The Secret of Goldenrod Read online

  They carried in Trina’s mattress first. As they crossed the foyer, headed for the staircase, Trina let go and the mattress fell to the floor. “I can’t make it another step, Poppo. Besides, we’ll boil to death if we sleep upstairs.”

  “Then we’ll sleep in the parlor until I can get the boards off the windows and the screens on,” he said. They pushed Trina’s mattress into the parlor and made a second trip for his mattress. Just as they let it fall to the floor, there was a loud clang from the parlor fireplace, followed by a billowing black cloud.

  “What’s that?” Trina squawked, jumping next to her dad.

  “Soot,” he said. “The flue must have fallen closed.”

  “But how does a flue close by itself?”

  Her dad wiped his brow. “Well, it’s either a negative pressure, or . . .” With a sly grin, he scooped her up and twirled her in the air. “Tiny flue fairies live in the chimney, and when they get too hot . . .”

  “Poppo, put me down,” she said, but for the moment she liked being safe in his arms.

  When he set her on the floor, the front door blew shut and the house was dark again.

  And Trina went back to being scared.

  Her dad walked quickly to the door and Trina followed close behind. He twisted the knob and fiddled with the lock, but it wouldn’t open. “Great, one more thing I have to fix.”

  “Let me try,” Trina said. She turned the knob and the door opened easily.

  “Looks like you have the magic touch,” her dad said. “Maybe we should just prop it open.”

  “I did prop it open,” Trina muttered, a little frightened by the idea that she had a magic touch. She looked out at the cornstalks and the goldenrod. Everything was as still as could be. And then she spotted her handy tree branch lying on the bottom step. “How in the world does a door blow shut when it’s not even windy?”

  Her dad folded his arms and thought for a moment. “Imagine if you hadn’t opened your mouth in a hundred years. You might get used to keeping it shut,” he said.

  “If I hadn’t opened my mouth for a hundred years, I think I’d have a lot to say.”

  “So, you think Goldenrod’s trying to tell us something, do you?”

  She sure did. Goldenrod was telling them she was a haunted house. But Trina knew better than to say that out loud to her dad, so she just shrugged.

  Trina spent the next couple of hours helping her dad. They unloaded the rest of the wood and set up the power tools—mostly in the parlor. “This is the fanciest workroom I’ve ever had,” her dad said. And then she held the tape measure as he mapped out the porch and made more notes.

  When it was dinnertime, she lit one of the giant burners on the big black stove. It popped and smoked with burning dust before the flame settled into a perfect blue ring beneath the spaghetti pot.

  “What’s for dinner?” her dad said, coming into the kitchen, carrying his oilcan and a screwdriver. “Let me guess. Sushi.”

  “Yup,” Trina said. “And chocolate mousse for dessert.”

  He worked on the squeaky swinging doors while the spaghetti boiled. When it was done, Trina heaped two piles of sticky spaghetti onto paper plates and carried them one at a time to the card table in the dining room. “Oops, I forgot the chopsticks.” She hurried back to the kitchen and returned with a pair of forks and a jar of spaghetti sauce, which she poured cold onto each steaming mound of spaghetti.

  With a mouth full of spaghetti and a twinkle in his eye, her dad announced, “First dinner on a new project. You know what that means. It’s time to play . . .”

  “Don’t Remind Me!” Trina spluttered with her mouth so full of spaghetti her dad beat her to the first question.

  “Worst dinner. Go!”

  Trina swallowed fast. “The barbecued snake in the desert. Worst motel. Go!”

  “The pink one in Wisconsin where our key unlocked all the doors. Funniest moment. Go!” He slurped up a few strands of spaghetti.

  This one took Trina a minute. Poppo worked so hard there hadn’t been a lot of funny moments. At least not lately. She put a big forkful of spaghetti in her mouth, thinking. “Umm . . .”

  “Ding, ding, ding!” he said, tapping his plastic cup with his plastic fork. “Five seconds remain. Five, four, three—”

  “When we went to the beach in Oregon and you, you . . .” Trina started to laugh. “You ran and got the lifeguard to rescue a dog that was swimming too deep in the waves and . . . and it turned out to be a sea lion.” Now Trina was laughing so hard she was afraid spaghetti would shoot out her nose.

