“Did he tell you she’d appointed him or did that come from her?” asked Mr. Pennypacker, leaning forward and squinting his eyes suspiciously. “How did you hear that he was your guardian? I cannot see her choosing him! Not him. I could see him lying to you, though, if he was working some kind of an angle.”

“No, no, we had to tell him he was the guardian in point of fact,” said Fiona, thinking this part was at least close to the truth because now there was nothing for it but to elaborate with an outright lie. “We found her request to have him made the guardian in some papers in her underwear drawer when we were clearing out her stuff for the attic and we gave the papers to him.”

She said this automatically because she kept things like chocolate bars or her diary or anything she didn’t want to share with her sisters in her underwear drawer. But now the idea of finding things among her great-aunt’s underwear made her blush and she wished she’d thought of another place to have found the papers.

“Well! She might have told me, her lawyer!” said Mr. Pennypacker, whose face had gone red and sweaty when he’d yelled. He sat back and wiped it with a handkerchief, trying to calm himself. “Well! I must say I don’t know what she was thinking but then I seldom did. She was a wonderful woman but what you might call buttoned-up. Very private. No doubt it was his proximity that she felt made him suitable. Or perhaps he enlisted himself for the job.”

Fiona snorted involuntarily at this.

“Well! All right. There are some things he will need to sign and I’ll need to see paperwork showing he is who your aunt chose to be your legal guardian.”

Fiona hadn’t thought of this.

“All right,” she said finally, wondering how she would get around this one.

“He’s moving onto your property at some point, or has already, I assume?”

“Oh yes, he’s looking into that,” said Fiona vaguely.

The rest was just a lot of talk about the house and the money that had been left to them. It seemed a substantial amount although she had never dealt with large sums before. She had no idea what kind of bills there would be or how much it would cost the four of them to live. Her parents had always taken care of that. And after their death, the church and Mrs. Weatherspoon. Everything of Aunt Martha’s had gone to Fiona and her sisters including, Mr. Pennypacker explained, the money from the sale of Aunt Martha’s fishing boat if they could find a buyer. Mr. Pennypacker was handling the sale. Only some old fishing gear had gone to Al Farber.

“Why?” asked Fiona.

“Why?” he said. “I suppose because he used to trail your great-aunt around like a sick puppy while she fished, writing about her. She was a professional fisherman, as you know. He came here to do an article about her for the New York Times. That was a while ago when there weren’t so many female professional fishermen going out alone. He ended up staying and writing a whole book about her. It was actually a bestseller for a time. Not that I ever thought it was much good. To capture your great-aunt on paper would not be an easy thing and I don’t think in the end he really managed it, popular though the book might have been. She thought he would just pack up and go back to New York after he finished writing it and he should have but instead he bought the lot next door to her farm and parked that hideous trailer on it and stayed on and on. There was some rumor he wanted to marry her. But she had more sense than to return his affections. He was more like…a…like a…STALKER!” Mr. Pennypacker spat out venomously.