The Secret of Goldenrod

by Jane O'Reilly

  Augustine peered at the words and touched the letter Z. The letters were the size of her hand. “What tidings does this letter bring you?”

  “She says, ‘Someday I will show you what the world looks like from way up here.’” Trina turned the postcard around so Augustine could see the picture. “She spends a lot of time in one of those. It’s a hot-air balloon.”

  “Her world is very small, so it will be easy to find her.”

  “Augustine, the real world is very, very big. This is just a picture of a tiny fraction of it. Like the fox is just a picture.”

  Augustine frowned. “Still, you are fortunate, Citrine, to be spared the uncertainty of not knowing where your mother is. You know your mother is in a balloon in the Land of New Zealand. Do you have any notion what a misery it is not knowing?”

  Trina was pretty sure she did have such a notion because she always knew where her mother was not, but she also understood that having a mother who loved to travel had to be better than having your mother lost to you forever. She put the balloon postcard back on the mantel.

  “As I said, Citrine, if you promise to help me, then I will promise to help you, because helping each other is what friends do. Is that understood?”

  Augustine had a way of making everything seem so simple. But more important than that, it felt good to have Augustine call her a friend. “Yes,” Trina said. “It’s more than understood.”

  Augustine clasped her porcelain hands together. “Then let us get started. Where should we begin?”

  Trina had been in every room of the house except for the attic. She had vowed not to go up there, but now she had Augustine to go with her. “We’ll start by looking for your mother and father in the Land of the Attic.”

  The first thing Trina did to prepare for the adventure was swap her flip-flops for tennis shoes. Then she grabbed her flashlight from her backpack. When Trina extended her hand to Augustine, the doll pulled herself into Trina’s palm, but she didn’t stop there. She crawled up Trina’s arm, tickling her to the point of giggling, and settled in the crook of her neck.

  With Augustine clinging to her earlobe, Trina walked down the hall to the attic door and put her hand on the cold brass doorknob. The door creaked as she opened it. “This hinge could use some oil,” she said, thinking how much she sounded like her dad.

  Trina turned on her flashlight and made her way up the narrow staircase one creaky step at a time. The air was stale and musty. “It’s hard to see in this narrow stairway,” she said to Augustine, but all she got in response was a faint little chuckle. “This is no time to laugh, Augustine. How can I look for your mother and father if I can’t see anything?”

  “I am not laughing,” Augustine said directly into Trina’s ear.

  “But you did. I heard you.”

  “I did not.”

  “Then who did?”

  “I did not hear anything,” Augustine said firmly. “You must have imagined it.”

  There is no such thing as a haunted house, Trina began to recite in her head. There is no such thing as a haunted house. When a blast of wind rushed across the rooftop and something scraped the slate shingles, she could hear her dad telling her it was just the wind in the big oak tree.

  At the top of the stairs, Trina made out a pale gray light coming through a curved row of small windows and figured she was at the top of the turret. The wind gusted again, and a hand-like branch of the tree brushed against the glass.

  “Maybe my father is right,” Trina said out loud, trying to stay calm. “Every time I think I hear something scary, there’s a logical explanation. See, it’s just a branch scraping against the window.”

  She glanced down at the windowsill. Dozens of dead flies were tangled in gauzy, dusty spiderwebs—one more sign that all the life had gone out of Goldenrod a long time ago. For a tiny second Trina hoped a prince would never kiss Augustine, or all the dead flies might wake up.

  “Citrine?”

  “Yes?”

  “What is this word, logical?”

  Trina kept her eyes on the floor in front of her while trying to figure out a way to explain the word logical to a doll who talked, which wasn’t the least bit logical in the first place. “It means something makes so much sense you don’t need any other reason for the idea to be true.”

  “What if something makes so much sense the idea is not true?”

  Augustine’s ideas always seemed to send Trina’s mind in circles, so she had to think about that one for a moment. “I guess that works too,” she said.

  Now they were standing under the giant rafters of the attic. The air was hotter than the desert in New Mexico, and the attic floor appeared to be just as endless.

  And dark.

