The Second Spy: The Books of Elsewhere: Volume 3 (25 page)

Stools squeaked as students climbed down and raced across the art room to the storage cabinets. As usual, Olive waited until everyone else was out of the way before crossing to the shelf that held her portrait of Morton’s parents. But as she pulled the canvas out of its spot, something else fluttered down from the edge of Olive’s shelf.

It landed on the dusty tiles near the toe of her shoe. Olive picked it up. It was a small, folded card,
made of thick ivory paper. The outside was blank. On the inside, however, was a note written in fine, ladylike cursive. Olive’s arms began to tremble. Staring at that familiar handwriting, she wondered for a second if she had hit a snag in the progression of time—if she had somehow skipped backward to another awful afternoon, when she had stood right here in the art room, reading her own name written by Annabelle’s hand.

But
this
note didn’t have her name in it anywhere.

Dear Florence,
it read,

I have received your bottle cap collage and the necklace you so inventively made of acorns, buttons, and fishing lures (which I see were put to good use before being turned into jewelry, as they are all endowed with a particularly fishy smell), but I must tell you that these gifts—and your repeated thanks—are perfectly unnecessary.

In spite of your charming self-invitations, I am afraid that I do not allow visitors inside my home. The upkeep of a house of this size is simply beyond the strength of someone my age, and I wouldn’t want strangers, however oblivious or persistent they may be, to see the house when it was not at its very best.

There is no need for further thanks on your part. And please—no more gifts.

Yours sincerely,

A. McMartin

Before Olive could begin to put these new pieces into the puzzle or stop her hands from shaking, a jingling sound came from over her shoulder.

“
That’s
where I put it,” said Ms. Teedlebaum, tugging the note out of Olive’s hand. “I must have left it there to remind me. Thank you, Florence!” She gave herself a pat on the head. “I thought you might be interested in it, Olive, as this came from your house’s former owner. And I’ve been meaning to tell you about how I met Ms. McMartin.”

A throng of goose bumps skittered up the backs of Olive’s arms. Even if Ms. Teedlebaum didn’t have anything to do with the portrait in her attic, it would be a while before the sound of several clinking keys didn’t make her skin crawl.

“I only met her once,” Ms. Teedlebaum said, tugging absently at a necklace threaded with multiple whistles. “She hardly ever left the house, so I went to Linden Street to thank her in person for her
sizable
donation to the local art museum—I’m on the committee for community outreach and acquisitions—but she didn’t even invite me inside the front door. And I would really have liked to look around, to see the collection of Aldous McMartin’s work. I didn’t get the chance to do
that
until the other day, when your mother was nice enough to let me in.” Ms. Teedlebaum smiled. “But Ms. McMartin was already a very old woman at the time,
and she seemed uncomfortable with being thanked, let alone having a visitor come inside her house. That’s why I decided to send the thank-you gifts instead. Art speaks louder than words.”

Olive managed to squeeze the words “What did Ms. McMartin donate?” past her rapidly beating heart. Were there other branches of Elsewhere—other trapped
people
—in another building, right in her own town?

“Money,” said Ms. Teedlebaum. “I don’t remember the exact amount, but there were a lot of zeros on that check. And a few paintings; nothing by Aldous McMartin himself, just a few pieces from the family collection.”

Olive’s heart tobogganed back to its usual spot.

Ms. Teedlebaum gave a little sigh. “I envy you, honestly,” she said. “How inspiring, to live in a place like that.”

“Um-hmm,” said Olive.

“In fact, you can keep the note,” said Ms. Teedlebaum, thrusting the card back into Olive’s hand. “It can remind you of your house’s history.” Ms. Teedlebaum beamed, clearly assuming that it was gratitude that had rendered Olive completely speechless. “You’re welcome,” she said. “Now, as long as we’re both standing here, why don’t I check you off my list right now? May I see your portrait?”

Slowly, Olive held up her painting of Morton’s parents.

In this second, non-magical version, she had worked hard to make their clothing look real, including all the wrinkles and rumples and folds of real fabric. Their eyes were still a bit too large, but at least they didn’t look like lemurs in human suits this time. Mr. Nivens’s fingers weren’t quite so sausagey, and there was something in Mrs. Nivens’s smile that made it look welcoming and warm and playful all at once, and this made her whole face seem almost alive.

