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were usually much more cautious about speeding around the twists and turns. Guy must be lost, I thought.
    As I walked down the driveway I could see that Pauline was already on the porch of the large gray house that was built before the turn of the century, and named Greycliff for the gray granite outcropping behind it. Pauline professed to hate the name, bestowed by the sentimental, Scot-loving Victorians who'd built the place, but unless she wanted to take a hacksaw to the fancy wrought-iron fence plate that spelled out the name, she was stuck with it. No one could have had the heart to undo that beautiful ironwork, though, no matter how good the cause.
    Even from a distance one could see that Pauline Westlake was tall and slender and indomitable. Her erect posture had, in the past, occasionally been echoed by a silent armada of lanky Siamese cats, who periodically aligned themselves around their mistress, as if subjecting her guests to the same sharp scrutiny that she was too polite to make obvious. They were gone now. When the last one, the patriarch, had been carried off by one of the eagles that soared over the river, she hadn't had the heart to replace him.
    I had first met Pauline when I was eight, the age at which my grandfather believed that children ought to start being introduced into the adult world. She was already nearly sixty then and she'd scared the hell out of me. My mistake had been in assuming that she was not kind simply because she'd not spoken down to me, a child. I eventually learned over the years that although Pauline did not tolerate silliness, she had a great capacity for good humor and, on occasion, an impulsive sense of daring that took my breath away.
    The passage of time had little altered my friend (surely too pallid a term for our relationship, but we had negotiated our relationship carefully over the years and earned the finer connotations of the word). The years only appeared to have distilled her to an even more essential form of herself.
    Pauline's hair was whiter, and still carefully bobbed to just above her chin, her posture not a whit relaxed from its military bearing. She still dressed with crisp orderliness in the jeans and men's shirts she'd worn since time immemorial. Pauline had always been a remarkable woman, and even now seemed to possess the secret, if not to eternal youth, then to eternal vitality. She'd done nearly as much as Grandpa had in making me the adult I am today, by sharing her tales of travel in far-off lands and her love of the objects she brought back from those solitary journeys.
    "Morning," Pauline greeted me. She held up the mug that I'd come to think of as my own. "Coffee?"
    "No, thanks," I said as I took the mug. "I hear caffeine is bad for you." I sat down on the swing next to her and drank deeply. "Oooh, plasma."
    "Close. Jamaican Blue Mountain," Pauline said. Her words were Beacon Hill Yankee, with the patina of antique family money. I loved listening to her speak.
    We rocked back and forth for a moment, enjoying the morning sounds of birds and wind on the river, which we could see in an unparalleled view from the porch. We could see Meg beginning to work below us, but were too far away to hear the sound of her trowel on the soil. On the far bank, a few scattered houses peeped through a dense, dark green wall of trees. On the river, moored sailboats bobbed lazily on the wake of two lobster boats chugging past. The sun was rising quickly now, burning the mist off the river.
    "What's the plan for today?" Her words were the same every morning, and if they had not been, I would have worried.
    "We're getting down through the eighteenth century, I think. If we get through that burn layer I've been seeing-- you remember?--we may be close to Fort Providence. Today could be the day," I said carefully, with no other emphasis.
    "That's something, isn't it?" Pauline said, staring out at the water. "An English site that was settled before Jamestown?
    That predates the