Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere (17 page)

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Authors: Jacqueline West

BOOK: Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere
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She put on the spectacles with shaking hands. The painting of the stone archway hung before her. Olive extended one hand and felt it slide easily through the warm surface of the painting into the stillness of the attic beyond. She leaned forward, pressing her face through the archway, feeling the painting slide and slip all around her, until she toppled all at once into the dark, dusty alcove. Well, at least she knew the spectacles worked. That was a plus.
She hurried up the stairs, trying to avoid stepping on any dead (or living) wasps with her bare feet.
“Harvey?” she called, reaching the attic floor. “Harvey, I know you can hear me!”
Whether Harvey heard her or not, he didn’t answer. Maybe he wasn’t in the attic at all. It was hard to imagine the place without Harvey, hiding somewhere in the rafters with his eye patch or his tuna-can breastplate, ready for the next adventure. Olive turned in a slow circle, taking in the dusty jumble of furniture, the silent corners, the shadows where no green eyes glimmered. The room felt stuffy and too quiet . . . and strangely lonely. Olive pulled her mind back to the missing book and let anger shove loneliness aside.
Stalking to the center of the cluttered room, she stripped the covering off of the easel. The pair of painted hands still curved around the scrapbook on the table. Olive could just catch a glimpse of the old photograph on the open page—
Annabelle and Lucinda, aged 14
—but she wasn’t about to board that train of thought today. She needed to get the book back.
“Harvey?” Olive called again, unsurprised now when there was no answer.
With a frustrated growl, she stomped toward the round window that overlooked the backyard. There were no cats to be seen in the overgrown garden or darting into the shadows beneath the trees—only a smallish, mussy-haired boy, striding quickly away across Mrs. Nivens’s lawn. Peeping around the window’s edge, Olive watched Rutherford hurry back into his grandmother’s yard. What was he up to? Had he been skulking around her house again, waiting to pester her with more questions about the book? As Olive stared, Rutherford glanced back at the old stone house. Instinctively, she ducked farther into the shadows. But Rutherford didn’t seem to see her. A moment later, he had disappeared completely behind the knot of birch trees. Olive breathed a sigh of relief.
Turning back toward the attic, Olive glanced around at the dentist’s chair, the mirrors, the miniature cannon, the boxes . . . and the stack of painted canvases. Her mind swirled downward through the house, like a leaf blowing down from the very top of a tree, rushing faster and faster through the hallways, the bedrooms, the main floor, the basement, past the ranks of waiting paintings, and all at once, a sense of how huge and how impossible this search was came over her. The book could be anywhere in this gigantic house—and not just in the house, but Elsewhere. It would take weeks, months, maybe
years
to find it again. If she ever found it at all.
Panic and defeat whirled together in Olive’s stomach. She staggered back toward the attic steps, remembering the sensation of being pulled across this floor by invisible strings, and wishing that she felt it now.
Where is the book?
Olive asked the house.
Please . . . I need a sign, a clue, anything. Just help me find it.
The tugging, when it started, was so faint that Olive wasn’t sure she felt it at all. She could very well have been imagining it, just like she’d once imagined that she was growing a third eye on her shoulder, which actually turned out to be part of her collarbone (the doctor was very nice about explaining this). She stood at the top of the attic steps, trying to feel which direction the house was pulling her—if it was in fact pulling her at all. She was quite sure that it was pulling her downward, but that might have been gravity. Still, Olive followed the feeling down the attic steps and back through the painting into the pink bedroom.
Once she got there, however, the tugging sensation stopped, leaving her feeling confused and lost and quite a bit heavier than usual. Olive dragged herself along the upstairs hall, looking carefully into the paintings through the spectacles, hoping to see something that sparkled like embossed leather, or a carefully arranged pile of leaves that seemed suspiciously out of place.
She studied the painting of Linden Street, remembering that she could finally climb in on her own again. But she didn’t want to. The problem of Morton seemed distant and unpleasant now, like a mass of gray rain clouds on the horizon, which will eventually drift closer and spoil the whole day. The spellbook was much more important. Once she got it back,
maybe
she would think about helping Morton. Maybe.
Olive was still looking so hard at the paintings on the walls that she almost missed what was waiting for her on the floor. (This was especially bad because she had wandered to the top of the staircase, and with one more step she would have sledded down into the foyer face-first.) But at just the right moment, she glanced down and spotted the edge of the first stair . . . and the lilac leaf on the carpet.
Olive halted. Three steps below was another leaf, and below that, there lay a little cluster of grass clippings, along with a splotch of mud. Olive climbed down the stairs, pulling off the spectacles and putting them into her pocket.
A few crumbs of dirt waited on the hallway floor. Olive crouched down, frowning, and felt a soft, warm breeze ripple over her arms. She glanced up.
The front door of the big stone house was standing open.
17
 