“You paid close attention to detail, and you were careful to keep everything in scale.” Ms. Teedlebaum nodded to herself. A thousand kinks of dark red hair nodded in agreement. “Beautiful job on the facial expressions. You have a real talent for this. This is something special.”

Olive ducked her head and smiled.

Ms. Teedlebaum tapped her uncapped pen thoughtfully against her chin, leaving a cluster of inky freckles. “You know, Olive,” she began, “if you would be willing, I’d like to keep your portrait to use as an example for future art classes. And of course it would be displayed in the Case of Fame too.” Ms. Teedlebaum gestured to the glass-fronted shelves lining one wall of the room. Olive spotted several colorful canvases, some coil pots that looked as though they could have suffocated
jungle mammals, and a handful of other papier-mâché people/zucchinis.

“Thank you very much,” she said, “but it’s a present for someone.”

“Ah. I see.” Ms. Teedlebaum nodded, moving away toward the table where the other students were waiting. “Well, as they say, there’s no time like a present.”

Still smiling to herself, Olive shuffled toward the display table. She took the stand at the very end of the row and balanced her painting of Mr. and Mrs. Nivens on it. As the rest of the class shoved and laughed and looked at each other’s work, she stared into Mr. and Mrs. Nivens’s painted eyes.

Where are you, Mary and Harold Nivens?
she asked the painted people.
I’ve looked everywhere in the house, over and over. Where could you be?

“Is that one yours?” said a voice over Olive’s shoulder.

Olive jumped. She turned away from Mrs. Nivens’s painted eyes to a pair of living eyes, surrounded by the thick black paint of eyeliner.

“Um…yes. It’s mine,” she mumbled.

The dark-haired girl leaned toward the canvas. “Those clothes are really weird and old-fashioned. It must have taken you forever to paint all those buttons.”

“It—it took a long time.”

“Are they your ancestors or something?” The girl’s eyes swiveled up to Olive’s again.

“Um…” Olive stalled. “They’re sort of…in my extended family.”

The girl nodded. “It’s really good,” she said, after a silent moment. Then she wandered back to her own noisy friends, leaving Olive to smile at her silent ones.

With a large, rectangular, paper-wrapped package under her arm, Olive hurried up Linden Street at Rutherford’s side.

“Can you hear what everyone is thinking all the time, like a bunch of TVs all playing at once?” Olive asked. This was her eighteenth question in a row (not that Olive was keeping track), but Rutherford didn’t seem to be losing patience. Rather, he appeared to be relishing the fact that someone
wanted
to hear his answers.

“No,” he said. “If I heard billions of thoughts all at once, I probably couldn’t understand anything at all.” He gave a little bounce, shifting his giant backpack. “I have to concentrate on one person at a time, and it has to be someone I know—otherwise, how would I know whose thoughts I was hearing? In other words, I can’t just decide to listen to the president’s thoughts, whether or not that would be potentially criminal of me.”

“Is it actually like
reading?
Or is it like hearing something?”

“It’s more like dreaming, really,” said Rutherford, dropping his voice as they passed Mr. Butler, at work on his hedges. Mr. Butler’s eyes followed them suspiciously. “I see and hear several things at once, and not everything makes sense, and events frequently jump out of sequence. Often it looks like someone has smeared a bunch of pictures together.”

“Do you think you could teach me how to do it?”

Rutherford shook his head. “My grandmother says it’s something you have to be born with. It runs in families, like dimples, or being able to roll your tongue. Or curly hair.” Rutherford tugged on the messy tuft above his ear. “It’s fairly prevalent in magical families. Apparently, there have been other readers on our family tree, but the trait has skipped the last couple of generations.”

Olive looked down at her shoes scuffing through the piles of fallen leaves and thought about how her family’s math gene had skipped her particular generation.

Rutherford watched her. He nodded at the package under her arm. “I think your artistic talents more than outweigh your lack of mathematic skills.”

Olive glanced up. “It’s kind of weird knowing that you can look into my brain anytime, whether or not I
want you to. No wonder Harvey said you were a spy. You sort of
are.
”

“I promise not to do it often,” said Rutherford. “I give you my word of honor. I’ll even take an oath.”

