Greenglass House (4 page)

Milo paused on the second landing under the pale green window and he and Clem waited for the other two to catch up. “This is the first floor of guest rooms,” he said when Mrs. Hereward and Dr. Gowervine reached them. “You can pick whichever you like, except Three E. That one's occupied. It's the one with the door closed.”

The three guests looked at one another. Clem waved a hand and gave the other two a dazzling smile. “You go ahead.”

Mrs. Hereward gave her a curt little nod and stalked down the hallway. While she was examining the open room at the far end, Dr. Gowervine carried his belongings into the nearest open room and dumped them on the floor. “I'll take this one,” he called.

While the tall old lady made a big production of deciding between the two remaining rooms, Clem leaned over and spoke quietly. “Say, Milo, I don't suppose there are upstairs rooms that are available, are there?”

“Well . . . sure, lots. Why?”

He supposed it wasn't really any of his business, but Clem didn't seem bothered. “I need my exercise,” she explained. “I get a little stir-crazy if I don't get it, and what with the snow, I can't imagine I'm going to be putting in any runs outside anytime soon. Would it be a pain in the neck for your mom and dad if I took one on another floor?”

“Not at all. In fact, I don't think there's anybody on five. Two flights up? Five W has a really cool window with painted glass, if you like that kind of thing.”

“Perfect.”

Down the hall, Mrs. Hereward peered out the door of 3N, next to Mr. Vinge's room. “Young man, could I have the rest of my things brought up?”

“Sure, ma'am.” Milo turned back to Clem, but she had already disappeared up the staircase.

 

two

By the time Milo had squared away Mrs. Hereward's luggage, had checked in with Clem on the fifth floor, and had gotten himself a mug of hot chocolate from the saucepan on the stove and a few marshmallows to top it off, he was starting to feel out of control again.

It was late, and from throughout the inn came the sounds of strangers. The house's noises were different. Even the air smelled different. It should've smelled like winter and snow and fireplace and hot chocolate. Those aromas were still there, but they were buried now under the scents of Mrs. Hereward's wet wool coat, Georgie Moselle's broken bottle of perfume, and a faint whiff of tobacco from the pipe Dr. Gowervine had smoked out on the screened porch.

Milo slid onto one of the benches at the dining room table, where just a few hours ago he'd eaten a perfectly normal dinner before all the guests had started pouring in out of the snow. His mother muttered a goodbye into the phone she'd been glued to for the last twenty minutes, hung it up, and dropped onto the bench next to him. “How you doing, kiddo?”

He growled into his cup.

“Well, don't panic. That was Mrs. Caraway. She and Lizzie are coming back to help out. We're going to do our best to make sure you get your vacation.”

“They are?” Mrs. Caraway was the inn's chef, and her daughter Lizzie, who owned a bakeshop, had come to help out once or twice before during especially busy times.

“When?”

“Tonight, if the roads are clear enough. But late. They're going to have to drive really slowly.” She put an arm around his shoulder. “You want to stay up with me? I seem to recall owing you a brownie sundae.”

Normally, Milo loved to sit up late with his folks in front of the fire. Sometimes they would read; sometimes they would play Scrabble or cards. Tonight, though . . . Milo peered over his mug into the living room. Mr. Vinge had gone back upstairs, Dr. Gowervine had done the same after his pipe, and Mrs. Hereward hadn't come down again at all, but Georgie Moselle and Clem Candler were both sitting there with hot drinks in green mugs. Blue-haired Georgie was curled up on the couch, her drink on the end table beside her elbow and a cigar box in her lap. She had a roll of black tape in one hand, and she was wrapping it carefully around the edges of the box. Redheaded Clem sat on the rag rug, just barely within view from where Milo was: She had a roll of white tape, and she was wrapping up her ankles. Evidently, her climb up to the inn hadn't been quite as painless as it had looked.

Still, they were being quiet, and this might just be his last evening of peace. He could always go upstairs to the family's private space, but his parents would be down here taking care of the guests, and too much quiet and loneliness wouldn't make him feel any better. “I'll go get something to read. Be right back.”

He was halfway up the first flight of stairs when he remembered that he hadn't returned Georgie's book, the one he'd taken accidentally from her room earlier that evening. He stopped, foot poised over the next step, and patted down his pockets. “Oh, no. What did I . . .”

There was really only one place he could have left it. He'd had it when he'd run out to answer the railcar bell. He didn't recall having it when he'd led the three new guests up to their rooms, or when he'd come back down to get Mrs. Hereward's luggage. Which meant it had to be outside. Probably in the pavilion.

Milo flung himself back down the stairs and into the foyer, where he grabbed his boots and ducked outside before anyone could ask him where he was going. He skidded across the porch, passing his father, who was busy stacking firewood under a tarp, and sprinted down the path and into the woods.

The fairy lights were still on along the roof and down the railing of the long staircase, but now they glowed under a half-inch glaze of snow. Milo found the paperback right away, wedged between the
Whilforber Whirlwind
and the edge of the wooden floor. He must have dropped it when the tower of luggage had come tumbling down.

He tugged the book free and tucked it in his back pocket, and he was just about to head back inside when he spotted something else on the steel tracks.

It looked like a blue leather wallet, only bigger. Milo climbed down onto the rails behind the car and picked it up.

And that's how he found the first map.

It was tucked into the left-hand pocket of the leather wallet, folded into quarters. The paper was old and green-tinged, the way the copper pots in the inn's kitchen were tinted green from verdigris—only Milo had never seen paper turn green like that. He unfolded it carefully with cold fingers. It was brittle and delicate and didn't look as if it could stand much more folding and unfolding, but he could tell it had once been thick and expensive. Milo held it up so that the light from the closest lamppost shone through, and he could just make out a watermark: it looked like a wrought-iron gate, but slightly warped and wrenched out of its original shape.

