The Case of the Toxic Mutants Read online

  For my grandmother, who paid for my dental work, a fact that I did not appreciate nearly enough at the time.

  DIAL BOOKS

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  Copyright © 2013 by Ursula Vernon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vernon, Ursula.

  The case of the toxic mutants / by Ursula Vernon.

  p. cm. — (Dragonbreath ; 9)

  Summary: Danny Dragonbreath and his friends try to help the senior reptiles of Sunny Acres find a lost item.

  ISBN 978-1-101-60011-5

  [1. Lost and found possessions—Fiction. 2. Stealing—Fiction. 3. Dragons—Fiction. 4. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.V5985Cas 2013

  [Fic]—dc23

  2012026079

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright

  The Dreaded Visit

  Slime Molds and Turlingswards

  A Diabolical Denture Thief

  Animal Trackth

  The Vanishing Mister Honkers

  A Tragic Loss

  The Mutants Are Coming!

  Operation Denture Retainer

  Into The Midden . . .

  Slimy, Smelly Sludge

  The Great Goose

  A Hard Bargain

  Sweet Rewards

  “What?” Danny Dragonbreath shook off the hazy dreams of lazy summer days, and managed to focus on his mother, who was blocking the sun. “I just visited Great-Granddad. He’s fine. He hasn’t seen a ninja in months. Suki’s helping him grow tomatoes.”

  “Not your great-grandfather,” said his mom. “Your grandfather. On your father’s side. At the home.”

  This was not the ideal activity for a summer afternoon.

  Actually, Danny would have had a hard time coming up with a less thrilling activity for a summer afternoon. Going to the dentist, maybe. Shopping for school stuff.

  Come to think of it, shopping for school stuff was kind of fun, as long as you avoided buying one of the folders with something humiliating on it. You could pick out pencils based on their properties as missile weapons. Certainly it was a lot more fun than visiting his paternal grandfather.

  “He doesn’t like me!” Danny said. “He calls me a whippersnapper and tells me that when he was my age, he was working two jobs and eating knights. I don’t want to eat knights! Dragons don’t even eat knights anymore! They’re an endangered species or something!”

  “Oh, I’m sure he likes you fine,” said Danny’s mother, in a tone that indicated that A) Danny was quite right and B) it didn’t actually matter that he was right. “He’s just old and set in his ways.”

  “I can be young and set in my ways,” offered Danny. “Here, I’ll lie in this hammock and when you try to get me to move, I’ll complain.”

  Danny sighed and rolled out of the hammock, which involved a queasy moment when he nearly ended up in the dirt. “Can I go tomorrow?”

  “Oh, no,” said his mother. “He’s bored or lonely or . . . well, bored. He’s called today twice already, claiming that people at the home are stealing his false teeth. Go keep him entertained for an hour or two.”

  “But Mooommm. . . .” Danny dragged his feet. “He doesn’t want me to come over. The last time I visited him, he told me that he had some very important business to attend to and I should leave. And then he went to sleep. I don’t think he likes kids!”

  “Don’t worry,” said his mother grimly, “he doesn’t like grown-ups either. Remember the Thanksgiving we tried to have him over, and he moved without a forwarding address?”

  “But—”

  “But—”

  “You two would have to share a room.”

  “Gotta go, Mom, bye!” Danny tore out of the yard.

  “Thought that’d work,” muttered Danny’s mother under her breath.

  Danny was halfway to the bus stop when he decided to make a detour and pick up his best friend, Wendell the iguana. He had no idea how you entertained an elderly and cantankerous dragon, but Wendell might. Wendell was good with adults. They thought he was intelligent and serious and polite. (This was all true, but Danny tried not to hold it against him.) If anybody would know how to keep his grandfather happy, it would be Wendell.

  “Thure,” said Wendell, closing the front door behind him. “Let’th go.”

  Danny paused. “You feeling okay?”

  “Oooh! Did they give you metal fangs and stuff?”

  “No, it just feels like my teeth are all different lengths,” said the iguana, enunciating very clearly. “And if I’m not careful, I lisp a little.” He grimaced. “The dentist says I’ll be used to it in a couple of days, but I have to wear it for a whole year.”

  “I’m going to loothe it,” said Wendell morosely. “I know I am. If I don’t loothe it, Big Eddy will thteal it. How can I keep track of thomething for a whole year?”

  “You’ll do better than I would,” said Danny. “I’d have lost it before I was out of the dentist’s office.”

  They reached the bus stop. Wendell checked the schedule, did some math, and announced that the bus would arrive in fourteen minutes. Danny saw no reason to question this.

  “We’ve got time to go get Chrithtiana,” Wendell added. “If you want.”

  Normally Danny would have thought twice about spending an afternoon with Christiana, Nerd Queen Extraordinaire. She was a friend, sure, but not a very comfortable one, and she still didn’t believe he was a real dragon. But anybody he could bring along to keep his grandfather entertained was fine by him.

