“Daddy, some of these books are mom’s. I’m not leaving them. I’ve also got my school books. I think they are important. The rest of the books are important too. There are just a couple novels but most are how-to books. I think they are all necessary. Even the novels can help if someone gets bored.”

  Bill looked at her, shook his head, and walked to the living room where he pulled a stack of hunting magazines off a shelf and added them to her boxes.

  It was still dark when they finished loading the truck and set off for the farm.

  The sun was just peeking over the trees in the distance when Bill backed his truck close to the east door of the barn. The smell of bacon reached them as soon as they stepped inside.

  Mary stood at the wood stove. Bacon sizzled in a pan. Next to it another pan waited for the eggs to be scrambled.

  Jaden picked up the first box and moved toward the stairs that would take her to her new room. Bill followed her with another box. Before they’d even gotten to their room, four men were unloading their truck and carrying boxes to their rooms.

  “Jaden, how about letting the men carry the heavy boxes and you come help me set the table,” Mary called.

  “Okay. Tell me what to do.” Jaden stepped up to the counter.

  “Take the rag out of the soapy water, wring it out and clean those tables. Then we can set the table for twelve people. Thanks so much for your help.”

  “Thanks for letting me help,” Jaden said. “I hate just standing and watching people do things.”

  Mary snorted. “You are such a gem, sweetheart. I can see why Allison is so excited about you being here.”

  “I really like Allison too. I like her because she said she will teach me things and because she is really nice to me. I wonder why she likes me?”

  “Well, part of it is because you are so willing to learn and to help and part of it is because you are really nice as well. Now let’s get the table set and put the food out. Why don’t you set the plates and silverware? I’ll pour the milk.”

  “Where did we get milk?” Jaden asked setting the plates carefully on the tables.

  “The neighbor has cows. They made a deal with Allison they will be using our labor and Allison’s medicines in return for all sorts of stuff. Trust me, we got the better end of the deal.”

  Jaden leaned across the table to set plates on the opposite side. She felt a soft nudge on her butt and spun around.

  “Bella!” she giggled. She sat down on the bench and pet the dog’s head, pausing to scratch her ears. “You are such a good girl,” she whispered.

  Allison followed Bella into the bunkhouse. “Good morning, Jaden! Steve saved the solar project for after breakfast.”

  “I can’t wait,” Jaden said. “I’ve always wanted to learn more about solar electricity.”

  Bella nudged her hand.

  “You want your belly rubbed?” Jaden asked. She pointed at the bench. “Bella, paws up.”

  Bella stood still looking at Jaden.

  Jaden tried again, “Bella, paws up.”

  Bella still kept her feet on the floor.

  Jaden looked at Allison, the question in her eyes.

  Allison smiled. “Bella is doing what she’s supposed to do. When there is food on the table, she’s not allowed to put her feet up on the bench.”

  “Aww, Bella, I’m so sorry. I was teasing you, wasn’t I? I can get on the floor and rub your belly.” She slid to the floor and started scratching Bella’s belly. Bella laid down and rolled to her back.

  Men started approaching the table to find places to sit.

  “Okay, Bella,” Allison said. “It’s time to be quiet.”

  Bella rose to her feet and padded to the dog bed that sat under the counter at the far end of the room. She turned twice in her bed and then laid so that her chin rested on the cushion and she could watch the tables.

  Jaden’s dad sat across from her. Steve sat next to him.

  “We got all our stuff up in our room,” her dad said. “If you have time later, maybe you could start putting some of it away on the shelves they built.”

  Allison leaned forward so she could see across Mary. “I’ve got some extra boxes if you want to use them like drawers and put them on the shelves.”

  “Thanks,” Bill said. “We do have some boxes. I’m not sure we have enough. But we can let you know if we need more. There are actually some more boxes in the storeroom that I hauled food in. Once the food is put away, we can use those boxes too.”

  When breakfast had been consumed, Allison stood. “All right, before we get to work on the bunkhouse, I asked Steve if he would give us all a quick lesson in solar electricity. He’s going to put together a small, portable unit that we can use.”

  She turned to Steve. “When will it be ready to use?”

  “I’d like to let it charge all day today,” Steve answered. “If it reaches a full charge, we could use it tonight, but then it would have to be topped off with energy from the sun.”

  “Okay then, let’s all learn a little about solar,” Allison said, sitting back down.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Steve walked to a green wagon with a steel mesh bed. The back of the wagon sported a graphic of a gorilla with the words “Gorilla Carts.”

  “I have one of those Gorilla Carts,” one man said. “I love it! You can’t break those things if you tried. I love the wheels. I can take it anywhere.”

  “Yeah.” Steve nodded. “Allison offered me either this or a smaller flyer wagon. I think she might have been disappointed that I took this, but I chose it for the same reasons you just mentioned.”

