“All sorts of good breakfast things going on out here! Just come on out and see! Doesn’t even matter if you’re still in your pajamas, I’m still in mine. Just come on out here and see what the breakfast patrol has got cookin’!”
Thoroughly mystified, but not knowing what else to do, I followed the voice’s instructions and made my way out to the kitchen. There, to my surprise, I found the little redheaded girl I’d seen in Ridgewood before. Now at a much shorter distance, I could see that she wasn’t exactly a little girl; her face made me think she was somewhere in her middle teen years. She was definitely little, though, standing only an inch or two over five feet tall, if that, and she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds soaking wet.
Standing at a small, butcher-block island in t
