Still Life

by Jacqueline West

  OLIVE STEPPED OUT of the dark gray house into the blinding winter sun. For a few seconds, she stood on the stoop, squinting and blinking. The difference between indoors and outdoors seemed as vast as the difference between Morton’s house yesterday and today, and all of the sudden changes were making her mind feel rather blinded and blinky too.

  So maybe it was her mind, or maybe it was her eyes, or maybe it was the strange incompleteness of everything Mary Nivens had said, but something kept Olive from seeing the figure on the sidewalk until she’d nearly walked into it.

  Olive jumped backward.

  The figure was about Olive’s size. It wore a tailored coat made of bright red wool. Its hair was long and dark and shiny. And its faintly suspicious eyes were rimmed with thick black eyeliner.

  “You don’t live here,” Olive blurted.

  “I know,” said the girl. “I know where I live.” She pointed past Olive, at the tall gray house. “Who lives there?”

  “Where?” asked Olive.

  “That house. The one you just came out of.”

  Olive’s throat tightened. “Nobody.”

  “Then what were you doing inside it?”

  “I mean—not nobody,” Olive amended. “Just . . . people.”

  “I thought it was empty.”

  Olive’s throat tightened a little more.

  “No,” she croaked. “Not anymore.”

  The girl glanced from Olive to the curtained windows.

  “Well . . .” Olive rubbed her hands together. “It’s really cold out here! Brr! I’d better get inside!” She took a few rapid steps toward the old stone house. “Aren’t you cold?”

  “Not really.” The girl’s eyes drifted from the Nivenses’ home to the rooftops of the old stone house. “So that’s where the famous artist lived? The one Ms. Teedlebaum was talking about?”

  Olive swallowed. “Yes. That’s—that’s my house.”

  She took another two steps up the slope. The girl didn’t move.

  “Brr . . .” said Olive once more, over her shoulder.

  Then she broke into a run.

  She whirled through the front door of the old stone house and slammed it soundly behind her.

  “There you are, Olive!” shouted her father’s voice from the library. “Come and help us decorate the tree!”

  “Just a second!” Olive called back.

  Craning around the curtains, she peeped out the narrow hallway windows. The girl wasn’t standing on the sidewalk in front of the Nivens house anymore. Olive scanned the street. The sidewalks were empty. The houses stood, muffled and quiet, on their snowy lawns. She thought she caught a flash of red behind Mr. Hanniman’s house, but it was gone so quickly that she wasn’t certain it had been there at all.

  Olive straightened up. The girl had caught her and Rutherford with the portrait of Morton in the museum. What might she have overheard? And why was she here now, on Linden Street, asking questions, if there wasn’t some—potentially dangerous—reason?

  With worry writhing in her stomach, Olive tossed her coat over the rack and headed into the library.

  A very tall, very wide pine tree had been stationed in the corner beyond the tiled fireplace. Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody were opening boxes of ornaments beside it.

  “Isn’t it a beautiful tree?” Mrs. Dunwoody asked as Olive shuffled across the floor. “So symmetrical!”

  “It forms a nearly perfect cone,” Mr. Dunwoody added, patting the branches.

  “It smells nice too,” said Olive.

  “Yes!” said Mrs. Dunwoody, as though this idea had never crossed her mind. “I suppose it does.”

  There was a very specific tree-trimming routine in the Dunwoody household. First, Mrs. Dunwoody hung the strings of little electric lights so that there was a perfectly even number on each part of the tree, while Mr. Dunwoody and Olive waited. Next,

  Mr. Dunwoody hung the garlands of wooden beads so that each downward swoop was exactly the same size, while Mrs. Dunwoody and Olive waited. Then came the careful planning stage, when Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody sorted the ornaments by weight and size, with the largest ones assigned to the lower branches, the medium to the middle, and the smallest to the top, while Olive waited.

  Finally, there was the decorating free-for-all, when Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody hung their ornaments with careful attention to spacing and branch size, and Olive hung hers with careful attention to color scheme, glittery-ness, and whether certain ornaments looked like they would get along with each other.

