The Mapmaker and the Ghost (5 page)

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.

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.

Whatever Goldenrod is doing
, he thought one day,
it has to be more fun than this.
And then, suddenly, he had decided that he wasn't going to stand for it anymore. Take note, boredom. This was war.

At 8:00 a.m. that very next morning, Birch took his own purple-and-gold backpack and filled it with a notebook, a box of colored pencils, and the brand-new calculator he had received on his last birthday. He stashed the bag under his bed. Then he took out a Tupperware he had specially prepared the night before. Inside was a particularly odorous mixture of peanut butter, one raw egg, and a mashed can of chili beans. Now that it had settled in overnight, the gooey green-and-brown concoction looked—and smelled—perfect for his plans.

Still in his pajamas, Birch walked into the bathroom and proceeded to scoop out the goo all over the tiles closest to the toilet. He sculpted the mixture with the spoon to get
it just right and then ran back to his room to hide the Tupper-ware. Within a few moments, he was back in the bathroom, performing a few convincing coughs and barfing noises, and then finally screaming “Mom!” in his best weak-with-dire-illness voice.

When his mother came, she found Birch grabbing his stomach and looking miserably at the mess on the floor. “I'm sorry,” he managed to say weakly before bringing his hand to his mouth.

Exactly as he had expected, Birch was led back to his bed, a thermometer was produced, and he was ordered to take a nap. While his mother cleaned the mess, he closed his eyes and steadied his breathing so that, when she came in to check on him at 8:45 a.m., he looked every bit like a sick little boy fast asleep.

At 8:55 a.m., on the other hand, Birch looked every bit like a determined boy with a very serious mission. Crouched behind the hydrangea bushes in his backyard, wearing an all-green outfit, his camouflage baseball hat and his purple-and-gold backpack cleverly tucked under a hoodie, he waited until he had heard Goldenrod say good-bye to their mother and then make her way down the road.

Then, as his mother pruned, he tiptoed out from behind the bush, quietly opened the gate, and briskly followed Goldenrod's path.

For a week, Goldenrod had diligently mapped out Pilmilton Woods without further incident and found nothing to indicate that there had ever been any ghosts there, famous or otherwise.

For at least a day or two after their first encounter, she had been on the lookout for Meriwether Lewis. She had headed toward the little clearing that she'd been led to by that small laugh. “Hello?” she'd called out, a little tentatively. The birds chirped and the sun shone, but it had still been a tiny bit intimidating to bait a ghost, even if the ghost was the spirit of one of her all-time heroes.

It turned out that she didn't really have to worry; there was no answer. She had called his name some more. She had tried walking in the “wrong direction” as before, hoping this would cause the ghost to come out and tell her so. She had even once said, “I'm on a quest” loudly, thinking those might be the magic words that would make him appear. But they had merely echoed off of the trees and sounded rather bizarre, even to herself.