The Mapmaker and the Ghost Read online

  Goldenrod shook her head. “No. Not at all.”

  “That’s good. It’s important to know where you are.”

  Goldenrod nodded. She was so excited, she didn’t quite know where to start. Should she ask the old lady why her house wasn’t on a street? Should she just sit and draw everything as quickly as she could?

  Before she had enough time to come to a decision, the old lady’s sharp eyes had noticed the sketchbook that was tucked beneath Goldenrod’s arm.

  “Are you planning on drawing something?” she asked.

  “Well…,” Goldenrod began and then paused. She still hadn’t told anyone about the map, not even in her phone call the night before to Charla, because she wanted the final product to be a big surprise. She had considered telling Birch, but then she was sure he would want to help—and even though having an assistant to aid with the measurements would be a huge time-saver, babysitting a little brother was definitely the opposite of an adventure; Meriwether Lewis certainly hadn’t brought his along.

  But there was something about the old woman, some funny way in which she stood stooped there, waiting with bated breath to see what Goldenrod would say, that made Goldenrod want to trust her. “I’m making a map, actually.”

  “A map?” the woman asked.

  “Yup. It’s going to be the most accurate map of Pilmilton in the world. Every house. Every tree. Every shrub. Everything.”

  “Wonderful!” the woman exclaimed. “What a splendid idea.”

  “Thanks.” Goldenrod smiled.

  “What are you going to do first?”

  “Well … I think I’ll get a rough sketch of your house and this area.”

  “And what will you do after that?”

  “Take a few measurements. Make sure everything is drawn to scale,” Goldenrod said.

  “And after?”

  “Then I’ll have to go into the woods. That’ll be the hardest part, I think, what with all the trees …”

  “I was hoping you’d say that! Are you really going into the woods?” the woman asked.

  Goldenrod nodded.

  “Is there any way you could do me a tiny favor?”

  “What is it?” Goldenrod held her sketchbook limply at her side, all but forgotten at this point.

  “Well, at the very center of the woods, there is a certain bush, a rosebush. And it blooms very, very rarely: for three days only, once every fifty years. It blooms with the most magnificent rose you’ve ever seen. It’s a bright, bright shade of blue and smells just like a summer night.”

  “What does a summer night smell like?”

  “I can’t explain it, but if you smell this rose, you’ll know immediately what I mean. Anyway, I’m sure this bush is pretty rare. I’ve seen a lot of roses, and I’ve never seen anything like it.” The old lady glanced knowingly at Goldenrod and her own admittedly spectacular rose garden before continuing. “I have calculated that this bush is set to bloom Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of next week. And then that will be the last time it will bloom for half a century. I had planned to go in myself, you see, but, well …” The woman sighed deeply.

  “What?” Goldenrod asked a little breathlessly.

  “Well. You may have noticed, I’m pretty old.”

  Goldenrod didn’t know what to say. Would it be rude to agree with her or rude not to? In the end, she decided to side with the truth and nodded. The old woman laughed, flashing her hideous teeth.

  “With my arthritis, I think it’ll take me about a week just to make it to the center of the woods. And if I’m gone for a week, believe me, my son will have the whole town out looking for me. Then I’ll be the crazy old lady on the news who dodged a search party and claimed I was only trying to pluck a rose.”

  Goldenrod hesitated for a moment. “Why don’t you just take a cell phone in there with you?”

  “Smart girl! Unfortunately, can’t get any reception in the woods. See how dense those trees are?” She pointed to them.

  Uh-oh, Goldenrod thought. No reception? Well, she couldn’t see any reason why her mother would have to know about that.

  “Can’t you just tell your son where you’re going and then he won’t worry?”

  The old woman laughed again. “You just wait until your seventy-one-year-old mother tells you she’s planning to hike all alone into the woods and see what you say!”

  Seventy-one? Goldenrod would have guessed that she was more like a hundred. But that was probably the fairy tales talking again.

