Fiona was quiet for a minute. Something that had been said here had sparked an idea but she couldn’t quite grasp it, reeling as she was from this impediment to their safe new life.

“Charlie,” she said, “don’t cry. I think there’s an idea somewhere in my brain. I just have to try to shake it loose.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Charlie, ignoring Fiona’s admonition not to cry.

“Well, we are going to explore our new property. We are going to see what food is in the cupboards and if there’s dry yeast and flour I am going to bake bread. Mom always said that she got her best ideas kneading bread. Don’t you remember that’s the first thing she would do when we got into a new home? Because it made the house smell like all our other homes? She said baking bread smells the same no matter where you end up.”

“All right,” said Charlie.

They spent the next hour walking the property. There was a small orchard in one corner of the large fenced-in meadow and other trees scattered throughout the rest of it. Way at the far end of the fenced meadow were a couple of large shelters.

“Those look like stables. She must have had horses at some point,” said Natasha. “Too bad not anymore.”

“I don’t think we can afford horses,” said Fiona. “We may have to be very careful with money. I haven’t paid much attention to what we have because Mrs. Weatherspoon did that and I expected Aunt Martha to when we got here. But now I need to sort that all out. So no, for now, no horses.”

They found a rocky path that took them down to a small beach. The tide was out and the water was shallow for a long way warming in the sun.

“Is this our own beach?” asked Charlie.

“I guess it is now,” said Fiona.

“Well, we’ve never had one of those before,” said Charlie, cheering up. “That doesn’t cost anything.”

They waded and put their fingers in sea anemones, watching their tiny tentacles closing around their fingers. They spied huge colored starfish with many arms lying among the rocks. Charlie thought they were octopi at first and cried out but Natasha explained what they were and also pointed out that the thing to stay away from was the translucent hard-to-see jellyfish that floated here and there. “They sting,” she said.

By noon, feeling salt-encrusted, hair-tossed, and sun-soaked, they went up to the house, where Fiona made them lunch from the huge supply of cold cuts their aunt had clearly bought for them. Then Fiona shooed them away to read their books or make wildflower chains while she rummaged in the kitchen and found with delight that she had all the ingredients for bread. She put the yeast and water together but nothing happened the way it used to for her mother and she was puzzled. She called Marlin. Marlin looked at it, read the recipe from the internet on Aunt Martha’s MacBook Air, stuck her finger in the water with the yeast, and said, “I think your water was too cold.” She dumped it out. “Let me.”