“How well do you know Claire Waverley?” he’d asked.

“Claire?” Anna shrugged and leaned against the doorjamb. “Let’s see. I’ve known her for about five years now. She caters all our department parties.”

“I mean personally how well do you know her?”

Anna smiled in understanding. “Ah. Well, personally I don’t know her well. You’ve been here a year, I’m sure you’ve noticed certain…peculiarities in this town.”

Tyler leaned forward, curious to know where this was going. “I’ve noticed.”

“Local legend is important here, as it is with most small towns. Ursula Harris in the English department teaches a course on this.” Anna walked farther in and took a seat opposite him. “For example, I was sitting in the movie theater last year and two elderly ladies came in and sat behind me. They were talking about someone named Phineas Young and how he was the strongest man in town and he was going to tear down a rock wall at the back of their property for them. I’d been looking for someone to remove some stumps in my backyard, so I turned around and asked them if I could have his number. They told me he had a waiting list and he might not live long enough to get to me. It turns out that the strongest man in town is ninety-one years old. But local legend has it that in every generation of Youngs, there’s always one named Phineas, who is born with superior strength, and that’s who you want to help you with hard labor.”

“What does this have to do with Claire?”

“Locals believe that what’s grown in the Waverleys’ garden has certain powers. And the Waverleys have an apple tree that is talked about in almost mythic proportions around here. But it’s just a garden, and it’s just an apple tree. Claire is mysterious because all her ancestors were mysterious. She’s really just like you and me. She’s probably even more savvy than the average person. After all, she was smart enough to turn that local legend into a lucrative business.”

There was probably some truth to what Anna was saying. But Tyler couldn’t help but remember how, when he was young, every year on January 17 it snowed on their colony in Connecticut. There was no meteorological explanation, but legend had it that a beautiful Indian maid, a daughter of winter, had died on that day, and every year since, the sky wept cold snowy tears for her. And as a boy it was a fact that if you caught exactly twenty fireflies in a jar, then let them all out before you went to bed, you’d sleep through the night without bad dreams. Some things couldn’t be explained. Some things could. Sometimes you liked the explanation. Sometimes you didn’t. That’s when you called it myth.