“Papa!” I exclaimed. “When did you come to hear this?”

“On account of its overabundance of girl children,” he continued, determined as a broad-beamed vessel cresting a troublesome sea, “the mother and father were in desperate need of guidance as to what kind of employment they might find. Rorie Grange’s father contrived that one of the girls might find employment in Grange House’s kitchen, thereby alleviating the strain of five daughters packed together in one small fish house. The father beamed at the plan and, it’s said, he turned to his wife, winking at her in that particular Irish way, and said, ‘Choose the one, then.’ Whereupon the good wife chose.

“And choose well she did, for that canny woman marked the bent of her husband’s thinking and chose the girl who indeed ended the story by becoming the young Rorie Grange’s wife. Cassie Grange was a proud girl and fine, and the two made a handsome pair; like great steeds, they cut a swath through the timorous grasses of Middle Haven society. They were given three children—George, Susannah, and Nell.”

Here Papa stopped suddenly, lost in thought.

“That is not the way it was,” I protested. “Cassie Grange arrived from Ireland all alone—”

“The way it was?” Papa looked down at me, though his tone remained unreadably light. “It is a story, Maisie.”

I considered him awhile. How had Papa come to read one of Miss Grange’s stories? “Nonetheless,” I continued at last, “you have told me a love story when you promised me a ghost.”

“All love stories beget ghost stories, Maisie. Sure as fire,” he said quietly.

And then he walked away from me along the path, his pace quick, as if he strained forward, away from the story he had started. I watched him go. How well did he know Miss Grange after all? There was nought to do but follow his departing back, though I meant to stick him with the questions when he stopped.

But he did not speak again. For in a short while, we arrived at the tower, which now surged upward through the clearing at the rocky center of the island, its high white figure rising straight up from the granite plateau upon which it rested. An old Martello tower, it was built by the Sicilians who had come to work the quarry on this inhospitable northern island. As the island’s granite cache dwindled, the workers grew inexplicably mournful, though their misery at the severe Maine climate had been loudly proclaimed. It might have been in answer to the emptying island that the men began to build the tower over the first of the quarried cavities, a southern shrine to the northern hole. And now it seemed a finger held up in urgent proclamation, debating, with its solid casing, the soft tendrils of fog drawn close around it.