Phineas looked at his cigar.
‘You’re spoiling my smoke,’ he said.
‘I’m not trying to catch you out. I’m not blaming you for altering the details of the story. But it’s important that you tell me where you were, as best you can, when you saw that girl. Please.’
‘How about a story for a story?’ said Phineas. ‘Suppose you tell me why you need to know?’
So I told him of an old man on his deathbed, and a plane in the Great North Woods, and I told him what linked Harlan Vetters’ search for a boy named Barney Shore to the discovery of that plane: the ghost of a girl. The plane lay in her territory, wherever that might be, and despite Harlan Vetters’ story about malfunctioning compasses and lost bearings, I believe he did have some notion of where exactly that plane rested. Perhaps he had chosen not to share the location because he didn’t trust his son, not entirely, or because he was dying and confused, and couldn’t keep all of the details straight in his head.
Or maybe he did share that detail, but only with his daughter, and she had held it back from me for reasons of her own. She didn’t know me, and it could be that she wanted to see what I’d do with the information she’d already given me before she entrusted me with that final, crucial element.
When I was finished telling my tale, Phineas nodded his approval. ‘That’s a good story,’ he said.
‘You’d know,’ I replied.
‘I would,’ he said. ‘Always have.’
His cigar had gone out, so engrossed had he been. He lit it again, taking his time with it.
‘What were you doing up there, Phineas?’
‘Poachin’,’ he replied, once the cigar was going again to his satisfaction. ‘Bear. And maybe mournin’ some.’
‘Abigail Ann Morrison,’ I said.
‘You got a memory almost as good as mine. I suppose you need to, given what you do.’
Now he told the story again, and it was more or less as he had told it before, but the location was changed to deep in the County, and he had a landmark to offer.
‘Through the woods, behind that girl, I thought I saw the ruins of a fort,’ he said. ‘It was all overgrown, more forest than fort, but there’s only one fort up in those woods. Wherever she hides, wherever that plane lies, it’s not far from Wolfe’s Folly.’
It was growing colder, but Phineas did not want to return to his room, not yet. He still had half a cigar left.
‘Your grandfather knew that I was lying about where I saw that girl,’ said Phineas. ‘I didn’t want to tell him that I’d been poachin’, and he didn’t want to be told, and it was none of his business if I was crying for Abigail Ann, but I wanted him to understand that I’d seen the girl. He was the only person I could tell who wouldn’t have laughed me away, or turned his face from me. Even back then, people in the County didn’t care to hear the fort being brought up in conversation. She still comes to me in my sleep, that girl. Once you’ve seen something like that, you don’t forget it.
‘But you were also part of the reason for changing the location. I didn’t want to be putting fool ideas into your head. We don’t talk about that part of the woods, not if we can help it, and we don’t go there. If it hadn’t been for that damned dog,
I had brought a copy of the Maine
‘Who do you think she is?’ I said.
‘Not ‘‘who’’,’ said Phineas, ‘but ‘‘what’’. I think she’s a remnant, a residue of anger and pain, all bound up in the form of a child. She might even have been a little girl once: they say there was a child in that fort, the daughter of the commanding officer. Her name was Charity Holcroft. That girl is long gone. Whatever’s left bears the same relation to her as smoke does to fire.’
And I knew that what he said was true, for I had seen anger take the form of a dead child, and heard similar stories from Sanctuary Island at the far edge of Casco Bay, and I thought that something of my own lost daughter still walked in the shadows, although she was not composed entirely of wrath.
‘I used to wonder if she was evil, and I came to the conclusion that she was not,’ said Phineas. ‘She’d have done me harm, but I don’t think she’d have meant it, not really. She may be angry, and dangerous, but she’s lonely too. You might as well call a winter storm evil, or a falling tree. Both will kill you, but they won’t consciously set out to do it. They’re forces of nature, and that thing in the shape of a little girl is kind of a storm of emotion, a little whirlwind of pain. Maybe there’s something so terrible about the death of children, so against the order of things, that this residue, if it sticks around, naturally finds form in a child.’
His cigar was almost done. He stamped it out beneath his foot, then tore apart the butt and scattered the tobacco on the breeze.
‘You can tell I’ve thought on this over the years,’ he said. ‘All I can say for sure is that’s her place, and if you’re going in there then you need to watch out for her. Now take me back to my room, please. I don’t want a chill to get into my bones.’
I wheeled him back to the center, and we said our goodbyes. His roommate was back in his bed, still reading the same newspaper.
‘You brought him back,’ he said. ‘I was hoping you’da drowned him.’
He sniffed the air. ‘Someone’s been smoking,’ he said. He shook his newspaper at Phineas. ‘You smell like Cuba.’
‘You’re an ignorant old man,’ said Phineas. ‘I smell like the Dominican Republic.’
He reached into a pocket of his coat, and waved a fresh Cohiba at his rival. ‘But if you’re good, and you let me nap in peace for an hour or two, maybe I’ll let you wheel me out to the lake before supper, and I’ll tell you a story . . .’
44
Shielded by looming pines, Wolfe’s Folly hid itself from the setting sun; less a fortress than the memory of one constructed by the forest, its lineaments blurred by shrubs and ivy, most of its buildings long collapsed in on themselves and only its log walls still standing intact.
Its proper name was Fort Mordant, after Sir Giles Mordant, an advisor to General Wolfe who had first suggested its construction. It had been intended as a supply depot and a place of refuge, a link in a proposed chain of such small forts stretching from the colonies on the east coast of the British claims to the St Lawrence River by the northwest of the French territories, part of a new front from which to harry Quebec. Unfortunately, the changing fortunes of war had left Fort Mordant unsuited to its purpose, and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 made the fort redundant. By then Wolfe himself was dead, killed at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham with his enemy Montcalm, and Sir Giles had been shipped home with a chest wound from which he never fully recovered, dying at the age of thirty-three.
In 1764, it was decided that the fort was to be abandoned, and its small garrison sent east. By then, the name Wolfe’s Folly had stuck: while the blame for the fort more properly lay with Mordant himself, it was Wolfe’s folly to have listened to him in the first place. It was said by some that Wolfe owed a substantial debt of money to Mordant, and was obliged to support his scheme; others took the view that Mordant was a fool, and Wolfe preferred to have him concentrating on his fort than interfering in more important matters of war. Whatever the reason for its construction, it brought no luck to either man, and had no impact on the outcome of the conflict.
The man entrusted with bringing word of the decision to close the fort and supervising its evacuation was a Lieutenant Buckingham, who traveled northwest in April 1764 accompanied by a platoon of infantrymen. They were still three days’ march from the fort when the first rumors began to reach them. They encountered a Quaker missionary named Benjamin Woolman, a distant relative of James Woolman of New Jersey, a leading figure in the burgeoning abolition movement. Benjamin Woolman had taken it upon himself to preach Christianity to the natives, and he was known to act as a conduit between the tribes and the British forces.
Woolman informed Buckingham that the garrison at Fort Mordant had carried out a punitive expedition against a small Abenaki village a week or so earlier, killing more than twenty natives, including, it was said, women and children. When Buckingham requested information about the reason for the slaughter, Woolman replied that he
