By then I'd started tugging straw hats onto the trolls. Tying the strings under their scaly chins was the trickiest part. Every time I tried, they pulled away as if I were planning to strangle them. Whenever I leaned closer, the crickets riding their shoulders would whisper, "She's not a blue-wing fairy."
"Oh, yes she is," Stump said miserably.
Thirty-nine
The Old Lady's Older Brother
She may not have had lacy wings or been small enough to hide under a teacup, but the old lady handled the boat as easily as a fairy steering a leaf. Even without a motor, sail, or paddle, we flew down the river. To change the boat's direction, she simply pointed where she wanted to go. When she wanted the boat to slow down or speed up, she twisted a silver ring on her left hand as if it was a throttle. The trolls kept an awfully close eye on that silver ring, turning jumpy whenever she touched it.
"Ah, are you really a blue-wing?" I stuttered.
"Your great-great-great-grandfather once asked me the same question," she said, amused.
"Are we talking about Huntington Bridgewater?" I asked in the name of accuracy.
"We are."
"What'd you tell him?" I didn't even bother to bring up how she could be old enough to have known him.
"That it sounded to me like he'd been talking to river trolls."
She blocked more questions by picking up her ukulele and serenading the river trolls, who plugged their ears and held their breath beneath the flowery hats. They looked like three plums about to explode.
And so the ride downriver went. Fishermen in high-powered boats skipped past us, tipping their hats to all the old ladies they thought they saw in our boat. Barges going upriver rocked us with their wake.
We pulled into a landing above Blue Wing, where a well-polished white van awaited us. The door of the van said in gold letters:
COINS, GEMS, RUNESTONES,
RIDDLES & OTHER IMPONDERABLES
WING REPAIR ON OCCASION
The same letters had been on the coin shop door where the sheriff had stopped for silver dollars.
The man standing beside the van held a wet orange sneaker. His sharply pressed bib overalls and billed cap with corn logo made him look like a retired dairy farmer, but the old lady introduced him as her older brother. It fit, I guess. They both had finely spun white hair, were tall, and wore orange tennis shoes, which the old man hadn't bothered to lace. He wasn't what you'd call friendly, more what you'd call prickly.
"You trolls get in the back of the van," he ordered, "where you can't be seen. We don't want to throw the townspeople into a dither."
"Do we have keep wearing these?" Biz complained, pointing to the hat atop his head.
"Not in my van you don't."
Sailing their hats at the old lady, the trolls piled in back as if afraid the hats would follow them. I sat up front with the old lady, the old man, and a white-faced golden retriever named Pumpkin. Hearing that Pumpkin was some kind of royalty wouldn't have surprised me. She held herself regally and didn't bother to sniff me even once.
From the back of the van came singsong voices of complaint.
"Crickets," the old man grumbled before starting the motor. "Where to?"
"You'll have to ask my associate," the old lady told him.
Having never been anyone's associate before, it took me a bit to catch on, but when I saw them both looking at me, I figured it out.
"The No Leash Dog Obedience College," I directed.
The way Pumpkin barked her approval, I guessed she'd been there before and made friends with Uncle Norm. Even the old man lightened up a bit, his mood upgrading from prickly to just crusty.
"So what'd you step into this time?" he asked his sister.
"I'm trying to help my associate here bring her grandfather back to life."
"Stone?" he asked.
"Solid. The trolls in back claim to have the feather."
"You don't know?"
"Haven't seen it yet."
"Those are river trolls," the old man pointed out, "in case you haven't noticed. You may never see it. That one in back who's acting too proud to be here—he belong to the Mossbottoms?"
"He does."
"Suppose he thinks he's a king."
"The idea's occurred to him," the old lady admitted.
"Doesn't it always," the old man muttered. "Suppose the short one's a Fishfly, trying to prove something."
"I'd say he's already proved it," the old lady said, sticking up for Stump. "They've been up to Bo's, you know."
"The smarmy one an Eel-tongue?"
