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is always an excellent idea.
    She turned away from the trees, courageously faced her sisters, and said, “Let’s have breakfast.”

CHAPTER SIX
Pancakes
    J UST AS HUNGRY AS S KYE , Jane rashly volunteered to make pancakes for everyone. She’d watched her father make pancakes from a mix a hundred times and was sure she could do it herself. After all, the directions would be right there on the box. Unfortunately, those directions turned out to be not as clear as she would have liked, starting with the first step.
Heat skillet on medium to low
, it said. But the knob on the stove had numbers, with no indication which number meant medium or low, let alone medium to low. If only Jane had paid attention to the setting her father had used at home—but who cared enough about stoves to notice things like that? She was going to have to experiment, and since experimentation canget messy, Jane didn’t want Skye around watching the process. Too stressful. So she wondered loudly why Jeffrey wasn’t yet back from taking Hoover home. This worked perfectly—Skye rushed off, certain that Hoover had broken Jeffrey’s leg or arm or killed him altogether.
    Batty stayed behind, too hungry to run away, even for Jeffrey.
    “I’ll help,” she said. “So will Hound.”
    “Thank you.” Jane lifted Batty onto a chair to make her tall enough for helping. “And we can talk while we work. Do you have any fears or anxieties to discuss?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I mean, was it scary when Aunt Claire got hurt?”
    “Yes, but then Skye and Jeffrey came.”
    “And me, too.”
    “Uh-huh.” Batty blew the opening notes of “Taps” on her harmonica. “But not Rosalind.”
    Jane would have liked a more enthusiastic response to her own role in this tale, but she understood that Rosalind would have been preferable. “How many pancakes should we make?”
    Once they’d decided on the recipe for twenty-four pancakes, they put together the ingredients. Once again, the directions proved to be vague, calling for two cups of mix and one and a half cups of milk. After some deliberation, Jane decided that a mug was sort ofa cup, so she used one with a seagull on the side for measuring. Batty proved to be surprisingly good at breaking eggs without smashing them to bits. Only a few pieces of shell got into the batter, and Hound licked off all the yolk that splattered onto Batty’s shirt.
    Next came stirring. The directions said to stir with a wire whisk, but since neither of them could find anything that might be called that, they settled on a fork. While they worked, Jane told Batty about meeting Dominic and Mercedes Orne, and about the Love Survey she was putting together to help with research for her book.
    “And I’m still looking for a name for Sabrina’s true love. Do you like Dylan?” But when Batty vehemently shook her head, Jane remembered. “Sorry. That’s the name of the boy who poured glue on you at day care, right?”
    “He poured glue on everybody,” said Batty darkly.
    “What about the other boys?”
    “Isaac is nice. He invited me to his birthday party. So did Jaimon and Gabe. Satchel didn’t. Also Satchel pushed me off the swings, and Zoe said it was because he likes me, but I don’t like him, and if he likes me, he should’ve invited me to his birthday party. He invited Zoe.” Batty frowned. “She got a stuffed animal for a party favor.”
    “I won’t use Satchel, then.” Jane gave the batter one last stir. “Let’s try a pancake.”
    The directions said to use less than a quarter cup of batter for each pancake. Jane found that it was harder than it looked to pour batter from a mug into a hot pan, which meant that a lot of batter ended up on the stove and the floor. But the hiss when the batter hit the heat, and the way the batter turned itself into a round cake—all that was quite gratifying.
    “We’re supposed to turn the pancake over when it starts to bubble,” Jane told Batty, and thought seriously of