“Come.” She was almost impatient with me now. “Come,” and she walked still farther down the path from me, the stone wall running by. Without thinking, I followed, just able to keep her figure in my sight, so quickly now she moved. We drew near a thinning in the web of trees. And with a shock, I realized where she had brought me. I stopped dead in the middle of the path and watched as Miss Grange proceeded through a break in the wall, into the middle of the clearing, and came to stand over the leaning granite marker of a single little grave.

She turned right round to me and said, “The last story, the unwritten story. It begins here.”

“In a graveyard?” I could hardly speak. The loneliness of the thin granite slab, the chiseled like of which made wilder the trees and swift branches ringing round, frightened me beyond reason. Indeed, all was made crooked about this little granite moon.

“Every story begins in a graveyard.” She beckoned sharply, so intent was she now. “Come—step through the wall. Read the legend on the grave.”

But I could not move from where I stood still in the middle of the path.

“Why have you brought me here?” I could not quell the brief panic in my voice, and I crossed my arms for comfort.

“I wished to show you—” she began, but seeing my agitation, she drew closer, stopping just across from me and leaving the wall between us. “Here,” she said, “give me your hand.”

I hesitated.

“Come, give it me,” she repeated more softly. I lifted my hand from my side and reached it across the wall, and she clasped it in hers and gave it a little squeeze as if to reassure.

I shuddered and Miss Grange looked up swiftly. “Why are you frightened?”

“I never thought to see a grave,” I whispered.

“Listen to me, Maisie.” She squeezed my hand once more in an effort to turn my stunned attention elsewhere. But all round us the trees leaned, and the tiny gravestone rose up behind her shoulder.

“Listen, Maisie.” Again, there was that strained urgency in her voice. And perhaps it was that insistence, that new tone in her voice, that forced my eyes to look up at her once more.

“Some stories are only fathomed in the writing of them.”

I watched her.

“And the one I told you yesterday was one of many I wrote, again and again—to bear what had happened. But this one”—she pointed to the earth—“this one I never could write.”

I waited, my heart scarcely beating. She looked straight at me across the wall.

“And I fear that is why Halcy has drowned.”