The Mapmaker and the Ghost Read Online Free PDF

and Goldenrod set to work on it with the spoon.
    â€œYou know, you really do have an amazing rose garden. I bet my mother would love to see it,” Goldenrod said.
    â€œOh? Is she a gardener?”
    â€œShe’s obsessed.”
    â€œHow 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.
    â€œI should get going,” Goldenrod eventually said.
    â€œOf 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 Goldenrodcould 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 asshe 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