  “I haven’t dared mention this whole rose idea to anyone,” the old lady continued. “In fact, you’re the only person I’ve ever told about it.”

  “Really? Why would you tell me?” Goldenrod blinked in surprise.

  “Same reason I’m the only one you ever told about your map.”

  “But how did you—”

  “You just wait until you’re seventy-one, honey. You’d be surprised the amount of things you know. Anyway, since you’re already on your way into the woods, if you run across that bush next week, could you cut three roses for me? They will keep for a whole week if you’re able to store them in an airtight container as soon as you clip them,” the old lady continued, her eyes shining almost as if she could see Goldenrod’s specimen jar through her backpack.

  “Sure,” Goldenrod said without any hesitation. Flora that possibly no one had ever heard of before? This was clearly a great stroke of luck!

  “Wonderful! Thank you so much. And just for even saying you’ll try, how about I help you out with some of those measurements? It seems like you could save time if you had an assistant, eh?”

  Goldenrod had no idea how the old woman knew what she had been thinking, but she was glad for the help. So she took out her measuring tape, gave one end to the old lady, and went about the business of measuring all around her house. For a brief, shining moment she wondered if maybe this old lady would turn into her replacement Clark. But then she came to her senses and remembered the woman’s arthritis and why she couldn’t go into the woods in the first place. Still, there was something about this old lady that Goldenrod liked very much, and that afternoon, for the first time in a while, she felt like she was talking to someone just like she would to a friend.

  5

  INTO THE WOODS

  The next day, Goldenrod was ready to finally step into the forest itself. As soon as she arrived at its edge, she saw the old lady again diligently working in her garden.

  “How about a muffin before you set off?” the old lady asked her.

  Goldenrod hesitated and took a quick peek at her watch.

  “I’ll make it snappy,” the old lady promised.

  “Sure. Thank you,” Goldenrod said.

  “Just have a seat.” She pointed to one of two rusty white metal chairs on her front porch before she bustled into the house.

  She was back a minute later, carrying a plastic store-bought bin of muffins and two mugs with spoons sticking out of them. “Nothing goes better with banana chocolate chip muffins than chocolate milk.”

  “Thank you,” Goldenrod said politely as she stared at the chalky mixture inside her mug. A big clump of powder floated on top, and Goldenrod set to work on it with the spoon.

  “You know, you really do have an amazing rose garden. I bet my mother would love to see it,” Goldenrod said.

  “Oh? Is she a gardener?”

  “She’s obsessed.”

  “How wonderful.” The old lady sighed.

  They spent a few more minutes discussing some of the finer points of Mrs. Moram’s garden while Goldenrod picked at her stale muffin and drank most of her chocolate milk.

  “I should get going,” Goldenrod eventually said.

  “Of course, of course. You have very important work to do,” the old lady said without a single note of sarcasm.

  Goldenrod smiled as she took her backpack. “See you later,” she said and headed toward the forest.

  She had only walked a few steps in when she noticed right away how d
ifferent the forest felt from anywhere else she’d ever been. The first thing she observed was the light. Almost immediately, the trees above her closed in, creating a dense green and gold roof that filtered the sunlight in an almost magical way. The entire world was bathed in a soft glow with the trees themselves rustling gently and reminding Goldenrod of gossiping ladies leaning into each other. The ground was a richer shade of brown, and Goldenrod could see patches of emerald-green moss growing in certain places.

  And then there were the sounds, because, surprisingly, the woods were very noisy: not in a traffic-on-the-street, kids-on-a-playground way but in a did-you-ever-know-there-were-so-many-species-of-birds way. Maybe one of those birds, Goldenrod thought excitedly, would not be found in Charla’s Encyclopedia of North American Flora and Fauna. Maybe one of them was just waiting to be discovered by her. She wondered for a moment whether if she did discover a new species, it would be named after her, like Lewis’s Woodpecker was named after him.

