her as smoke does to fire.’
And I knew that what he said was true, for I had seen anger take the form of a dead child, and heard similar stories from Sanctuary Island at the far edge of Casco Bay, and I thought that something of my own lost daughter still walked in the shadows, although she was not composed entirely of wrath.
‘I used to wonder if she was evil, and I came to the conclusion that she was not,’ said Phineas. ‘She’d have done me harm, but I don’t think she’d have meant it, not really. She may be angry, and dangerous, but she’s lonely too. You might as well call a winter storm evil, or a falling tree. Both will kill you, but they won’t consciously set out to do it. They’re forces of nature, and that thing in the shape of a little girl is kind of a storm of emotion, a little whirlwind of pain. Maybe there’s something so terrible about the death of children, so against the order of things, that this residue, if it sticks around, naturally finds form in a child.’
His cigar was almost done. He stamped it out beneath his foot, then tore apart the butt and scattered the tobacco on the breeze.
‘You can tell I’ve thought on this over the years,’ he said. ‘All I