The Secret of Goldenrod

by Jane O'Reilly

  “Whose grave?” Charlotte muttered, gripping Trina so tightly Trina could hardly move.

  “Her grave,” Trina whispered, wiping the tombstone with the palm of her hand, reading the worn inscription. “Annie Roy’s.”

  Charlotte squeezed Trina’s arm even tighter. “You mean we’re in a graveyard?”

  “No, we’re in the East Garden,” Trina said. “Listen to this: Annie Roy, darling daughter, aged six years.”

  Trina ran her fingers in the curves of the letters. “Now it all makes perfect sense.”

  Edward stood up, brushing mud and leaves from his knees. “Who in the world is Annie Roy?”

  Charlotte gave Edward a shove. “Don’t you ever listen? Annie Roy was the little girl who used to live here.” She turned to Trina. “She’s the ghost, isn’t she? That’s who we heard breathing.”

  Trina felt a calmness sweep through her. “I don’t think so,” Trina said. “My dad says there’s no such thing. And I think he’s right. All the scary noises have logical explanations like radiators heating up or pipes rattling.” An image flashed through her mind—of gates and paths and partygoers—but instead the field was dotted with stakes for the new septic system. She could see them in the shadows. No wonder Goldenrod was scared. If they had never found Annie’s grave, it would have been dug up by the septic company and Annie would have been lost forever.

  “Explain why she’s buried out here,” Edward demanded. “Why isn’t she in the Roy family plot at the cemetery with everybody else?”

  Trina thought back to Mr. Kinghorn’s story about how they found Mrs. Roy wandering in the garden after Annie died. “I bet her parents couldn’t bear to have her so far away from them.” For the first time all night, since she ran from the house into the storm, Trina felt guilty. Her own dad was still out looking for her.

  “She sure is a long way from them now,” Edward said.

  “I bet she’s lonely without them,” Charlotte said.

  Trina was surprised to think she might have loneliness in common with the meanest girl in fifth grade. “I bet you’re right.”

  “Girls are crazy,” Edward said.

  “I think you’re crazy.” Charlotte lunged for Edward again, but this time, as he ducked out of the way, he lost his balance and tumbled backward into the tall weeds.

  A loud “Ow” was followed by a frantic rustle. When he sat up, he was holding the striped ball.

  Charlotte gasped.

  Before Trina could react, Edward had put down the ball and was yanking a handful of weeds from the ground. “Hey! Give me the flashlight. I think I found another grave.” Edward shined the flashlight on another flat slab of stone. “Toby, our eternal best friend.”

  “Toby was Annie’s dog!” Trina cried, leaning in to see better.

  “Then that’s why she’s buried here. They must have buried her by her dog so she wouldn’t be all alone.” Edward handed the flashlight back to Trina and picked up the ball. “Mystery solved.”

  “But what about the ball? How’d it get out here? How do you explain that?” Charlotte asked.

  Trina knew the ball was Goldenrod’s way of leading her to the graves, but she also knew Charlotte and Edward would never believe her if she said it out loud. “Maybe Annie wanted to play with us? Maybe she felt left out.”

  “Maybe,” Charlotte said.

  Edward snorted and dropped the ball into the weeds. “We better get home, Charlotte, before your grandma—”

  Thunder rolled in the distance, followed by a streak of lightning. “You can’t go anywhere in this weather,” Trina said. “You’ll have to spend the night.” She stood up and headed for the French doors.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” Charlotte asked.

  “I know it’s safe.” But Trina didn’t want to let her off the hook too easily. “That is, as long as you follow Goldenrod’s rules.” Trina tried not to sound too gleeful.

  But Charlotte seemed to have gotten over her fear. “Edward.” Her voice brimmed with excitement. “Think about it. We’ll be the first kids in something like . . . four generations to spend the whole night at Goldenrod. We’ll win the dare!”

  “Yeah, right,” Edward said. “Until your grandma finds your pillows in your bed and comes looking for you.”

  “How did you even get out here, anyway?” Trina asked. “The creek flooded the road.”

  Edward pointed toward the apple trees. “The old path there. Through the cornfields. Goes all the way into town.”

  “We didn’t want anyone to see us,” Charlotte said.

