Still Life

by Jacqueline West

  “Mary Nivens,” Mr. Fitzroy said softly. “Nobody could keep a secret around her. And there were people on this street who wanted to, believe me.”

  “I believe you,” said Olive. “Do you think that got her into trouble somehow? Like someone told her something big and dangerous, or—”

  Mr. Fitzroy’s paint-flecked eyes sharpened. “You’re pretty good at digging up secrets yourself, aren’t you?” He examined Olive over the crinkles of his beard. “You might want to be more careful. Some secrets are safest where they are.”

  Before Olive could think of a reply, the old man turned and strode up the street. Olive stood still, staring after him, until his striped pajamas had vanished into the mist.

  Back outside the picture frame, Olive tugged off the spectacles and looked anxiously around the hallway. The gaping doorways of unoccupied bedrooms watched her like hollow gray eyes. She checked the painting of Linden Street again. For a moment, she thought that its surface looked dimmer than before—but then she remembered how dim the hall itself was, with the darkness of a winter afternoon already pressing at its windows.

  With a little shiver, Olive dove through her own bedroom door. She flicked on the lights before leaping toward the bed, kicking her feet safely out of reach of the shadows beneath, and landing with a noisy cre-THUNK.

  On the vanity, a massive orange cat glanced up from its own reflection.

  “Hello, Olive,” the cat said dryly. “You are moving through the house with your usual calmness and grace, I see.”

  “Horatio, you haven’t noticed any of the paintings changing, have you?” Olive gave Hershel, her worn brown bear, a squeeze. “Maybe growing darker, or changing color?”

  “I have not,” said Horatio. In the mirror, his vivid green eyes focused on her. “And I have been keeping a very close watch.”

  Olive squeezed Hershel tighter. “Because Aldous will try to come back, won’t he?”

  “Whether he will return is not the question,” said the cat. “The question is when.”

  “And why,” Olive added. “I mean, Annabelle is gone, the shades are gone. What else does he want? Elsewhere? Me? You?”

  Horatio gave a soft snort. “There are many things in this house that Aldous will not give up. Not willingly. Not as long as he exists.” The cat’s green eyes flicked sideways. Olive followed them to her collection of old pop bottles—and to one bottle in particular.

  Wrapped around its dusty green neck was a gold locket. Olive crossed to the vanity and picked it up. The filigreed pendant was cool and heavy in her palm. Reluctantly, like someone lifting up a bandage to look at the blood beneath, Olive pried open the locket’s halves.

  The face of Aldous McMartin stared up at her.

  It was a powerful face, ridged and craggy, with long, hard features and a stern mouth. Its sunken black ink eyes seemed to gaze straight into hers.

  Olive snapped the locket shut again. Then she yanked its chain off the bottleneck and tossed the locket into the back of her top vanity drawer.

  “I’m going to see Morton,” she said, slamming the drawer shut. “Do you know where my purple sweater went?”

  “As I’m not in the habit of borrowing your clothes, my answer would be an emphatic no.” Horatio turned back to his fluffy reflection. “Be careful out there,” he added. “Don’t stay out after dark.”

  “I will,” Olive promised. “Or—I won’t. Or both.” With a little wave at Horatio, she tore out the door and raced back down the steps.

  At the bottom of the staircase, the library’s carved wooden doors stood open. Inside the huge room, rows of bookshelves towered toward the ceiling, and ancient velvet couches leaked wisps of stuffing onto the rugs. Olive’s father, Alec Dunwoody, sat at his desk in the center of the room, holding a neatly sharpened pencil. His head was raised. His gaze was distant. The cheery glow of the fireplace formed two smaller cheery glows in the lenses of his glasses.

  “I’m going next door,” Olive called from the doorway.

  Mr. Dunwoody went on staring straight ahead. The pencil in his hand made invisible scribbles in the air.

  “Dad?”

  Mr. Dunwoody turned the pencil around and erased one of the invisible scribbles.

  “Dad?”

  “Ah! Olive!” Mr. Dunwoody’s face broke into a smile. “Did you just get home from school?”

  “It’s one in the afternoon,” said Olive. “And it’s Sunday. And I just sat next to you at lunch, remember?”

