The Secret of Goldenrod

by Jane O'Reilly

  “Augustine,” she said in a rush, terrified to learn the truth. “Is Goldenrod haunted?”

  Augustine jumped to her feet and put her hands on her hips. “Goldenrod? Haunted?”

  Trina nodded, but she wasn’t sure if Augustine knew what the word meant.

  “Does haunted not mean Goldenrod is full of ugly and evil things?” Augustine folded her arms, huffed, and looked away. “Why ever would you ask such a horrible question?”

  “Because so many strange things keep happening. Because of the ball. And, well, because of you.”

  “Me?” Augustine turned back to Trina. Her eyes were wide with indignation.

  “You’re a doll who talks,” Trina said.

  Augustine was crestfallen. “But I am a good thing, am I not? Is talking not good? Does it not make you happy?”

  “Yes, you are a good thing,” Trina said, gently stroking Augustine’s head. “But I don’t know of any other dolls that talk, and I don’t understand why you do. Or how that ball dropped right when it did. Or how you ended up by the book about Annie. People in my world like explanations for things they don’t understand, and I don’t understand what is happening here. Please, Augustine. I have to know. Is Goldenrod haunted?” Augustine tilted her head to one side and then to the other, so Trina continued. “Everyone is afraid of her, Augustine. They say she causes bad luck.”

  “I am not afraid of her,” the doll said. “Are you?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Trina said.

  Augustine shook her head, disappointedly. “You ask me many questions, Citrine, but you do not ask the most important one. Why would beautiful Goldenrod choose to be haunted?”

  The answer was easy. “To scare people away,” Trina said.

  “Precisely,” Augustine said.

  But now Trina was really confused. “But why would she want to scare people away?”

  Augustine put her dainty little forefinger to her daintier little brow, and a very wise look crossed her face. “How would you feel if people stole from you? Precious things that belonged to your family? What would you do?”

  Trina had never thought about Goldenrod this way. “I suppose I’d try to keep the bad people away and then somehow try to get all my things back.”

  Augustine nodded smugly. “And, may I ask, has Goldenrod hurt you?”

  Trina thought and thought, remembering how she had come to the conclusion that Goldenrod seemed to be crying wolf. She had been frightened and startled, but never hurt. And she had been afraid of Augustine only until they became friends. Trina couldn’t argue with Augustine’s logic. She shook her head slowly.

  The doll raised her eyebrows. “So maybe you should take a very good look at Goldenrod and tell me what you see.”

  Trina looked around the library—at the few books on the shelves, the charred fireplace full of ashes and soot, and the faded walls with dark squares where the pictures once hung. “I see really old green wallpaper. And floors that need to be refinished. And a fireplace that needs to be scrubbed.”

  Augustine shook her head in frustration. “Citrine, have you no imagination? Perhaps you should look for what is not here, such as the laughter of children or a fire burning in the fireplace.” Augustine’s feistiness had all but faded away. She looked up at Trina with a pleading look on her face. “I believe the house longs for a family, Citrine. I believe Goldenrod simply wants someone to call her home.”

  Poppo had said the same thing. But Goldenrod was never going to be Trina’s home. Goldenrod was going to be sold. Who knew what would happen to her next?

  Being the new kid in school, or being bullied by Charlotte, or even looking at Annie in the photo with her mother and her father, hadn’t made Trina feel as lost or alone as she felt at this minute, putting herself in Goldenrod’s place.

  Instead of being afraid of the house and its squeaks and groans and unreliable lights, Trina tried to listen to it the way someone might listen to a good friend’s secrets.

  “I think she feels alone,” she finally said.

  Without wind, and without the push of a switch, the sconces on the library wall dimmed to a sad, golden light.

  Chapter Eleven

  Trina read fable after fable to Augustine, and then she moved on to Grimm’s Fairy Tales when Augustine insisted on hearing “The Frog Prince.” “Imagine what she could have missed, Citrine,” Augustine began very seriously, “if the princess had not kept her promise and allowed the hideous frog to live in her castle. She never would have found her true love.”

