I lay awake for a while listening for disturbances, but the only disturbance was Sina knocking on my door and coming in to say she had something to tell me. And when she was done my head was spinning, but at least after that it was a quiet night.

* * *

Sunday dawned clear and calm. Most of us were in our right minds again or at least keeping up a modest pretext of it. When we appeared for breakfast we found nothing prepared and no sign of Gladys. Sina went worriedly to her cabin, saying she hoped Gladys wasn’t ill, but I could tell that after all the hoopla of the past few days she thought anything might have happened to her—ghosts, UFOs—as far as uninvited guests went, we at East Sooke Farm had it all.

When Sina returned, she looked utterly bewildered. She sat down at the kitchen table next to us children, who were wondering if breakfast would be prepared or if we should make our own. At first Sina said nothing, just stared ahead as if puzzling something out, and then turned to us and said, “Gladys will not be cooking today.”

“Oh dear,” I said. “Men from Mars?”

“She says it’s her day off. She says it is union-mandated.”

“Is she a member of a cooking union?” asked Winifred in surprise.

“So she says,” said Sina. “And she accused me of trying to run a sweatshop. I said that I thought you needed a lot of people to run a sweatshop and she said no, you needed only sweat.”

When Old Tom came in from feeding the animals and saw there was no breakfast, he puttered around making coffee and pancakes for everyone. On learning why Gladys hadn’t cooked, he looked rather happy and said, “Never mind, I’ll make my roast chicken. Best chicken you’ve ever had, children. And I see you’ve already picked one out, Franny.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Bad layer?” he asked.

“Bad all-around chicken,” I said, and looked the other way. I preferred Old Tom not to get wind of my chicken-culling methods, so I changed the subject. “Sina, would you make paper dolls for Winifred and me?” Sina made the best paper dolls in the world. She could give them any nuance of expression you wanted. Winifred and I were rather old to play with paper dolls but not too old to own them.

“Certainly,” said Sina, and the three of us began to plan a whole family of very snooty dolls. Wilfred and Old Tom sat at the opposite end of the dining room table, where we’d moved to eat breakfast, planning their work for the day, and so we hardly noticed when Zebediah slipped out, made for the woods, and didn’t return until lunch.

* * *

“Boys,” said Sina after lunch when she saw Zebediah race out the door again, “need lots of time and leeway to explore and get into trouble. It helps them get it out of their systems before they become men.” Then she drew a series of paper-doll boys hanging by their ankles from trees and falling off cliffs and such. We thought it was very funny at the time because we had no idea what Zebediah was actually up to.