  Mr. Dunwoody’s eyes unfocused. “I remember a lentil salad . . .”

  “You said the lentils were softer than usual, and Mom said she’d made .25 cups of lentils—”

  “—to .4 cups water, and I suggested a ratio of 1/4 cup lentils to 1/3 cup water instead, or .25 to .33 repeating. Of course!” Mr. Dunwoody beamed at Olive, his eyes focusing again. “So, how was school?”

  “It was fine,” said Olive. “I’m going next door for a little while. Is that all right?”

  “Certainly,” said Mr. Dunwoody. “It’s good to get out of the house and enjoy the—the inverse! That’s it!” The pencil began to scribble on the air again.

  “Hey, Dad?”

  Mr. Dunwoody glanced up. “Oh, hello, Olive!” he said brightly. “Back home already?”

  Olive decided to skip this question “Have you seen my purple sweater?”

  Mr. Dunwoody looked down at his own blue dress shirt. “I don’t believe I have,” he said. “Not today, that is. I have seen it in the past, approximately once a week, for a period of—”

  “Thanks anyway,” said Olive.

  She hurried around the staircase and down the hallway to the kitchen.

  Alice Dunwoody stood at the kitchen counter. Her brown hair was pinned into a bun, and she was stirring something in a large blue bowl.

  “Are you baking?” Olive asked dubiously.

  Her mother smiled down at her. “I prefer to think of it as combining a series of precisely measured ingredients which then undergo various chemical processes. But I suppose ‘baking’ is a simpler way to put it.”

  Olive peeked over the rim of the bowl. “What is it?”

  “Two teaspoons of vanilla, 6.8 ounces of sugar, a quarter pound of butter . . .”

  “I mean, what will it make?”

  “Oh.” Mrs. Dunwoody consulted her cookbook. “Snickerdoodles, apparently.”

  “Mom, do you know where my purple sweater went?”

  “I washed it yesterday,” said Mrs. Dunwoody, starting to stir the batter again. “It’s probably in the dryer.”

  Olive let out a sigh. The dryer meant the basement. And the basement meant lots of unpleasant, basement-y things. Leaving the warm, vanilla-scented kitchen behind, Olive headed across the hall to the basement door.

  The basement of the old stone house was chilly in the height of summer. In mid-December, it was frigid. Olive wavered at the top of the staircase, her toes inching reluctantly toward the next step. Then, with a deep breath, she plunged down the creaking wooden planks into the darkness below.

  She groped for the chain of the hanging bulb. The light clicked on, its glow pressing through the shadows like a flashlight dropped in an icy lake. Olive glanced around. Dusty cobwebs dangled from the rafters. Empty boxes cluttered the floor. In the uneven stone walls, fragments of gravestones—the markers of McMartin ancestors, brought across the ocean by Aldous to build a new family home—revealed their carved and timeworn names. Olive paused for a moment, recalling the smoky, twisting, whispering darkness that had poured from the graves and chased her and flaky Delora and pompous Dr. Widdecombe up the stairs just a few weeks ago. She shook the memory away.

  The washer and dryer stood in one corner, looking as cheerfully out of place as two tourists from the future in a medieval dungeon. Dancing from one foot to the other to keep either one from freezing, Olive
hurried across the floor and yanked open the dryer. The door’s metallic creak echoed through the basement.

  “Hello, miss,” said a gruff voice.

  Olive spun around. A pool of shadows with bright green eyes watched her from the darkest corner.

  “Hello, Leopold,” she whispered back. “Aren’t you freezing down here?”

  “Not at all, miss.” One very large cat-shaped shadow split from the pool and moved closer. “It is my duty to stand guard at all times, in all seasons.” The cat puffed out a chest covered in sleek black fur. “Fortunately, I am well equipped for service.”

  “Well, I’m not,” said Olive, rooting through the dryer. “That’s why I need a sweater.”

  “If you will permit my saying so, miss, it might have been wiser on your part to be born with fur.”

  “Hmm,” said Olive, finding the fuzzy purple sweater at last. “It’s a little too late for that.”

