“That is not for me to say, miss,” said the cat. “Besides, you are safer not knowing.”
Olive put her head to one side and considered this for a moment. “What if I want to know anyway?”
The cat blinked. “Look,” he said, dropping his military pose. “If I tell you what’s in there, then we’re in trouble. And I don’t mean just you and me. I mean everybody in this house.”
Olive crouched down on the floor in front of the cat. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
The cat tilted his head. “There might be, someday. But for now . . .” The cat paused, then said sheepishly, “If you wanted to, you could aid the effort by boosting troop morale . . .”
“I would be happy to,” said Olive.
“Oh, good,” said the cat. “Then would you scratch between my ears?”
Olive scratched Leopold’s glossy black head gamely. The cat began to purr, caught himself, and jerked back into his military position. “Your contribution is appreciated, miss,” he said.
From above there came the sound of two car doors slamming.
“My mom and dad are home,” said Olive. “I have to go.”
“Good day, miss.”
“Bye, Leopold.”
Olive watched the glimmer of the cat’s green eyes grow fainter and fainter as she climbed the stairs. Perhaps the trapdoor was what the builders in the painting had meant about “something funny.” But where did the trapdoor go? And if Leopold was guarding it, how would she ever find out? On the top step, Olive switched off the flashlight. The green glimmer disappeared, but Olive knew Leopold was still there, standing guard.
10
F
OR A FEW days, things went on as normal—that is to say, as was normal for the Dunwoody family.
Mr. Dunwoody put the finishing touches on an algorithm he called The Chandelier Conundrum, named after the dusty brass monstrosity that hung over his desk in the library. Mrs. Dunwoody refilled an old prescription for allergy medication, wondering why on earth her cat dander allergies were acting up.
Olive, who would normally have been content painting in a sunny spot in the kitchen, or reading in the library, or digging for buried treasure in the old garden, couldn’t sit still long enough to do anything. She was wary of climbing into the paintings, and she had to be extra careful with her parents around anyway. She wondered what was hidden in the basement, but she still had no way to get Leopold away from the trapdoor. She hadn’t seen Horatio in days, even though she kept hoping for him to turn up. And, worst of all, she still had no idea what to do about Morton. She was stuck.
So Olive flopped around the house. She flopped on couches, she flopped in easy chairs, she flopped on the porch swing, and she flopped on empty beds. She thought and thought and thought until she could feel the neurons in her brain sizzling out like Fourth of July sparklers. But nothing new came to her. If she was trying to put a puzzle together, Olive realized, she was still missing most of the pieces.
“When you want to do something well, proceed methodically,” Mr. Dunwoody always said. That meant: “Take it one step at a time, and don’t skip around just because you feel like it.” Mr. Dunwoody proceeded methodically whether he was fixing the dishwasher or eating a piece of chocolate cake, and things usually turned out all right. Olive decided to try it.
Methodically, she went to the far end of the upstairs hall and proceeded to search every bedroom. She found one of her missing slippers under the bed in the pink room. There were two buttons, a penny, and a bit of gold string on the closet floor in the blue room. There was an old safety pin in the hall, which she found because it poked her in the foot.
She went back to the violet room and rifled through the drawers, looking at the lacy handkerchiefs and buttoned gloves. But this time, when she reached her arm all the way to the back of the narrow drawer, she touched something that didn’t feel at all like a handkerchief or a glove. Olive pulled it into the light. It was a small, worn leather folder, slightly larger than a post-card, with little gold scrolls embossed on the corners.
Olive opened it. Inside, two old black-and-white photographs were stuck to the leather with gold paper tabs. On the left side was a photograph of a youngish couple with round, slightly stupid faces. The woman’s eyes looked like they were slowly taking over her forehead. The man was smirking goofily, like he had just seen someone get hit on the head. On the other side of the folder was a portrait of an older man. He had white hair, and a face carved in ridges that looked like they had grown hard with time. He was thin and rigid, with square shoulders, a square jaw, a sharp nose, and long arms; Olive could see them posed stiffly on the photographer’s chair. The man wasn’t smiling.
Olive had often wondered why people from a long time ago didn’t smile for photographs. These days, everybody knows you’re supposed to smile, or at least say “cheese.” Were people from a hundred years ago all crabby? She had once asked her father about this, but when Mr. Dunwoody started to explain about convex and concave lenses and their properties of reflection, Olive’s mind had run away.
It wasn’t the man’s stern mouth that made him look unfriendly. There was something about his eyes, shadowed by the sharp ledge of his eyebrows. They made him look not just stern, but
menacing
. Olive felt an uncomfortable little twinge shoot down her spine, like a finger running down a row of piano keys. She stuffed the photographs back into the drawer and slammed it.
Olive stared up at the portrait of the dark-haired woman. She looked the same as ever: big-eyed, soft-haired, and pretty, in an understated way. To Olive’s relief, she hadn’t seemed to notice Olive’s silly panic over an antique photograph.
Olive put the spectacles on and looked at the portrait. The dark-haired woman didn’t move. Olive took the spectacles off and looked at it some more. She tilted the spectacles so that they went over just one eye. Nothing. She wiped the spectacles on her T-shirt and put them back on. Still nothing happened.
Olive sighed and leaned on the chest of drawers. It didn’t make sense. She had first noticed Morton flitting through the forest before she had even found the spectacles. But the rest of the painting hadn’t moved—the trees hadn’t shifted in the breeze, dry leaves hadn’t blown across the path—until she had put on the spectacles. Without the spectacles, the other paintings seemed like ordinary, motionless pictures. And here was a painting that had moved once before but that now refused to move at all, with or without the spectacles. “I don’t get it,” she mumbled.
