Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere (24 page)

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Authors: Jacqueline West

BOOK: Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere
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Rustling sounds came from the kitchen, where Mrs. Nivens was getting the candy. Then her steps clicked back down the hall, moving fast. Her shadow, with its neatly starched skirt and just as neatly starched hair, flitted toward them. Olive, Leopold, and Morton bolted around the corner into the living room, pressing their backs to the wall.
“Here we are,” they heard Mrs. Nivens tell Rutherford cheerily. “Two candy bars. But don’t spoil your dinner.”
“Actually,” said Rutherford, still speaking as though he were addressing someone on the other side of a busy street, “I can’t have this kind. I’m allergic to peanuts. The reaction can be quite severe.”
“Well, just take the other one, then. It doesn’t have peanuts in it.”
“The thing is,” Rutherford said, “I can’t have anything that contains peanut-derived products, or that even came into contact with anything that contains peanuts or peanut-derived products. You should probably check the ingredients on the bag, just to be safe.”
Mrs. Nivens let out a breath that Olive could hear all the way around the corner. “All right,” she said, her voice losing some of its cheery polish. “I’ll just go do that.”
“In fact,” Rutherford shouted after Mrs. Nivens, “you should probably make sure that the candy came from a factory that doesn’t process any peanut products at all. If it doesn’t say so on the package, you might want to call the company. Just to be safe.”
In the kitchen, Mrs. Nivens muttered something that Olive couldn’t quite make out.
Olive, Morton, and Leopold peeped out into the hall. Muffled sounds still came from the kitchen. With a soldierly nod, Leopold signaled that the hallway was clear. Morton edged around the front wall of the living room, turned to the left, and darted lightly up the staircase to the second floor with Leopold at his heels. Meanwhile, Olive slipped across the hall and through the doorway of the room where she’d seen the light burning last night.
The room was empty—empty, that was, except for a long dining table covered with a lacy tablecloth, a set of uncomfortable-looking chairs, and an old-fashioned glass-shaded lamp. Two of the chairs were pulled slightly away from the table, as though they had been recently used. The rest of the room looked as though it hadn’t been touched, or even breathed in, for about fifty years. There were no paintings or spectacles to be seen.
Olive edged back into the hall. She could hear Mrs. Nivens thumping cabinet doors in the kitchen. Giving Rutherford a reassuring nod, Olive hurried up the staircase.
She found Morton standing in the upstairs hallway. He stared from side to side, looking at the blank walls. “There used to be pictures here,” he whispered as Olive tiptoed up behind him. “And right here, there was a little table. Mama used to put flowers on it.”
Olive nodded, trying to hurry him along. “Where do you think Lucinda would have hidden the painting?”
But Morton didn’t seem to be listening. Still staring up at the empty walls, he trailed forward a few steps and turned to the right, turning the knob of a closed door. Its hinges creaked softly as he pushed it open.
Olive froze. She and Leopold exchanged a glance. Had Mrs. Nivens heard them? Olive strained to listen to the voices below. Rutherford’s voice was still coming from the distant front door. She thought she caught the words “Cretaceous period” and “K-T extinction,” which meant he was probably in the middle of some very long explanation. With a nod at Leopold, Olive followed Morton through the open door.
It was Leopold who remembered to bump the door shut behind them. Olive was too busy watching Morton. And Morton was too busy looking around.
The room in which they stood was painted a pale shade of blue. A small wrought iron bed sat in one corner, while the opposite wall was lined with a dresser and a bookshelf. An old wooden wagon sat in one corner, holding a baseball bat, a toy drum, and a somewhat deflated-looking striped ball. Black-and-white pictures were tacked to the walls, many of them cut from newspapers and catalogs—pictures of baseball players and exotic animals and funny old-fashioned cars that looked, to Olive, more like sleds on wheels. The paper of the pictures was yellowed and curling. The bed was perfectly made, all the furniture was dusted, but from the loneliness that hung in the air, Olive could tell that no one had used this room for a very, very long time.
Leopold cleared his throat and nodded toward the door. It was time to move on. Olive glanced around, taking in every corner. There was no painting here.
“Morton—” she began.
Morton didn’t turn around. “This is my room,” he said softly. “It’s just the same. She kept everything just the same.”
Olive wrapped her hand around Morton’s baggy sleeve. “We have to keep looking, Morton. I don’t know how much longer Rutherford can keep her busy.”
Morton gave an absent nod. “You go,” he whispered, staring at the little iron bed. A small blue horse made out of corduroy was lying on the pillows. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
With a worried sigh, Olive turned to the door. “Stay with him,” she whispered to Leopold before sidling back out into the upstairs hall.
Olive edged along the wall, starfish-style. She could hear Rutherford’s voice still rambling in the distance. When her fingers hit the cold brass of the next doorknob, Olive opened the door, backed smoothly through it, and shut it again behind her.
