Then, as he straightened up to leave, Mr. Hastings suddenly turned and looked Sina right in the eye and said, “It’s a good thing you didn’t think it was…”—and here his gaze once more became intense—“a UFO!”

At this we all jumped. We couldn’t help it. But when Sina froze and still said nothing, he began to laugh jovially as if it had all been in good fun.

“Hahahaha,” he went on amiably, but his eyes were not amiable; they were beady little lasers, piercing into Sina’s, asking but not asking and I was about to say, That’s exactly what she did think, if just to put an end to this stand-off, but was stopped before I began by Sina also laughing amiably and saying, “Yes, good thing,” and then looking quickly away.

Mr. Hastings gave her one last searching glance and said, “Good-bye.” A word that was suddenly rife with meaning.

“Good-bye,” said Sina, equally meaningly, and herded us inside before closing the door.

I turned to her and said, “You’re right! It was a UFO! And he knew! He knew it was a UFO!”

“Hush,” said Sina, hustling us toward the kitchen as we heard the car pull away.

Gladys had apparently given up on the cookies. There were trays of little burnt nuggets scattered around the kitchen and no Gladys in sight. Sina sat us down at the kitchen table and put on the kettle. She always recovered from things with a pot of tea.

“He was fishing!” I said. “He knew you hadn’t seen a meteor. He wanted you to say it without putting words in your mouth.”

“Yes,” said Sina. “I believe you’re right. I’m an idiot. The trouble is, when I talked to the Space Institute on the phone at Brookman’s I said I’d seen ‘the meteor’ and somehow I didn’t feel I could backtrack from that without looking a fool. It’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ all over again. I have no moral courage.”

And before the water even got a chance to boil she stood up, turned, and stomped upstairs.

“Where are you going?” I called after her.

“To clean my room,” she said and we could hear her slamming things about up there, so we took the kettle off the stove and went outside to find Zebediah. Winifred suggested we look in the woods for him and tell him his secretiveness with his letter had caused him to miss the Space Institute man. She was feeling quite gleeful about this.

“It was the way Mr. Hastings said it,” I explained to Winifred as we were walking. “He was trying to get her to admit it was a UFO. He was testing her.”

“Why didn’t he just come out and ask?” Winifred said. “I mean, if he knew that’s what it was?”

“Because if they go around asking people if they’ve seen any UFOs lately, then suddenly people think they’ve seen things they haven’t or they want to appear important so they make things up they didn’t see. I think people have to come to them with what they saw; the Space Institute men can’t just tell them it was a UFO and go from there. I don’t even think he was taking measurements. I mean, what kind of measurements could those possibly have been? I think he was just trying to give her a chance to spill the beans.”