After that the girls sat on chairs in the baggage area and waited an hour. They waited two. They phoned their aunt but got only an answering machine. Fiona left messages each time but none of her calls were returned.

“Fiona,” said Marlin, “what are we going to do?”

“We are going to take a cab to her address,” said Fiona. “I have plenty of cash. We will worry about things when we get there.”

They were all exhausted by the thirty-nine hours of traveling. No one argued except the cabdriver, who said, “That’s a long cab ride all the way to St. Mary’s By the Sea. It’s going to cost you.”

Fiona waved a handful of bills in front of him and he shrugged and threw their suitcases in the back and said no more. It was coming to evening. The road was busy at first and then became much less so as it wound around the island’s cliffside roads, the water stretching out below on one side and the pine forests stretching in a dense green blanket on the other.

“Pine trees,” Fiona pointed out to Charlie, but Charlie had fallen asleep.

“Beautiful,” said Fiona, watching two bald eagles circling, riding the thermals in spirals over the forest. “I knew it would be beautiful. Eagles, Natasha.”

But Natasha had fallen asleep too.

The sun left a rosy peachy trail across the sky as it headed on its own journey to the west to make its way around the corner of the earth, bringing a new day to other people, people the girls had left behind in Borneo and beyond.

“It will be all right, Marlin,” said Fiona to Marlin, whose eyes were drooping, and then as her mother often said, “All things will be all right.”

But they were not so immediately. The cabdriver finally made his way through one end of the charming little seaside village of St. Mary’s By the Sea, all old clapboard shops leaning against each other, sidewalks trimmed with old-fashioned-looking streetlights and neat little hanging baskets spilling a profusion of greenery, out the other end and past the manicured little houses and lots surrounding it. Then they drove once more into the wilderness of long forested roads until finally they came to Martha McCready’s farm. After Fiona had paid the driver and he had taken off, they knocked on the door of the small two-storied house with its wraparound porch and then rang the bell, but no one answered.

“I don’t think anyone’s here,” said Marlin, stating the obvious and leaning on the door. She, like all of them, was on her last legs and almost crazy with fatigue.

“No,” said Fiona, looking for the first time too stupefied to figure out what to do next.

Marlin searched about the mat and doorway and finally found a key under a flowerpot.

“Good finding,” murmured Fiona tiredly, and opened the door.

The house was spic-and-span and empty. Upstairs there were four cots made up side by side in a large bedroom.