Free The Dragon Tree by Jane Langton

knew what to do. At once she jumped up and went to the window. Perhaps she could slip a piece of paper through a crack. Reaching her fingers through the chicken wire, she tried to rattle the lower sash, but it was too closely jammed in its frame.
    But there must be a hole. There had to be a hole. Emerald moved the chair to the window, climbed up, and looked through the broken slat. The morning was bright. She could see green leaves, a bird in a nest, a flash of butterfly wings. Below the tree she could just make out a wisp of the sandy hair of the professor next door.
    For a moment she stood quietly looking down at Professor Hall. Then she poked a finger through the barrier of chicken wire and ran it along the crack between the upper and lower sash. This time she found a flaw. The two halves of the window were not a close fit. Perhaps a scrap of paper could be pushed between them.
    Emerald had no scrap of paper. But there werepeeling fragments of wallpaper around the window. She had no pen or pencil, but there was another kind of ink. Bravely she set to work.
    Finished, her message was sloppy, but bright and clear. She flapped the scrap of wallpaper to dry the wet red word. Then she climbed on the chair and looked down.
    Good. The professor was still there. Quickly Emerald folded the note and thrust it through the chicken wire. Then she worked it between the two parts of the window. To her delight it dropped between them, slipped neatly through the gap in the shutter, and fluttered down and out of sight.
    But from the window of her Nature Center on the first floor, Margery Moon was also looking out, staring from behind her purple drapes at the man in the lawn chair under the tree, the stubborn neighbor who had caused them so much trouble. She watched him yawn and stretch. The fool had been guarding that dreadful tree all night.
    His yawn was catching. Mrs. Moon yawned too, and began to turn away. But then out of the cornerof her eye she caught a glimpse of something drifting past the window, a scrap of paper.
    At once she darted out-of-doors and peeked around the corner of the house. Professor Hall was leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed. On tiptoe she made her way to the bushes and groped among the twigs until her fingers closed on the scrap of wallpaper, the note that had been dropped by the crafty girl in the attic.
    There was only a single word on the note—
    HELP
    —but it had been written in blood.

32
THE SECOND NOTE
    A FTER THAT M RS . M OON kept her eyes peeled. Often she bustled around under Emerald’s attic window with a trowel in her hand, pretending to be gardening. What if the girl were to write another note? What if it fell into the wrong hands?
    Then there really
was
another note, but this time Mrs. Moon missed it. When Emerald dropped her second scrap of wallpaper through the broken slat of shutter, it was plucked out of the air by a robin, carried away to her nest high in the tree, and tucked among her greenish blue eggs. Before longthree infant birds were sitting on Emerald’s desperate call for help. Unfortunately none of them could read.

    “But, Mortimer, we can’t keep her locked
up forever. You’ll have to deal with it somehow.”

“I intend to. Trust me.”

“You mean—like before?”

“Exactly.”

33
THE WILD WIND
    T HE STORM CAME without warning in the middle of the night. A wild wind began to blow, pelting the rain sideways, sucking the curtains in Eddy’s bedroom flat against the screen. When his alarm clock buzzed he got out of bed sleepily and banged down the sash.
    From the rest of the house there were shouts of “Quick, quick,” and sharp crashes as Uncle Fred and Aunt Alex ran from room to room, slamming down windows on the west side of the house.
    Then Georgie shouted, “It’s coming in here too,” because the wind was blowing from the north. Eddyran across the hall and helped her close her windows, and then he plunged downstairs to slam the window in the front