The Mapmaker and the Ghost(11)
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.
Eventually she had given up and returned to her map. By the end of the week, the effect of all her very precise measuring and her scientific documentation was this: she had started to doubt that she’d ever seen the ghost at all.
Could it just be that she had been tired, fallen asleep in the forest, and had a very vivid dream? Really, were there even such things as ghosts? And if there were, what would be the probability that Meriwether Lewis would choose dinky Pilmilton to haunt, anyway?
Very slim, she had to answer for herself, because the only two people she could think of to tell about the whole thing were the old lady and Charla—the first of whom she hadn’t seen for a week and the second of whom she hadn’t seen for much longer, and couldn’t find the right words to type in an e-mail to her and not sound pretty crazy anyway.
But even though she hadn’t seen the old lady again, Goldenrod hadn’t forgotten her promise to clip three blue roses for her—and the delicious thought that a new discovery just might await her. She had her specimen jar and her shears ready. The only problem was that she had yet to come across any such rosebush.
And soon enough, according to the old lady’s calculation, it came to be the last day that the rosebush would bloom for fifty years. Goldenrod had decided to spend most of it laying aside her accurate map (and any lingering thoughts of transparent men) in favor of pure exploration. Knowing she still had to be precise with the ground she covered, though, she went deeper into the forest, using her grid system as a guide. She had just about finished a thorough examination of the first unmapped square on her grid when she got a glimpse of a deep blue something through a clump of trees.
Her heart leaped with excitement, but it only lasted a moment before she realized that the blue thing she was seeing was moving and that hovering somewhere above it was a sweaty white T-shirt.
No matter how unusual this blue rose might have been, it seemed unlikely that it would be mobile and wearing clothing. It also didn’t seem very probable that an animal like a coyote or a prairie dog or a pygmy short-horned lizard—all of which had been discovered by Lewis and Clark—would be found wearing a sweaty white T-shirt in its natural habitat. But then again, thought Goldenrod, one must never jump to conclusions without full exploration if one wants to be a true pioneer.
Goldenrod quietly started to run after the flashing white T-shirt and blue jeans. It wasn’t too hard to follow, since whomever the shirt belonged to was not very stealthy. The snapping branches and startled bird sounds were enough to ensure Goldenrod that she was both on the right track and had little chance of being overheard.
A couple of minutes later, the sound of broken twigs was replaced by a girl’s voice. “There you are, Lint. What took you so long?”
“The security guard was watching me,” Sweaty T-shirt Guy panted. And Goldenrod realized she knew that voice.
“But you weren’t doing anything suspicious, were you?” She knew the third voice too.
Goldenrod tiptoed behind a tree to get a better look. There were Charlie Cookman and Jonas Levins, looking as mean as they ever had in school, right in the middle of her forest.
8
CAN’T REWIND
Charlie and Jonas weren’t alone. With them was an older girl with dirty-blond hair whom Goldenrod didn’t recognize.
“I was just drawing,” Charlie said.
“Well, did you get everything done?” the girl spoke again. She looked about twelve or thirteen. There were patches of dirt on her face, and her hair seemed to be matted from grease.
Charlie pulled some things from his pockets. Goldenrod could make out a crumpled piece of gridded paper with what looked like a detailed diagram on it. To her great surprise, it almost looked like it could be a map of some sort.
“That’s it?” the girl asked.
“I told you, that security guard knew I was up to something. I had to get out of there fast,” Charlie said.
The girl turned to Jonas. “Look, Brains. Why don’t you live up to your name a little and not send the dumb kid to do the job where, you know, you need to act like you belong in a museum.”
“I’m not dumb!” Charlie said as he rolled up his T-shirt and started to fuss around with his cavernous belly button, around which there were muscles for miles.
“Right. And I’m not a girl. And Brains is an idiot. Although I’m starting to suspect …”
“Stupid girl,” Charlie muttered.
“Sorry? What did you say?”
“Better to send me than a girl,” Charlie said as he continued to pull bits and pieces of things from his belly button and quickly transfer them to his right-hand pocket.