  “And who told me to run for the lifeguard?”

  “I did, but I already knew it wasn’t a dog.” She batted her eyes at him.

  He stopped twisting his spaghetti around his fork and looked up. “You what?”

  “Worst night,” Trina said, quickly resuming the game and changing the subject. “Go!”

  Her dad answered this one a little sadly. “When we got snowed in up in Minnesota. I thought they’d never dig us out. Best night. Go!”

  “When we got snowed in up in Minnesota.” Trina smiled, watching her dad eat, waiting for him to respond.

  He looked up, confused.

  “It was the best night, Poppo, because we had popcorn and cocoa for dinner and played Crazy Eights by the lantern in front of the fire. It was the best night ever.” And it really had been the best night, waiting out the storm together.

  “Ding, ding, ding,” her dad said, tapping his plastic cup again. “Trina wins by a landslide.” Then he pushed his plate to the center of the card table and it left a trail of tomato sauce.

  “You know, Poppo, if we’re going to be here a whole year, maybe we should get a few real plates and stop wasting paper.”

  “Good idea,” he said. He pulled out his notebook and scribbled as he talked. “I’ll put it on the list for tomorrow. Along with building a new porch, rewiring the house—you should see the attic; it looks like Frankenstein’s lab up there—and then I’ll put in a new septic system.” He tapped the pencil against his chin. “Oh, yeah, and I need to get the screens on the windows.” With a heavy sigh he said, “There’s only one way to cope with all that work.”

  “How?” Trina asked.

  “With a good night’s sleep. It’s time for me to hit the hay. I’ll get the sleeping bags from the truck if you wash all the dishes,” he said with a smile.

  Sleeping in the parlor was like sleeping in an enormous cavern. The tiniest noises sounded as if they were blown through bullhorns. And if the impossible heat didn’t wake Trina up every little while, her dad’s snoring did. When he started to sound like his chain saw, she stopped trying to sleep at all.

  She lay there, blearily staring up at the ceiling. Enough moonlight trickled in between cracks of the boards covering the bay window to make the chandelier twinkle like a handful of stars in a black sky. It made her homesick for Portland. Worst project, go, she thought to herself. Goldenrod, hands down. Six bedrooms, four fireplaces, and a library. So what? It would be nothing but work. And loneliness. Six bedrooms and one turret room.

  Trina sat up, alert and wide-awake now. Where was the door to the turret room?

  Ssss . . .

  “What, Poppo?” She looked over at him, but he wasn’t talking. He wasn’t even snoring.

  Ssss-konk. Ssss-konk. Ssss—

  “Poppo!” she shouted. “Poppo, there’s someone in the house!”

  All he did was roll over.

  Konk.

  Trina’s heart sputtered. What if the noise was coming from the turret room?

  “Poppo,” she hollered, crawling off her mattress to tug on his arm.

  This time he sat bolt upright. “What? What is it?”

  “There’s someone in the house!”

  They sat there in silence. Listening.

  “I don’t hear anything,” he finally said. He was right. All Trina could hear now was her own pounding heart. “What did it sound like?”

  “Like someon
e whispering. Or breathing. I don’t know.”

  “I’m sure it’s just the tree scraping against the roof,” he said, lying back on his pillow. “Go back to sleep. Long day ahead.”

  Just the tree. Just the tree, Trina repeated silently to herself, trying to calm down. And then, all of a sudden, a squeal came from the back of the house, followed by a rumbling in the walls. “You heard that, didn’t you, Poppo?”

  “Yes,” he said, sounding frustrated. “It’s the toilet flushing.”

  “By . . . itself?” Trina squeaked.

  “Probably a leaky valve.”

  “Can you check? Please?” She wanted to believe her dad but she couldn’t. Not if she would be lying awake listening for strange noises while he snored the night away. He turned on his flashlight and dragged himself sleepily out of the room, his footsteps gradually fading away. She waited, alone in the dark, hugging her pillow as tightly as she could.