  Goldenrod allowed herself another five minutes to soak in the surreal beauty of the woods and the grandiose thoughts of her future as a famous explorer, before making herself get back to work. She backtracked so that she was once again at the edge of the forest and then took out her sketchbook and her new and improved measuring tape. She had spent the night before working on it, so that now the end of the tape had a hole punched out of it that was the perfect size for one of Mr. Moram’s golf tees. By using the tee as a stake in the ground, Goldenrod could easily and quickly measure things as a solo explorer.

  The morning went along quietly enough, and by late afternoon, Goldenrod had made a sizable amount of progress measuring distances and documenting a few insects as she came across them. She was just about to try and draw a rather large, purplish one when she heard something. It wasn’t a buzzing or a chirping or a croaking; in fact, it didn’t sound like a noise any bug or animal would make at all. What it sounded like … was a laugh.

  She looked up from her work and listened more intently. This time, after a few moments, she heard a rustling. It sounded like it was coming from a southeasterly direction and like it was getting farther away.

  Goldenrod sprang up to investigate. She followed the rustling sound as best she could until, after a couple of minutes, she found herself entering a small, almost perfectly circular clearing. She listened for the rustling noise again to see where to go next. She waited. But after about ten minutes, when all she could make out were the normal chirping and cawing sounds she had grown used to over the past few hours, she realized she had lost the trail.

  She took a look around the little clearing and figured she would make her way back there—methodically speaking—in a couple of days’ time to map it. She waited just a few more minutes to make sure that the noise wouldn’t start up again, thinking that it might be a small animal and hoping that she would come across it later. Perhaps a small animal with an unusual call, Goldenrod thought, as she once again heard what sounded like a very far-off giggle.

  Too bad she didn’t have more time to investigate today, she realized as she looked at her watch and saw that it was almost 5:20 p.m. already. She found her way back out of the forest again, gave the old lady a wave as she passed her by, and headed home—feeling confident about her chances of a great forest discovery after all.

  6

  THE TRANSPARENT MAN

  When Goldenrod went downstairs at precisely 9:00 a.m. the next day to set out for the forest, Birch was waiting for her at the front door. He eyed her green backpack curiously.

  “Morning,” Goldenrod said.

  “Hi,” Birch said and then hesitated. “Where are you going?”

  “Oh … just around town.”

  “Why?”

  Goldenrod shrugged. “Exercise, fresh air, that sort of thing.”

  “You sound like a grown-up,” Birch said.

  “Do I?” Goldenrod asked. She was feeling a little bit taller these days.

  Birch shrugged and then finally asked, “Can I come?”

  Goldenrod sighed. It was one of those questions she had been dreading because she knew how much Birch looked up to her. In all honesty, most of the time, she really liked having him around, but this was just one thing she felt she had to do on her own. She was genuinely sorry when she told him no.

  Birch didn’t cause a scene but quietly walked away. It didn’t feel so great to make her little brother sad.

  She felt better when she was closer to the forest, though, and especially as she gave a jaunty wave to the old lady before heading in.

  She picked up where she had left off the day before and soon finished another small section on her grid. Now she had to decide which way to go. Since she had gone southeast toward the little clearing the day before, she decided that maybe she would give northeast a try. She picked up her backpack and was heading in that direction when she heard a tiny cough.

  She stopped and turned around. The forest was making its usual forest sounds, but she didn’t see a single creature in sight that she thought could cough in that way.

  After another minute of making sure the coast was totally clear, she walked a little farther northeast.

  Ahem.

  There it was again. And this time it was much louder and unmistakably the sound of someone clearing their throat.

  Goldenrod looked all around her once more, but absolutely no one was there. If Birch’s “grown-up” comment hadn’t been still fresh in her mind, she might have felt a tiny bit nervous. Explorers don’t get scared though, she thought. They figure out what’s going on.

  She stayed put for one minute, two. When she was certain that there really was no one else besides herself, she put her foot one step in the direction she was going.

