I looked away. “You can travel. You can feather—fly—” I trembled. “There are far too many plots. You have no need of plots.”

“But—”

“You see so much, Mr. Hunnowell,” I finished, “isn’t sight enough?” I was near to tears, though I did not understand why.

He stared back at me, then said very softly, “Thank you, Maisie Thomas.”

We were both quiet.

“I had begun to tell you, however, that the man and the woman have found themselves stopped above a haunted spot.”

I stared. “This is where you found Halcy and Henry?”

He nodded.

Startled, I turned my face away from him. I did not want to recall Halcy Ames.

“I have thought of them all this past winter,” he continued softly.

“I have seen poor Halcy’s ghost.” I blurted it out, and then turned to see the manner of his reaction.

“What do you mean?”

“I have seen her—twice.”

“Where?”

“The morning she drowned, and on Leadbetter’s Island. Last summer. On the day”—my voice shook—“Papa fell.”

Bart put both hands on my shoulders and bade me turn all the way around, until we sat face-to-face, our knees touching in the space between the seats, our oars shipped and crossed behind us and pulled into the boat.

“Tell me what you saw.”

So I did, leaving nothing out. I told him how it came to be that I walked the path so far ahead of my parents, and of the place where I stopped, and of the figure I had seen and of what she held in her arms. I told it all to him in a great rush and then, unable to stop, I kept right on speaking and told him the whole sad tale of Papa’s accident and of the moments when we stood over his fallen body, unable to reach him and unable to move. And then I ceased, suddenly as I had begun. But the words that had flown from me seemed to gather like rope in the air between us.

“Maisie, let me tell you what I heard last summer.” Bart spoke very gently, grabbing light hold of this line newly cast between us. I looked up at him.

“After your father was carried into the House and up to his room”—I closed my eyes against the memory Bart’s words recalled—“I lingered in the passage by Miss Grange’s stairs for some while. I had the hopes”—he swallowed—“of being of use to you and your mother.” I opened my eyes. He tapped an oar upon the water.

“Go on,” I whispered.