  The whole process—with a break for sandwiches and cocoa in front of the fire—took the rest of the afternoon. The sky beyond the library’s tall windows darkened to gray and then to blue-black. The lights of neighbors’ trees and garlands and wreaths sparkled along Linden Street like fallen stars.

  Safe inside the old stone house, with a project and her parents, Olive felt the worries of that morning back slowly away. She didn’t know it yet, but they were just waiting for nighttime to return.

  • • •

  “Are you warm enough in here, Olive?” Mrs. Dunwoody asked, stepping through the door of Olive’s bedroom. “I swear, this room stays at least two degrees colder than the rooms at our end of the hall.” She frowned around at the dimness. “I would estimate it’s sixty-three degrees in here. Sixty-three point five at the most.”

  “I’m all right,” said Olive, wriggling her legs under the blankets. “I’ve got three quilts on top of me.”

  “Did you enjoy your first day of winter vacation?” Mrs. Dunwoody asked. “I noticed you spent a lot of it at the new neighbors’.”

  “Yes,” said Olive, not meeting her mother’s eyes. “They’re nice. And interesting.”

  Mr. Dunwoody bustled through the door. “Brr! Is it sixty-three point five degrees in here?”

  “That was my estimate exactly,” said Mrs. Dunwoody. “But Olive says she has a sufficient quantity of quilts to keep her warm.”

  Mr. Dunwoody patted Olive’s shoulder through the blankets. “Ready to catch some designations of the set of integer numbers?”

  “What?” said Olive.

  “In mathematics, Z designates the set of all integers.”

  “Oh,” said Olive.

  “If you’re feeling bored without school or homework, Olive, we could all take a family outing together,” said Mrs. Dunwoody. “We could visit the zoo, or the bookstore, or . . .” She inhaled like someone about to take a bite of extremely unpleasant vegetables. “. . . or the art museum.”

  “No,” said Olive quickly.

  Her parents sagged with relief.

  “I got to spend plenty of time at the museum already.” Olive’s toes curled, remembering those dim corridors. “But thank you.”

  “All right.” Mrs. Dunwoody drifted toward the door. “If you change your mind, just let us know.”

  “Good night, Olive,” said Mr. Dunwoody, giving her shoulder another soft pat. “You know what they say about an object at rest.”

  “I do?” said Olive.

  “An object at rest will stay at rest, unless acted upon by a force. That would make a better ‘Good night’ than that old ‘don’t let the bedbugs bite’ rhyme, wouldn’t it?” Mr. Dunwoody tilted his head thoughtfully. “The sky is blacked, your quilts are stacked; do not let the forces act.”

  Olive smiled. “That’s pretty good, Dad.”

  Mr. Dunwoody switched off the reading lamp. “Do not let the forces act,” he murmured through the glowing band of the doorway. The door thumped shut behind him.

  Olive lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  Be an object at rest, she told herself.

  But the mention of the museum had let all her worries back in. Even with her body perfectly still, Olive’s mind would not stop spinning. Mary Nivens’s words from that morning tumbled around and around inside
it, like a few mismatched socks in a dryer. What had she heard? Who had she seen? What secret was so big that it had consumed the entire Nivens family?

  Olive remembered Mary Nivens’s frightened eyes. Long after dark, I could hear voices coming from outside . . .

  The minutes ticked by. Olive heard the sounds of her parents brushing their teeth and the click of a distant light switch, followed by a long and sleepy silence.

  And then Olive heard it too.

  Voices.

  Coming from outside.

  Prying off the quilts, Olive swung her legs out of bed. She padded across the floor to the windows. The panes were fogged with frost. The yard below was dim, but enough light fell from the winter sky that Olive could make out the lilac hedge, and the edge of the Nivenses’ snowy yard—and, sheltered in the shadow of a huge oak tree, a dark figure wrapped in a long, rippling cloak. She pressed her ear to the cold glass.

  Yes, there were voices. Two voices; one higher, one lower, but she couldn’t quite make out their words. As gently as she could, Olive unlatched the window and pushed up the frosty frame. Cold air and whispered words rushed over the sill.