  Allison put her elbows on the table and smiled. “You are welcome to anything I have, as long as it helps us get through this.”

  Steve lifted the contents of the wagon and set them aside.

  “I want to make this quick so we can get back to work, but I also want to give you a good foundation, so what I’m going to do is start with our appliance. In this case, it’s our big box fan. This fan is a regular household fan that you would plug into an outlet in your house. House electricity is Alternating Current which we call AC. Our solar panel generates Direct Current which we call DC. These are appliances that can run directly off the battery or by using one of the 12 volt DC plugs in your car.”

  He held up the fan. “Most appliances that we use – or used to use – in our homes have at least the amps listed. Many will have both amps and watts listed. The stamp on this fan says ‘.45 Amps 55 watts.’ So, I need an inverter that will handle 55 continuous watts.”

  He looked at each of them, his gaze landing on Jaden. “If you decide that you want to learn more about solar power, later we will talk about peak or surge power. But I’m going to keep it simple today and tell you that the inverter that Allison has here is a 1500-watt inverter with a peak surge limit of 3000 watts.”

  He frowned. “We can go ahead and use this inverter, but it is a huge overkill. Ideally, we would have a smaller inverter for just this fan. I’d like to use a 100 watt inverter if all we were running was the fan. I will look for a smaller inverter, but for now, this is all we have.”

  He paused before continuing. “If we were going to run a refrigerator or something like that, a 1500 watt inverter would be necessary because large appliances like that pull a bigger load when they start.”

  He held up a blue box up. It was about a foot long and not quite as wide. He pointed to the top. “It says right here ‘1500-watt 3000-watt peak surge,’ so we know that it will handle one little fan with ease. When we get this all set up, the fan will plug into the end of this.”

  He turned the box so they could all see two outlets.

  “Our inverter will hook up to our battery. I’m not going to hold up the battery because it is really heavy. This battery is a 200 amp-hour 12-volt battery. We can determine if it’s enough to keep us happy by doing a little math.”

  He paused and closed his eyes, then opened them. First, we want to multiply the volts by the amps to get our watts. It’s a 12-volt 200 amp-hour battery so that equals 2400 watts. Next, we know that the fan is a 55-watt fan. So, we divide our 2400 by 55 and we get…”

  “Forty-three with a remainder,” Jaden called.

  Steve raised his eyebrows and then smiled. “Thanks, Jaden.”

  “So, with a full charge, in theory this battery could run that fan for 43 hours. However.” He held up his finger. “We don’t want to run the battery down less than half charge. That would eventually ruin the battery. We need to always make sure that it maintains at least a half charge. So, half of 43 hours would give us twenty-one and a half hours of running time before we needed to recharge the battery. We could also run two fans for a bit over ten hours.”

  He looked around at the faces staring at him. “Do you all understand how I reached that number?”

  Most of the group nodded. One man shook his head and muttered that it was gobbly gook. The blond woman nodded. “I think I kind of get it, but it’s making my brain all mushy. I’ll pass on learning that stuff.”

  Jaden sat watching Steve. Her eyes were round. “That’s so cool!” she blurted.

  Steve grinned. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s move on to the charge controller. I’ll hurry so I don’t put you all to sleep.”

  He picked up a smaller box. “The only thing the charge controller does is keeps the solar panels from over-charging your battery. It regulates the current and the voltage from the solar panels. This particular charge controller can handle 400 watts. It has positive and negative leads that the solar panel feeds into. And positive and negative leads that go to the battery. One thing that I love about this charge controller is this display that shows the amount of charge remaining in the battery.”

  He smiled. “I’m glad that these solar panels are simple 100 watt panels. If we were working with larger solar panels, we would want to use an MPPT charge controller. But, I’ll keep this simple.”

  He set the controller down and pointed at the two solar panels leaning against the wall. “Each of those panels is a 100-watt panel. They collect the sun’s energy and send it to the charge controller, which sends it to the battery, which stores it until we ask for electricity. The inverter converts the electricity from the battery which is Direct-Current to Alternating-Current that our fan requires.”

  He stepped back. “Now, Jaden has said that she’d like to help assemble this. If anyone else wants to stick around, it’ll only take a few minutes to put it all together. Or you can go ahead and get to your own work and I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

  Allison was the only person to join them in assembling the generator. Bella followed them out and lay on the driveway to take a short nap. Ten minutes later, Steve attached the solar panels to the charge controller and set them to face the sun.

  Jaden smiled. “I guess I should go put our stuff away in our new room. Can Bella come with me?”