  A secret path. Of course there would be a secret path. There was secret everything in New Royal. How else would the Dare Club’s members have come and gone from Goldenrod without a secret path?

  As the rain started coming down again, the three of them hurried into the dark house. Trina shut the French doors and made sure the lock was secure.

  “I’ll get a light,” she said. She got a match from the kitchen cupboard, lit the wick on the oil lamp, and carried it to the dining room table. The lamp lit up the wall in a semicircle, like a warm, yellow smile.

  “Wait ’til you see all the stuff I have on the house,” Trina said. “I’ll be back in a second.” She left the oil lamp with them and picked up Edward’s flashlight. In its fading beam she made her way to the library where she kept the photo album and Mr. Kinghorn’s scrapbook and brought them to the dining room table.

  Edward opened up the album and flipped through the pages. “Look, there’s Toby,” he said.

  Trina pointed at the picture. “Look what he’s chasing.”

  “The ball,” Edward said. “In the East Garden.”

  “That’s creepy,” Charlotte said as she unfolded a newspaper clipping. A newspaper clipping Trina had somehow missed. “Listen to this: The annual Harvest Moon Masquerade Ball will be held at Goldenrod Saturday evening, the seventh of October. Mr. and Mrs. Roy request that guests dress as their favorite literary characters in honor of the new library.”

  “What’s a harvest moon?” Trina asked.

  “It’s a full moon . . . at harvest time . . . when the corn is ready.” Edward looked up from the photos. “This year it’s the last week of September. Duh. Everybody knows that.”

  “You mean, everybody who isn’t a city kid,” Charlotte said with a sneer, although it was a friendlier sneer than usual.

  “Look,” Trina said, reaching in front of Edward to turn the page of the photo album. “From here on, all the pages are blank.”

  “Why?” Edward asked.

  “Because Annie died,” Trina said.

  “That’s sad,” Charlotte said, just as footsteps sounded on the porch. Charlotte and Edward didn’t move, but Trina headed instantly for the foyer, wondering why she hadn’t seen headlights coming though the cornfield. When the front door pushed open, her dad stepped in. Wide-eyed and covered in mud, he was squeezing her baseball cap so tightly water dripped on the floor. Trina touched her head, trying to remember where she would have lost her hat.

  As soon as he saw her, his frantic look changed to a look of tremendous relief. He rushed to Trina and lifted her off the floor, nearly crushing her with his muddy hug as he twirled her around the room. “Thank God you’re okay,” he said. “Thank God.” Trina could hear the worry in his voice, which made her feel guilty again, and his hug felt safe and good. Still, she was glad Charlotte and Edward couldn’t see her all the way from the dining room as her dad twirled her around and around.

  When he finally set her down, he went to the front door and hollered out, “You were right! She’s in here!” Then to Trina, “I drove all the way into town and couldn’t find you anywhere. On my way back, I found Carrie—I mean, Miss Dale—and Miss Kitty stuck in the mud on their way out here. They assured me they hadn’t passed you on the road. I hauled their car out of the mud with the truck and they followed me here, sure that this is where you’d be.”

  Miss Kitty came up the porch steps and stepped across the threshold, c
learly too afraid to go any deeper into the darkened house. She looked nervously around the foyer as if she might need to make a quick getaway. For some reason she was carrying an old flour sack, which seemed to weigh a ton.

  Miss Dale followed, clutching her purse with her good arm. The two of them huddled together under the chandelier in the foyer until Trina’s dad lit the gas sconce on the wall. Then he led them through the parlor and into the dining room.

  Trina was anticipating the moment Miss Kitty would spot Charlotte, when Edward sneezed. Miss Kitty yelped and dropped her flour sack. It clanged so loudly it sounded like a bag full of chains. She reeled around and around, like a scared cat on the lookout, until she recognized Charlotte lurking in the shadows of the dining room.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing way out here on a night like this, Miss Charlotte?” Miss Kitty took a step forward, waggling her finger at Charlotte. “You took your bike out here, didn’t you? In this terrible weather, no less! And you were snooping around, weren’t you? Did you take anything? Because we sure don’t need any more bad luck than what we’ve already got.”

  Charlotte shook her head so hard her red hair flew straight out from her head.

