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squirmed and complained, and she nearly lost her balance.
    “Hey, wait, you guys,” she yelled. “I saw something!”
    Henrik and Peter circled around, and they all took a closer look at what appeared to be a bicycle tire hidden in the bushes. It was a tire, all right, attached to the rest of a bike. Uncle Morten’s bike.
    “Are you sure it’s your uncle’s?” asked Henrik.
    “Positive.” Peter pointed to the little light on the front fender. “He keeps it in the boathouse. I’d know it anywhere. But I don’t know why he would ride it out here.”
    “Maybe it’s stolen,” Elise suggested. “Maybe the thief stashed it here in these bushes, and he’s coming back for it.”
    Henrik found a rough path that led from the side of the road and into the woods. It started right at the bush where the bike had been stashed. Peter looked at Elise, who kind of shrugged her shoulders. Without saying anything more, they pushed the bike back into the bush, parked their own bikes behind another bush, and started down the path.
    The three of them had explored this area before, but Peter couldn’t remember exactly if this trail led straight to the beach or if it just wandered through the woods.
    “What do we do if we find a thief in the woods?” Peter was in the lead and turned to whisper to Henrik behind him. They almost collided.
    “Here, let me go first,” said Henrik as he stepped past Peter. Henrik was usually the first one at school to stand up to bullies, or score a goal in soccer, or climb to the top of the school building to fetch a lost ball. He was also the first one in the neighborhood to break his leg falling out of a tree, and he got into more of that kind of trouble than anyone, mostly from all the crazy ideas he came up with. Not smart aleck trouble, just getting into things trouble.
    Peter? He was the one who could get the pigeons to perch on his shoulder and eat out of his hand, the one with the stamp collection, the one who liked to draw pictures of airplanes. Maybe he wasn’t as smart as his twin sister, but he was the one who usually figured how to get out of the trouble they got into, like the time they were going to raise and sell hamsters. (He shuddered every time he thought about that one.)
    Mostly, Peter didn’t mind being in the middle. The way he looked at it, he, Henrik, and Elise were all just good at different things. Elise was reading long chapter books when she was only six years old, and she could cook practically anything their mom could. The year before she had won a prize at the school science fair for her experiment with plants, and she was the best piano player in the school. But between the three of them, there was no doubt: Henrik was definitely best at leading the way on a trail like this.
    The path twisted down through a dense stand of trees and bushes, and the branches whipped at their arms and legs as they passed through. Overhead, silvery beech trees formed a canopy, and the sun only broke through in splinters. If Peter hadn’t been so worried about running into a thief in the woods, he would have enjoyed it.
    Suddenly Henrik froze and signaled with his hand to the others. Peter could see nothing but heard voices up ahead. Two voices. One of them was Uncle Morten’s, but he wasn’t speaking in Danish.
    “It’s just my uncle,” Peter whispered into Henrik’s ear. “No thief.” So they tiptoed around a bend in the trail and stood awkwardly at the edge of a clearing.
    The Swedish man standing next to Uncle Morten was short and dressed like a fisherman in boots and gray work clothes. Uncle Morten towered over him, light haired like Peter and Elise, but large, well built, and bearded. He stopped what he was saying in midsentence, looked up, and stuffed an envelope into his shirt.
    “Hi, Uncle Morten.” Peter tried to sound casual. “We saw your bike in the bushes by the side of the road, and we weren’t sure. We just came in to see if there was a thief in here or