  “If she wants,” said Allison.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jaden climbed the stairs with Bella on her heels. She walked the mezzanine until she came to the room that she would share with her dad. Two stacks of boxes waited outside the door. The top box contained clothes and was fairly light. Jaden picked it up and stepped into the room.

  It was total darkness inside the room. Absent-mindedly she reached to the side to flip a switch. There was no switch. She backed out of the room and set the box back on top of the pile. Bella stood watching.

  She turned to walk away when Allison hurried toward her. She held two plastic tubes. She handed one to Jaden.

  “Just press this button on the top,” she said. She pushed the button on the top of the one she still held. The tube lit up. Jaden pressed her button and smiled when it lit as well.

  “Cool! Where did you get these?”

  “I bought them when they were on sale. They’re called Luci lights. They are solar charged. You put them in a sunny window or outside in the sun to charge. Then you can use them at night. I bought a whole bunch to give to friends and family at Christmas, but think this is a better use for them. None of the rooms have windows so they are all going to be dark.”

  She stepped inside the room and set the light on a shelf. The top of the shelf was angled and covered in aluminum foil.

  “Why is there aluminum foil on that shelf?” Jaden asked.

  “Because it reflects light back into the room and gives us a little more light.”

  Jaden looked around the tiny room. It was narrow, but looked to be longer than she expected. The wall to her immediate right was floor to ceiling shelves. The Luci light sat on one of those shelves. The bed dominated the opposite wall. Built of two-by-fours and plywood, it was higher than a normal bed, leaving plenty of space underneath for storage.

  A sleeping bag lay open on the bed.

  “Oh, we brought our own sleeping bags and we brought my twin sized mattress. It’s still in the back of my dad’s truck.”

  “Your mattress won’t fit on either of these beds, honey. We made the beds narrow to give you more space in your room. We put a couple blankets under each sleeping bag to give you more cushion. They should be comfy,” Allison said.

  She put her index finger on her bottom lip. “We could use your mattress in the house. We are going to turn one room in the basement over to the security team. That way they can get sleep when there is activity in the bunkhouse. Would you mind donating it to the security team?”

  “I wouldn’t mind at all. But I’ll need to ask my dad.”

  “I’ll ask him. Now, do you want to see your tiny room?” Allison pointed to the back of the room where a curtain hung. This area also sported plenty of shelves, including a bank of box-like shelves against the back side of the hanging curtain. Jaden found the shelf with the aluminum foil backing and set her Luci light on it.

  “I love it,” she whispered. “There’s room for everything.”

  “Can I help you unpack?” Allison asked.

  “I can do it,” Jaden said. “I’m sure you have other things to do.”

  “Actually, James and I thought that we would be safe running the generator for a few days, but after a few days, the noise might attract the attention of people we don’t want knowing that we are here with a generator. Today is the last day I feel comfortable running it so I do want to get a little more laundry done. One of the things on my list is to build some sort of noise baffle so that we can run the generator occasionally without the sound traveling very far.”

  “Go,” Jaden said. “As soon as I get our stuff put away, I’ll come help if you want.”

  “Thanks.” Allison turned and looked at Bella who had curled up in the middle of the floor. “Are you going to stay here, Bella, or do you want to come with me?”

  Bella thumped her tail but made no move to get up. Allison grinned. “Looks like she wants to stay with you. Do you mind?”

  “I’d love to have her here. I’ll bring her to the house when I get done.”

  “Then I’ll see you when you are done.” Allison stepped to the door, backed up and said, “You will want to put those Lucis on the windowsill when you are done using them. You’ll want a full charge tonight.”

  “Okay. Should I bring them to the house?”

  “No, use the window that is closest to the stable door. They shouldn’t be in anyone’s way there.”

  “Thanks.”

  Jaden unpacked each box filling the shelves in her father’s room with his belongings and her shelves with her own belongings. There was plenty of space left.

  She looked up when she heard Bella’s tail thumping. The blond lady stood in the doorway.

  “Hi,” she said. “My name is Greta. I just thought I’d pop in and introduce myself.”

  “I’m Jaden.”

  “I know. Everyone is talking about you.”

  Jaden’s eyes widened. “Why?”

  “Because you’re such a good kid. Because you are really nice. Because your dad is so proud of you. Hey, did you really get expelled from school the day this happened?”

  Jaden shook her head. “Absolutely not! Why would my dad say that?”

  Greta started giggling. “He said that the last normal thing that he did before the lights went out was the least normal thing ever. He said he’d been called to the school and you were in the principal’s office. That you were in trouble for reading a book rather than going outside to play.”

  Jaden grinned. “Well, yeah. My dad was mad too. I don’t know if they would have expelled me though. They probably have just told my dad to make me go outside.”

  She looked down at her hands. “And then my dad probably would have told them I wasn’t coming back. So, yeah, I was probably done with school.”