"Naturally."
The old man harrumphed and nodded toward me. "This one here a Bridgewater?"
"How'd you know that?" I asked.
"You've got the look," he said. A second later he confessed, "That, and Sheriff Pope's been by three times to see if I've heard anything about you."
"Was my mom or dad with him?" I asked.
"Your dad," he said. "Didn't look like he'd been getting much sleep."
Forty
More Stone (Again)
Since we reached Duke's house in broad daylight, the old man pulled up to the garage so that we could smuggle the trolls inside. The back door was still hanging open, the Beware of Dog sign draped on the handle, right where we'd left it, and everything in the kitchen stood exactly as before: Uncle Norm and Aunt Phyllis leaned over the breakfast table; Grandpa and the doctor and the policeman were piled around them like toppled bowling pins; Duff crouched under the table, the back of Grandpa B's head touching the tip of his tail. The old golden retriever named Pumpkin whined and pawed at the floor in front of Duff, trying to wake him.
The only addition to the scene was a sparrow who'd flown through the open door and landed atop Uncle Norm's head. It'd been turned to stone with its beak wide open.
I think I'd been secretly hoping that my mom and dad—or even a sister or deputy—would be moping around Duke's place, fussing about me. They'd take one look at Biz, Stump, and Jim Dandy and forbid me from spending another second with such company. (Adventures can become bothersome things, especially when there's nobody around to tell you to quit them.) When I saw they weren't there, I exhaled hard and tried to keep my chin up. The old lady saw through the act and handed me a scrap of paper, along with a pencil stubbin.
"Leave a note," she suggested. "Tell them you'll be all right."
"I will?"
"As long as I have anything to say about it," the old lady said, patting my shoulder.
So I wrote the note, just to keep my folks from worrying, and also to remind my sisters that feeding a fly to the toad named Three wouldn't kill them.
While I was busy scribbling, the old lady said to the trolls, "Time to do your stuff, boys."
"Look under the dog," Biz squeaked.
The haughty way he said it, you just knew that poking around under a stone dog was way beneath a future king.
"How'd it get under there?" the old lady asked.
"Accident," Jim Dandy swore as if under oath. "Somebody knocked it out of my hand."
"Accident my foot," the old man said with a snort. "Most likely the three of you were fighting over it."
"All right, all right," the old lady refereed. "So where's the stone glove?"
Biz looked one way, Jim Dandy the other, so the old lady zeroed in on Stump, who hung his head and confessed, "Broke to bits. When we fell on it."
So. They'd been lying to me all along and probably hadn't intended to lift a finger to help Grandpa and the others. I stood there feeling limp as a rag doll. Buttons would have been fine for my eyes, little as I'd been seeing. When Stump half raised a hand toward me, I turned my back to him.
"We'll need a stone to pry up the dog," the old lady observed, taking command.
"I've got just the thing in my van," her brother answered, heading for the door.
"Hold on," Biz squeaked. "I won't allow anything that might hurt that feather. It belongs to my Great-Aunt Tar. It's her pride and jo
y."
"We wouldn't be talking about Tar-and-feathers Slice-toe, would we?" asked the old man, stopping short of the door.
"That's no concern of yours," Biz squeaked, fidgeting.
"Oh, I wouldn't count on that," the old man drawled. "Some years back she broke into my store and walked off with my prize feather. I've been looking for it ever since."
"Impossible," Biz indignantly squeaked. "Great-Aunt Tar wouldn't be caught dead inside a store."
"Don't I wish," the old man muttered. Then louder, "And if she passed the feather on to you, then I'm putting my claim forward right now. This feather we're after rightfully belongs to me."
"Well," Biz hedged, "she didn't exactly pass it on to us."
"Stole it, huh?"
"Borrowed."
"Jim Dandy talked us into it," Stump volunteered.
"I don't care how you came by it," the old lady interrupted, having heard enough. "You could have sent away for it from a wishing catalogue, for all I care. Right now we need to get the feather out from under the dog. So I repeat: We need a stone glove."