  An hour later, Trina was the one getting sleepy, but she kept her word and read to Augustine until the sun went down and it was time to tuck the doll into bed. As Augustine fell asleep, Trina began to fix the blue velvet doll chair with a dab of glue. She pinched its broken leg in place, holding it until hunger overcame her and she went downstairs in search of food.

  She was making herself a big plate of cold pizza in the kitchen when she heard her dad finally come in from working on the porch. He walked into the kitchen carrying the photo album. “Where’d you get this?”

  “I found it in the attic,” Trina said. “It’s a photo album of the Roys and their little girl.”

  He set it on the kitchen counter. “I hope you’re sharing,” he said as he picked up a slice of pizza from her plate. “I forgot to eat lunch.”

  “Look,” Trina said, turning the pages slowly so her dad could see Annie Roy as a baby, and Annie playing outside with the dog and the ball, and the Roys on the front steps. She felt safer looking at the album with her dad right next to her.

  “Look at the background,” he said. “I love seeing pictures of the house as it used to be. Look, there. It’s a porch swing. We’re going to make the porch look just like that again.”

  But Trina was mostly interested in the people. She turned the page to a picture of Annie in her playroom, and there was the dollhouse. Trina squinted hard, pretty sure she could see Augustine sitting on the horse in the stable.

  The next page was blank.

  The next one too.

  The whole rest of the book was blank.

  “Oh, Poppo. It’s so sad.”

  “What is?”

  “All these blank pages. Annie must have died right after the picture was taken of her in her room.” She flipped back to the photo of the Roys on the porch. She liked to think of them as a whole and happy family, the way she wished her family was.

  Her dad was very quiet, studying the photo. Maybe he was thinking about her mother, missing her just the way Trina was. Maybe now was a good time to ask about her, but Trina didn’t know how to bring up the subject. “I think they loved each other very much,” she said.

  He put an arm around her shoulder. “Love is the easy part.” Trina was about to ask what her dad meant, when he added, “Bath night.”

  “Poppo,” she said, embarrassed. Just when she thought she was proving her independence, he managed to make her feel like a baby. “You don’t have to remind me.”

  She turned a few more pages of the album, just in case she had missed something, and her heart plummeted all over again at the sight of the first blank one. But then she noticed a stain on the page, a faint outline of a stem and flowers. A shape that looked familiar. “I’ll take a bath now,” she said excitedly as she closed the cover and ran upstairs to her room with the album in her hands. Where had she put it? She looked around her room until she spotted the dried sprig of goldenrod lying on the floor next to the dollhouse. She placed it on the stained page of the album. What was left of the stem of goldenrod fit the outline perfectly. A sense of comfort filled Trina, happiness she knew was not her own. The flower was back where it belonged.

  In the bathroom, she filled the claw-foot tub with hot water, squirted soap into the stream, and climbed into the froth. She scrubbed her dirty feet with a washcloth, leaned back, and buried herself in the bubbles, thinking about Annie Roy.

  Annie Roy would have touched the banister and climbed the stairs. S
he would have slept in her room and she would have looked out the same windows. She would have played with Augustine.

  And she would have taken a bath in the same tub.

  Trina sat up quickly, climbed out of the tub, and pulled the plug. As the bathtub emptied, the drain made a great gulping noise and sucked down her white washcloth with a greedy swallow. Behind her, water started gurgling and rising in the toilet.

  “Poppo!” Trina screamed. She pulled on her clothes over her wet, sticky skin as water spilled over the toilet’s rim onto the floor. “Poppo, the toilet!” She ran down the hall and leaned over the railing. “It’s overflowing!”

  Taking the steps three at a time, her dad raced past her, splashing across the water on the bathroom floor. He pushed the plug back in the slowly draining tub and the toilet waterfall stopped. “What on earth happened?”

  “My washcloth went down the drain,” Trina said.

  “That’s it?”

  Trina nodded. “I’m sorry, Poppo.”

