Miss Macy took off with little Ermintrude. Gladys, who was supposed to be baking, took off down the military road to visit the soldiers.

Sina clutched her head. It was clear that the population of the farm was increasing in dribs and drabs and was utterly out of control.

Meanwhile, Winifred and I could see Zebediah creeping down the stairs and sneaking out the back door.

Winifred jabbed me with a finger and whispered, “Come on. He’s going to hide today’s letter, I bet. Let’s follow him.”

So we sallied forth as well, staying at a distance and dodging behind buildings now and again until we reached the safe cover of the woods. From there it was easy. Zebediah would have made a rotten spy, because he didn’t once cotton on to us. We stopped at one point when he got to the old petroglyphs. There are long, flat rocky ledges there where you can sun yourself and stare at the ancient rock pictures of seals. Zebediah sat down. Winifred and I squatted beneath a bush to watch as he took the letter out of his pocket, opened it, and read it before putting it back in his pocket and leaping up to carry on. He seemed to have a kind of spring in his step after that. Was it of suppressed excitement? Then he led us to the hermit’s. The hermit was weeding his garden when Zebediah got there. We saw him show the hermit the letter, and the two of them disappeared into the hermit’s cabin.

“He must be hiding the letters there,” said Winifred.

“We need to find a way to lure the hermit out so we can search for them,” I said. “But how?”

“I have it!” said Winifred so loudly I was afraid she had given us away. Then she motioned for us to head back to the house. We’d walked a bit when she said, “Don’t you see? We don’t have to lure him away at all. We’ll go there tonight by cover of nightfall when the hermit comes to weed the night garden. Does he come every night?”

I thought about this. “Not every night, but he often comes whenever the moon is bright,” I replied. “But even with a bright moon it will be pitch black on that trail through the forest and easy enough to fall over the cliffs.”

“We’ll carry flashlights,” said Winifred.

“Which will attract the cougars that prowl at night.”

“Well, no plan is perfect,” said Winifred.

I looked at her to see if she was joking, but she turned to me a face bereft of fun and games and said, “I’m terribly worried about Father, Franny. Terribly.”

“So it’s a plan,” I said.

* * *

That night the sky was so thickly covered in clouds that the moon wasn’t visible and the hermit never came. So we waited patiently for Sunday night, hoping the skies would clear and doing our best to appear normal with such plans in the offing. We ate Gladys’s terrible cooking. She had decided to try making the Sunday chicken. She claimed she had a better recipe than Old Tom’s. We all begged Old Tom to overrule her and make the chicken himself, but he said we must give her a chance to shine, which was very like him. So we crossed our fingers and hoped she really did have a good recipe, but it turned out to be scorched chicken and dumplings.