  Minutes went by. Or maybe hours. Maybe she should have followed him. What if something had happened? Just when she couldn’t take another second of waiting, she heard his footsteps padding back through the dining room and into the parlor. “It’s a slow leak in a valve, just like I thought,” he said. “Likely to happen again when it fills up.” He crawled back into bed. “I’ll look into it in the morning.”

  Trina lay back down.

  Ssss—

  She pulled her pillow over her head and whispered, “There is no such thing as a haunted house. There is no such thing as a haunted house.” She repeated her dad’s words over and over until she eventually fell asleep.

  The next thing Trina knew, she was wide awake again, but this time the air smelled like burned toast and she could hardly breathe. She sat up quickly. A smoky haze swirled around her. “Poppo,” she choked. “Something’s burning!” She jumped to her feet. “Poppo, wake up! The house is on fire!”

  Her dad was awake in an instant. “Get out! Hurry!”

  He flung open the front door and Trina raced down the steps into the sunshine, but when she turned around, her dad wasn’t there. “Poppo?” she hollered. He didn’t answer, but as she ran back into the house, she could hear him laughing. “Poppo?”

  “Nothing’s burning,” he called. “It’s just steam.”

  “Steam?” Trina asked, following her dad’s voice across the hazy foyer one shaky step at a time.

  “Yup,” he said, coming out of the library. “Someone must have bumped the thermostat and the furnace kicked on. Any open valve on a radiator will steam like a sauna. I’d say you found your ghost.”

  “My ghost?” Trina’s skin crawled. “Poppo, what do you mean?”

  “All I’m saying is the furnace probably caused the noise you heard in the night. C’mon. Let’s get cleaned up and go get breakfast in town.”

  “Okay,” Trina said, but she was still a little wary as she headed upstairs. Every other time something scary happened, her dad had an ordinary explanation, but who bumped the thermostat? She brushed her teeth in record time and then chose her purple Santa Fe T-shirt and her Diamondbacks cap to wear into town.

  As she headed back downstairs, she remembered the turret room. She paused to count the doors to the rooms on her fingers. Five on one hand, four on the other. Nine doors. And she had opened every one of them.

  What if Poppo was right? What if there was a ghost? And what if the ghost lived in the turret room? Wherever it was.

  Chapter Three

  “Is it a long way into town?” Trina asked as they hit rut after rut on the dirt road that cut through the cornfield.

  “Six point four miles. I clocked it,” her dad said as they stopped across from the big red barn. “Of course, that’s once you get to this point.” He looked in both directions before taking a left-hand turn onto the two-lane road toward town.

  As Trina twisted in her seat, watching for a stir of dust that meant they weren’t the only people left on Earth, a terrible thought struck her. “Poppo, do you think the school bus comes way out here?”

  “Maybe,” he said, turning on the radio to nothing but static. “But I can drive you if it doesn’t.”

  “You sent the school my records, right?” Trina said. After too long a pause, Trina turned to stare at her dad. “Poppo, did you forget to register me?” Again, she wanted to say, only this time it would be a lot worse if he forgot because this was the one chance she had to be there for the first day of school, just like all the other kids.

  “Of course not,” he said, switching off the radio. “I just figured we’d take care of it when we got here.”

  Trina folded her arms and scowled. “No you didn’t. You forgot. You always forget everything.” She stamped the floor with both feet and turned her head to the window.

  “I tell you what,” he said calmly, as if she hadn’t just acted like a baby. “After breakfast we’ll get you registered and then we’ll go buy school supplies at Hank’s. And if you’re a really good girl, I’ll get you another sucker.”

  He was trying to make her smile, but it wasn’t working this time. “I’m not a little girl,” she said. “You have to take me seriously. You have to think about my feelings sometimes.”

  He didn’t say anything, but Trina wasn’t surprised. He was really good at not talking about things that made him feel bad. She looked out the window again, just as they passed a large green sign that read:

  Welcome to New Royal

  Population 397

  Trina would have slipped off her seat if it hadn’t been for her seat belt. “Three hundred ninety-seven people? That’s it? Poppo, my last school was bigger than that!” Why hadn’t he warned her that the town was so small? “Do they even have a school?”

