Yellow Brick War by Danielle Paige Page B

missing.
    â€œSo where was your friend, Tornado Girl’s mom, when the tornado hit?”
    â€œShe was with me—we were at a tornado party,” Tawny said dramatically, and then burst into guilty tears.
    â€œTornado party,” Nancy repeated, her southern drawl wrapping around the words, making it sound even more awful.
    At the word party , I clicked on the X to close the screen. I had seen enough. I turned to my real mission.
    For hours, I looked through websites about prairie history, old farmers’ journals, and black-and-white pictures of the people who had come to Kansas back in Dorothy’s era to make a better life for themselves. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for; I just knew I’d know it when I saw it. And after reading about a million articles on devastating blizzards, crop failures, droughts, disease, and poverty, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Dorothy. Whatever she’d turned into in Oz, her life in Kansas had been harder than anything I could imagine.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
might have portrayed her life with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em as idyllic, but it didn’t take much reading for me to realize that life on a Kansas farm as a dirt-poor orphan probably hadn’t been a walk in the park.
    And then I found it—on a historical website dedicated to printing techniques in old newspapers. I sat up straight on my mom’s couch with a gasp. “Area reporter interviews Kansas tornado survivor.” It was a scan of a yellowing, torn newspaper article from the
Daily Kansan,
dated 1897. The paper was so faded I could barely make out the words, and most of the article was missing. But I saw enough to know what I was looking at. “Miss D. Gale, of Flat Hill, Kansas, population twenty-five, describes her experiences in the tornado as ‘truly wondrous,’ but the most wonderful aspect of her story is that she survived the devastating tornado that destroyed her home. Miss Gale reports extraordinary visions experienced during the storm, including wonderful creatures andan enchanted ci—” The page was torn off there, so neatly that it almost looked as though someone had done it on purpose. And then I saw the author’s byline: Mr. L. F. Baum.
    â€œHoly
shit
,” I said out loud into my mom’s empty apartment. Dorothy
had
been real. She
had
lived here in the very town where I’d grown up. And L. Frank Baum had
interviewed
her. How did no one
know
about this? I didn’t know much about the history of Baum’s books, but I was pretty sure that I would have heard about it if people realized Dorothy was based on a real person. She’d told him the whole thing, everything that happened to her, and he’d taken her entire story and turned it into a book. She’d come back to Kansas, just like I had, dumped back into her ordinary, crappy life. No one could possibly have believed her—not even Baum himself.
    But if Baum had put Dorothy’s shoes in
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, that meant she’d told him about them. And the rest of the article might be a clue to where they were now. Dorothy might not have looked for the shoes the first time she returned to Kansas, but she hadn’t hesitated to take up the offer of a second trip to Oz. If she hadn’t looked for them then, they had to still be here. And if I could find the rest of the paper, I’d be that much closer to figuring out where they were.
    Extraordinary visions, all right. How had no one else found what I’d just stumbled across? How was it possible that no one else had realized Dorothy was real? There was something else going on here. Something big. I had to find the rest of that article. But how?
    I heard a key turning in the lock, and I scrambled to delete my search history. I’d barely managed to return the computer to where I’d found it—under a pile of papers and magazines on the table by the couch—when my mom walked in.