  Wendell gave him a suspicious look. “Where are we going that you’re acthually happy to have Chrithtiana along?”

  “Sunny Acres Reptile Village,” said Danny. “My grandfather thinks people have been stealing his false teeth.”

  “How old ith your grandfather?” asked Wendell.

  “I dunno. Eleventy hundred years or something. He’s the size of a house.”

  Wendell accepted this without comment. A great many reptiles kept growing more or less forever, and retirement homes tended to have very large doorways as a result.

  “Ith he a dragon?”

  “Yeah. Not like Great-Granddad Dragonbreath, though.”

  Christiana answered her door on the first knock. “Are we going somewhere?”

  “Sunny Acres Reptile Village,” said Danny.

  “That’ll work.”

  “What’th the exthperiment?” asked Wendell.

  “I’m teaching a slime mold to run a maze.” She considered. “Well . . . ooze a maze.”

  “Slime molds are real?” asked Danny. “I thought they were just—y’know, monsters in video games.”

  “Yeah, they’re f
ungus things that grow in mulch.”

  “What kind are you uthing?” asked Wendell.

  “Fuligo septica. Dog vomit slime mold.”

  “They’re capable of surprisingly complex behaviors,” Christiana said. “I’m trying to teach one to navigate a maze.”

  “Yeah, good luck with that,” said Danny, remembering the problem at hand. “You know anything about entertaining old people?”

  “He’s mostly interested in sleeping,” said Danny. “And writing letters to the editor.”

  Christiana clicked her tongue at him disapprovingly. “Have some respect. We’ll all be old someday too, you know.” She considered. “Well, Wendell and I will. You’ll probably die in some kind of freak bottle rocket accident before you’re twenty.”

  “Anyway,” said Christiana, once the bus had arrived and they had gotten settled on it, “the point is that just ’cos somebody’s old doesn’t mean they’re automatically grumpy and boring. Have an open mind!”

  Danny rolled his eyes. “I didn’t say that he’s grumpy and boring because he’s old. There are some old people I like very much. My great-grandfather Dragonbreath is totally the coolest! My grandfather Turlingsward, however, is grumpy and boring because he’s grumpy and boring.”

  There was a brief silence while Christiana and Wendell absorbed the important bits of this speech.

  “Wow,” said Wendell. “No wonder your family went with ‘Dragonbreath.’ Imagine being Danny Turlingthward.”

  “He still hasn’t forgiven my dad for changing his name,” said Danny. “He usually forgets Christmas, but when he remembers, he gives Dad monogrammed socks that say Turlingsward.”

  “Bet those are hard to re-gift,” said Christiana.

  “Anyway,” said Danny, who felt they were getting badly off the topic, “the point is that Granddad is, like—like—”

  “You could have told us this before we got on the bus,” said Christiana, looking at her transfer sadly.

  “Yeah, well.” Danny folded his arms. “Mom said that he thinks somebody’s been stealing his false teeth. So we probably just have to find them, listen to him talk about the young people today, and then get off his lawn.”

  “That doethn’t thound tho bad,” said Wendell.

  Danny hoped that the iguana was right.

  Sunny Acres Reptile Village was big. Like, really big.

  Since so many elderly reptiles were extremely large—a boa constrictor grandmother could be fourteen feet long, and required both space to sun herself and an apartment large enough to hold her collection of commemorative spoons—Sunny Acres consisted of dozens of individual cottages with big yards. Each yard had an enormous flat rock in the sunshine. Between the cottages were hedges of tall grass and trees. A creek ran through the middle of the property, and there were birds singing in the trees.

  “Thith playthe ith bigger than the mall!” said Wendell, looking around. “Where’th your granddad live?”

  “Over in the back, near the creek,” said Danny. He waved to the elderly boa constrictor on the nearest rock. “Hi, Mrs. Scalinghurst! Remember me?”

  Mrs. Scalinghurst waved her tail at him. “Why, if it isn’t little Danny! How you’ve grown since last time! My, it took us ages to clean up all the wreckage after that . . .” She flicked her tongue thoughtfully. “I figured we’d see you out here, given all the commotion.”

  “Not that anyone believes that fire-breathing nonsense,” said Mrs. Scalinghurst cheerfully. “I suspect your grandfather’s getting a trifle . . . ssss . . . fuzzy in his old age. But the idea of setting that nice woman’s home on fire! Dear me! If he doesn’t stop, they’ll kick him out of Sunny Acres, and then where will he be?”

  “Living in my room,” said Danny glumly.

  “Fire-breathing . . .” scoffed Christiana. “Seriously?”

  Danny debated whether to argue that his grandfather wasn’t senile, he was just a real dragon, and real dragons breathed fire . . . or just to smile and nod and go make sure that “Real Dragon Breathes Fire on Neighbor” did not become a story on the nightly news.

  “Um . . .”