  Trina shined the flashlight in front of her. Thick beams crisscrossed the low ceiling, and rows and rows of black electric wires as thick as ropes ran along the beams, looping and coiling their way to white glass knobs. Her dad was right; it did look like Frankenstein’s lab.

  A hundred years of dust crept up Trina’s nose, and she sneezed so hard that Augustine squealed and slipped from her perch. She grabbed Trina’s hair and dangled like a mountain climber. Trina swept Augustine back to her shoulder before Augustine could fall, and sneezed again.

  “Oh, Citrine! That sound—is it a dragon?” Augustine whispered, crouching desperately in the nape of her neck. “Is that what keeps me from my mother and father?”

  “No, Augustine, there’s no dragon.” Trina would have thought Augustine’s question was funny, except the deep corners where the eaves met the roof could easily hide a dragon. “I sneezed, that’s all,” she said, taking a careful step forward.

  “Sneezed?” Augustine asked.

  Before Trina could answer, something thin and cold brushed against her face. She swatted at it with the flashlight, missed, and then whatever it was reached out and touched her again.

  She frantically swung the flashlight in the air until the beam showed a bare bulb on the ceiling. The wisp of cold was just the light chain. Trina pulled the chain, hoping for more light, but nothing happened.

  “Nope. Nothing’s here,” Trina said, ready to go back downstairs. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Remember,” Augustine whispered in her ear, “no stone unturned.”

  As much as she wanted to, Trina couldn’t turn back. She couldn’t let a three-inch doll be braver than she was. She crept forward, ducking under the rafters, sweeping the flashlight in front of her. She imagined it was the beam of the lighthouse she and her dad had seen on a cliff above Lake Superior, scanning the dark unknown as big as an ocean. Keeping everyone safe.

  And they were safe. Trina saw nothing in the attic except posts and rafters. “Just like I thought, Augustine. There’s nothing up here.”

  Crunch!

  Nothing except for what crunched beneath her shoe.

  Augustine crawled forward on Trina’s shoulder as Trina lifted her shoe from what looked like a dried flower. She picked up the long sprig and twirled it in the flashlight’s beam. Bits and pieces of the petals fell like dust to the attic floor, but slowly she recognized the flattened stalk as an ancient piece of goldenrod.

  “It’s a flower,” Augustine said.

  “Yeah, but it’s been squished.”

  “Did you not step on it?”

  “I mean it was squished long before we—or at least I—got here.”

  Just as she spoke, the wind slammed against the house. Trina quickly turned for the stairs.

  “No, we cannot leave,” protested Augustine. “We have not searched every corner. How can you be sure my mother and father are not here? Perhaps they are lost in this dark Land of the Attic.” Augustine pulled Trina’s hair, forcing her to look up. “Have you looked there? Have you—”

  THUD!

  Thud, thud.

  Something had streaked past Trina’s eyes and stopped at her feet.

  Slowly she pointed the flashlight at the floor. A ball. A red and white striped ball with
stitching on its side like a football. An old leather ball had dropped out of nowhere and landed right in front of her.

  On instinct, Trina gave the ball a good kick and it rolled across the uneven floor until coming to rest in one of the dark corners.

  Trina dragged the words from her mouth. “Where did that ball come from?”

  “From that corner, up there, where I was pointing,” Augustine said cheerfully.

  “But . . . it . . . bounced. Right in front of me,” Trina squeaked.

  “That is what balls do. Unless they are rolling. Is that not logical?”

  “That’s not what I mean, Augustine. Balls don’t just move by themselves.”

  And then.

  From behind her.

  Zaa-huh-zaa-huh.

  “Did you hear that?” Trina asked, afraid to turn around.

  “Is it not the tree branch scraping against the window?”

  Zaa-huh-zaa-huh.

  Trina reached up and clasped her fingers around Augustine and turned around. “There’s no such thing as a haunted house,” she recited as she looked at the attic window.

  The spindly black tree branch outside wasn’t moving.