"My feather," the old man warned, pointing an angry finger at Biz before heading outside to his van.
A couple of minutes later he returned with a marble arm that looked as though it'd once belonged to a Greek statue. The hand at the end of the arm had lost a pinky somewhere through the ages, but otherwise it looked none the worse for wear. The old man also brought in the stiffest glove I'd ever seen. Stone, from the looks of it.
"For the feather," he said, handing the glove over to his sister with a bow.
"At least you're good for something," she commented.
Holding up the stone arm, he said, "I'll need a fulcrum."
We dug a saucepan out of a cupboard and set it upside down near Duff. Resting the marble arm's elbow atop the pan, the old man wedged its fingers under Duff's stone bottom and pushed down on the upper end of the arm, prying Duff up.
"Careful, careful," Biz squeaked.
"Can you see it?" the old lady asked.
Stump and Jim Dandy had dropped to their hands and knees, then laid their heads sideways on the floor. I joined them.
"Not yet," I reported.
"Higher," Jim Dandy ordered, motioning upward.
"Careful, careful."
"Now?" the old lady asked.
"Can't tell," I said. "There's shadows."
"Well, look," Biz squeaked, so worked up that he'd planted a hand on Stump's back and was leaning over for a squint himself.
"We need more light," Jim Dandy called out.
"There's a flashlight out in my toolbox," the old man grunted, still pushing down on the stone arm.
The old lady sent me to fetch it, and without too much digging I found an old metal one that had an orange sticker on its bottom that said ATOMIC POWER. Its beam was so bright that everyone had to look away when I turned it on. As I shined the light under Duff, we all tilted forward, blinking against the glare. I had to clear my throat repeatedly, and the old lady held her breath. Pumpkin whined as Stump gasped, "It's gone."
"Liar!" Biz squeaked. Pushing Stump aside, he crowded forward to see for himself.
"Probably never there," the old man said.
"It better have been," the old lady warned.
"My aunt's going to kill me," Biz squeaked, crowding so close that his snout almost touched Duff. As Biz inched closer, his tail whipped back and forth so hard that Pumpkin snapped at it.
Scared, Stump reared away from Pumpkin's fangs, upsetting Biz's balance as he did.
"Don't!" Biz shouted.
Biz fell sideways, colliding with Jim Dandy, who crashed into the old man, who lost his grip on the marble arm, which slipped off the saucepot, causing Duff to topple toward Biz.
"Look out!"
That must have been me shouting. I don't know who else it could have been. Everybody else was busy shouting a different warning.
"Stop!"
"No!"
"Fools!"
"Woof!"
Biz, Jim Dandy, and Duff smacked into one another.
Forty-One
The Missing Feather
Just like that, Biz and Jim Dandy were stone. The stone didn't start where Biz's snout collided with Duff's ribs, or Jim Dandy's paw landed on Duff's shoulder, and spread from there. It didn't go in stages. It happened all at once, like a flash, except that there wasn't any light or sound or even the slightest shimmer. It just was. Neither troll even had time to cry out. They'd become the same crumbly yellowish sandstone as all the others.
Their crickets got it too. They clung to Jim Dandy's hair and Biz's shoulder, more stone than bug and unable to lie about a single thing.
One thing they could have lied about was the whereabouts of the stone feather. Stump was right about that much; it wasn't hidden under Duff. We could see that much for sure now that Duff had toppled forward. There was a stone beneath Duff, but not one that looked anything like a feather. It was square shaped, with some writing scratched on it. Using the marble arm's fingers, the old man bumped it away from Duff, where the old lady could reach it with the stone glove. We crowded around her to read:
IOU
B. DEEPTHINK
Little as we had to say, you might have thought we'd all been turned to stone ourselves. But finally we found our voices.
"How'd that get there?" the old man crossly said.