It was then, with the page lit up from behind, that Milo realized what he was looking at. He turned and hopped across the rails to the shed that housed the big winch, turned on the overhead light, and held the paper up again to get a better look.

It's a funny thing about maps: you don't have to know what they're supposed to represent to know you're looking at one. A map is pretty much unmistakable. Draw one on a napkin, sketch one into the mud with the toe of your shoe, line up the flakes of your cereal with your spoon to make one in your breakfast bowl; maps come in all kinds, but they all still manage to look like maps. And the brittle, watermarked paper Milo was holding was definitely a map, even if it didn't look like any map he'd ever seen. At least, not at first.

There were no lines for streets, no boxes for houses, nothing to mark the features of a city or a town or even a lonely road winding through the countryside. Instead, there were shapeless washes of blue layered one on top of the other, so that in some places the paper was merely blue-tinged and in others the color deepened by degrees to china blue and ultramarine and royal and navy. Here and there, centered in the bands of shading, were groups of green ink dots, small clusters of two and three where the blue was lightest and larger clusters of nine or ten or more where it was darkest. In one corner was a group of nearly white curls, like slightly twisted triangles gathered together. In another corner was the shape of a bird with an arrow pointing away from one outstretched wing.

Milo knew a thing or two about maps. This, of course, came from twelve years of growing up around smugglers and sailors. And as he stared at the paper in his hands, he realized it reminded him of a very specific sort of map, one that he saw fairly often. It looked like a nautical chart, the kind that ships' navigators use.

Yes, a nautical chart. That was exactly what it was, with the shadings of blue and the green dots meant to represent the different depths of the waterway. The bird shape must be the compass rose, which would mean the wing with the arrow was supposed to be pointing north.

He turned the page so that the arrow pointed up, but that didn't make the waterway any more familiar. He turned it again and again, trying to find the orientation that would transform it into something recognizable: the Skidwrack River, or the Magothy Bay it emptied into, or one of the Skidwrack's inland tributaries. But no matter which way he held the map, it didn't look like any river or bay Milo knew of.

Then, outside in the pavilion, he heard a voice muttering curses. He put his eye to the crack between the door and its frame. A person wrapped in a heavy coat crossed Milo's view, head hunched low into the collar. A short, sharp breeze kicked up, swirling snow around the figure. It wasn't his mother or father, but between the snow and the twinkling lights, he couldn't quite work out which of the guests it was.

The person strode out of view and back in again, making a circuit of the pavilion, then hopped down onto the tracks inside it. Milo heard footsteps crunching over the stones between the steel rails.

He or she had to be looking for the leather wallet Milo had just found. The logical thing to do would be to step out and announce that he'd found it. It was, after all, the property of one of the guests, and at some point, he was going to have to give it back. Still, when the dark shadow swung itself back up off the tracks, something made Milo edge deeper into the shed and tuck himself as far behind the winch as he could.

He held his breath and waited. Long minutes passed without any sound from outside. At last, Milo tiptoed back over to the door and put his eye up to the crack again. The unknown person was gone.

As quietly as he could, he refolded the map and tucked it into the leather wallet. He slipped it into his other back pocket, making certain it was hidden by his coat. Then, when he was sure, absolutely sure, that he was alone in the pavilion again, he crept out of the shed. Whoever it had been, he or she had left footprints, but already the swirling snow was busy erasing them.

Inside, the inn was basically just as he'd left it: his mom was at the dining room table; in the living room, Georgie Moselle was on the couch with her cigar box and Clem Candler sat on the rag rug, stretching her taped-up legs.

Mrs. Pine looked up from her book. “Milo, where'd you go?”

Milo yanked off his hat and looked around as he unwound his scarf, sure he must be missing someone. “Someone went outside after me. Who was it?”

Now Georgie and Clem looked up. “Nobody else came through this room,” Georgie said. “We didn't see anybody.” She looked at Clem. “Right? Or was I just not paying attention?”

“I didn't notice anyone leave. Not this way, anyhow.” The redheaded girl stood and stretched. “Well, that's it for me, folks. See you in the morning.” Then, silently, she ran up the stairs two at a time.

“What about Dad?” Milo asked, even though he was certain that whoever he'd seen, it hadn't been his father. “He was outside, right?”

“He came in right after you went out. He's upstairs now.” Mrs. Pine frowned. “What's wrong?”

Milo opened his mouth, then shut it again. “Nothing,” he said at last, taking off his coat and boots and sliding onto the bench across from his mother. “Somebody was walking outside, that's all. Thought they must've come in this way.”

“Good grief.” Milo's mother slid off the bench and headed toward the foyer to put on her own cold-weather gear. “Guess I'd better make sure nobody's gonna freeze out there.”

“Nobody's gonna freeze,” Milo protested. “It's not like you can miss the house.” But the door was already swinging shut behind Mrs. Pine, leaving Milo alone with Georgie Moselle.

For a few minutes, they ignored each other. Georgie continued messing around with her cigar box and her black tape, and Milo sipped his hot chocolate, acutely aware of the paperback tucked in his back pocket.

When he'd emptied his mug, he finally spoke up. “Hey—Miss Moselle?” he asked awkwardly. “Can I get you anything? More hot chocolate?”

“No, thanks,” Georgie replied. “Don't worry about me. And you can call me Georgie, if you want.”

Milo paused on his way to the kitchen and looked at the box she was occupied with. “What is that, by the way?”