The morning after 4-year-old Juliana died on the second plane to strike the World Trade Center, Paula Clifford Scott woke to find a gold thread in her bed.

It was as if the magic in the story she used to tell her granddaughter was real.

Every time Juliana had discovered a stray thread in her bedroom, Scott had told her the thread faery had visited while she slept.

"She was always picking up little threads, and I just put a name to it," Scott said. "In the morning she'd say, 'You know, the thread faery was in my room.'" And they had saved all the threads the child had found.

On the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, Scott looked at this small gold thread in her own bed and saw proof that her granddaughter, and her daughter - Juliana's mother, Ruth McCourt - were watching over her from heaven.

The two McCourts had lived on Pequot Avenue in New London. Scott lived nearby, moving to the city from Colorado in 1999 to help care for her daughter's child.

They died aboard United Airlines Flight 175, which crashed into the World Trade Center's South Tower. McCourt's best friend, Paige Farley Hackel, died on the other hijacked plane. The trio was planning to meet in Los Angeles for a trip to Disneyland. One of McCourt's brothers, another of Scott's six children, was in the South Tower as the plane carrying his sister crashed into it. He escaped.

Three years later, Scott told her story to Amy Crockett, her friend from church. Crockett, who owns Norwichtown Veterinary Hospital, grew eager to capture the tale in verse. She has written a book of poetry from the points of view of the animals she treats in her veterinary practice.

Now, with help from Crockett and from a Mystic artist whose imagination was caught by the story, Scott's cherished memory is becoming a children's book.

Scott asked that the story begin in Ireland and cast Juliana as the thread faery. And she wanted the thread faery to ascend to heaven.

Crockett, seeking inspiration for her writing, accompanied Scott to her native Ireland in 2005, and completed the poem soon after.

"Every step of the country road is full of folklore," Scott said.

"The Thread Faery" details the journey of a faery named Rowaine from Ireland to America, where she gave birth to the thread faery in a flower bed. The daughter danced on children's beds at night, leaving stray threads behind as a sign that she was there. After Sept. 11, the young fairy asked God if she could become an angel to guide fellow youths to heaven.

"This was not only something I had to be inspired to write, but also I had to create for [Scott] what she wanted, what she needed, what she needed to heal," Crockett said. She recently wrote a sequel which further details the thread faery's mythology.

The next step was finding an illustrator.

Scott found Elaine Mills through a connection in Mills' weekly painting group.

"When she read the story to me on the phone, I could see the whole book," Mills said.

Mills described illustrating the poem as an extended exercise in imagining being small in the natural world. Tiny beings would use little things to function as bigger objects, such as acorn tops for drinking cups.

"I did spend a lot of time in the woods," Mills said, "and I did spend a lot of time sitting down under big trees and looking very closely from that point of view." She created the illustrations digitally, drawing with a stylus on a tablet hooked to her computer.

Crockett and Mills never met Scott's granddaughter, but they both paged through stacks of photographs. Mills' illustrations of "The Thread Faery" look like Juliana, bobbed haircut and all, rendered as a book illustration from the late 19th century.

The three women, who have forged a lighthearted camaraderie, are trying to get "The Thread Faery" published. They found their agent, Redding-based Jan Kardys, when she gave a talk at the Groton Public Library on publishing in December. They showed her their manuscript after the talk.

"I heard their story and it really moved me," Kardys said. "Number one, it hit my heart. And then I just looked at the story and I thought, 'Wow this was so charming.'" She instructed her new clients to form a marketing plan before she submitted the work to publishers.

They hope to see the book published before Sept. 11, 2009, Crockett said, and they plan to donate a portion of any future profit toward upkeep of the Lyman Allyn Museum's McCourt Memorial Garden. It was dedicated to McCourt, who was well-known for her love of gardening.

The garden's sculpture has a faery, added for Juliana, suspended in one corner, and it is a place that's close to Scott's heart.

"I can't live her life," Crockett said of Scott, "but I somehow wanted to be empathetic enough to write something that would be from her heart, but it was from mine."

K.GOLDENBERG@THEDAY.COM