Greenglass House (6 page)

Milo stayed in the living room reading until almost two, which was a truly unthinkable time to be allowed to be up. The fire had burned down to embers, the hot chocolate was cold, and outside the front windows the world was all shadowy snow and thick, deep night.
The Raconteur's Commonplace Book
sat open on his knee. The house, with its noises thrown off by all the strangers stashed here and there on the floors above, was just unfamiliar enough and the story he was stuck on was just creepy enough that Milo had about decided it was time to call it a night.

He shook himself awake for the fourth time and tried to make the words swimming on the page resolve themselves into sentences and paragraphs. It didn't work. He stretched and yawned—and then he spotted the dark blotch out in the snow. A darker shadow, a person-sized shadow.

The wind came pouring across the lawn and into the trees carrying a swirling cloud of white. When it cleared, there was no one there.

 

“Did you
sleep
down here?”

He came awake to find Meddy Caraway standing between the loveseat and the still-dark window with an incredulous look on her face. Milo stifled a yelp of surprise and tried to get up. The leg that had been folded under him all night was numb and he fell forward, straight out of the seat onto the floor.

He turned his head to regard the pink-fluffy-sock-encased toe of Meddy's left foot, and blew out a mouthful of air. He managed to shift the book, which had fallen from his knee and now lay under his cheek, just far enough to speak without chewing on paper. “What time is it?” His voice came out like a croak.

Meddy extended her left hand so that her wrist and the giant watch strapped to it popped out from under her sleeve. “Six. What are you doing down here?”

“What are
you
doing down here?” Milo retorted.

She turned and looked over her shoulder, frowning. “I heard a weird noise.”

Milo followed her glance, then remembered the shadow he'd spotted outside before dozing off. He hauled himself to his feet and stared out the window, but there was nothing to see except the still-falling snow. “What did you hear?” he asked.

“If it was something I
recognized,
” she said patiently, “I wouldn't have called it
weird.
But I can tell you this: it was inside the inn. Not out there.”

“The house makes noises. It's old. Used to wake me up at night too.” Milo rubbed his wrists, which were aching a bit from his fall, and shot Meddy a look over his shoulder. “When I was little.”

Her eyebrows lowered. “Did it.” She turned on her heel, heading toward the staircase. Then she paused, bent, and picked up something from the floor near his feet. Milo clapped a palm awkwardly to his back pocket. The blue leather wallet was not there, of course, because it was in Meddy's hand.

“Wait—” But she took out the folded map. “Careful, that thing's fragile,” Milo protested as she opened it. He could almost hear the paper cracking.

“What's this?”

“Give it to me.” Milo held out his hand, wiggling his fingers.

Meddy ignored him. “In a minute. What is it?” Milo wiggled his fingers more insistently. She waved him off, turned the page upside down, and frowned at it. “Oh. I see. A navigational chart.”

Annoyed and mildly surprised that she'd identified the chart so quickly for what it was, Milo folded his arms. “Yeah. The dots are depths, probably, and the gull is the compass rose.”

“I can see that. But it's not a gull, it's an albatross.” She touched the bird almost reverently with one finger.

He didn't much like being told he was wrong, but Milo wasn't positive he knew exactly what an albatross looked like, so he decided not to argue.

She clearly wasn't going to give the chart back until she was ready, and he wasn't about to rip the thing by grabbing for it. “Can you be careful, please? It's old, if you hadn't noticed. Don't tear it.”

“I'm not going to tear it,” she mumbled. “This is really nifty. What's it a chart of? I mean, where? Doesn't look like the Skidwrack or the Magothy.”

“I didn't think so either. I don't know what waterway it's for,” Milo admitted reluctantly. “I sort of found it.”

“What do you mean, sort of?”

“I think one of the guests dropped it. Just give it back.” Exasperated, he reached for it again. Meddy took another long look at the page, then folded it up carefully and handed it over.

“Aren't you curious?” she asked. “Are you going to try and find out more about it?”

What he really needed to do, if he was honest with himself, was find out whose it was and just return the thing. Still . . . “How?”

It came out a little bit like a challenge, but Meddy didn't seem to be bothered by his tone. She tilted her head and peered off into space for a moment, then turned slowly, gazing around the empty rooms that made up the first floor: living room, foyer, kitchen, dining room. She considered the closed door to the screened porch at the other end of the living room, and she glanced at the wide staircase. Then she looked back at Milo, smiling an odd kind of half smile. “A campaign.”

“A—a
what?
”

“Just listen. We're stuck here, right?”

“We—
I live here!
”

She gave him a sharp look. “You're telling me you're
happy
about this? Is this how you wanted to spend your winter vacation? Snowed in with a bunch of strangers underfoot?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Okay, well, I don't know about you, but if I'm going to be stuck here, I'm going to find something to do. I say we go in search of whatever this chart leads to.”

Milo felt his temperature rising. It was one thing to be stuck with strangers and quite another to be stuck with Meddy. And for her to come barging in and telling him what to do—and with something
he'd
found—was completely not fair. “Who said
we
were going to do anything?” he grumbled.

She folded her arms. “What's your problem?”

“My problem is that you're right, I didn't want to spend my vacation this way, and that includes with
you!
”

“Right, I know what your problem with
me
is,” Meddy said patiently, “but what's your problem with my
idea?
I mean, we're here now. Might as well do something fun.”

Aggravatingly, there didn't seem to be any good argument against that. Milo crossed his arms too. “Well, how, then? How do you suggest we begin?
If
I agree?”