  Miss Kitty put her hands on her hips and huffed. “I thought you went to bed awfully early.” Miss Kitty paused. The shadowy light did nothing to hide the angry look on her face. “You stuffed your bed with pillows, didn’t you?”

  Miss Dale put her arm around Miss Kitty as if to corral her anger. “Charlotte, what your grandma is trying to say is she was worried about you because she did the same thing when she was your age. Aren’t you, Aunt Kitty? That’s all you talked about the whole way out here.”

  When Edward snickered, Miss Kitty pointed her finger at him. “Just because I did it doesn’t mean it’s okay. You understand me?” Miss Kitty glared at him. “Do your parents know you’re out here?” Edward’s snicker disappeared and he shook his head.

  “They weren’t snooping around, Miss Kitty.” The lie came out of nowhere, but Trina couldn’t think of any other way to calm her down.

  “Then tell me what they were doing that they had to sneak out here to do it. Why couldn’t Charlotte come right out and tell me?”

  Trina looked at Charlotte and Edward, then at Miss Dale and Miss Kitty and lastly at her dad, trying to concoct a story to keep Charlotte and Edward, and maybe herself, out of trouble. “Poppo,” she said, “this is Edward. And this is Charlotte.” She looked her dad straight in the face, hoping he would remember. “Charlotte is Miss Kitty’s granddaughter,” she emphasized. “I asked them to come over to help me solve a mystery.”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding, and Trina could tell he was trying to put the pieces together. “Nice to meet you.” He let it sink in for a moment and added, “How about we all sit down so we can have a good talk about what’s going on.”

  Miss Kitty plopped down in one of the folding chairs at the dining room table. She ran her hand across the polished top as though she recognized it, and then said, “A mystery? Really? I’m all ears. And it better be a good one.”

  “Just a minute,” Trina’s dad said. “Let’s get some coffee on and let me wash up a bit.”

  “Do you have any tea?” Miss Dale asked, taking a seat next to Miss Kitty.

  “I can make goldenrod tea,” Trina said, suddenly glad she had picked such a big batch for Augustine’s tea parties.

  “That would be lovely,” Miss Dale said.

  As the rest of the group sat quietly in the dining room, Trina rushed around the kitchen by the light of her dad’s flashlight, and her dad washed up in the bathroom in the dark. She put a big pan of water on the stove to boil and got out six of their new blue coffee cups, six plastic spoons, and the pretty tray, and she arranged a plate of vanilla wafers. She was glad to have a house full of company; that way she didn’t have to talk to her dad about her mom, or about running away, or about their big fight. And the last thing she wanted to do was talk to her dad without talking to Augustine first. She wondered what Augustine would say when she learned Trina had come back home.

  When the water had boiled, her dad made a pot of instant coffee, and Trina made the goldenrod tea. She poured the tea into the new blue teapot, refilled the sugar bowl, and poured milk into a little blue pitcher. Together they carried everything to the dining room. It was almost like having a real party, except Trina and her dad had to stand because there weren’t enough chairs.

  Edward was the first to try the tea with a big slurp. “This is good. It tastes like a dandelion smells.”

  Miss Kitty held her coffee cup with both hands and took a sip. Trina noticed her hands were shaking a little, but her voice was strong when she said, “So, Miss Citrine, let’s hear about this mystery of yours.”

  Trina had so much to tell, she didn’t know where to begin, so she started with day one. She described what had happened with the fireplace flue and the furnace. She told them about finding Augustine and her dollhouse in the secret turret room—although she didn’t mention that Augustine could talk—and finding Augustine’s mother in the drain, and all about finding the album and ball in the attic. She told them about Mr. Kinghorn and the scrapbook and the original house plans, and she told them about Annie Roy dying so young. “I told Edward and Charlotte that the house made strange noises and they could come over any time they wanted to help me figure out why.”

  Charlotte’s eyes were practically bugging out at the story, especially the part about the invitation to come over whenever she wanted, but Edward jumped to his feet and started reenacting the whole scene.

  “We got here and it was pitch-black and we couldn’t see anything,” Edward said, leaving the dining room and gesturing for everyone to come with him. His audience steered clear of the flour sack in the middle of the floor and followed him into the foyer, spellbound. “Something went bump on the stairs and a ball bounced down the steps all by itself and rolled to a stop. Right here.” He stood a few feet away from the bottom step of the staircase.