  He looked from the bathtub to the toilet and back. “It’s not your fault. There’s no drain cover. But I still don’t understand. These old drains are so big you could flush a boot down the toilet if you wanted to.” Frowning at the mess, he said, “I’ll get the snake.”

  Trina used up every bath towel they owned while she waited for her dad. “Good news,” he said as he reappeared with his tools and a five-gallon paint bucket. “The kitchen sink drains just fine, so the clog shouldn’t be too hard to reach.”

  Trina wrung the towels over the bucket as her dad knelt on the bathroom floor and cranked the plumber’s snake, sending the long metal chain through the drain in the tub into the guts of the house, cranking and cranking and cranking.

  “I can’t seem to reach it,” he said, standing up. “I guess that’s what we get for tall ceilings. Looks like I’ll have to open up the wall in the downstairs bath and go up from there. Think you can help?” Trina scowled. She wanted to go to bed. “Don’t worry. I’ll do the dirty work,” he said.

  They set up shop in the bathroom next to the kitchen. The job required a sledgehammer, a ladder, an electric saw, the emptied five-gallon paint bucket, two pairs of gloves, two pairs of safety glasses, earplugs, and a big plastic bag. As her dad bashed the wall near the ceiling, Trina stuffed the falling chunks of plaster and lath into the garbage bag. When the hole in the wall was almost as big as she was, and the big black cast-iron drainpipe was exposed, her dad picked up the saw and climbed the ladder.

  Sparks flew and vibrations traveled through Trina’s whole body as she tried to hold the ladder steady. Eventually the saw hummed to a stop and he climbed down from the ladder and stood on the floor to make the bottom cut. “Help me here,” her dad said. He handed her the saw so he could heft the large section of pipe to the floor.

  A clump of wet cloth hung from the open drain.

  “That’s pretty dirty to be your washcloth,” he said. “Hand me the bucket.”

  Trina handed him the bucket.

  “Bombs away,” he warned. He gave the clump a tug, and sludge slopped into the bucket with a big splash. “Looks like a hundred years of clog.”

  “Gross,” Trina said, trying not to breathe in the pungent smell of the ancient slime.

  Her dad pulled a small flashlight from his hip pocket and shined it into the pipe. “And another hundred to go.” He reached into the pipe, gave another little tug, and Trina’s washcloth plopped into the bucket followed by a small torrent of water and a lot of soap bubbles. “Looks like your washcloth wasn’t the culprit. That first clump of whatever-it-is caused the whole problem.”

  Pinching her nose, Trina peered closely at the muck in the bucket. “It looks like a dead animal.”

  “Could be,” he said, grimacing. “Like maybe a rat.” He picked up a piece of lath and poked at the soggy mass. Blobs of muck slid from the clump and then a fleck of something white flashed and disappeared.

  “What was that?” Trina’s heart raced. Could it be? She grabbed the bucket from her dad. Water splashed, mud washed away, and a face appeared. A little white face with sparkling eyes. And they were staring straight at her.

  “Here, I’ll dump it out back,” he said, reaching for the bucket.

  “You can’t,” Trina said, whirling around with the bucket tight in her arms. The mud sloshed again and the little face vanished. “Oh no, she’s drowning!”

  “Who’s drowning?”

  “Augustine’s mother.” Trina tilted the bucket until the doll’s face appeared again. “Annie must have taken her into the bathtub and she went down the drain.”

  “Annie?”

  “Annie Roy, Poppo,” Trina said with exasperation. “The little girl who used to live here.” Trina closed the stopper in the bathroom sink and turned on the hot water. “I can’t believe it. Augustine has a mother again.” With a piece of lath, she carefully scooped out the muddy doll and slid her into the sink. “She’s so lucky.”

  “She looks pretty hopeless to me,” her dad said. He wound up the cord of his saw and collapsed his ladder. “Don’t worry, I’ll fix the drainpipe tomorrow.” And then he left with the bag of plaster and lath and the bucket of sludge. “Good luck trying to revive her.”