  “Dithcrethon ith the better part of valor,” said Wendell under his breath. “Let’th go.”

  “Huh?”

  “Dithcrethon . . . Dith . . . Oh, never mind.” The iguana rolled his eyes. “Let’th jutht go deal with your grandfather.”

  Most of the cottages looked alike, so Danny might have had a hard time figuring out which cottage he was looking for. Fortunately—if embarrassingly—they heard Grandfather Turlingsward long before they saw him.

  They peered around the end of the hedge. Danny almost didn’t want to look.

  Standing on top of his rock, wearing spectacles and waving a scaly fist in the air, Grandfather Turlingsward was yelling across the path at . . . nobody.

  A closed door and an abandoned drink indicated that someone—possibly the rumored Miss Flicktongue—had left the front yard a few minutes earlier. The fact that she wasn’t there, however, didn’t slow Grandfather Turlingsward down. If anything, it made him madder.

  “Sure, go ahead and hide! When I burn your house down, where are you going to hide then?”

  The ancient dragon focused his eyes on Danny. “Oh. It’s you.” He didn’t sound terribly excited. “Harold’s boy. Harold Turlingsward’s boy. Have you gotten a job yet?”

  “I’m still in grade school,” said Danny patiently. “We don’t have jobs. Granddad, you can’t stand around threatening to burn people’s houses down.”

  “Hmmph!” Grandfather Turlingsward looked annoyed, but he did lie down on his rock and fold his arms. “I’ll do whatever I have to do, if she doesn’t give my dentures back!”

  “Why would anybody take your denthureth?” asked Wendell.

  The old dragon rolled his head to one side and peered at Wendell. “Who’s this?”

  “This is my buddy Wendell. And this is Christiana.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” said Wendell, speaking very carefully so as not to lisp.

  “Hi,” said Christiana.

  “Is this the crew that’s supposed to get my dentures back?” asked Grandfather Turlingsward. “You’ll need more than that. That old biddy Flicktongue is wily.”

  Danny and his friends exchanged glances. Apparently his grandfather wasn’t interested in the niceties. That was fine with Danny.

  “Why would she take your dentures?” Wendell repeated, a little more loudly.

  “How should I know?” asked Grandfather Turlingsward. “You expect me to know what goes on in the diabolical mind of a denture thief?” He waved a hand. “Just get them back! Do you know what it’s like not to have dentures? I’ve been eating oatmeal for three days! Do you know what that does to my bowels?”

  You could say a lot of things about Christiana Vanderpool. Danny had said a lot of those things, over the years. She was nerdy and brainy and objected to really weird things. She still didn’t believe Danny was a real dragon, and after he and Wendell had even taken her into the Fairy Realm, she had convinced herself that she’d hallucinated the whole thing.

  But when it came to tackling a problem logically . . . well, you really couldn’t do better than Christiana.

  “When did you first notice the dentures missing?” she asked.

  Grandfather Turlingsward looked pleased. “Finally, somebody’s taking this seriously! Well, young lady, they vanished three nights ago. I’d put them in the bucket by the nightstand to soak, like I do every night, and when I woke up, they were gone!”

  “I see.” Christiana clasped her hands behind her back. “If you did it every night, then a thief would know exactly where to look for the dentures, wouldn’t they?”

  “Yes!” said Grandfather Turlingsward. “You see? Miss Flicktongue would have known she could find my dentures th
ere!” He glared across the street at the absent Miss Flicktongue.

  “We haven’t ruled out the possibility of other thieves yet,” said Christiana firmly. “Was your door locked?”

  “Is there anything else you can tell us?” asked Christiana. “Anything suspicious?”

  Grandfather Turlingsward thought about it. “The window was open,” he said finally. “I mean, it’s summer, so it’s usually a little open, but it was pushed all the way open. I don’t usually do that.”

  “So the thief may have gone through the window!” said Christiana triumphantly.

  Danny listened to the crested lizard interrogate his grandfather. Something was bothering him. There was something that the old dragon hadn’t mentioned . . .

  “Granddad?”

  “Eh?”

  “What about your hoard? If somebody broke into the house to steal stuff, wouldn’t they have taken something from your hoard?”

  The old dragon narrowed his eyes and made a ferocious hrrrumph! sound. It sounded like a car backfiring on a distant street. “Never you mind about my hoard, boy. My hoard’s safe and sound. I keep that door locked up tight.”

  Danny was a little disappointed. He’d been hoping for a look at it. A dragon as old as Grandfather Turlingsward surely must have accumulated an enormous hoard over the years. Danny was pretty sure he kept it in the back bedroom. The last time he’d come over, the door had been open, and he’d caught a glimpse of coins and glittering jewels before his Grandfather had shut the door and grumbled about looky-loos. (Whatever that meant.)

  For Danny, who had so far managed to accumulate five rolls of quarters, fifteen arcade tokens, and a genuine cubic zirconia in his hoard, this was very inspiring.