The Dragon in the Driveway (10 page)

“So we’re an hour late for dinner,” she said. “We can talk our way out of that kind of trouble any day. We’ll just say your watch stopped.”

Jesse shook his head, feeling suddenly exhausted. “Daze, it’s seven-thirty
in the morning.
See where the sun is? It’s
rising
, not
setting
. We’ve been underground
all night long.
”

Daisy’s jaw dropped. “Yikes!” she cried out. “We are in so much
trouble
!”

They racewalked down the path away from the clearing in the Deep Woods, but it was hard going. Now that Jesse and Daisy knew they had been out all night, their heads swam, their limbs felt as if they were filled with wet concrete, and their eyelids felt scratchy as sandpaper. In the gathering light, they staggered across the pasture. They stopped for a moment to shake their heads at the deep muddy grooves the earthmover had left, and at the patch of tread-flattened dirt where the hole to the root cellar and the old mine tunnel had been.

“Maybe we should check the barn and make sure the Magic Museum’s okay,” Jesse said nervously.

“We have to get home!” Daisy said. “We have to find Emmy.”

At this, Emmy burst out of the laurel bushes and came running down the hill to meet them.

“My Keepers!” she cried. “I was so sad and scared. But I stayed in the bushes and waited and waited for you just like you told me to.” She grabbed them in a great big dragon hug.

“You are a very good dragon,” said Daisy, laughing with relief.

“And you are very good Keepers, because you came back for me,” said Emmy, setting them down gently. “My friends said you would come back, and you did.”

“So did the dryads keep you company?” Jesse asked.

“Alllll night long. I was scared. The laurel dryads were plotting against me. They wanted to hand me over to the Slayer. Nasty laurel
wenches
!” Emmy said, pouting.

“It’s not their fault,” said Daisy. “They’re St. George’s slaves.”

“My friends came and told those wicked wenches to hold their traitorous tongues. Then Douglas and the lady brought me lots and lots of dandelion greens, and I ate so much that I am full, full, full. And now I need my cozy nest of socks, please, thank you, you’re welcome, much obliged, you’re too,
too
kind.”

Emmy turned around and ran back up the hill, diving into the laurels. Crawling behind her, the
cousins watched as her long dragon tail transformed into the furry little nub of a sheepdog.

Jesse and Daisy and their faithful dog trudged into the backyard toward home. Daisy thought that her house had never looked quite so peaceful and inviting. The lights in the kitchen were on and the windows were fogged up. Then she thought of her parents waiting inside and suddenly she didn’t feel quite so welcome anymore. They would be drinking their umpteenth cup of coffee, drumming their fingers on the kitchen table. Had they called the police? How much money, she wondered, had they put up for information leading to their return?

Jesse hurriedly unlocked the garage door and watched as Emmy scampered over to her nest in the packing crate, leaped in, and burrowed under the socks. Then he locked the door and turned to Daisy. “Okay,” he said, breathing deeply to calm his nerves. “What’s our story?” Dealing with your own angry parents is bad enough. Dealing with someone else’s angry parents was petrifying.

Daisy said in a voice like iron, “When all else fails … the truth—sort of: that we got lost in the Deep Woods and we’re really,
really
sorry and we’ll never do it again, and maybe they’ll be so glad we didn’t get torn apart by bears and wolverines, they won’t ground us for the rest of time.” She took a
deep breath and marched up the back stairs into the house.

When she saw her parents sitting at the kitchen table, Daisy realized with a sickening jolt that she hadn’t seen them since breakfast the morning before. But Aunt Maggie looked up from her newspaper and smiled with unnatural brightness.

“Hey, kids,” she said. “You’re home early. Did you have fun?”

CHAPTER EIGHT
THE MAGICAL DAIRYMAN

Jesse and Daisy turned to each other and blinked once. Home early?

Daisy, shrugging, turned back to her mother. “We had a great time, didn’t we, Jess?” She gave him a sharp elbow to the ribs.

Jesse nodded so hard, it rattled his brains against his skull.