  “Of course they have a school,” he said, fiddling with the radio again.

  They turned off the road, following a handmade sign with an arrow that said, “Main Street This Way,” and drove toward a little park in the center of town. The park had a bandstand and ornate benches and drinking fountains, but there wasn’t a single person in sight. “It looks like a ghost town,” Trina said.

  “Nah. It’s a cute little town,” her dad said. “I’ll give you a tour.”

  Her dad turned right, driving past Al’s Antiques and Vacuum Repair that shared the block with Shegstad’s Funeral Home, Three Generations Taking Care of Your Loved Ones, Gerald Shegstad, Director.

  Shegstad. The name was familiar. “Hey,” Trina said. “Isn’t it kind of weird that the funeral director is the one who wrote you the letter about Goldenrod?”

  Her dad shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes funeral directors have a lot of family records.”

  “I think it’s weird,” she said. They turned another corner of the square and passed the surprisingly majestic First National Bank of New Royal and an elegant post office. Hank’s Tool and Lumber took up most of the next block. One more turn put them in front of the red brick New Royal Public Library with white columns and lots of steps. It sat on a block all by itself.

  “Sure are a lot of big buildings for such a small town,” Trina said. “That’s weird, too.”

  “I’m guessing New Royal was an important town in its day. Probably the only town for miles.”

  They pulled up in front of the Cat’s Meow Diner, a low, white building badly in need of paint. It sat in the middle of a block with the New Royal City Hall on one side and an old-fashioned gas station with one pump on the other. Bolted to the window frame above a flower box filled with dried-up flowers was a rusty dinner bell. Homemade Breakfast Served All Day was painted on the window in peeling blue paint, surrounded by blinking white lights. Most of the lights had burned out.

  “How about this place?” her dad said cheerfully.

  “I hear it’s the best place in town,” Trina said, certain it was the only place in town.

  Dangling tin cat cutouts clinked overhead as Trina pushed open the café door. She counted six stools, five tables, four booths, and one jukebox in the whole restaurant, and the jukebox was out o
f order. Except for two men in a corner booth and a plump gray-haired waitress carrying a dirty dish in each hand, the place was empty.

  “Seat yourselves,” the waitress said in a hoarse voice, her ponytail bobbing as she went by. “I need a chance to clean up some after the rush.” Then she disappeared behind a set of swinging doors.

  Rush? Trina wondered. When her dad rolled his eyes she knew he was thinking the same thing. They both squelched giggles as they sat down at the counter on stools covered with cracked black plastic.

  The menu was an old school chalkboard mounted above an enormous griddle: eggs every which way, waffles, and mile-high pancakes with real maple syrup. On the end of the counter was a plastic dessert case with chocolate chip cookies and mammoth brownies for fifty cents each. The place was run-down, but the food sounded delicious.

  Dishes clattered somewhere in a sink, and then the waitress pushed back through the swinging doors. She gave them the once-over. “You folks just passing through?”

  “Nope,” her dad said.

  “We live here,” Trina chimed in, making out the name Miss Kitty on her waitress badge.

  “Live here? Then you must be brand-spanking new because I know everybody in town.” Miss Kitty grabbed a coffeepot from a hot plate next to the griddle and filled Trina’s dad’s cup with steaming black coffee. When Trina held up her cup, Miss Kitty pursed her lips and shook her head.

  “We’re living out at Goldenrod,” Trina’s dad said.

  Trina swore that Miss Kitty’s pink cheeks paled by several shades.

  “You didn’t say Goldenrod, did you?” Miss Kitty said, squinting suspiciously.

  “Sure did.” Her dad poured sugar into his teaspoon until it spilled over its rim and into his coffee.

  Trina nodded.

  “Hear that, boys?” Miss Kitty’s hand trembled as she set the coffeepot down with a clank. “They say they’re living in Goldenrod.”

  Both men snorted. “That’s a good one,” the older man scoffed.

  “Not for long,” the younger one said, and they snorted again.

  “That’s right,” said Miss Kitty. “Nobody can live out there. The old place is haunted.”