“Olive!” Morton’s head popped up amid the crowd. “Come look at what we did!”
Following Morton’s impatiently beckoning hand, Olive wound her way up the steps and across the porch, smiling and murmuring hello and trying not to step on anyone.
Morton darted through the crowd and grabbed her by the arm. “Look!” he said in a whisper that was nearly boiling over with excitement. “Look! Look! LOOK!” He pointed toward the center of the porch.
The heap of ragged paper bits that Olive had smuggled from the basement had dwindled to a handful, like the crumbs left behind by an especially delicious cake. Encircling the remains of the pile, Morton’s neighbors huddled over their work, dreamily passing rolls of tape back and forth.
In front of each neighbor lay a reconstructed sheet of paper. The papers were wrinkled and bumpy and almost entirely coated with tape, but they were there. Words written in a jagged hand slashed across the pages, dark and whole and clear, even in the faint twilight. Olive felt as though she was seeing the end of a very difficult magic trick without getting to watch all the wand-tapping and hand-waving that comes in the middle.
She skimmed the top of the nearest page. Crimson, it read, in thorny cursive. The headings Ocher, Umber, and Emerald Green seemed to call out to her from other nearby pages.
“Wow,” breathed Olive as a mixture of excitement and dread and rightness fizzled through her. “I thought so.” She looked down at the top of Morton’s tufty head. “You know what these are, Morton? These are the instructions for making Aldous McMartin’s magical paints.”
Morton twitched a little at the name Aldous McMartin. Then he straightened his shoulders. “I already figured that out,” he said. “I know what crimson means.”
“I can’t believe you did this so quickly,” said Olive.
Morton nodded proudly. “Mr. Fitzroy asked what I was doing, and I let him help,” he said, pointing at the bearded man. “Just to make it go faster. Not because I needed help. He brought somebody else, and then she brought somebody else, and pretty soon everybody was here. And now we’re almost done. But I did the most,” he added in a whisper.
“Thank you, everybody,” said Olive. A dozen pairs of painted eyes gazed up at her. Suddenly, Olive felt a tremor wind its way into her words. “It’s—it’s so nice of you to help us.”
“It’s good to have something to do,” said the woman with white hair. Her face looked a bit vague, the features soft and unclear. Olive couldn’t tell if it was the dim light, or the mist, or if Aldous had somehow made her that way.
“My brothers and sisters and I used to play with jigsaw puzzles when we were children,” said the woman in the lacy nightgown. “It helped to pass the time, especially on long winter evenings, when we couldn’t go outside, and it seemed like spring would never come…” The woman trailed off, looking down at her hands.
“Just what are you planning to do with these papers, young lady?” asked the bearded man who Morton had called Mr. Fitzroy, giving Olive a sharp look.
Olive glanced around the circle of painted faces. “I’m just—I’ll—I’m going to keep them safe,” she said. “Because I’m sure Annabelle McMartin would love to get her hands on them. I think she already tried to get them once, but maybe she didn’t realize how important they were. I mean, I didn’t know for sure what they were…until…” Olive looked down at the paper by Morton’s feet. Crimson. Two spoonfuls of dried and powdered blood… Olive swallowed. “But I’m going to make sure she never gets them,” she continued, trying to sound firm and confident. “And I’m doing everything I can to make sure she can’t use the paints.”
“Then wouldn’t the safest thing be to destroy them for good?” said the old man. “Burn them up, so they can’t be put back together again?”
Panic shot through Olive’s body. “No!” she shouted. The painted people stared at her, their faces unchanging. “I—I just don’t think we should do that. Not yet,” she hurried on, crouching down to gather the pages into a haphazard pile. “I might be able to learn something from them—like how to help all of you.” She clutched the pages to her chest.
The man in the striped pajamas frowned. “Just don’t let those cats get at them,” he said with a warning nod.
“The cats aren’t what you think they are,” said Olive. “They’re good.”
“Are you trying to tell us that they aren’t witches’ familiars?” said a bald man with ears that stuck out from either side of his head like the handles on a trophy.
