The Mapmaker and the Ghost(24)

At that moment a tall, dark-haired woman walked into the den. She was wearing a beige short-sleeved blouse and a shapeless brown skirt: teacher clothes, Spitbubble thought, even though it was still summer vacation and she wouldn’t be back in the classroom for a few weeks yet.

“How was your day, Stannie?” she asked her son.

“Good, Ma,” he said as he counted out the money one more time to make sure that Barnes hadn’t shortchanged him.

The woman walked over and squinted at what he was doing. “Another good garage sale find?”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

The woman chuckled as she patted Spitbubble on the head. “Oh, Stan. You have such a head for business. Lord knows how you spot these things. Who are all these stupid people selling their valuables in garage sales left and right?!”

“Well, you know what they say, Ma. One man’s junk is another man’s treasure,” Spitbubble answered.

The woman giggled and beamed at her son. “They sure do. You’re going to save yourself so much money for college, Stannie.”

“Mmmm.” Spitbubble smiled back, all the while staring at the purple bags under his mother’s eyes and inwardly swearing that he’d never fall to the same fate as her, looking old and tired while trying to earn an honest living. An honest living was for chumps and lame-os; Barnes knew that and so did he. Instead, Spitbubble was going to make enough money to be able to skip college and do whatever he wanted. He was determined to make adulthood fun.

All he had to do was get Brains to rig up the lair for heat and electricity, and then those hot springs would create the perfect natural spa for people like his mother. Tired, stressed-out adults who would pay a lot of money for a little bit of relaxation. A close-by getaway for when you don’t have time to get away. Or something like that. He’d have to work on the slogan. Oh, and getting those kids out of the forest by the time he was ready to open the spa. Though it shouldn’t be too hard to anonymously tip off the cops about a bunch of orphaned and runaway kids hiding out in the forest.

“What do you want for dinner? Is meatloaf okay?” his mother asked, bringing him back—for the moment—to his present-day situation.

“Yum,” Stan Barbroff said.





17

TWO MORAMS ARE BETTER THAN ONE


Sweet, thought Lint to himself as he threw his lint ball on the floor and watched it bounce high. This was his sixty-fourth lint creation and the best of them all. Building the lint around a rubber ball had been a stroke of genius and, most importantly, he had come up with the idea completely on his own. Lint wasn’t stupid, but he knew enough to know that the rest of the kids thought he was pretty stupid. His father and his six brothers and sisters wouldn’t argue against it either—that is, if they were to ever bother thinking about him at all. He had now slept in the cavern, away from home, for over a whole week straight and no one had come looking for him. For the tiniest, most fleeting second, he allowed himself to wonder, if his mother had been around, whether she would have realized he was missing. But then he bounced the lint ball particularly high and let his pride in his own handiwork drive that thought right out.

Something silver came whirring at Lint’s ball just then and knocked it out of its perfect bounce trail. Lint looked up to see two more silver things flying toward him. He ducked just in time.

“Whoops,” No-Bone yelled from the top of the staircase.

Lint grunted and looked down to see what had nearly blinded him. It was three chocolate protein bars. His favorite kind, actually. He forgot about the near blindness and picked them up.

“Those are for the Morams,” No-Bone yelled back.

“Why?”

“Because Brains said we can’t let them starve, man. Just give it to them, okay?”

Lint stared down at the protein bars, eyebrows furrowed. They were his contribution to the group’s food supply.

“We’re leaving for a little while,” No-Bone continued. “Need privacy to talk through some things. Brains said be careful with the prisoners.”

Lint smirked as he pointed behind him. “Them? What’re they gonna do, tremble to death?” He chuckled at his own cleverness.

“Yeah, yeah. Just watch ’em, okay?” No-Bone disappeared from the top of the stairs, and Lint could hear him and the others leaving the cavern.

He stared down at the three bars. He immediately pocketed one, and was about to turn around to give his prisoners the other two. But then he came to his senses. Honestly, the two of them probably couldn’t even finish one whole bar between them, let alone two. No point in wasting perfectly good food that had personally cost him a decent amount of effort.

He tore one open and took an enormous bite that nearly finished off the entire thing. With the foil-wrapped stub in his hand, he turned around to give Mold-and-rot and her brother the other bar that he had so generously spared for them.

Except that when he turned around, there was no Mold-and-rot and her brother—there was just the girl, asleep in an exhausted pile in the middle of the room, her head resting on the two backpacks that were against a small ledge in one of the walls.

“What the …,” Lint started. Where was the boy?

“Hey! Hey!” he started to shout, waving the sticky chocolate stub around frantically.

Goldenrod stirred and suddenly woke with a start.