“That’s okay,” said Olive as they reached the edge of Mrs. Dewey’s yard. “Just don’t do it unless there’s an emergency or something.”

Rutherford gave her a sweeping bow. This made his giant backpack slide off his shoulder and whack him in the side, nearly knocking him off his feet. He tried to regain his dignity. “I shall read your mind only in emergency situations,” he announced, holding up one palm. “Or when I
think
there is an emergency. Or when I know there’s
going
to be an emergency. Or—”

“Good enough,” said Olive.

“But your question reminds me,” said Rutherford, beginning to jiggle excitedly from foot to foot, “you’re invited to come over tomorrow afternoon. My grandmother will teach us the rudiments of protective charms and the herbs involved in their concoction. It should be very helpful, considering your situation.”

Olive sighed. “I’m trying
not
to consider my situation.” She glanced up the street at the towering stone house. “But I’d better go. I want to give Morton his present.”

Rutherford gave Olive a sweeping farewell bow, and Olive, after bowing awkwardly back, ran up the
sidewalk to the big stone house and pulled open the heavy front door.

The foyer was silent and empty. Quietly, Olive locked the front door behind her and lowered her book bag and the rectangular package to the floor. She glanced through the open doorways to either side: the dusty, double-doored, high-ceilinged library to her left, the formal parlor to her right.

Annabelle McMartin—the real, living-and-dying Annabelle McMartin—had stood in this spot not long ago, closing the door in Ms. Teedlebaum’s face and locking out the world. And just yesterday, the un-living, undying Annabelle had stood here again, looking for a way to take it all back. This thought made Annabelle seem near enough that Olive could almost feel her chilly presence over her shoulder, her cold, smooth hand reaching out to lock around the spectacles and—

“Olive?”

Olive’s heart executed a leap so high it bumped into Olive’s molars. She let out a squeak.

Mrs. Dunwoody’s smiling face appeared at the end of the hallway. “I came home early today,” she announced. “I figured you could use some pampering, after another long day of junior high.” Mrs. Dunwoody held up a plate. “I fixed you a snack. Celery sticks with peanut butter and raisins.”

“Is it creamy peanut butter?”

“Naturally,” said Mrs. Dunwoody as Olive trailed down the hall to join her in the kitchen. “I don’t like the crunchy kind myself. That sort of randomness of texture distracts me.”

“Thanks, Mom,” said Olive, taking the plate and noticing that there were exactly six neatly aligned raisins on each celery stick.

“There’s fresh orange juice in the fridge,” Mrs. Dunwoody added, leafing through a stack of bills and catalogs on the counter.

“I’m going to take my snack up to my room,” said Olive. “I’ve got some homework I want to get over with.”

“We could do something fun after that, if you’d like,” said Mrs. Dunwoody. “We could go to the library or rent a movie.”

“Sure.”

Leaving her mother humming happily over the bills, Olive hurried back down the hall, grabbed her backpack and the rectangular package, and thudded up the stairs.

But before she could open the door to her bedroom, something made her stop in her tracks.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” announced a voice from the end of the hall. “You are about to be awestruck by the feats of the greatest escape artist who has ever
lived! No trickery! No fakery! Only pure superhuman skill! The one—the only—
Hairy Houdini!
”

There was a flapping, flopping sort of sound as Harvey’s head appeared through the doorway to the pink bedroom. His head was gradually followed by the rest of his body, which was swaddled in bands of torn cloth, rusty chains, tasseled curtain cords, and anything else wrap-able that could be found in the attic. Harvey wormed his way down the hall toward Olive. His front legs were bound to his body, so he had to push himself along with his back feet while his head coasted like a ship’s prow across the floor. Olive could hear the crackle of fur-on-carpet static from several feet away.

“Prepare to be amazed!” Harvey grunted, before flopping over onto his back and kicking wildly at his restraints. “Just a few more seconds—just—a few—more—”

Ropes and chains looped around Harvey’s thrashing legs like the yarn in a game of cat’s cradle. Eventually he managed to free one paw, but this quickly got stuck again in the wads of fabric.

“Mr. Houdini?” Olive asked, setting down the plate and book bag and dropping onto her knees next to the squirming cat.