  Revive. Poppo had no idea how alive the mother doll might be. Trina squirted some hand soap into the sink and then she stirred the soapy water with the piece of lath like a gentle washing machine until the doll was clean enough to pick up.

  The mother doll wasn’t as lifelike as Augustine, but she was beautiful, just as Augustine had said. Her brown eyes didn’t blink, and her dark brown hair and black shoes were painted porcelain, but her arms and legs moved. Her simple ruffled dress, which must have been much whiter once upon a time, was stitched into her soft body, and it was identical to the one Annie’s mother wore in the photograph.

  Trina wrapped paper towels around the doll and squeezed her gently, over and over again, until the mother was nearly dry, and then she took her upstairs and leaned her against the mantel in Augustine’s bedroom.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, leaning as close to Augustine as she could, Trina whispered, “Augustine, I don’t know if you can hear me at night, but I have a wonderful story to tell you. Once upon a time, a mother was lost from her daughter. It seemed she was lost to her forever because she was gone for years and years without any explanation at all, but then she was found in a . . .”

  Trina stopped. She could never tell Augustine that her mother had been trapped in a dark, slimy drain for a hundred years. She would have to make up a different story. A nice story. The kind of story Augustine would like to hear.

  “Augustine, your mother left home to go on wondrous adventures to see the world, but she became trapped in a cave for many years until a golden bird found her and carried her back to the Land of Goldenrod. And now she is very happy to be home because she missed you very much. She loves you, Augustine.”

  Trina paused, then said, “You were right, Augustine. No stone unturned.”

  Chapter Twelve

  As the sun came up, Trina was awakened by a faint hum. Like the buzzing of a bee around a flower. She sat up in bed and looked toward the dollhouse. Augustine was singing. “Good morning, Augustine,” she said.

  “Oh, Citrine. It is the most wonderful day!” Augustine had slipped from her bed and was twirling toward her mother, who still leaned against the miniature mantel. “My mother is no longer lost to me.”

  Trina climbed out of bed and knelt down by the dollhouse. “She came back to you, Augustine.”

  “Mother, this is my friend, Citrine. Her mother is traveling in a distant land just as you were, and soon she will come home to her as you have come home to me.”

  The Land of Smelly Sludge, thought Trina, tamping down a grin. “Welcome home,” she said, nodding at Augustine’s mother.

  “She flew home on a golden bird, Citrine,” Augustine continued. “The bird freed her from a grea
t cave. She said it was a dreadful place and she prefers not to recall a single moment.”

  The mother doll said nothing.

  “Does your mother talk?” Trina asked.

  Augustine put her hand to her mouth to smother a little laugh. “Yes, but not so you can hear her.”

  Trina felt left out of the joke, but it was probably a good thing Augustine’s mother didn’t talk. Having to deal with one talking doll was hard enough.

  “My dear Citrine,” the little doll said, her feet skipping across the polished floor to the open edge of the dollhouse. “My mother and I would like very much to have a tea party today as a celebration of her homecoming.” She ran downstairs and climbed into a velvet chair at the dining room table and folded her hands in her lap. “Would you be so kind as to set my mother at the table next to me? And then you must make us some goldenrod tea and bring us some cream and sugar, just as Annie did.”

  You can make tea from the flowers, you know, Mr. Kinghorn had said. No, Trina hadn’t known, but she would try. She set the mother doll in a chair next to Augustine and then, pinching the edges of the tray, she carried the tiny tea set downstairs into the kitchen and put a pan of water on the stove to boil. By the screech of the saw outside, she could tell her dad was already working.

  When she went out the front door to pick the goldenrod, she was surprised to step onto a section of cedar planking, and even more surprised to look up and see the framework for the porch roof. She breathed in the sweet cedar scent and admired her dad’s work.

  He stopped the saw instantly. “Good morning, Princess. Watch where you step.”

  “You sure have made a lot of progress,” Trina said as she began to pick the goldenrod for the tea.