  “. . . as long as they will be safe. Just let me go!”

  “Shh!” someone hissed.

  The dark figure turned its head to stare up at Olive’s window. Its face was hidden in shadow, but Olive felt certain that it had heard the window creak open; that it was staring straight at her, hidden in the darkness behind the glass. Then it whirled around and darted toward the street.

  Olive bolted toward her door at the same time.

  She flew down the carpeted steps, crammed her feet into her boots, and snatched her coat from the rack. She was still threading her arms into the sleeves as she zoomed out through the front door.

  OLIVE’S FEET CRUNCHED down the icy porch steps. A pounding mixture of curiosity and fear drove her forward.

  Linden Street was empty.

  The cloaked figure—whoever it was—had already vanished into the darkness and the snow. Panting, Olive glanced back along the leafless lilac hedge. Another figure still stood beneath the oak tree: a figure with long, dark skirts and glints of moonlight on its blond hair. It didn’t move as Olive hurried toward it.

  “Mrs. Nivens?” Olive breathed, stopping a few feet away. “Who was that? What’s going on?”

  Even in the weak light, Olive could see that Mary’s skin looked strange. “Olive . . .” she whispered through lips that barely moved. “Please . . . help me inside . . .”

  Olive managed to pry one of Mary’s arms up and around her shoulders. With Mary leaning on her side, she struggled toward the back door of the tall gray house.

  Except for the moonlight filtering through the windows, the kitchen was dark. Olive pulled Mary through the door and shut it firmly behind them. She braced Mary against one wall. Then she turned on the oven and opened its creaking metal door. Soft electric light poured from its mouth. A tide of heat followed it, sweeping out to the corners of the room.

  “That stove—that wasn’t here before,” said Mary stiffly. “We’ll have to—replace it.”

  “Who was that?” Olive asked, placing a stool at a safe distance from the oven door.

  Mary sank slowly onto the stool. She didn’t meet Olive’s eyes. “I don’t know who you mean.”

  “In the yard,” said Olive. “Who were you talking to?”

  Mary gave her head a small shake. “I just . . . I wanted to look at the sky. I wanted to be outside without the light burning me. I forgot that the cold could be just as bad.”

  Olive glanced around the empty kitchen. “Where’s everybody else?”

  “Upstairs. Walter is asleep in Morton’s bed. Harold and Morton are repairing Lucy’s old room.” Mary’s eyes flicked to the hallway. “I didn’t want them to hear.”

  “Hear what?” asked Olive. “Hear you and that person in your yard?”

  Mary’s mouth opened. One of her hands jerked rigidly in her lap. Her eyes moved from Olive to the hall to the blue-gray pane of the window. “There is something I should tell you,” she said at last.

  Olive sat down on the chilly floor. “What?”

  “I wasn’t honest with you this morning,” said Mary, still staring at the window. “I’m not sure why; that house is yours now, after all. It’s about the real reason the Old Man trapped us—our family and our neighbors. It was my fault.”

  “You said you heard something in the backyard . . . ”

  “Yes,” Mary whispered. Her face was thawing, lines of worry forming on her painted skin. “That night, when I got out of bed and went to the window . . . the air was so clear and still, like warm water. I could see all of them down there, behind the stone house: a man and a woman and a big orange cat.”

  In spite of the heat from the stove, Olive felt a sudden chill. “A big orange cat?”

  “I recognized the man, of course,” Mary went on. “It was Aldous McMartin, with his gray hair and his tall, thin body. But I’d never seen the woman before.” Her eyes flicked toward the hall again. “I’d rather Morton and Harold not hear about this, even now . . .”

  “What did the woman look like?” Olive asked quickly.

  Mary frowned, her eyes dimming. “She looked quite young; too young for the streaks of gray in her long red hair. And she was beautifully dressed, in a gray silk robe with a gold pendant.”

  The air stuck in Olive’s throat. “A pendant—like a locket?”