“No…” said Olive. “They are. Or they were, anyway. But they don’t want to work for the McMartins anymore, or to hurt anybody, ever again. The cats are probably the ones who tore up these papers in the first place.”
The neighbors were quiet for a moment. Morton stood among them, watching Olive and wavering slowly from foot to foot.
“I wouldn’t be so sure about them,” said Mr. Fitzroy, breaking the silence at last. “Back in my day, their loyalty seemed to run pretty deep.”
“They’ve changed,” Olive argued. “Really.”
The woman in the lacy nightgown looked down at her hands. “I suppose they can’t hurt us anymore, either way,” she said.
Everyone was quiet once again. Olive grasped the papers, squirming under the neighbors’ stares as the silence seemed to grow even deeper. Whenever she wasn’t inside of it, the quiet of Morton’s world seemed impossible. There were no rumbling furnaces, no buzzing refrigerators, no distant cars. There were no birds chirping, no breezes whispering. Even amid this crowd of people, there wasn’t a single rustle or sigh. Of course, Olive remembered with a little shiver, this was because she was the only one who was breathing.
Olive sidled toward the porch stairs. “Um…” she began. “I’ve got to go. But thanks again for your help. I’ll be careful with these, I promise.” She halted at the top step. “Oh, Morton,” she added, making her voice as light and careless as she could. “I just remembered. Could I borrow that photograph of your family? The one we found in Annabelle’s empty portrait?”
Morton’s face dented with a small, worried frown. “What do you need that for?”
“It’s for a school assignment,” said Olive, semi-truthfully. “We’re supposed to bring in old portraits of families.”
“Oh,” said Morton. The small frown didn’t go away.
“I’ll take good care of it, I promise,” said Olive. “And I’ll bring it back as soon as I’m done.”
Without another word, Morton turned away. The hem of his long white nightshirt brushed the floorboards as he walked across the porch, between his neighbors, and through the house’s front door. He didn’t invite Olive inside.
Olive hovered on the porch, clutching the sheaf of papers. The neighbors’ painted eyes watched her. “I’ll be careful,” she promised again, even though no one had spoken. Then she shut up and waited for Morton.
A moment later, he slipped back through the door and thrust the photograph into Olive’s hand.
“Thank you,” she told him. “I’ll keep it safe. I’ll keep all these things safe.” Then, feeling like someone taking a midnight shortcut through a graveyard, Olive leaped down the porch steps and ran across the lawn, into the dark, deserted street. When she glanced over her shoulder one last time, she could see Morton’s eyes still following her, even as the mist thickened between them.
Olive toppled back through the frame into the hall, pinning the sheaf of precious papers to her chest with one arm and trying to catch herself with the other. Instead, she landed with a loud “Ooof!” on her stomach. She hadn’t even had time to roll over before a voice hissed, “Freeze! Present identification!”
Olive tilted her head and looked up into a pair of manic green eyes. The reassembled papers and the photograph were trapped underneath her body. She was quite sure that they were safe from Harvey’s sight, but her heart started thumping like a bass drum anyway.
“It’s—it’s just me,” she stammered.
“Ah. Agent O
live.” Harvey sat down beside her head and spoke into his imaginary transistor watch. “Suspect intercepted. She’s one of ours.” His eyes zinged back to Olive’s face. “All clear in the yard, under and above ground. However,” he went on, lowering his voice, “it is my obligation to inform you that Agent 411 has ascertained that some of the jars are indeed missing.”
“Agent 411? Do you mean Leopold?”
Harvey glanced over both of his yellow-painted shoulders before giving a short nod. “Our current objective is to prevent the loss of any more materials.”
“Good,” said Olive. “But shouldn’t you be…um…monitoring the…parameters?” Olive wasn’t sure that this was quite the right word, but it appeared to be close enough for Harvey.
“Absolutely correct, Agent Olive. I’ll complete another survey of the territory. Over and under. In and out.” With another nod, Harvey bolted down the stairs.
