“She won’t have to live here, too, will she?”

“Good question. I can’t imagine I would want to pay anyone what it would be worth in gas to come here and back every day from Brookman’s. She’s apparently staying with them over the store, so conditions are quite crowded. She’d probably jump at the chance to move out. We’ve got the cabin we keep for the hired hands when we have them. She can have that.”

“You will ask her if she can cook first, won’t you?”

“I shall endeavor to do so,” said Sina.

* * *

After the dishes were done we gathered in the parlor and Sina played the piano and we all sang songs, songs from musicals, folk songs, hymns, and the popular songs of the day. Sina had shelves of sheet music. Winifred knew quite a few of them, as she’d been in a choir. Zebediah played the drums on the top of a side table with two pencils he’d found. It was rather annoying until Old Tom went into the kitchen and got them each a couple of spoons. Old Tom showed him how to play the spoons and they played together for a while until Zebediah tired of this, too.

“I want to go out and see the night garden at night,” said Zebediah. “I want to climb over the fence and see what it’s like inside.”

Old Tom stopped playing and held Zebediah’s spoons to quiet him for a moment. “The night garden is off-limits,” he said simply. “You are none of you to go into it. Not ever.”

“Why?” asked Zebediah.

“Never you mind,” said Old Tom, and he put down his spoons, went to the couch, and began to read his newspaper.

There was an awkward silence after that, which Sina tried to fill by breaking into a rousing march on the piano, but it was too late; the happy mood of the evening could not be recovered, and in the end everyone decided to head upstairs. Sina lit the coal lanterns and distributed them. Usually Old Tom, Sina, and I liked to read for a long time in our beds before we slept. I don’t know what Winifred, Wilfred, and Zebediah normally did, but they went up to their rooms as well. I decided to make one more try at my mermaid story before going to bed, so I went up to my cupola. With the advent of the Madden children I could see that I would get in little daytime writing and would have to resort to an evening schedule.

Despite that, and despite houseguests, it had certainly been successful enough, even a rather normal evening.

Then the shouting began.

THE CONVERGENCE OF A UFO, A COOK, AND THE BEGINNING OF THE MYSTERIOUS LETTERS

I was at my desk writing. Old Tom had gone downstairs to get some water. The Madden children were up in their rooms doing whatever they were doing. It sounded very much as if Zebediah was jumping on his bed. We may have been feeding him a bit too much, I was thinking, when suddenly Sina came tearing out of her room, screaming, “UFO! UFO! UFO!”