The Mapmaker and the Ghost (4 page)

The very next day found Goldenrod standing at the edge of Pilmilton Woods with her backpack and a head full of possibility. She hadn't walked more than thirty steps inside her forest barrier when she saw something that proved her hunch from the day before had been correct. There was a house right on the very edge of the woods that she had never, ever seen before. Had never even known existed! Of course, that wasn't terribly shocking, considering the house was blocked by a grove of very dense maple trees that she had never been allowed to walk behind before. Needless to say, a discovery of this magnitude could prove to be a very important moment in the life of a mapmaker.

The house was small, but looked well kept and cozy. There was a very bright rose garden in the front. Only by walking closer to it did Goldenrod notice the very small old woman who was on her knees, tending to the roses.

The old woman looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps. “Well, hello,” she said.

For a moment, Goldenrod was a little startled by how ugly the old woman was.
If this were a fairy tale
, she thought,
this woman might be a witch or a sorceress
. But here, in real life, she was merely exceedingly ugly. She had extremely thin hair that was so white it was almost perfectly clear, showing the freckled and dry scalp underneath. Her nose was very large and accented with an enormous bump that grew out of the middle of it, like a volcano. By contrast, her eyes were very small and close together, so small that it was hard to tell what color they were at all. She had a pair of white bushy eyebrows. Her ears were rather large and protruding. Her teeth were very crooked.

It took Goldenrod a second to realize that she was gawking rudely. “Hello,” she finally said, a little embarrassed.

“Are you lost?” the old lady asked.

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.

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 different 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.