Olive rolled over. She pulled the spectacles off her nose and tucked them carefully down the front of her shirt. Then she slid the photograph into her pocket. The house was quiet, but she didn’t want to be startled again with the pile of papers in her hands. She needed a place to hide them—someplace safe, someplace Annabelle couldn’t get at them—where they could wait until she had time to experiment. Just in case Agent 1-800 surprised her again, Olive tucked the papers inside her shirt, where they scratched and tickled softly against her skin. Then she glanced around the hallway.
She wasn’t going to hide the pages inside the painting of the moonlit forest. No way. Even the thought of that place made her shudder. She wasn’t going to hide them beside the silvery lake either. She couldn’t leave them in the painting of the bowl of weird fruit; that would be like playing hide-and-seek in a room with only one piece of furniture. Olive shuffled past the bowl of fruit and neared the craggy hillside with its tiny, distant church.
Before she’d reached the edge of the frame, something in the air seemed to change. Olive sniffed. The air in this part of the hall usually smelled like dust and old wood, with the faint scents of potpourri and mothballs from the guest rooms woven in. But what Olive smelled now was smoke.
Wood smoke. The smell of a cozy log fire in an old fireplace.
She turned toward the painting. A single golden leaf was dancing along the hillside, twirling and leaping, looking absolutely delighted with itself and its world. And Olive wasn’t wearing the spectacles.
She stepped closer to the canvas, inhaling the spicy, smoky scent that was drifting from inside. At the edges of the painting, a furze of trees could be seen, their golden leaves as soft as feathers. And today, the bracken that covered the hillside didn’t look thorny and brown—it had blossomed into an ocean of tiny pink and white flowers. How had she never noticed how beautiful this place was?
Olive put on the spectacles. This time, instead of a flock of birds, a rich swirl of golden leaves blew across the hillside, whirling and tumbling through the air. A sense of certainty filled her. This wasn’t just a perfect place to hide things. This was where she was meant to hide things. Olive wrapped her hands around the bottom of the frame and—
“Olive?”
Olive clapped her arms protectively against her body. The papers in her shirt made a muffled crackle.
Horatio stepped through the doorway of the pink bedroom, gazing up at her. His tail flicked back and forth like a fuzzy metronome. “What are you up to?” he asked.
“Just…just checking things,” Olive stammered. “Making sure everything is safe.”
Horatio’s sharp eyes moved across her face. “You look…How shall I put this?” He gave her a little smile. “The expression ‘like the cat who ate the canary’ comes to mind, but I’ve always found it rather prejudiced. No, you look like the girl who ate the forbidden cake, and ended up with a streak of chocolate across her chin.”
“I got a bad grade on a math quiz today,” Olive improvised quite honestly, standing as still as she could in hopes that the papers wouldn’t crinkle again. “I was thinking about hiding it in there.”
Horatio’s eyes flicked from Olive’s face to the painting. “In there?” The cat seemed to hesitate. “I wouldn’t suggest that. In fact, I would suggest avoiding that painting altogether.” With a swish of his tail, Horatio glided abruptly past her.
“What?” said Olive, gazing after him. “But why?”
Horatio ignored her.
“Why? You can tell me, Horatio. You can trust me.”
At this, Horatio paused. He turned to meet her eyes. “Olive, why don’t you go wash up,” he said dryly. “You’ve got some guilt on your face.”
Then, with another tail-swish, Horatio disappeared through a darkened doorway.
9
AS IT TURNED out, Olive didn’t find a clever place to hide the paint-making papers that night. Unless you think your own backpack is a clever place to hide things. And Olive didn’t.
Having the papers inside her backpack meant that Olive had to carry the backpack with her everywhere: to the dinner table, to the bathroom, to bed—and the next day, through the crowded halls of junior high, where the effort of avoiding Rutherford would have been trouble enough. It meant that she felt paranoid and preoccupied and even-more-than-usually jumpy. It also meant that she had to keep at least a part of her mind on the safety of the backpack, rather than devoting all of it to imaginary screaming matches with Rutherford. But there was plenty of room left over.