  “I suppose you are correct, miss.” Leopold watched Olive wedge her head awkwardly through the neck of the sweater. “But never mind. We all have our deficiencies.”

  “I’m going to see Morton,” said Olive, patting at her staticky hair. “Keep watch over the house while I’m gone, okay?”

  The big black cat sat up even straighter. “You can rely on me, miss.”

  Olive gave Leopold a scratch between the ears. “I know I can.”

  She found Harvey waiting for her beside the front door, wearing a tiny bowler hat that appeared to have been made from a hollowed-out pincushion.

  “Inspector,” he said, with a businesslike nod.

  “Inspector.” Olive nodded back. Then she tugged her coat over her sweater, and together, they stepped onto the porch.

  Olive paused at the railing to gaze down the slope of Linden Street. Drifts of snow swamped the houses in a sugary white sea. Frost coated their glowing windows. Nothing moved but the branches of the surrounding trees, shoved back and forth by the cold wind.

  “All clear,” whispered Harvey from his spot near her feet. “Shall we proceed, Inspector?”

  “Yes, Inspector,” Olive whispered back. “We shall.”

  Side by side, they raced across the snowy lawn, through the clattering lilac hedge, and into the shadow of the tall gray house beyond.

  WALTER THREW OPEN the door before they could knock.

  “Come in!” he exclaimed, his bass voice making the floorboards vibrate. “Now that we live here—mmm—officially, you can walk right up to the door any time you’d like!”

  Olive and Harvey stepped inside, and Walter closed the door behind them.

  “We don’t have to hide anymore!” Walter rumbled happily on, leading them into the chilly white living room. “I can turn on the lights whenever I want to. I can study in the parlor. I can even build a fire!” He beamed at the lifeless fireplace. “Of course, I haven’t done that, because—mmm—because of Morton—but I could!”

  Olive looked around the parlor. The fireplace wasn’t the only thing that was lifeless. All of the furnishings remained exactly where Lucinda Nivens had left them, looking fragile and feminine and faintly unfriendly. A few china figurines posed daintily on the mantel. The room was coated with dust, as though each surface had been draped in mouse-colored velvet. No one had touched this place in months, Olive realized—not since Lucinda herself had fizzled up in a ball of fire.

  But beneath the couch, Olive spotted something strange. A wad of blankets and pillows had been stuffed between the couch’s wooden legs. Next to the bedding was a lumpy sack of clothes, one sock protruding from its mouth like a limp brown tongue.

  “Walter,” Olive asked, “are you sleeping down here?”

  Walter’s smile faded. He rubbed his shaggy hair with one hand.

  “An astute question, Inspector,” said Harvey, wedging his head under the couch. “Aha!” He whirled back to the room, shoving a pair of fluffy gray objects before him. “Bunny slippers!”

  “Mmm . . .” said Walter uncomfortably.

  “Why are you sleeping on the couch when there are three bedrooms upstairs?” Olive gave the figurines on the mantel a distrustful look. “You don’t have to leave everything exactly the way it was, you know.”

  “But—I do.” Walter’s Adam’s apple bobbed like a yo-yo on a very short string. “Morton doesn’t want to change anything, unless we’re changing it back. He says—mmm—he says everything has to be exactly like it was when his parents come home.”

  Olive let out a little sigh. “Where is Morton?”

  “Upstairs, I think.” Walter pushed his sweater sleeves up his spindly arms. “He’s—mmm—he’s reorganizing.”

  “Reorganizing?”

  “I’m not allowed to help.” Walter’s sleeves slipped back down again. “He says I don’t know where things belong, and—mmm—there are things I’m not supposed to see.”

  Harvey nudged Olive’s ankle. “The game is afoot, Inspector Olive!” he whispered.

  “And that game is hide-and-seek, Inspector Harvey,” Olive whispered back. She turned to Walter, who was watching the two of them with wide, worried eyes. “We’ll talk to him,” she promised.

  As Walter returned to the dining room, Olive and Harvey crept up the stairs to the second floor.

