After a little distance, we arrived at the abandoned quarry that lay between Grange House and Middle Haven at the center of the woods. Long before my birth, quarrymen had worked its cold innards, tapping the granite veins until they were sure of the weak spot in the stone where they’d wedge open a seam and cut great chunks of the rock to ship to Boston, New York, and farther south to Philadelphia. It was to the financial promise of this rock that Papa had been drawn so many years ago, and he described once how the granite dust blew upon the sea breeze, and he recalled the small Sicilian men whom the company had hired to work the rock, appearing weary but spruced up in bowler hats and stiff old-fashioned collars, promenading the streets of Middle Haven.

I, however, never stood at the lip of this deep hole without thinking of secrets, for cold water had surged up through the rock with a bottomless green so dark, a stone thrown disappeared immediately, as if grabbed by a lost lady’s hand. The spot held about it the cool damp air like to castles and cathedrals, and whispers seemed to sound along the windy and abandoned walls.

It was here at the edge of the quarry that Miss Grange motioned for us to sit, our backs against the natural stone bench made by an old cut in the rock. From her basket she pulled the makings of a country luncheon, bread and hard cheese and two small blueberry tarts, and we settled companionably into our meal. The water lay very still in its granite bowl, the white rock across the way seeming to shine in the sun that penetrated through the surrounding trees. I brushed the crumbs from my skirt and leaned back against the rock, its old warmth stealing through my thin muslin blouse.

“Halloooo,” I called out suddenly. Miss Grange started, but she smiled as my smaller, hollow voice returned to us across the water: “Hallooo.”

“Surely, Miss Grange, this place is peopled,” I remarked gaily to my companion.

“Of course it is peopled,” she retorted.

I turned to face her, but she spoke out directly to the water. “There are other stories beside the one we live,” she said. “And I intend that word—beside—to be understood quite literally, Maisie. When we walk, the others we might have been step in and out beside us.”

I looked down swiftly, thrusting my boot into a clump of moss and upending it. When I looked into the quarry, I saw possibility—of wild imagined occurrences. Instead, it appeared, she saw lost souls.