“What don’t you get?”
Olive looked up at the portrait through the spectacles. The woman in the painting had turned her head and was looking down at Olive with an expression of kind concern.
“Did you just talk?” Olive whispered.
“Yes, I did,” said the woman. She gave Olive a sympathetic little smile. “I’m sorry if I’m intruding, but you look so unhappy.”
“I’m not really
unhappy
,” said Olive slowly. “I’m just trying to figure something out. But I can’t tell my parents, because they would think I’m making it all up.”
The woman in the portrait nodded. “It’s always hard to move to a new place. Why don’t you come in here with me, and we’ll have a real visit?”
“Really?” said Olive.
“I’d be delighted to have a guest. Climb right up,” the woman said, smiling.
Olive clambered onto the chest of drawers and leaned into the portrait’s silver frame. She landed with a bounce on a squishy sofa covered with dozens of ornamental pillows, all in different shades of pastels. Long, lacy curtains were draped around the windows, delicate vases full of lilacs and lilies stood on every surface, and elegant collections of seashells and bottles and porcelain rosebuds were scattered everywhere.
In her jeans and sweat socks, Olive felt like she had wandered into the pages of
Little Women
or
Anne of Green Gables,
two books that she liked very much but that she wouldn’t have wanted to live in. She could never have kept all those petticoats clean.
The woman from the portrait was seated at a little cloth-covered table, just pouring a cup of tea from a filigreed silver pot.
“Won’t you join me?” she asked, gesturing to the other chair.
Olive freed herself from the sofa pillows and made her way to the table.
“Do you take sugar?” asked the woman.
“Yes, please,” said Olive.
The woman dropped a lump into Olive’s cup and passed it across the table. Olive tried to take the cup gracefully, but her hands weren’t cooperating. The delicate saucer slipped out of her fingers, hit the tabletop, and split in two with a brittle
chink
.
Olive shut her eyes and wished that she could disappear. She had wished the same wish many times, and it hadn’t come true yet. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
The woman across the table smiled. “Don’t worry. Everything stays the same here. Look.” She gestured to the broken bits of porcelain. Olive glanced down. The two halves of the saucer had pulled back together, like magnets. Olive picked up the saucer very, very carefully, and turned it over in her hands. There wasn’t even a chip in the glaze.
“I’m so glad you came,” said the woman, picking up her own teacup. “I haven’t had a visitor for ages.”
Olive looked around the room while the blush on her cheeks started to cool. “This place seems familiar to me,” she said.
“It should,” answered the woman. “It’s the downstairs parlor of this house.”
Suddenly Olive could recognize the shape of the fireplace, the built-in bookcases, the carved wooden panels of the door. The woman seemed funnily familiar too—not just because Olive had looked at her picture so many times, but because she reminded Olive of the kindergarten teachers at her old school. She had the same sweet, slow way of speaking and moving, which always ended up seeming a bit too sweet and slow to be real.
“I grew up in this house, years and years ago.” The woman gave a little laugh. “It belonged to my father, and to his father before him. But I’m sure that many things about the place have changed since I was a girl.”
“I suppose so. It doesn’t look like this anymore.” Olive took a sip of her tea, then plopped four or five more sugar cubes into the cup.
“Why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself?” said the woman with a very sweet smile.
Olive cleared her throat and began the recitation. “My name is Olive Dunwoody. I’m eleven. My parents are Alec and Alice Dunwoody. We just moved here a few weeks ago.”
“And what do you think of the place?”
“It’s kind of . . . strange,” said Olive, hoping not to seem impolite.
“Yes, I suppose it is a bit strange. Most old houses have a secret or two.” The woman rearranged her string of pearl beads and sipped her tea. “Well, Olive, my name is Annabelle. And you can come to see me any time you like.”
“Really?” asked Olive, wondering meanwhile if a person could put more than ten sugar cubes in one cup of tea without seeming insane. “The people in all the other pictures were worried I would get them into trouble. They said there was a man who was watching them.”
“Oh, that,” said Annabelle, stirring her tea with a dainty spoon. “That is really nothing for you to worry about.” She leaned closer to Olive, lowering her voice. “I don’t want to sound unkind, but there are some . . .
people
in this house who like to make something out of nothing. They’re like cats getting startled by their own tails. You can’t believe everything they tell you.” Annabelle pressed her cold palm hard against Olive’s hand. “Trust me,” she said.
Annabelle stood up, brushing imaginary crumbs out of her lap. “I do hope that you’ll come and see me again sometime, Olive.”
She held out her icy hand, and Olive shook it.
“Be careful as you leave,” said Annabelle. “Don’t hit your head on the chest of drawers.”
“Good-bye. Thanks for the tea,” said Olive, climbing onto the couch. Then she smiled back at Annabelle, pulled herself through the picture frame, and hit her head on the chest of drawers.
11
O
LIVE LEFT THE violet room and walked slowly down the hall, past the pictures of the rocky hillside and the bowl of odd fruit, and stopped in front of the painting of Linden Street. The windows of the distant houses were dark. The same starless sky hung above them, stifling the street like a heavy black blanket.
Olive played with a strand of her hair and gazed at the empty street. She tried to imagine living in a painting, like Annabelle or Morton. It would get dull, that was certain. It would be sort of like being sick—lying on the couch, unable to move, while everybody else bustles around you. Olive liked being sick, because it meant she got to stay home from school, and she could read and draw all day. But she supposed that if she were sick for a really long time, she would probably get cranky and impatient. She imagined being stuck like that for years and years, and felt a tiny tug of pity for Morton. Even though he was about as much fun as having a burr caught in your hair.