“It’s red with a big golden lion in the center,” Daphne said. “The lion has wings and is guarding a castle on a hill. There’re all these vines on the border and little saints in the corners, too.”
Scarecrow rubbed his burlap chin, thought for a moment, and then his eyes lit up. “I’ve seen that flag!” He raced off, leaving the children behind. They chased the Scarecrow through the stacks and caught up with him in the back of the library. He was already climbing up a big bookcase, reaching for a book on the very top. The bookcase was not mounted to the wall and was teetering back and forth under the Scarecrow’s weight.
“Does anyone else see where this is going?” Sabrina sighed. She remembered seeing the movie The Wizard of Oz when she was a child. The Scarecrow was such a klutz, Sabrina would giggle whenever he was on-screen. The real flesh-and-hay Scarecrow wasn’t much different, but the pratfalls weren’t as endearing. Perhaps she was getting older and had less patience for such silliness, or maybe, she suspected, the Scarecrow was just annoying. “I think I know why Dorothy wanted to go back to Kansas,” Sabrina muttered to herself.
Despite the Scarecrow’s weight, the shelf did not topple over, but that didn’t mean Sabrina and Daphne were safe. The Scarecrow kept tossing down the books he didn’t need. The tumbling volumes were encyclopedias, and the children darted around like they were trapped in a whack-a-mole game.
“Here it is,” the Scarecrow cried, just before he fell off the shelf and landed in a heap on the floor. Without missing a beat, the librarian sprang to his feet and opened the book. Inside were pictures of flags from all over the world. He flipped through the pages until he found a flag that looked just like the one the girls had seen hanging from the Hotel Cipriani’s banister. “Is that it?”
Daphne and Sabrina nodded.
“That’s the flag of a city called Venice,” the Scarecrow said, quite proud of his discovery. “It’s a lovely place built on one hundred seventeen islands connected by one hundred fifty canals. In Venice, you don’t hail a cab, you hail a boat called a gondola, because many of the roads are actually waterways. The population is roughly two hundred and fifty thousand people. The average annual rainfall is thirty-four inches. The major industry is tourism, and the region’s biggest exports are textiles, clothing, glass, paper, motor vehicles, chemicals, minerals, and nonferrous metals.”
Sabrina prepared for Daphne to ask for the definition of nonferrous; she herself had no idea what it meant. But much to Sabrina’s surprise, the little girl took a pocket dictionary from her purse and looked up the word on her own.
“Nonferrous is a metal containing little or no iron,” she announced.
Sabrina grabbed the dictionary. “What’s this?”
“What does it look like?” Daphne said, rolling her eyes.
Sabrina could feel her face tighten up. How dare Daphne roll her eyes at her!
“Now, how about that hotel?” the Scarecrow asked, interrupting the argument.
“It’s called Hotel Cipriani,” Daphne said, since Sabrina was still too angry to talk.
“Sounds like that language they speak over there,” Scarecrow said. “What’s it called? You know, the language they speak in Italy?”
“Uh . . . Italian?” Daphne asked.
“Bingo!” Scarecrow raced back through the library to where travel books for places all around the world were kept. Soon the girls were caught in another hailstorm of books. Copies of Fodor’s Guide to Oz, Frommer’s Lilliput, Lonely Planet’s Narnia, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Neverland flew at them. After some very close calls, Scarecrow snatched a book off a shelf and held it triumphantly above his head. “Here it is!” In his excitement, he lost his balance and nearly fell off the bookcase. He managed to hold on with one hand, but he struggled to regain his footing.
“Oh, yeah, that’s a secondhand brain, for sure,” Puck said, flying down to the girls’ level. “Oz was such a prankster.”
“Have you forgotten that Oz tried to kill us?” Sabrina said.
“You can be a homicidal madman and hilarious at the same time, you know,” Puck said—right before the bookcase tipped over and came crashing down, burying him in a mountain of books.
“Boy, am I accident prone today,” the librarian said.
“The books! They’re touching me,” Puck groaned. “They’re all over me!”
“We’ll get this off you in no time,” the Scarecrow said. Working together, he and the girls lifted the heavy shelf off Puck. When he got to his feet, Sabrina noticed he had blotchy red marks on his arms and legs, and his face had swollen to the size of a pumpkin.