“The phone call—was it about the olenstay aneplay?” Sina asked Mrs. Brookman.

“Well, what else could it be about? Oh, poor, poor Mother,” sobbed Winifred, amazing us all with her easy acquisition of a foreign language, even if it was only pig latin.

“Now, now,” said Mrs. Brookman. “We know nothing at this point. Your father’s disappearance could be a coincidence.”

“Ha. Fat chance,” said Winifred, and then began sobbing again.

“Winifred, dear,” said Sina. “Do you know something we don’t?”

I pinched Winifred. I thought it best that if Winifred’s father were truly in trouble, as it was now clear that he was, that we not get him further in trouble by divulging what we knew. Not to mention what kind of trouble we might be in for having had some advance inkling of it without doing anything about it.

We rode in silence except for Winifred’s sniffles. Sina brought the radio with us and kept it tuned to the CBC waiting for the next news break. It was interesting riding in a car with the radio playing.

“Someday,” I said as I began to find our silence awkward and just trying to make cheerful conversation, “they should put radios in cars.”

“Hush, Franny, not now,” said Sina.

“They do put radios in cars, dear,” said Mrs. Brookman kindly. “But your farm truck is an old 1918 Buick, and this is a 1927 Nash touring car. They didn’t put radios in cars until about a decade ago.”

I was put out to think that once again somebody had beaten me to the punch of a groundbreaking invention. Oh well, I wasn’t an inventor. I was a writer. That was difficult enough.

“Sssssh!” said Winifred fiercely as the news came on again. They were interviewing Crying Alice.

“How could he have?” came her voice over the radio. “He’s not a real pilot. He’s just read about it! He’s been so strange and edgy of late, but I never expected this.”

“Oh, Mother!” shouted Winifred in supreme irritation. “What a thing to say!”

We shushed her as Crying Alice continued to rant to the interviewer. “I came up to Comox because I thought he was going to do something stupid. I have a sixth sense about these things. And when I got here he said to me, ‘I plan to do something spectacular, life-changing, life-threatening even, something bold and beautiful and I can’t tell you what it is.’

“‘You must tell me,’ I begged him over and over, ‘You must tell me if it’s life-threatening. Could you die?’

“‘I could,’ he said.

“‘Then tell me.’

“‘No can do,’ he said. ‘You would only try to talk me out of it.’

“That man can be so maddening!”

“So, Mrs. Madden, do you think then that your husband was talking about stealing the Argot?”