  “There is too such a thing!” Trina shouted, dropping the flashlight. She hurried down the attic stairs and ran down the hall and into her bedroom where she plastered herself against her closed door as she slid to the floor.

  Safe and sound.

  Outside, her dad’s nail gun gasped and thunked. Eventually the rhythm calmed her and she caught her breath enough to speak. “Augustine,” she said. “You have to tell me . . .” Her voice trembled. “Is Goldenrod haunted?”

  Trina looked down at her right hand which was still clinging to the sprig of goldenrod.

  And when she opened her left hand, bracing for Augustine’s response, her hand was empty.

  Chapter Ten

  Trina stared helplessly at her empty hand. She remembered grabbing Augustine, but she must have dropped her on the way downstairs. She had to go back for her. She had to go back to the attic.

  Alone.

  And without her flashlight.

  She headed back down the hall—afraid to return to the attic and afraid not to—and pulled open the attic door. If she was scared, she could only imagine how much more frightened Augustine was, and that made her take two steps upward into the pitch-black stairwell. Then two more. From the landing above her came a faint glow of light. Trina took two more steps—the flashlight was there, pointed at the wall.

  She picked it up and searched the stairs, but Augustine was nowhere to be found. Trina filled with dread. “Augustine,” she called.

  No answer.

  Slowly she continued up the attic steps. She turned away from the windowsills with the dead flies, ducked under a rafter, and shined the flashlight all around her. There, in the distance, where the roof met the eave, was the ball. Trina froze. But then she saw something glimmer right next to it.

  Augustine?

  She had to keep going.

  She made her way toward the faint glimmer on the floor, keeping one eye on the ball to make sure it didn’t move. The ball remained still, and whatever was next to it was still too. But it didn’t look like Augustine. The closer she got, the bigger the thing got until she could see that it was a large book with shiny gold letters on a very thick cover. The gold letters glimmered.

  Trina bent down and brushed the dust away from the cover, and made out the word Album. More curious than afraid, Trina lifted the cover. On the first page was a black-and-white photograph of a woman holding a baby bundled in blankets. The baby’s face was barely visible, but beneath the picture was written, Little Annie, five days old. Trina felt as if she had just uncovered a buried treasure.

  The album was so heavy she needed both hands to pick it up. She set down her flashlight, lifted the album from the dusty floor, and spotted Augustine in the beam of light, lying on her side.

  “Augustine!” Trina cried.

  But Augustine’s little eyes didn’t open.

  With a sinking feeling, Trina wondered if she had broken the doll when she dropped her. What if she had broken her beyond repair?

  She closed the book, picked up Augustine and laid her and the flashlight on top of it, and slowly navigated her way downstairs into the sunlit hall. Augustine’s eyes fluttered and Trina’s heart lightened.

  “My prince?” Augustine said, barely moving her tiny lips.

  “No, Augustine, it’s just me. Citrine.” Trina was about to explain how she had dropped her as she ran from the attic, was about to apologize for leaving the little doll behind, when Augustine’s lips parted. “I ran, calling and calling for you. I was afraid the dragon got you,” Augustine said weakly.

  “I didn’t hear you, Augustine.”

  “But you came back. You braved the dragon to rescue me, Citrine. You are a true friend.” Augustine’s eyes fluttered shut again.

  “Oh, Augustine,” Trina said, tears filling her eyes.

  She carried the book and Augustine downstairs, as far away from the scary attic as she could get, and set them on the dining room table, side by side.

  “I have a surprise for you,” Trina said. “A book you might like very, very much.”

  “Is it a storybook?” the little doll asked, sitting up unsteadily.

  “Kind of,” Trina said, dusting off the album’s cover with the hem of her T-shirt. “I think it tells the story of the family who once lived here.”

  Augustine’s little mouth eased into a smile. “A story would be wonderful, Citrine.”

  Trina propped up the album so Augustine could see the pictures as she turned the pages. The first few pages were filled with pictures of Annie as a baby, wearing lacy dresses and bonnets, but Trina could tell Augustine wasn’t very interested. “There are no words,” Augustine said. “I would like to hear a different story.” She ducked under Trina’s hand and wandered the top of the dining room table.