Meddy nodded at the paper in his hand. “Well, for starters, before everyone comes down, why don't you tell me what you know about it? And then we should probably come up with a way of talking about it without everyone knowing what we're up to.”

“Why?”

“Because the easiest thing to do would be just to ask around until we found out who the chart belongs to.”

“Obviously.”

“Yeah, obviously, except you haven't done that yet. How come?”

Milo hesitated, thinking of the person who had been out in the pavilion just after he'd found the chart, and how he'd instinctively hidden rather than given it back. “I don't know.”

Meddy grinned. “I don't either, but I think it's interesting.”

Milo opened his mouth, then shut it again. There was really no reason not to give Meddy's game a try. And he
was
curious. “All right.”

They sat down side by side on the loveseat, and Milo told her how he'd found the chart, which led to him explaining how he'd wound up with Georgie Moselle's book, which led to Meddy demanding to know everything he could tell her about every guest in the house.

The sound of feet on the stairs made him pause. Meddy made
shut up
gestures, and Milo shot her a scowl in return and mouthed
I know.
“They're coming down from our floor,” he added quietly. “It's not one of the guests, or we'd have heard the stairs way before.” It was true. The sound of the fourth-floor flight in particular was unmistakable.

Sure enough, the person who appeared, feet first, was Mrs. Caraway, come down to start the first pot of coffee. She blinked blearily at Milo and Meddy. “You're up early. Want some hot chocolate?”

“Not me, Mrs. Caraway. I think I'm going back to bed for a while.” He collected the chart in its leather wallet, and Georgie's book, and hauled himself up the stairs.

Milo's room was on the second floor. In addition to his room, his parents' room, and the two private guest rooms where the Caraways stayed, there was also a living room, a kitchen, and a dining room, all much smaller than the ones downstairs, so that Milo and his family could have privacy when they wanted it. He padded through to the far end of the living room and past the biggest of the house's stained-glass windows, a huge floor-to-ceiling panel in copper, wine, chestnut, verdigris, and navy. He continued down a very short hall to a blue door at the end of it. A big, round brass bell tied to his doorknob with a wide plaid ribbon gave a welcoming jingle as Milo turned the knob to enter and another as he closed the door behind him. He reached for a switch and the lights came on: a brass anchor lantern that hung beside the door that had once belonged to the ship his grandfather had served on, and a string of onion-shaped red silk lanterns embroidered with Chinese characters and hung with gold tassels that crossed the room diagonally from opposite corners of the ceiling.

He shut his eyes, stretched out the hand that held the book and the chart, and released them into thin air. Just as he knew they would, they landed squarely in the middle of his desk. He could tell by the quick, neat noise they made when they hit the leather blotter. Then, eyes still closed, he turned ninety degrees, took two steps to his right, tipped back on his heels, and let himself free-fall backwards. He landed, just as he always did, right in the middle of his bed.

Slowly, slowly, he felt himself relaxing. He swung up his feet and wriggled under his blanket—the knitted patchwork one his mother had made for him way back when she and Mr. Pine were still waiting to be matched with a baby—and in a few minutes he was asleep.

 

three

Milo's room had the best view in the whole house. It was a garret with a dormer window that looked out over the woods at a point where the slope down to the Skidwrack River was particularly steep, so on the right kind of day he could see all the way to the steely gray and blue water below. His window also had a fire escape, which was one of his favorite places to sit, particularly when the sun was going down behind the hill—although, strictly speaking, he wasn't allowed on it without supervision.

At the moment, however, it was morning, and there was no sky visible at all, just a thick gray overlay of cloud. It could've been any time of day at all. Milo, eyes still bleary with sleep, turned from the frosted window and reached for his alarm clock. Ten a.m.

The snow wasn't falling anymore, but from the thickness of the coating on the trees, it looked like it had to have been falling all night. It was the kind of sight that made Milo long for the ritual of warming up by the fire after an hour outside building something fortress-like and stocking it with an armory full of perfectly round, perfectly packed snowballs.

He changed his clothes, straightened the book and wallet so that they were neat on his desktop blotter, and left the room. He paused for a moment to tweak the bow that tied the jingle bell to his doorknob so that its loops were even, then headed down to the first floor.

In the dining room, breakfast was winding to a close—but Milo almost didn't notice. He was too busy thinking,
Boy, is it ever weird seeing them all in the same place.

There was the nondescript Mr. Vinge swirling his fork in the last dregs of maple syrup on his plate. He was sitting at the near corner of the table with one ankle crossed over his knee, and this morning he was wearing yellow socks with blue polka dots about the same shade as Georgie Moselle's hair. There was Eglantine Hereward, watching with vague disapproval while Lizzie Caraway set a kettle on the stove to boil. Wilbur Gowervine sat at the end of the dining table, also eyeing Lizzie dubiously; evidently he and Mrs. Hereward had the same lack of trust in others when it came to the making of tea. In between glances at Lizzie, he examined the window that poured green tones across the surface of the table. Clem Candler, ankles still wrapped in tape, sat at one of the little breakfast tables by the dining room window, picking at a plate of pancakes and looking dreamily out into the snow. From where he stood at the bottom of the stairs, Milo could just see Georgie's blue head above the back of the loveseat by the window on the other side of the foyer, where Milo had spent the night snoozing. As he surveyed the scene, his father came stomping through the front door with an armful of firewood, awkwardly kicked his boots off, and headed into the living room.