“How is Miss Alodie doing?” Uncle Joe asked in a strange flat voice neither of the cousins had ever heard him use before.

“She’s great,” Jesse said, staring curiously at his uncle.

“It’s her ankle I’m talking about,” Uncle Joe droned. “Tell us. Is her ankle better?”

“Oh, her
ankle
!” Daisy said, digging her nails into Jesse’s palm. “Much better. Right? It’s much better,” she prompted Jesse.

“Better,” Jesse echoed dumbly, and then he caught on. “Oh, her
ankle
! It’s, um, good!”

“That’s good,” said Uncle Joe, nodding mechanically. “She called to tell us about it yesterday afternoon. I offered to take her to the clinic. But she said if the cousins could stay and help her keep off the ankle, all would be well.”

“Yes, indeedy!” Aunt Maggie said with scary intensity. “Keeping a sprained ankle elevated is very, very, very, very important!”

“Don’t worry,” said Daisy doubtfully. “Everything’s fine.”

Then Aunt Maggie gave her head a quick shake and looked at Jesse and Daisy as if she were seeing them for the first time. “Really? That’s good! But
how did you two get so
grubby
?” she asked. “You look like you spent the night with the hobgoblins in the coal mines.”

Jesse was so sure his hair was standing on end that he actually reached up to smooth it flat.

“We were up late weeding,” said Daisy. “Miss Alodie said it works best … by moonlight.”

“That woman’s a real character,” said Aunt Maggie with a fond shake of her head. “Go grab yourselves a hot shower. Are you hungry? You look hungry.”

“We are!” said Daisy. “We fixed some … porridge and nuts and dried fruit for Miss Alodie, but you know how I feel about porridge.”

Uncle Joe’s face dissolved into a familiar goofy grin. “Remember we used to call it mush, Daze?” he asked. “Daisy never could stomach porridge, even when she was a baby. I remember you used to spit it out clear across the kitchen. Olympic-class projectile vomiting.”

Daisy and Jesse grinned wearily at each other, remembering Emmy’s own mush-spewing phase not so very long ago.

“I’ll fry you up a mess of eggs and sausage,” said Uncle Joe.

“Thanks, Poppy. We promised we’d go back to Miss Alodie’s later, didn’t we, Jess? She, um, needs
us to fix dinner for her.” Daisy gave Jesse another elbow jab.

“Yeah,” said Jesse. “She also needs us to get her a book. A nice big one.”

“That’ll keep her off the ankle,” said Uncle Joe.

“You know,” said Aunt Maggie, “I think it’s great that Miss Alodie has such considerate neighbors to help her out in a fix.”

Jesse and Daisy, nodding quickly, eased themselves out the door into the hallway. On the way up the stairs, Daisy whispered to Jesse, “Miss Alodie must have put some sort of spell on my parents, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” Jesse whispered back. “But sometimes parents can go weird like that all on their own.”

“That’s true,” said Daisy.

After showering and changing into clean clothes, then polishing off three eggs, three sausages, and three English muffins between them, the cousins went back upstairs to visit the professor online. Whether he would be able to help them or not, they still wanted to tell a grown-up about everything that had happened to them in the past twenty-four hours.

As soon as his familiar face appeared on the screen, Jesse and Daisy leaned forward eagerly and
started telling him about the door in the earth and all that had happened to them since they had gone through it. The professor listened, leaning back and stroking his beard. At the mention of the Golden Pickax, he sat upright and said, “Now
that
I can help you with. It’s on the barn wall, where I left it, hidden in plain sight among my own tools.”

Jesse smacked the desk and rolled backward, pointing an accusatory finger at the computer screen. “You!” he whispered. “You’re the farmer!”

“The Magical Dairyman,” said Daisy in a voice of awe.

Daisy and Jesse looked at each other and laughed. Then Daisy turned back to the screen and said, “We thought we had made you up! But you’re real.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” said the professor. “I have been many things and led many lives, and dairy farmer was, indeed, one of them.”

“So let me see if I’ve got this right,” Jesse said. “You were the farmer and St. George was pretending to work for the mining company so he could dig up the dragon treasure.”