  “I suppose it could have been a locket,” said Mary. “She was looking up at the sky, and I could see her face in the moonlight. She looked so sad. That was what haunted me. Her face was pretty, but much too thin, and her skin was like wax, and the way she stared up at the moon . . .”

  “What happened?” Olive prompted. “Could you hear what they were saying?”

  “I heard the woman say, ‘Please, let me go.’ The Old Man grabbed her by the hand and jerked her back to the house. He said”—Mary put on Aldous’s deep, stony voice—“‘Do not ask me again, woman! Now, hold your tongue!’

  “Then he dragged her inside. The cat went with them, staying right at the woman’s heels. I heard the door slam. And that was that.” Mary shook her head. “I tried to go back to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. Eventually, I got up and got my pencils and paper, and I did a sketch of the woman. I made it as real as I could.”

  Olive’s mind flashed to the drawings piled in the upstairs drawer, the sad-faced woman tumbled between the studies of Morton and Lucinda. She nodded.

  “I wondered what the Old Man could be doing to her up there in that awful stone house. Trapping her. Hurting her. Starving her.” Mary’s hands rose from her lap, clutching at each other. “But I wanted him to know that someone was watching. That someone else knew.

  “The next day, I brought the sketch to my drawing lesson. I asked him how long he’d had a houseguest. ‘Houseguest?’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He looked puzzled—or he pretended to be puzzled. ‘But I saw her,’ I said. ‘Don’t you recognize her?’ And then I showed him my sketch. The look that came across his face . . .” Mary’s back tensed. Her hands made little jittery motions, as if they were knitting an invisible scarf. “I almost turned and ran right then. But he erased the look as fast as he could. ‘What do you think you know?’ he asked, in his deep, slow voice. I didn’t answer him. I just stared straight into his eyes—those awful, yellow eyes—and I said, ‘She’s still here, isn’t she? In this house? Where you’re forcing her to stay?’”

  Olive held her breath as Mary paused, her eyes darkening.

  “I think that’s when he figured out the whole truth about me,” Mary resumed. “That he couldn’t lie to me. That I was watching him because of who I was. And he stared straight back at me and said, ‘Yes, she is in this house. She is safe. She is comfortable. It may not be what she would choose, but it is still li
fe.’ Then he moved toward me so fast I thought he was going to rip the sketch right out of my hand. But instead he just said, ‘Come back tomorrow. I believe we are ready to start painting at last.’”

  “Then what happened?” asked Olive.

  “I went back the next day. He had set up an easel with a painting already on it. It was a landscape—a muddy brown field, with hills and birch trees in the distance.”

  The bog, Olive’s mind whispered.

  “He said, ‘For your first attempts, you will reuse some old canvases of my own.’ He watched me finish my portrait of Morton, keeping almost completely silent. And next he gave me a painting of—of an empty, snowy forest . . .” Mary’s voice wobbled, growing even softer. “The day after I’d finished Lucinda’s portrait, Harold and I woke up—and Morton was gone. Of course, we suspected the Old Man. We told all the neighbors, thinking we were warning them, when instead, we were dooming them too. He got back at all of us soon enough.”

  Mary’s head drooped. Olive knew that paintings couldn’t cry, not actual tears. She guessed that needing to cry and not being able to would probably feel much worse.

  “So . . . did you ever find out what happened to her?” Olive asked after a moment. “Who she was, or why Aldous was holding her there?”

  Mary patted absently at her dry cheeks. “I didn’t get the chance,” she said. “All this time, I’ve wondered who she was, or what she knew that made her so important. To the Old Man, she was worth all of our lives.” She raised her head. Her ice-blue eyes honed on Olive. “Perhaps . . . perhaps you’ll find out the truth. If you act fast.”

  Mary glanced at the window again. Her worried frown shifted, a look of surprise taking its place. “Goodness!” she exclaimed in a brighter voice. “I can’t imagine what time it is! If your parents find you missing, they’ll be worried sick.”

  Reluctantly, Olive stood up. She shut the oven door and switched off the heat. “I suppose I should go.”