Mrs. M.

Mrs. M. is a local woman employed to do housework for Michael Noonan. In a brief visit to Sara Laughs, she hangs his laundry, advises him about bringing it in before the evening dew, and recounts the ghost stories her mother told about Dark Score Lake. Her role is modest but distinctive: she gives Michael a grounded, community-level account of the region’s haunted past while declining to claim supernatural knowledge of her own.

Identity and Work

Mrs. M. appears as a working woman who regularly does household tasks for well-off men. Michael describes her as someone who has spent much of her life doing such work, and her manner is both practical and unsentimental. She arrives at the house in the middle of her summer workday, completes the laundry, and reminds Michael that damp clothes must be brought in before dark.

Her instructions show an everyday competence shaped by custom. She arranges pants and shirts on the outside of the laundry whirligig and undergarments within, where passersby cannot see them. The arrangement is presented as something learned from her mother, connecting her work to inherited domestic knowledge as well as immediate practicality.

Visit to Sara Laughs

On a Wednesday morning, Michael comes downstairs for more iced tea and finds Mrs. M. hanging his clothes on the back stoop. As she prepares to leave, she tells him to take them in at around four o’clock and warns him not to leave them out overnight. Her concern is specific and ordinary: clothes dampened by evening dew will not feel fresh until they are washed again.

The exchange gives Michael an opening to ask whether the house feels all right to her. He approaches the question cautiously, as though seeking information without openly admitting how much he wants to know. Mrs. M. first asks what he means by all right, then supplies a mundane explanation for sounds in the house: it is a log building assembled in sections, and the structure settles as one wing shifts against another.

The Lake’s Ghost Stories

When Michael asks whether there are ghosts, Mrs. M. answers that she has never seen any. She distinguishes that personal limit from what her mother believed: the lake was haunted by the Indigenous people driven away by General Wing, by men from the area who died in the Civil War, and by a boy associated with the Red-Tops. Her account gives the haunting a historical and communal frame, carrying local losses into the present through stories passed down within families.

Mrs. M. says that more than six hundred men left the area for the Civil War and fewer than a hundred and fifty returned, at least in their bodies. The number makes the ghost stories part of a broader history of absence, not merely a collection of tales about unusual sights. She reports her mother’s belief rather than presenting the history as her own supernatural testimony.

The story of the boy is more particular. Mrs. M. says he was caught in an animal trap and remained there for much of a day, calling for help before people found him. Although they saved his foot, he later died of blood poisoning. The incident took place in the summer of 1901, and Mrs. M. suggests the tragedy was why the Red-Tops left the area. Her mother believed that the boy’s spirit stayed on the TR.

Michael recognizes the story as new to him, despite already knowing about Sara and the Red-Tops. He privately connects it to his own experiences, thinking that the boy may have appeared when he first arrived from Derry and returned on later occasions. Mrs. M. does not know of Michael’s encounters; the story she tells therefore bridges inherited local belief and the supernatural events he has experienced without resolving whether her mother’s explanation is true.

Limits and Narrative Role

Mrs. M. also mentions the story of Normal Auster, the father of Kenny Auster, who drowned his infant son under a backyard pump. She says people claim that Normal haunts the lake, but again refuses certainty, describing herself as not especially sensitive to such matters. Her position remains consistent: she can relay what people say and what her mother believed, but she does not claim direct knowledge of the dead.

That restraint makes her folklore neither a definitive explanation nor a simple dismissal. She places several kinds of loss alongside one another—the displaced Indigenous community, Civil War deaths, the boy’s death, and a family tragedy—while grounding the conversation in her immediate work and the dampness of the log house. She finally says that the building smells damp despite her efforts to air it out, attributing the problem to the logs and the lakeside setting. Then, with another reminder to bring in the laundry before dark, she leaves for one more house on her summer route. The ordinary errand closes the scene, even as her stories enlarge the sense of history surrounding Michael’s home.