  Three quiet bedrooms lined the hallway. In the first room, the walls were painted pale blue. Yellowing pictures of baseball players and old-fashioned cars dangled limply from the plaster. A small iron bed stood in one corner. On the floor, a wooden bat, a drum, and a half-deflated ball sat in the box of a rusty wagon, like passengers waiting for a trip that would never begin. Olive knew that this had been Morton’s bedroom, many years ago. But he wasn’t inside it now.

  The next room was as delicately dead as a white-winged moth in a specimen jar. This room had belonged to Morton’s older sister, Lucinda, and her frilly coverlet and china rosebuds waited stiffly in their places. Lucinda Nivens had worshipped the McMartins, and had even changed herself into paint to be like them. But Annabelle had turned on her in the end. Someone had cleaned up the dead leaves that had blown into the corners, and the broken window had finally been replaced, but the scorched spot where Annabelle had incinerated Lucinda still marked the floorboards, as black and deep as an empty hole.

  “No trace of him here,” Harvey murmured. “Carry on, Inspector.”

  Olive had never entered the last room in the hallway. But if the first room had been Morton’s, and the second had been Lucinda’s, she knew the third must have belonged to Mary and Harold Nivens.

  The heavy wooden door was shut. From the hallway outside, Olive could hear the soft shush and thump of drawers opening and closing, followed by the patter of bare feet. She grasped the brass doorknob. It didn’t budge.

  “It’s locked,” she whispered to Harvey, who sat watchfully beside her.

  But then, with Olive’s fingers still wrapped around it, the knob began to turn. Olive took a step backward.

  Groaning softly, the door inched open, and a small figure in white slipped out. Its round head was covered in pale, wispy tufts. Its long cotton nightshirt billowed past its bare toes, all the way to the floor. In the dimness, she might have mistaken it for a ghost—if it weren’t for the very unghostly squeal it let out when it spotted Olive.

  “Hi, Morton,” said Olive cheerfully.

  “You startled me,” said Morton, not cheerfully at all.

  “What were you doing in there?”

  “Nothing,” said Morton. “Just—sorting things. Organizing things.”

  “Have you found anything that might be a clue? About your parents, I mean?”

  Morton pulled the door shut before Olive could crane inside. “Not yet.”

  “Can we help you look?”

  “No!” Morton flung his arms across the closed door. “There are things you’re not—you can’t—” He scowled up at he
r. “Don’t be such an intruder!”

  “I believe you mean inspector, Master Nivens,” said Harvey. “Inspectors Olive Dunwoody and Harvey Cattisham, Scotland Yard.” He nodded his pincushion bowler. “No case too confounding. No clue too concealed. No suspect too surreptitious. No—”

  “Fine, Morton,” said Olive. She took another look at the door, Morton plastered across it like a stubborn starfish. “You can keep reorganizing all by yourself.”

  Morton’s frown unpuckered slightly. His arms dropped to his sides. “You can help me fix the pictures in my room,” he said at last. “If you want.”

  Olive and Harvey followed Morton back down the hall to the blue bedroom. As Morton rummaged for some pins, Olive looked at the bookshelf, where a familiar black-and-white photograph sat in a tarnished frame. It was the photograph she and Morton had discovered Elsewhere; the photograph Morton had brought back to his house on the painted Linden Street. Now he had brought it here. Olive looked down at the soft gray picture. In it, a small, round-faced boy, and a tall, sharp-featured girl posed for a portrait with their parents. The father had a mustache and warm, crinkled eyes. The mother had long skirts and a sweet, welcoming smile.

  Harvey dove into the shadows under the bed. “No spot too dark,” Olive heard him mutter. “No space too confined. No bunny too dusty.”

  Morton and Olive got to work reaffixing the newspaper clippings to the walls. The papers were yellowed and brittle, their edges as fragile as dried maple leaves.

  “I could bring you some new magazines,” Olive offered, pinning a picture of a Model T into place. “You could put up fresh pictures. Ones that are in color.”

  Morton shook his head. “Everything has to be the same,” he said. “It has to be just the way it was when Mama and Papa come back.”

  Olive tacked a torn sketch of a long-dead baseball player back into its spot. “Morton . . .” she began, making her voice as gentle as she could. “Is that why you’re making Walter sleep on the couch? Because you want everything to be just the way it was?”