Why had she let herself start to count on an outsider like Rutherford Dewey? Olive fumed as she slammed her locked door. What was the point of making friends if they were just going to zoom away to schools in Sweden as soon as you were sure they were your friends in the first place? She was just glad she hadn’t told him about the paints or the papers. It would be enough bother weeding him out of her life as it was.
Olive dragged these angry thoughts through every hour of the school day, until at last she was hauling both them and her backpack up the gritty stone staircase to the art room.
“Attention, everyone!” Ms. Teedlebaum called, attempting to blow on her dangling whistle necklace and blowing on a ballpoint pen necklace instead. “Settle down and take out the photographs I asked you to bring.”
While the students obeyed, Ms. Teedlebaum, who was barefoot that day for one reason or another, taped a large photograph to the chalkboard. A hush fell over the room as, one by one, the students noticed the picture. Olive, sensing the sudden silence, stopped scowling down at her tabletop and looked up at the photograph.
It was a family portrait. Judging by the kinky red hair on everyone’s head, it was a Teedlebaum family portrait. Six family members—a mother and father, two boys and two girls, one of whom must have been the young Ms. Teedlebaum—posed in front of a large fireplace. All six of them were in costume. The mother and four children were dressed as logs, their arms and faces poking out of holes cut in painted cardboard tubes. The father, on the other hand, was dressed as an axe.
No one in the class spoke, but as everyone looked at the photograph, a palpable air of unease filled the room. Behind the smiling Teedlebaum faces lay the implication that Father Axe was going to chop up the rest of his family—chop them up, and then perhaps toss them on the fire that flared cheerily behind them.
A boy near the front of the room tentatively raised his hand. “That’s your family, right?”
“Yes,” said Ms. Teedlebaum. She glanced up from the pencil she was twisting in the sharpener around her neck. “That’s us, about twenty years ago.”
“Why—why are you…” stammered a boy in a much-too-large sweater who sat to Olive’s left. “Why—”
“Why are you all dressed like that?” The girl in eyeliner took over.
“My father ran a lumberyard,” said Ms. Teedlebaum, setting up a giant sketchpad next to the photo.
“Was it Halloween?” asked the girl.
“No,” said Ms. Teedlebaum. “All right, everyone. When you start sketching from a photograph, you want to look at the b
ig picture. Get a sense of scale.” Ms. Teedlebaum turned toward the giant sketchbook and began to draw. “See how I’m sketching six ovals for the faces? You can tell that I’m planning to fill the whole page. Now I’ll make a very simple outline of the bodies.” Ms. Teedlebaum drew the shapes of five logs and one axe, her pencil making soft hissing noises against the paper. “You can always erase any lines you don’t need later. Once you’ve got those outlines, you can start adding the details.” Ms. Teedlebaum tossed her pencil into the chalkboard tray. It sent up a little puff of powdery white dust. “We’ll be painting these eventually, but we’re going to sketch before we paint. Just like you have to learn to roller skate before you can ski. As for materials,” Ms. Teedlebaum went on as the students blinked at each other, “if you need another pencil or eraser or a new sheet of paper, just look around the room. They’re scattered everywhere. You should be able to find what you need if you look under enough other things.” With a smile that seemed to suggest she’d just said something very wise, Ms. Teedlebaum clinked and jangled across the room to her desk.
Olive looked back down at the photograph of Morton’s family. Then she picked up her pencil and slowly made two large circles on her sheet of paper. Morton was already in a painting; he didn’t need to be in another one. And creating another portrait of Lucinda Nivens could mean a whole houseful of trouble, as Olive was well aware. Her portrait was going to contain just two people.
Frowning at the photo, Olive settled down to work. As she drew, a teeny bit of her fury and fear seemed to trail out through the tip of her pencil, and Olive wondered if she might finally be able to turn all of this trouble into something worthwhile.
Olive tried to keep her mind on her project as she boarded the bus that afternoon. Rutherford was sitting in their usual seat near the front, but Olive marched right past him, plunking down in a seat several rows farther back. From the corner of her eye, she saw his head poke into the aisle, his smudged glasses swiveling in her direction. She turned toward the window.
The Second Spy: The Books of Elsewhere: Volume 3 Page 6