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so . . . normal.”
    “That mean no?”
    “It means yes.”
    “All right, then. Where’d you like to go?”
    Well, there was a pesky question, wasn’t it? I considered Portland, but I wasn’t craving a city. A small ride in the extended twilight, that was what I wanted. Something with a pleasant aspect, that wouldn’t take all night. I had plans for a good percentage of all night.
    Nice , was it?
    “You want to go down Camp Ellis?” I asked. “That’s a pretty ride.”
    “So it is.” He started the truck and slipped it into gear. “Give you a chance to stick your nose into the cat business, too.”
    I laughed.
    “I’d be honest and tell you that I’d forgotten about the cats, but I know you wouldn’t believe me.”
    “Might try it; I could surprise you.”
    He turned right onto Route 1 out of Anjon’s parking lot, the truck gathering speed effortlessly.
    “Are there”—I said, rolling down the window so I could smell the complicated odors of the salt marsh we were passing through—“are there any other Guardians of the Land, up or down the coast?”
    It had never occurred to me to ask the question before, and I sort of wondered why it occurred to me now— Oh. The cats. If Camp Ellis had a Guardian . . .
    “Well, now,” Borgan said. “There’s some. Not so many now as had been, and never were a lot. Off the top of my head: Stonington, Roque Bluffs, Cutler, Barrington”—he threw me a half-amused look—“that’s in Nova Scotia. Had been a woman at Surfside, but her folk didn’t understand it.” He stopped, suddenly, as if he hadn’t exactly meant to mention the Guardian of Surfside.
    “What happened?” I asked, assuring myself that I just wanted to know, and that I wasn’t jealous.
    “What happened . . .” He sighed. “They sent her away, is what happened, by reason that she was crazy. That’s what her father said, and signed the papers to put her into a hospital in Portland. When she came home, she might as well have been dead. Married a man her father picked out, had his baby, then . . . she faded.” He shook his head. “Wasn’t a drop of harm in that girl, an’ her father could never say the same.”
    He guided the truck ’round a curve, then threw me a half grin.
    “Happens Camp Ellis has a Guardian. I’ll make sure to introduce you.”
    “I’d like that,” I said, truthfully. Borgan was the only other Guardian I’d met, and his service was different in key ways from my own. “What’s her name, the Camp Ellis Guardian?”
    “Melusina Cosette Dufour,” he said promptly. “But everybody calls her Frenchy.”
    * * *
    The public landing parking lot in Camp Ellis was about half full of cars. Borgan pulled into a spot overlooking the little spit of beach and the boats moored in the Saco River. The last, long rays of sunlight kissed it all: gilded the water, turned the sand to gold, and the working boats into the barges and barques of kings. Wood Island Light was precision-cut from shadow, standing tall and black against the rosy sky.
    Borgan turned off the truck, and I sighed in simple contentment.
    “Did you miss this, when you were out in the dry lands?” he asked.
    “I did, at first, all the time,” I said slowly, watching the wavelets brush gently against the little beach. “Then, it was like . . . it was like I convinced myself it wasn’t—it had never been—real. Just some place I’d made up out of my head, and it would be stupid to cry myself sick every damn’ night because I was missing a place that didn’t even exist.”
    “That’s some powerful spellwork,” Borgan said, after a moment.
    “Powerful stupidity, more like,” I corrected. Something moved in the corner of my eye. I turned my head and saw that the door of the red shack to our left had opened, and a stick figure in jeans, flannel shirt and a gimme hat was limping in our direction.
    “Looks like the lot man wants his fee,” I said.
    Borgan turned his head, then popped the door and got