“Don’t worry,” said Fiona, thinking of Miss Webster and Mr. Pettinger. She needed so desperately for them to come to their rescue that she now believed the adoption fantasy implicitly. “We have a backup plan. You may not have to pretend to be our guardian much longer.”

“Really?” said Al, looking intrigued. “What’s happening?”

“Never mind. It’s confidential for now. But I promise you, if things go as we think they might, we can get Mr. Pennypacker off your back completely. You just have to hang on a bit. In the meantime, do what I do and ignore him.”

Al rolled his eyes, took his dinner into the trailer, and slammed the door.

He still had little time for any of them except Charlie. He had started picking Charlie up on Saturdays with a box of Oreos and they drove to the Salmon River trail to look for Billy Bear.

Fiona was admonishing Charlie about this one night at Sunday night supper with Miss Webster and Mr. Pettinger.

“You know that’s dangerous, don’t you?” she said.

“If you want to look for Billy Bear, you should let me take you,” said Mr. Pettinger.

“But Al and I like to go together,” said Charlie. “Besides, mostly we sit in the truck watching for him. We haven’t seen him yet but we always leave a little cairn of Oreos for him when we leave.”

“A cairn?” said Natasha.

“It’s a rock pile people build,” said Charlie. “Only Al makes it out of Oreos. He calls it the bear cairn of cookies.”

“You’re not supposed to do that,” said Mr. Pettinger. “A fed bear is a dead bear.”

“Al fed him when he lived in our woods,” said Charlie. “Al always left him Oreos on garbage day.”

“Yes, and that’s why he had to be moved. At least in part. I know Billy was into the garbage but the cookies couldn’t have helped. If he gets used to people giving him food up there in the woods then when he sees people he’s going to come toward them looking for food and that’s how you end up with a dead bear.”

“Well, we don’t hand him anything because he’s never there,” said Charlie. “We just sit and eat cookies and look for him and then leave him a snack for later.”

“Even if Billy doesn’t connect people with the cookies you leave, you shouldn’t do it,” insisted Mr. Pettinger. “For one thing, Oreos are not healthy food.”

“We eat them,” pointed out Charlie.

“What do you talk about?” asked Marlin, changing the subject. “When I bring Al his dinner all he does is yell ‘WHAT!’ and then take it and give me the empty food container from the night before.”

“We don’t talk about anything,” said Charlie. “Well, sometimes about how we miss Billy. That’s all.”

“Does he talk about Aunt Martha?” asked Fiona.

“Or what it was like to write for the New York Times?” asked Marlin.

“Nope,” said Charlie. “I asked him once what Aunt Martha was like and he said, read the book. So then I asked him what it was like to be a writer and he said, read the book. Then I asked him why he’d never written another book and he said, none of your business.”