  “Well, really. You are going the wrong way, you know,” a polite voice said from behind her.

  Goldenrod whipped around.

  Standing there was a tall, elegant man. He was dressed in very old-fashioned clothing: a maroon coat with tails, a beige scarf around his neck, tan pants, and high brown boots, and he leaned on a thin, elegant cane. He had gray hair, though his face looked pretty young and unlined with its long nose and small blue eyes. But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about him was that he was rather transparent.

  To her surprise, and probably the man’s, Goldenrod actually found herself quite calm. In fact, the first words out of her mouth were, “Wrong way for what?”

  “Your quest, of course,” the tall, transparent man said with a smile.

  The two stared at each other. Finally, after another few moments of study, Goldenrod spoke again. “Do I know you?”

  “You might. Or you might not. It’s hard for me to keep up with the state of the education system these days,” the man said.

  Goldenrod continued to stare. She was certain that the man’s face was familiar.

  “I must say,” he went on, “I am rather impressed with how splendidly you are handling my appearance. Then again, I supposed you would handle it that way if you were the right man—excuse me, the right girl—for the job.”

  “Are you—”

  In a flash, the man was gone.

  Goldenrod stared and stared at the spot where he had been. She sat down right on the forest floor and leaned against a tree. There was certainly no tall, elegant see-through man there now. But there almost certainly had been just a moment ago.

  She looked at all of her very scientific notes and her very scientific tools (well, minus the yellow sock). She went through how logically her day had gone until then. Cornflakes and bananas for breakfast. A kiss from her mother. A conversation with her brother in which she had to assert her older sister status. And then her map going precisely as planned. She was an explorer, a scientist. What she had just thought she’d seen was quite impossible. And yet, she was almost positive she had seen it.

  Goldenrod didn’t get much accomplished the rest of the day. After a bit more thinking, and a written documentation of what had just happened in her Explorer’s
Journal (the lined notebook), Goldenrod found that she couldn’t concentrate enough on the detailed measurements.

  Around three, she left the forest with the hope that she would see the old lady on her way out. She thought that if there were anyone at all whom she could discuss her strange experience with, it would be her.

  But the old lady was nowhere to be found. Goldenrod even went so far as to knock on her door, but got no answer.

  Stuck with the disconcerting idea that she didn’t know whether to believe her own eyes, Goldenrod had no choice but to go home.

  The man from the forest was staring at Goldenrod.

  On a strong hunch, she had gone quickly to her room as soon as she had gotten home and pulled out her own copy of the Lewis and Clark biography. Right there, on page nineteen, was a portrait captioned “Meriwether Lewis.” A portrait that depicted the same gray hair and clear blue eyes that she’d seen, though positioned on a face that seemed rather more solid.

  7

  BOREDOM AND CURIOSITY

  Birch was bored. Nearly three weeks had passed since second grade ended and in those three weeks he had beaten all of his video games, perfected mimicking the voices of every single one of his favorite cartoon characters, and tried every possible variation of Goldenrod’s peanut butter sandwich that he could think of. His last concoction of peanut butter, chili powder, and raw egg had left a very bad taste in his mouth, literally, and now his stomach gurgled in protest any time he got too close to the kitchen.

  So now he was bored. And he missed Goldenrod. Every morning, precisely at 9:00 a.m., he watched as she set out with her green backpack, and every evening, at around 6:00 p.m., he watched as she walked back toward the house. When she had turned down his request to go with her, he hadn’t been particularly surprised. After all, the world as he knew it definitely involved an older sister’s right not to bring her eight-year-old brother along everywhere she went. He didn’t necessarily like it, but he hadn’t asked her again.

  But, really, boredom can make a person do all sorts of things one would probably never do otherwise. Suddenly, one finds oneself acting mean or loud or absolutely, monstrously bonkers simply because one doesn’t have anything better to do. In Birch’s case, boredom had wormed its way into his head and made him act very un-Birchlike indeed.