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injured. This chain of events ended in his being hit and killed one night by a semi. Our neighbor, Dave, told us about it at the beach. He knew one of the cops who was called to the scene. “Gretts was completely obliterated,” he said.
    I waited a few months out of some strange sense of respect, and then I told Lynn at the end of summer. We sat out back on the screened porch, having coffee by candlelight. The crickets were strong and the night was cool. When I finished telling her about my bearing witness to Crackpop, the first thing she said was, “Does that mean Ginny told someone and the old man was possessed by a demon?”
    I laughed. “I didn’t think of that,” I said.
    Soon after, there was another fatal accident down on Atsion. Four high school kids in a white Windstar, drunk and high, veered off the road into a large oak tree. The driver was killed instantly, the two in the back died later, and only the front passenger, having been thrown from the vehicle, lived. That person was Duane Geppi, and when he finally came to, he swore to the cops that it was Crackpop, back from the dead, who had come lunging out of the shadows at the van. That story made the rounds. I heard it from a number of different people and told it to more. Hence a legend was born. Weird old guy, hit by a truck on Atsion, comes back from the dead to walk the road, seeking revenge against the world that shunned him. Reports of his ill-intentioned specter showed up frequently in the local paper around Halloween, and I heard from my older son that kids sometimes drove out that way toward the lake, hoping for an encounter. Eventually, Crackpop’s house burned down in a fire of “mysterious origins,” as it was reported. They didn’t know the half of it.
    What really scared me was something else entirely. That question Lynn had asked me about whether Ginny might have given away the old man’s secret came back to me every time I’d see the oak tree painting in my office. I knew the only way I could find out whether she had or not was to meet her face-to-face. I believed that even if she lied to me when I asked her, I’d be able to detect the truth in her expression. I called the couple who’d had us to our first Christmas party in town, where I’d met Ginny, and spoke to the wife. I told her I wanted to get Ginny Sanger’s phone number. She said she didn’t know who I was talking about. I described the stately older woman with white hair, and she said, “I can tell you for sure, we don’t know anyone like that.”
    â€œShe doesn’t visit you sometimes? She lives down Atsion.”
    â€œYou must be thinking about one of your books,” she said, laughed, and hung up.
    I scoured the phone book, paid for an Internet trace, stopped and talked to old people when I’d see them out in their yards along Atsion Road. Nobody had ever heard of Ginny Sanger. I took some solace in the fact that Lynn attested to having met her. There wasn’t a Sanger in the county, though. It took me years to figure it out, my kids are in college now, but I had the answer hanging in front of me the whole time.
    I found her yesterday, in the circular cemetery next to the white church. The giant oak looking on, I scraped some moss off one of the stones and there she was: VIRGINIA SANGER, BORN 1770—DIED 1828 . Like I said to Lynn, don’t ask me to explain. I don’t understand my own part in what happened, let alone Ginny’s. What I was fairly certain of, though, was that, if I went into that church and went through their archive, I’d find some thread of a story about her, a sketch, a letter, and then there’d be no end to it—legend giving way to legend, like a hydra. That’s the way it is here. The mind of the place manifesting in human legends that intersect and interbreed into a vast invisible wilderness all their own. We really only live along the edge