I have been wondering how and if you should neatly sew up the edges when an incidental character has appeared, made a difference in the action and then has no further business with you. Do you allude to him/her/it in the future? Remind your reader that once upon a time……? Must you have finality in all your relationships with these people? So, I was reading “Pudd’nhead Wilson” a goofy Mark Twain melodrama, when I came upon this rumination right in the center of the book.

From: Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain

“When the book was finished and I came to look around to see what had become of the team I started with… they were nowhere to be seen; they had disappeared from the story some time or other. I hunted about and found them – found them stranded, idle, forgotten and permanently useless. It was very awkward.” …

“I didn’t know what to do with her. I was as sorry for her an anybody could be, but the campaign was over, the book was finished, she was sidetracked, and there was no possible way of crowding her in anywhere. I could not leave her there, of course, it would not do. After spreading her out so, and making such a to-do over her affairs, it would be absolutely necessary to account to the reader for her. I thought and thought and studied and studied; but I arrived at nothing. I finally saw plainly that there was really no way but one – I must simply give her the grand bounce. It grieved me to do it, for after associating with her so much, I had come to kind of like her after a fashion, notwithstanding she was such an ass and said such stupid, irritating things and was so nauseatingly sentimental. Still it had to be done. So at the top of Chapter XVIII I put a “Calendar” remark concerning July the Fourth, and the chapter began with this statistic:
“Rowena went out in the back yard after supper to see the fireworks and fell down the well and got drowned.”

“It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn’t notice it, because I changed the subject right away to something else. Anyway it loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and got her out of the way, and that was the main thing. It seemed a prompt good way of weeding out people that had got stalled, and a plenty good enough way for those others; so I hunted up the two boys and said “they went out back one night to stone the cat and fell down the well and got drowned.” Next I searched around and found old Aunt Patsy Cooper and Aunt Betsy Hale where they were aground and said “they went out back one night to visit the sick and fell down the well and got drowned.” I was going to drown some of the others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if I kept that up it would around attention, and perhaps sympathy with those people, and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any more anyway.”