O
LIVE STARED AT the door. It wasn’t wide open, but a few inches—just enough that someone could have slipped in or out without making a sound.
She looked over both shoulders, making sure she was alone. Then she darted to the doorway. The porch was empty: no spellbook, no cats, no intruders. Her parents wouldn’t have gone out by the front door; they would have gone out the side door, heading toward the garage. And Olive hadn’t opened it herself—she hadn’t even noticed that it
was
open until just now. She put her hand on the doorknob, looking out onto the shady porch. Was this the sign she’d been asking for?
The porch swing creaked softly on its chains. Baskets of thick ferns nodded in the breeze. Olive shuffled along the floorboards, looking in every corner. Nothing seemed out of place. She trailed down the steps onto the lawn, searching the grass just as she had done only a few days ago, following Harvey’s paw prints. So much had happened since then that it felt like years, not days, had passed. A short, sharp ache squeezed Olive’s heart. She wished she had something to follow now.
The house loomed over her, its windows dark and empty in the hot midday sun. Olive scanned the front yard—deserted, but for her—and then hurried along the side of the house, toward the back. Remembering the lilac leaf on the stairs, she checked the length of the hedge carefully. Nothing: no book, no broken branches, no telltale scraps of fabric. Olive let out an aggravated breath and turned back toward the yard. The garden looked just as she’d left it—an overgrown tangle of shoots and shrubs. The garden shed leaned crookedly in one corner of the yard. Olive walked toward it, dodging the weedy flowerbeds. She took a deep breath, bracing herself, and tugged open the creaky wooden door.
No one was there.
Olive stepped into the shed, inhaling the smell of moss and soil and rotten wood, glancing up at the old hammock from which she’d rescued Harvey, aka Captain Blackpaw. The memory made her smile, but it was quickly swept away by a new wave of anger. She couldn’t trust the cats anymore. Who did they think they were, anyway? (Well, Harvey thought he was Sir Walter Raleigh, or Lancelot, or Agent 1-800, depending on his mood, but that wasn’t really what Olive meant.) This was her house, the cats belonged to the house, and therefore they belonged to her. They were here to do her bidding. How
dare
they refuse to obey her!
Olive halted, startled by her own thoughts. This didn’t sound like her. This didn’t sound like her at all.
Something outside made a rustling sound. Olive lunged out of the shed and whipped around, inspecting the yard. She stopped beside the compost heap, where she’d buried the painting of the forest with Annabelle McMartin trapped inside it. The ground looked the same as before; here was the slight mound of dirt where she and the cats had filled in the hole. As far as Olive could tell, no one had buried anything else here . . . but just in case, she dropped down onto her knees to take a closer look.
“What are you doing?” said a rapid, slightly nasal voice.
Olive let out a little shriek. She flopped over onto her backside and found herself staring up into the smudgy glasses of Rutherford Dewey. Olive scowled. This was the second time this week that he’d startled her this way, and it had been irritating enough the first time.
“What are
you
doing?” she shot back. “Were you spying on me again?”
“Just because you didn’t see me coming doesn’t mean I was spying on you,” said Rutherford. “I simply walked across your backyard because it provided the quickest route.”
“Hmmph,” said Olive. “Why are you hanging around my house so much, anyway?”
Rutherford avoided the question. “Was the experiment a success?” he asked, beginning to jiggle enthusiastically from foot to foot. The wrinkled T-shirt he wore today was emblazoned with a picture of two knights jousting, just above the words
Camelot Renaissance Festival: Faire and Balanced.
Olive scowled at him. “I—” she began, but Rutherford was too excited to let her finish.
“I was thinking about the grimoire itself,” he zoomed on. “Obviously, it’s quite old, but the fact that it’s written in modern English—and I mean
very
modern English, not Shakespeare’s version of modern English—means that it definitely postdates the Renaissance, so perhaps it was
translated,
so to speak, by later generations of the family and recopied into a new volume, which would explain—”
“It’s gone,” said Olive.
Rutherford’s words crashed to a stop. He paused, his whole body tilted onto one foot. “The grimoire?”
“I think—” Olive started. “I think it was stolen. It was in my room last night, and when I woke up, it was gone.”
“Interesting,” said Rutherford. “Do you have any theories about who would have taken it?”
“Almost nobody knew about it, except me. And your grandmother. And
you
.” Olive gave Rutherford a close, careful look. He met her eyes, waiting for her to go on.
Olive struggled to her feet, brushing dirt and compost off the seat of her pants. “I think it might have been the cats.”
“Oh—like the cat who stole my figurines?” Rutherford started jiggling again. “I suppose that makes sense. Although most common housecats would probably find it difficult to move a large, heavy book.”
Olive was tempted to say
They aren’t common housecats,
but she stopped herself. “I thought they probably hid it somewhere close by. But then I noticed that the front door was open, and I thought they might have taken it outside.”
“I see,” said Rutherford. “I could help you look for it.”
Olive paused. She took a long look at Rutherford: his messy brown curls, his smudged glasses, his wideeyed expression. Maybe she
should
let him help. He already knew about the spellbook anyway, the cats were working against her, and Morton hadn’t wanted to help her find it in the first place. And, in spite of his straightforward gaze, she still got the feeling that Rutherford knew more about spellbooks than he was telling her. Perhaps if she let him stick around, he would drop a few more hints—and she would be waiting to pick them up.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “That’s very . . . nice of you.”
Rutherford gave her a small bow. “It’s part of the code of chivalry, as described by the Duke of Burgundy, to display the virtues of charity, justice, and hope, among other things.”
Olive glanced through the shade-spattered yard at the tall stone house, and tried to hear—or feel—what it was telling her. “I don’t think it’s inside,” she said at last. “Let’s keep looking out here.”
Rutherford gave her another bow and turned toward the cluster of dogwood bushes.
They searched the whole yard, as well as the shed and the garage and the spiderwebby space beneath the porch, but they found nothing. (Well, not quite nothing. Rutherford found something that he thought might be a fragment of a fossil from the cretaceous era, but to Olive it looked more like a bit of broken cement that had had a bottle cap pressed into it.) When they had finished with Olive’s yard, they took a brief, sneaky look at Mrs. Nivens’s, which didn’t take long. Mrs. Nivens’s yard was so neat, one out-of-place book would have stood out like a chocolate stain on a wedding dress.
“I don’t see anything. Do you?” Olive asked as they leaned side by side into the lilac bushes.
“No. Nothing that seems suspicious.” Rutherford pulled back from the bushes and blinked at Olive rapidly behind his smudgy lenses. “What should we try next?”
“I don’t know,” said Olive. She ripped off a handful of lilac leaves, crushing them in her fist before letting them fall to the ground.

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