  Then Trina turned the page to a very large photograph of a man and a woman standing on the porch at Goldenrod. The woman wore a straight dress with a ruffle that fell just above her ankles, and a big brimmed hat. She had on long gloves and carried a frilly umbrella that matched her dress. The man looked much older than the woman. He had a black mustache and wore a round black hat and a black suit. And he carried a cane. Between them stood a little girl whose long blonde hair was pinned back with a large white bow. She wore a pretty white dress and looked a lot like Augustine. She was smiling at the camera. The caption beneath the picture read, Welcoming home our dear Papa.

  “But, Augustine, this is the story of Annie Roy,” Trina said.

  Augustine turned around, her little feet pitter-pattering as fast as they could, until she crawled back under Trina’s arm. “My Annie?” With a hopeful look, Augustine placed her tiny fingertips on Annie’s cheek. “Annie? Have you come back to me?”

  “She can’t hear you, Augustine. What you see is just a picture.”

  “Does she live in a book now?” asked the puzzled little doll. “Is that why she is gone?” Trina ached with the truth.

  “No, Augustine. She does not live in a book.”

  “Did she grow up, Citrine? Did she grow up and go away?” Augustine turned to Trina with a look of despair. “Will she ever come back to me?”

  Trina’s heart was crumbling with every question. As much as she didn’t want to tell Augustine the truth, she knew she couldn’t lie to her. “No, Augustine, Annie never had a chance to grow up.” Trina shook her head, struggling with the words. “Annie died. A long time ago.”

  “Died? Is that all?” Augustine’s worried little face relaxed. “Then a prince must kiss her and wake her up.”

  A huge lump caught in Trina’s throat. “No, Augustine, there’s a big difference between sleeping and dying. Dying means you never wake up. It means . . . it means Annie is lost to you forever.”

  Augustine’s whole little body trembled. “Forever?”

  “Forever,”
Trina said.

  Augustine collapsed in a sad little heap.

  Trina’s mind raced as she tried to think of something to make Augustine feel better. “But at least you have memories.”

  Augustine lifted her head. “Memories? Please tell me, what are memories?”

  “Memories are like stories,” Trina said. “But they are true stories. They’re not made up.”

  Augustine smiled. “Stories have happy endings.”

  “Some stories do,” Trina said.

  Augustine reached out and touched Annie’s face again. “I remember when Annie went away. The house was very still. Annie’s mother put me to bed and she put my house away. She did not read to us ever again. And then it became very, very dark and quiet and I went to sleep for a very long time.”

  Augustine placed her hand where her heart would be. “I feel broken, Citrine. I do not like this story. Could you please tell me a different story about Annie?”

  “I wish I could, Augustine, but Annie’s story isn’t a fairy tale. If I change the ending, it won’t be true.”

  “All stories are true, Citrine. You simply have to believe them.”

  “But,” Trina started to say until she realized she was trying to make Augustine understand something that wouldn’t make any difference in her little world. There was nothing wrong in letting Augustine believe whatever she needed to believe to make her happy.

  “Please, Citrine, read me a different story.” With all her might, Augustine tried to close the photo album, but ended up turning to another page: a photo of Annie and a small spotted dog. And a ball. A striped ball. The same ball that was in the attic. The caption read, Annie and Toby playing in the East Garden.

  “I think you’re right, Augustine.” Trina picked up the doll and then she shut the album so hard dust flew. “We should definitely read a different book.”

  “Could you please read to me until nightfall?”

  Trina glanced out the window. Nightfall was hours away, but after such a difficult day, Trina knew she owed it to Augustine to read to her as long as she wanted. “Yes, I will,” she said.

  She carried Augustine to the library, pulled Aesop’s Fables from the shelf and climbed into the big rocking chair, leaning against one arm of the square chair with her feet hanging over the other and Augustine sitting on her chest. But Trina couldn’t get comfortable. She couldn’t get the striped ball out of her head. Or the photo album. Or the idea that she found the ball, the album, and Augustine together in one corner of the attic.