“He wants this house back,” whispered the woman, still clinging to Olive’s hand. “He needs it. The cats are helping him.” She looked at Olive through black irises. “They want to get rid of you.”
“Why?” Olive choked out. “Why does he need the house?”
“Go look at the stones,” said the old man. “At the bottom.”
“Don’t trust the cats,” hissed the woman in the lacy nightgown, her eyes glittering pools in a face of paint. “Believe us. Go now, while you might still save yourself. Go!”
A sudden wind lashed Olive’s face, blowing her hair into her eyes. She could hear the shush of moving air, and the thick rustle of leaves on towering trees. She squinted at the street. Again it was deserted, its porches and windows empty, the houses as lifeless as they had seemed before.
Olive raced back to the picture frame, her feet barely touching the ground. Horatio had said the McMartins’ old stone house wasn’t
necessary
in this version of Linden Street. Now Olive realized what the cat had meant. This painting was just a place to hold the people Aldous McMartin had captured, like moths in a specimen jar. Olive ran until the painted world around her became like the inside of her mind: a foggy blur streaked with shadows, where things she couldn’t see lurked and waited, suddenly rearing into the light when she had already gotten too close.
The upstairs hallway, which had seemed so dark and menacing before, looked brightly lit and comfortingly warm when Olive finally lurched through the frame. She stood staring at the painting of Linden Street for a while, listening to the thundering of her heart, wondering if she really did want to know what the people in the painting were talking about.
She took a deep breath.
Of course she did.
Olive had heard the old saying about curiosity killing the cat. It never quite made sense to her, even when she asked her mother to explain it. “It means that curiosity can lead to danger if we take too many risks,” Mrs. Dunwoody had said. “But, of course, if it wasn’t for curiosity, we wouldn’t take the risks that lead to wonderful discoveries. Roald Amundsen would never have explored the North and South poles. Marie and Pierre Curie wouldn’t have done their work with radiation. We would have no penicillin, no polio vaccine . . .” Mrs. Dunwoody had leaped to her feet and begun waving her arms. “Benjamin Franklin would certainly never have flown his kite in a lightning storm! It’s
curiosity
that is the mother of invention!”
Olive had to agree with her mother. What could you learn without curiosity, anyway? Only the stuff they made you study in school. She took another deep breath and squared her shoulders. She needed to look at the stones. The stones at the bottom. The stones that the builders must have meant all along.
Moments later, she stood at the top of the basement stairs, armed with one flashlight in her hand and another in her pocket, for backup. She took a last, shaky breath. This was no time to let fear carry her away. The air became colder and denser with each downward step, as if she were wading into a dark, chilly lake. She wasn’t going to turn on the lights. She hoped to avoid being noticed by Leopold for as long as she could, and she was sure that he was down there, waiting, his huge black body melding with the shadows.
Olive groped through the darkness, feeling for the basement wall. Her fingertips scraped the stones. She got down on her knees and ran her palms carefully over their surface, following the wall to the corner, then turning, running her hands over the next wall, as high and low as she could reach.
The stones were almost as cold as if they had been kept in a refrigerator, and they were jumbled on top of each other in all different shapes and sizes. She pushed against them, but the walls were solid. There were no cracks, no loose stones to pull out. Olive ran her hand over them in a long, slow arc.
There
. She felt something. A dent in the stone—and then another dent, and another, thin and blunted in places, like something that had been rubbed away. She turned on the flashlight.
In the small white blotch of light, a letter stood out against the gray stone. It was faint, and worn a little bit around the edges, but it was definitely there, and it was definitely real. Olive ran her finger over its carved branches. It was a letter
M
.
Shaking a sticky bit of old cobweb off of her fingers, Olive scanned the stones nearby. To the right, almost in the basement’s corner, she spotted what looked like another carving. She had to scrunch down until she was nearly on her stomach to get a good look. This one wasn’t a letter. This carving was a shape. Olive rubbed away a streak of dirt, focused the flashlight, and squinted hard. On the mottled gray stone was the outline of a skull. Its empty eyes stared back at Olive.
Her hands shook. A funny feeling, like static electricity, ran down her back and pooled in her stomach. Olive scrambled on her hands and knees along the wall, looking at the stones, and finally wedged herself behind the corner of the washing machine. Yes, there were more carvings in this corner. Jagged loops and swirls that might once have been letters arced above a tiny willow tree, half of its boughs worn away by time. On the intersecting wall, Olive found another letter
M
. This one was attached to a small
c
. The rest of the word was erased completely, but Olive knew what it must have said. Below the
M
and the
c
was a number: 17-something. Olive couldn’t make it out. The next digit might have been a 3 or an 8, but she couldn’t be sure.
With the flashlight clamped between her jaw and her shoulder, Olive sidled to her left, away from the washer and dryer, toward the largest, emptiest part of the basement. She ran her hands desperately along the wall, brushing away cobwebs and flakes of stale plaster and paint. Halfway along, she found another marking cut into the stone. This one seemed less worn, perhaps because it had been partly covered. Olive scratched away the last bits of dirt and paint.
Here Lies Alfred McMartin
, said the carving.
Memento Mori. 1623.
Olive stopped breathing. These were gravestones. And if they were gravestones . . .
where were the graves
?
The back of her neck began to prickle. She turned slowly to her left and looked over her shoulder. Two glowing green eyes stared back.
She tilted the flashlight. The outline of a huge black cat, just inches away, glinted in its beam.
“Leopold?” she whispered.
The cat didn’t answer.
“Leopold,” said Olive as another prickly wave raced up her neck and into her scalp, “how old
is
this house?”
The black outline that was Leopold made a low growling sound. “I can’t tell you that, miss.”
