“Why would you stay the night?” he asked maliciously as if he’d finally caught them out. “Al’s their guardian, isn’t he?”

For a split second Miss Webster understood her mistake and froze before she replied as casually as she could, “Oh, but I think sometimes in situations like this a girl misses a mother figure.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Pennypacker, looking skeptical, and found Al, who was sorting through Martha’s books in the living room and said to him, “You haven’t even moved in yet, have you? You haven’t shown me any paperwork because you haven’t got any, right? I bet you’re nothing to these girls any more than you were to Martha. My only question is why are these girls lying for you?”

Noooo, thought Fiona, who had heard this exchange, nooooo. But she was too exhausted to deal with yet another crisis. She heard Mr. Pennypacker follow Al outside to the porch but she could only pick up bits and pieces of what he said, mostly it was, “You’re not, are you? You’ve all been lying to me. I’ll tell you why, because she would never have put you in charge of anything. She knew what you were.”

Al answered but his answers and Mr. Pennypacker’s further inquiries became impossible to distinguish and finally their voices stopped as Mr. Pennypacker’s car door slammed and with an angry roar of his engine, he drove off. She peered out the window and saw Al head home.

Outed, thought Fiona grimly. Now what?

After that she was busy saying good-bye to Miss Webster and Mr. Pettinger, who stood at the front door with their arms around each other.

“All’s well that ends well, huh?” he said to Fiona.

Fiona knew he was trying to buck her up but she wanted to say, if you want this to end well you’d better hurry up and marry Miss Webster and adopt us because I don’t think Mr. Pennypacker is going to sit on these increasing suspicions for long. But she said nothing. She was numb with fatigue and the aftermath of worry so she just nodded.

Once it was just the four of them, Fiona went upstairs with the others to hear Natasha’s story. They’d been too busy clearing people out and Natasha had been too busy trying to warm up and recover to talk. Even now she was almost asleep and not terribly coherent.

“I went out to follow eagles. I just wanted to see where they nested. I know they have a nest somewhere in the back forest because I see them always returning there. I started going and I thought, I can just backtrack the way I came and then I kept backtracking but the bushes grew thicker. So then I’d turn around and no matter which way I went I couldn’t find our farm. When I knew I was lost I kept thinking, Well, I’ll just head downhill, if I go down then I’ll end up at the ocean and can follow the cliffs home. But I went down and then there was nothing there but another hill so I’d go up and then before I knew it I was really lost.”