The Second Spy: The Books of Elsewhere: Volume 3

by Jacqueline West

  “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.

  “Call me Hairy,” Harvey panted.

  “Hairy,” Olive repeated. She tried to slip a knot off of one of Harvey’s claws and got an electric shock in exchange. “Did you see any sign of the McMartins today?”

  “No,” Harvey grunted, finally succeeding in shaking his head out of one particularly thick loop of curtain cords. “All is calm, all is bright, as Shakespeare said.”

  “I don’t think that was Shakespeare.” Olive watched Harvey struggle for a moment. “Do you want me to help you out?”

  “No need for that!” said the cat. “Three—two…I mean…Ten—nine—”

  On his third attempt, Harvey managed to rock onto his side and balance on one foreleg and one hind leg. Bands of rope and chain still encircled the rest of his body, as though he had been very sloppily mummified.

  “Ta-da,” he declared.

  Olive applauded before getting up and heading toward her bedroom. Behind her, she could hear the flop of Harvey falling over.

  Horatio was seated at the foot of her bed, staring out the window, his soft, warm fur made half transparent by the afternoon sunlight. Olive set down the plate of snacks on her bedside table and tossed her book bag onto the bed. The mattress bounced. Horatio didn’t move.

  “Hi, Horatio,” said Olive. “I’m going to take a present to Morton. It’s a picture of his parents. Made with normal paint this time,” she added quickly. “Would you like to come Elsewhere with me?”

  Horatio didn’t answer. His ears gave a miniscule twitch.

  “Horatio?”

  Slowly, Horatio’s face turned toward Olive. “She’s out there. Not far away.”

  Olive clutched her painting to her chest. “What should we do?” she whispered.

  “What can we do?” Horatio’s whiskery eyebrows rose. “Be on our guard. Keep our eyes open. Trust each other.”

  The sick sensation filling Olive’s body lightened just the teensiest bit. She nodded.

  “Shh,” Horatio hissed suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Can’t you hear it?”

  Olive listened. From somewhere down the hall, there came a crash, followed by a string of angry muttering. “I think Harvey’s still stuck in his restraints.”

  “Not that.” Horatio’s eyes fixed on the window, where the ash tree’s nearly bare branches tapped softly against the glass.

  Olive stared at the window through the twin tufts of Horatio’s ears. She listened. She waited. But whatever Horatio was sensing, Olive didn’t feel it. What she felt was the sensation of balancing on something very high and very narrow. Whether she moved backward into safety or forward into the unknown, she knew that she couldn’t stay still for long.

  “What is it?” she whispered to Horatio.

  A tiny smile appeared on Horatio’s face. “We may not have to fight alone,” he said.

  About the author

  JACQUELINE WEST is obsessed with stories where magic intersects with everyday life—from talking cats, to enchanted eyewear, to paintings as portals to other worlds. An award-winning poet, former teacher, and occasional musician, Jacqueline now lives with her husband in Red Wing, Minnesota. There she dreams of dusty libraries, secret passageways, and many more adventures for Olive, Morton, and Rutherford.