"No trouble for Bodacious to put it there," the old lady answered. "She's mostly stone anyway."
"But how'd she know the feather was here?" Stump asked, rubbing his eyes as if it might change what he saw.
I knew the answer to that, though I certainly wished I didn't.
"Duke," I said grimly. "But what's she want with it?"
"To set a trap," the old lady supposed.
"For who?" Stump asked.
"Whoever comes after the feather."
"Why in the world would she want us?" Stump said.
"For mining," the old man guessed with admiration. "Isn't she slick?"
"Oh, now wait a minute," Stump objected, sounding just sick about it. "That's not right. We already said no to being miners."
"Bodacious Deepthink doesn't take no for an answer," the old man said. "The question is, what are you going to do about it?"
"The only thing we can," the old lady answered. "Go get the feather."
Forty-two
Reliable St. John
We headed back to Trolls & Things to rest until nightfall, when we would tackle Bo. The old man and Pumpkin dropped us off at the rowboat, which, minus Jim Dandy and Biz, wasn't anywhere near as crowded. The extra room didn't make Stump any happier, though. He missed his partners, he still had to hide out under a flowery hat, and his conscience flared up. Most of the cruise back he badmouthed himself for not having told me where their stone feather had been.
"I was afraid you'd get yourself turned to stone," he explained.
"Forget it," I repeated for the umpteenth time.
"Do you really mean it?"
"Mostly."
That quieted Stump for a hundred yards or so, when he started peppering his cricket with questions. The cricket, whose name was Reliable St. John, burrowed into Stump's leafy hair, refusing to answer.
"What kind of lucky cricket are you?" Stump demanded to know. "My partners are stone."
"A very sensible one," the old lady answered for the lucky cricket. "One who's not too eager to see Bodacious Deepthink again."
"Why not?" Stump said.
"Because she's so nice," Reliable St. John piped up.
That lie silenced Stump for fifty yards, after which he asked in a small, small voice, "Do you really know where my father is?"
"Of course not," Reliable said. "None of the other fathers either."
Satisfied that at least Reliable St. John could lead him to his father, Stump shut up.
By noon we were entering the old lady's store through a back door that led down a hallway crowded with crates and boxes stamped with
labels like PRODUCT OF TIBET or KEEP FROZEN 1000 TEARS or MIDNIGHT GLASSWARE. Stepping through another door, we found ourselves in a small kitchen, where the old lady served me peaches and cream, twice, and gave Stump the okay to dip into the tub holding willow cats. Reliable St. John was given a small leaf of lettuce to dine on.
Then naps. After promising to keep his mouth shut, Stump was allowed to conk out in a bathtub filled with minnows. Reliable St. John was tucked away in a bamboo cage that was hung from a rafter. In case the cricket had any tricks in mind, the old lady asked her raccoon friend, Princess Trudy, to stand guard below the cage. My guest room was a dry bathtub filled with blankets and heart-shaped pillows.
"I don't even known your name," I said, wanting to say something grateful as the old lady tucked me in.
"I don't either," she said with a sad smile. "It's gone."
"Gone?" I sat up. "Gone where?"
The old lady smoothed my hair with a soft, comforting touch of her hand. "It seems like just yesterday that your grandfather asked me that question too."
"So what'd you tell him?"
"That I didn't think he could be trusted to keep a secret."
"He hasn't been known to keep many," I agreed, trying with all my might not to worry about him or Aunt Phyllis, Uncle Norm, Duff, and even—a little—Jim Dandy and Biz.
Tapping a finger on my chest to show how serious this was, she said, "You must promise never to tell anyone."
"I'll do my best."
"From what I've seen," she said, lifting her hand away, "I couldn't ask for more."
A look far away as the moon settled over her eyes then. Whatever she was remembering widened her smile but deepened her sadness.
"My name's gone into a spell," she said at last. "A spell that lets magic work along this stretch of river. If it wasn't for the spell, the magic folk around here would have all been drowned a century ago by these modern times."
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