“Good sleuthing!” said the professor, beaming.

Daisy asked, “So now he’s going after the treasure again?”

“It’s far more valuable and far more important
than a mere treasure. But waste no more time in conversation with me. You must get the Golden Pickax without delay and keep it out of St. George’s clutches. With the Golden Pickax he will be able to reach the treasure with ease.
The pickax knows where to dig.
Much hangs on your actions, Dragon Keepers, so tread very carefully.”

Jesse turned to Daisy. “I guess we have to wake up Emmy,” he said.

At that, the backdrop behind Professor Andersson burst into a wall of red-hot roiling flames. The professor leaned forward, the flames reflecting in his eyes. He opened his mouth and bellowed at them, “LEAVE THE DRAGON IN HER LAIR AND GO ON ALONE!”

Then the screen hissed into blackness.

The cousins sat in stunned silence.

Then Jesse said, “That guy sure is dramatic.”

“I guess we have to do like he says and let Emmy sleep,” said Daisy. She rubbed her face. “I’m so tired, I could sleep for a hundred years myself.”

“Me too,” said Jesse. “But we can’t sleep yet. We’ve got Dragon Keeper business to do.”

Jesse went to the mudroom and got their backpack. He checked the jar to make sure that the worms were still alive (they were quite lively!). Then he tossed out the head of cabbage (which was
really
stinky!), changed the water in their canteen, and packed up a couple of sandwiches. Daisy went to the living room and told Aunt Maggie that they were going first to the Dell, then to the library, and later to Miss Alodie’s for dinner.

“Okay,” Aunt Maggie said, “but try to be home for an early-ish bedtime. You look tired, both of you.”

On their way past the Rock Shop, Uncle Joe shouted through the screen window. “Hey, guys! I just remembered the farmer’s name. It was Lukas Burton Andersson!”

“We know!” the cousins shot back as they ran up the rise toward the Dell. Coming down the hill from the laurel bushes, Daisy tried to picture the wall of the barn and the rusty old tools that had been hanging there for decades. Was the pickax still there?

When they got to the barn, they stood and scanned the wall above their Magic Museum. The magic shovel was hanging back in its spot, but just above it and slightly to the right was a perfect pickax-shaped silhouette on the wall where the red paint was less faded.

“It was hanging right
there
,” Daisy said, jabbing her finger at the spot.

Jesse sat down hard on the milking stool and
buried his head in his arms. “
That’s
what he was doing here yesterday. He ran us out of the way so he could come in here and get the pickax.”

“Because,” said Daisy, “the Golden Pickax knows where to dig.”

“It knows where to dig up the dragon treasure,” said Jesse.

“Don’t call it a treasure,” Daisy reminded him.

“The Important and Valuable Thing,” Jesse said, lifting his head wearily.

“He probably took it to the cavern. The cavern is his new headquarters,” said Daisy. “We’re going to have to sneak in there and steal it. Everything hangs on our keeping the Golden Pickax out of his clutches.”

“How are we going to do that?” Jesse asked.

“I don’t know, just be really sneaky, I guess,” Daisy said. “Maybe he’s asleep.”

“Maybe …,” said Jesse. “But maybe he’s wide awake and ready for us.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Daisy said, “about that ramp. It’s about fifteen or so feet off the ground of the cavern when you first go in, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yeah, about,” said Jesse.

“So maybe we can lower ourselves over the side and drop down beneath the ramp, where the big
book is. We’ll hide there and wait for our chance,” said Daisy.

“That could work,” said Jesse, “unless he happens to be doing something with the book.”

“The ramp has gaps between the boards,” said Daisy. “We can peek down and check first.”

“Okay,” Jesse said with a sigh. “Let’s go.”

They went across the pasture. Just as they were entering the Deep Woods, the dryads drifted out of their tree trunks and stood before them. Their forms were even paler in broad daylight. In fact, if you didn’t already know what they looked like, you might not be able to see them at all. Only the sashes Miss Alodie had given them were truly visible, floating in the air about six feet off the ground.