Mrs. Weatherspoon sent out appeals to all the relatives she and the girls could find except for a great-aunt, Martha McCready, who lived off the coast of British Columbia. The girls’ mother, when opening Martha’s annual Christmas card, called her “that peculiar woman hiding in the woods.” Mrs. Weatherspoon said they would save her as a last resort. But surely someone more suitable would respond first. There were aunts and uncles in Tampa, Florida; Lansing, Michigan; Shreveport, Louisiana; and Kingsport, Tennessee. That was the lot. It took a while for the responses to Mrs. Weatherspoon’s appeal to trickle in. The mail pickup and delivery in the jungle was unreliable and slow. After receiving the appeal, the relatives then had to think about it. These were their sister’s or brother’s children, it was true. But there were four of them. Fitting four children into an already-established household was no small matter. Some of them wrote to ask Mrs. Weatherspoon to write them if no one else had come forward. When Mrs. Weatherspoon did, they had to think about it all over again. This took time. And none of them had met the McCready children. Mr. and Mrs. McCready had become estranged from their brothers and sisters many years before when they had made what the siblings considered a “very weird choice,” joining a church that none of them had heard of and of which, for some reason never explained to the girls, they all disapproved.

It was a very sad year but one made more interesting for the children by waiting to find out where they were eventually going to end up. Fiona, who felt herself in charge of keeping up with family practices, remembered her father’s dictum to never shy away from the difficult subjects. Talk about them.

“Where would you most like to go?” Fiona would quiz the others at dinner.

“Tampa, I suppose,” said Natasha. “We could swim in the ocean.”

“Is Tampa on the ocean?” asked Marlin.

“It’s in Florida,” said Natasha.

“Not all of Florida is on the ocean,” replied Marlin.

“Sharks,” said Charlie, who tended to see danger everywhere.

“Not on land,” said Marlin.

“I’m sure they’d make us go swimming,” said Charlie. “Everyone always wants to make you go swimming even if you don’t want to. They will make us take swim classes.”

“Swim classes are in pools and you’ve already learned to swim,” said Marlin. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

“They probably make you take your swim classes in the ocean if you live on the ocean and we will be eaten by sharks,” said Charlie morosely.

Marlin could understand why Charlie would be afraid of the ocean, given their recent tragedy. But Charlie, she thought, was afraid of the wrong thing. She should be afraid of tsunamis, not sharks. She was going to point this out but decided not to give Charlie any more cause for worry.

Mrs. Weatherspoon was always very quiet during these discussions. It pained her that the children had lost their parents and it pained her that they were left to such an uncertain fate. She would have taken them on permanently herself but she too had other plans and had to get back to Australia eventually.