Free Valley of the Scarecrow by Gord Rollo Page B

drives me insane, but I love the crazy bugger. I don’t know what I’d do if I ever lost him.”
    The smile fell off Kelly’s face, thinking of her own relationship problems. She tried to hide it but Lizzy saw her face and regretted opening up her big mouth. “Sorry, Kel. You know what I mean. Besides, you and Dan will be walking down that aisle right behind us. I know you will.”
    “Who knows? I certainly used to hope so. Now, I’m not so sure. We’ll see, I guess. Let’s get you married off first though, okay? And you damn well better have me as your maid of honor or I’ll kick your ass. Got it?”
    “Deal. Now let’s go shopping. I wanna pick up something sexy for the trip.”
    “Lingerie? For a camping trip? You crazy?”
    “Hey, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. Let’s go.”
    Kelly laughed, but in the back of her mind she thought maybe she might actually pick something out as well; just in case.
    When Kelly showed up at Pat’s house Monday morning at 11:00 A.M. as agreed, the rest of the gang was already there, down in the basement poring over old maps and mildew-stained journals. Funny, because Kelly had made a deliberate point of showing up a bit early, eager to get a jump start on this important meeting. Obviously the rest of the guys were just as eager as she was to see if they could find the location of the abandoned village. If they ran into a dead end here, their dreams of finding Joshua Miller’s treasure might be over before they even started. That would definitely suck but there was no doubt it was a realistic possibility.
    “Hi, guys,” Kelly said when she walked into the room. “Any luck?”
    “Hey, look who finally crawled out of bed,” Dan said, winking at Kelly to show he was only kidding.
    “About time you showed up.” Rich carried on the joke. “We thought you’d decided to cut us all out and had decided to keep the gold for yourself.”
    “Ha ha…you two are so funny.”
    “We haven’t found anything,” Lizzy said, disappointment clearly written on her pretty face. “There’s like…a billion maps left to look at.”
    “We haven’t found anything yet,” Pat corrected her, walking over to an old yellow chart draped over the nearby coffee table. “We just got started. Glad you’re here though, Kelly. From what you told us, we’re looking for a map from the 1920s or ’30s at the latest, right. I’ve got one here, copyright 1929, but there’s no mention of Miller’s Grove on it.”
    “Then keep looking,” Dan said. “Far as I’m concerned, the harder it is to find that village, the better our chancesthe treasure might actually still be there. Know what I mean? If we have to look at every damn map here, that’s what we do.”
    That was no easy task. Pat’s father had an entire rec room filled with boxes and trunks, all of them filled to overflowing with bits and pieces of Iowa’s geographic history—past and present—and sorting through it all wasn’t as easy of a job as any of them had originally thought. It was tough slugging, even for a group of people like they had. And time consuming as well; in fact, they were still searching through the reams of paper hours later when Pat’s father came home from school.
    Jason Brannon was a tall, thin man with a full head of gray hair and a matching goatee. He’d been teaching high school geography for twenty-one years now at the same school and he was looking forward to retiring in another few years. Today, his final class had been over by 2:00 P.M. and the last thing he expected to return home to was a group of kids destroying his life’s work. He’d been collecting these maps and charts since he was a little boy and had taken an interest in geography as a Boy Scout. Seeing everything scattered all over the tables and floor didn’t exactly make him happy. In fact, everyone could tell he was pissed.
    “What in the hell is going on here?” Mr. Brannon yelled when he came down the stairs. “This