  “Was it a striped ball?” Trina’s dad asked.

  “Yes,” Charlotte said. “It came down the stairs like someone had pushed it.” She sounded scared all over again and Trina saw her step closer to Miss Kitty.

  “The only strange thing about that ball is that it’s still full of air,” Trina’s dad said. “I found it in the attic and stuck it up in the rafters the first time I went up there. The wind must have dislodged it.”

  Maybe the wind had knocked the ball free and blown open the attic door, but Trina knew there was more to the story. After all, something helped her find the album and Augustine in the attic, and the ball had rolled outside and into the East Garden and stopped right next to Annie’s and Toby’s graves.

  Miss Kitty looked around the foyer as if something might jump out at her. “Where’s the ball now?”

  “Outside!” Edward led the group back into the dining room and pointed through the French doors. “Out there. Right by the graves.”

  “Graves?” Miss Kitty plopped back down in a folding chair as if her legs had given out from under her. “You mean dead bodies are all around us?” Even Miss Dale’s eyes flashed wider than usual.

  “No,” Trina said. “Just Annie’s. And her dog’s.” Trina turned to her dad. “Annie is buried in the East Garden, Poppo. Right where you’re thinking of putting the new septic system.”

  Her dad walked to the French doors and cupped his hands to the glass. He shook his head. “Wow. We’re really lucky you found them when you did. The workmen come next Tuesday, but the graves will have to be moved first.”

  Lucky, Trina thought to herself. There wasn’t a single bit of luck involved. It was all Goldenrod’s doing. Goldenrod had led her right to the graves. She looked around the dimly lit room. Not one thing about Goldenrod scared her anymore, because in that moment Trina knew the answers to her questions. If Goldenrod wasn’t haunted, why would she scare people away? Because she was protecting Annie Roy. And why were Trina and he
r dad allowed to stay? Because Goldenrod needed their help.

  “So Annie Roy is a ghost. And that’s why you hear things in the night,” Miss Kitty said.

  “Yup,” Edward chimed in. “That’s why the house is haunted.”

  Trina’s dad put his hand on Edward’s shoulder. “If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times. There’s no such thing as a haunted house.”

  Right on cue, the downstairs toilet flushed itself. Edward jumped as Miss Kitty gripped the table. Charlotte flung herself into Miss Dale’s arms. “It’s just a leaky valve,” Trina said. She figured Goldenrod was trying to agree with her dad when Miss Kitty spoke up.

  “There are 397 people in this town who think there is such a thing as a haunted house, Mr. Mike. As one of them, I’m not going to take any chances.” She slapped the dining room table. “Charlotte, I have half a mind to ground you ’til the cows come home, but . . .”

  Trina was so afraid of what Miss Kitty might say next, she couldn’t help coming to Charlotte’s rescue. “Wait a minute, Miss Kitty. If you thought Charlotte was home in her bed, why are you here?”

  Miss Dale gulped, but then she smiled at Trina.

  “Because . . . I . . . uh . . .” Miss Kitty looked around the room nervously. She glanced at her flour sack sitting in the middle of the floor and up at Trina. And then she turned to Miss Dale for help.

  “Aunt Kitty and I were talking about all the stories about the house over the years—”

  “And Carrie,” Miss Kitty interrupted, “she got so scared, she decided she couldn’t wait another minute to make amends and bring back something that belongs to this house. Right, Carrie?”

  “Right, Aunt Kitty,” Miss Dale said, winking at Trina. “So I guess I’ll go first.” Miss Kitty helped Miss Dale open her purse, and then Miss Dale reached inside and brought out a bundle of worn cloth tied with a thin white ribbon and laid it on the dining room table. Her pink fingernails peeked from her bandage as she untied the ribbon with both hands. Everyone huddled around her. “My mother gave this to me—”

  “Because her grandmother gave it to your grandmother,” Miss Kitty interjected. “She didn’t steal it, mind you. She found it in the garden when her mother came to dig up a few daisies.” Trina covered her mouth to keep from gasping. Even the flowers had been stolen, but Miss Kitty didn’t seem to realize that as she talked. “Go on now, Carrie. Don’t be so shy,” Miss Kitty said.