“Leopold . . .” Olive whispered, not sure that she wanted to ask the next question, “. . . how old are
you
?”
The cat said nothing. His green eyes didn’t blink. Olive’s words wavered, unanswered, in the cold air.
The warning from Morton’s neighbors spilled through Olive’s mind like a river of ink, dying everything a new color. She had been fooled. Tricked. Manipulated by three furry demons guarding a house built on gravestones. And here she was, alone with them. For the
whole night
.
Olive thundered up the basement stairs so fast that she fell forward and climbed half the flight on all fours. Between her scrambling feet, she caught a last glimpse of Leopold’s glowing eyes, still watching her from the dark corner.
15
O
LIVE SLAMMED THE basement door behind her and skidded along the hallway, whooshing around the banister at the bottom of the staircase. “Annabelle!” she shouted, even though she knew Annabelle probably couldn’t hear her. “Annabelle!” Olive pounded up the steps, wishing her legs were long enough to take them two at a time. There were no cats to be seen in the upstairs hall, but Olive turned on every light anyway, telling herself that tonight she wasn’t going to worry about wasting electricity. She would leave every light in the whole house burning if she felt like it.
The violet room was dim and silent. A bit of sunlight, fading behind the thick trees, slipped in through the lace curtains. Olive flipped on the lights and managed to put on the spectacles, in spite of her shaking hands.
In the portrait above the dresser, Annabelle stirred with surprise, hurriedly wiping something away from her cheek.
“Annabelle?” panted Olive. “Can I come in? It’s kind of an emergency.”
“Of course, Olive,” said Annabelle. “It’s been weeks since I’ve seen you. I’ve been hoping you would come.”
Before Annabelle finished speaking, Olive had scrambled up onto the dresser and landed on the pillowy couch inside the portrait.
Annabelle sat at the tea table, dabbing at her eyes with a piece of lace that looked much more decorative than absorbent. “Would you care for a cup of tea?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” said Olive. “Annabelle, I have to ask you something. But it might sound . . . weird.”
Annabelle’s eyebrows went up in concern. “You may ask me anything, Olive.”
“Well,” said Olive, tugging at a purple tassel in the mound of pillows, “you know about this house. So maybe you know about . . . the cats?”
Annabelle tilted her head the tiniest bit. “The cats,” she said slowly. “Yes.”
“The people in one of the paintings told me that the cats are . . . that the cats”—Olive swallowed hard—“that the cats are
witches’ familiars
. That they’re evil.
That they’re trying to get rid of my family because they want to get the house back for somebody who used to own it. And it has something to do with the basement. Because . . . because there are gravestones in the basement. Really, really old gravestones.” Olive clutched the tasseled pillow to her chest like a shield. “And my parents are going to be gone for the whole night, and I don’t like Mrs. Nivens, and I don’t know anybody else, and I’m scared.”
Annabelle closed her eyes. Olive watched her closely, holding her breath. Any second now, Annabelle would open her eyes and look down at Olive with a mix of pity and disappointment, and she would say, “Olive, I’m afraid you’ve lost your mind. Now, why don’t you toddle on down to the closest mental hospital?”
Annabelle opened her eyes. She looked down at Olive. Her eyes weren’t full of pity or disappointment. They were circles of honey-colored paint. “Olive,” she said, “I’m afraid that what you’ve heard is true. Those cats are, quite frankly, dangerous. But you can stay with me. You can stay with me just as long as you want to.”
Olive felt so relieved, she thought she might cry. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Annabelle reached out and patted Olive’s hand. Olive tried not to shudder at the chill of Annabelle’s skin. “Sometimes it’s hard to know whom to trust,” Annabelle said softly. “And heaven knows we all make mistakes.” Here Annabelle made a dainty choking sound and pressed her fingertips to her mouth.
“Annabelle, are you—crying?” Olive asked hesitantly, knowing that many people didn’t like to admit it if they were.
Annabelle sighed. “Oh, I’ve been having a bit of a weep, yes. But I’m just being silly.” Then she buried her face very suddenly in her handkerchief.
“What’s wrong?” asked Olive, who thought that grown-ups hardly ever cried—except when they dropped things on their toes, of course, like her father had when they tried to haul the oak hutch up the staircase.
“Oh,” Annabelle sniffled, “I’m just remembering something. Something my grandfather gave me a long, long time ago, and I lost it. He would be so disappointed in me if he knew.”
“Well, where did you last see it?” Olive asked. This was what Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody asked Olive every time she lost something important. In the single summer when Olive had worn a retainer, she found it in the freezer, in one of her slippers, under the bathroom sink, and in the basket at the bottom of the laundry chute, on four separate occasions.
“It was so long ago,” said Annabelle. “I don’t know how I could have lost it. It was the loveliest thing I’d ever been given. And—it’s funny—but I have the feeling that it is still in this house somewhere.”
“What was it?” asked Olive, who was already getting a strange sinking feeling in the bottom of her stomach.
“It was a necklace,” said Annabelle. “A beautiful gold necklace with a filigree pendant. Grandfather had it made especially for me.”
Olive swallowed hard. She could feel the necklace thunking heavily against her chest, inside her shirt. Somehow, she didn’t want to tell Annabelle that she had it. Annabelle might be angry that Olive had put the necklace on in the first place. And Horatio had warned her to keep it hidden—although, of course, she couldn’t trust Horatio anymore. Whatever the reason, a little niggling warning in her brain kept stuffing the truth back into its hiding spot. “Maybe if you take a look around, you’ll remember the last place you had it.”
“Maybe,” said Annabelle slowly, “but that would mean getting out of this portrait.”
“Can you do that?”
“I can if you let me,” said Annabelle, giving Olive a sharp look. “Someone has to let me out. Just like you did with the dog.”