For a moment, she practically glowed with pride. She had never done anything so gracefully and quietly in her whole life. Even Horatio would have been impressed. Blood was pounding through her body, but Olive’s mind felt surprisingly calm and clear. She could do this. Still smiling to herself, she took a look around.
She had backed into a bathroom. Like the living room and hallway, it was spotless and shiny. The tiles around the bathtub gleamed, the faucets didn’t drip, the mirror didn’t have a single fleck of toothpaste on it. Even the dish full of seashell-shaped soaps was so clean it looked new, as though it had never been touched at all.
There were no spectacles to be seen. Olive checked the drawers and the medicine cabinet, just to make sure. But they were all completely empty. This seemed odd at first, until Olive realized that Mrs. Nivens, being a painting, wouldn’t need to use a bathroom or anything in it. All of this was only for her nonexistent guests, like most of the bedrooms in the Dunwoodys’ house. The difference was that Mrs. Nivens obviously
cleaned
for her nonexistent guests.
Olive peeked back out into the hall.
“
Coelacanth
actually means ‘hollow spine,’ in Greek. But the spine of the coelacanth isn’t really hollow, it’s a sort of cartilage tube full of fluid.” These were the words Olive could hear Rutherford saying, although to Mrs. Nivens, they probably sounded something like this: “Butthespynovthesealacanthisntreallyhollowitzasordovcardilidgetoobfullovfluid.” Rutherford’s voice buzzed on as Olive slipped toward the third door. “Another interesting thing about the coelacanth is that it gives birth to live young. Well, technically, they’re ovoviviparous . . .”
She had just placed her hand on the knob when, behind her, someone let out a gasp.
Morton stood in the hall, the blue horse clutched in his arms. He shook his head emphatically and then broke into a run, hurrying toward her. Leopold bounded silently along beside him.
“You can’t go in there!” Morton whispered once he’d reached the doorway. “That’s Lucy’s room!”
“We have to check everywhere,” Olive argued under her breath. “Besides, where would she be more likely to hide things than her own bedroom?”
“No! She’ll be really mad!” Morton argued back, trying to pry Olive’s hands off the doorknob.
Maybe it was the painted slipperiness of Morton’s hands, or maybe Olive was stronger, but somehow Morton lost his grip and staggered backward into the hall. Suddenly fighting a one-sided battle, Olive staggered backward too, pulling the door open with a much-too-abrupt yank. The heavy door made a low rattling noise against the frame.
Olive held her breath. Morton gave her a horrified look over the head of the blue horse. Leopold froze, doing his best small stuffed panther impression.
Rutherford’s clear, rapid voice was still ringing up the stairs. “. . . Of course, by that time ichthyosaurs were extinct, making mosasaurs the dominant ocean predator. Most people aren’t aware of this, but ichthyosaurs bore live young, like the coelacanth, except the ichthyosaur also breathed air . . .”
Perhaps Mrs. Nivens hadn’t even heard them over the sound of Rutherford’s rambling. No footsteps hurried up the stairs; no one shouted, “Who’s there?” They were safe.
With Olive leading the way, Leopold marching after her, and Morton trailing reluctantly behind, they edged into Lucinda’s bedroom.
It was the neatest room Olive had ever seen. A white lace bedspread covered the bed, looking as clean and fresh as one giant snowflake. Matching white lace curtains hung over the windows, all of their frilly edges evenly spaced. Olive wondered if Mrs. Nivens straightened them with a ruler. The walls were bare, apart from two framed arrangements of dried flowers that looked as though they had been petrified by shock. A row of books with matching pale pink covers lined the bookshelves, surrounded by a collection of delicate porcelain ballerinas and blown glass roses and other things that would have to be dusted with a Q-tip.
And yet, in spite of its neatness, there was something horrible about this room. It was girlish and cold and still, like a rosebud embedded in ice: If it thawed, it would instantly decay. Olive tiptoed across the floor and touched the lacy bedspread with one fingertip. No wonder the room was so neat, she thought. It was a museum. No one slept here, ate stashes of hidden cookies here, had bad dreams here, and woke up to read books by the light of the bedside lamp. No one lived here at all. This room—this whole neat, perfect house—was one gigantic coffin.
Ready to bolt back out into the hall, Olive turned back toward Morton and Leopold. But Morton wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were fixed on a full-length, white-framed mirror that stood against the left-hand wall.
“This wasn’t here before,” he whispered.
Olive hurried to one side of the mirror and Morton darted to the other. Very carefully, trying to keep its legs from scraping against the polished hardwood floor, they slid the mirror to one side. Behind it, leaning against the spotless white wall, was a painting—a painting in a heavy gold frame.
Olive knew this painting well. It had once hung in her upstairs hall. She had noticed it on her very first visit to the old stone house, and she had known, even then, that there was something strange about it. It was the first painting she had ever explored with the magic spectacles. It was where she had met Morton, and been rescued by the cats, and been chased by a . . . a
thing
made from the ashes of Aldous McMartin. It was a painting of a dark, eerie forest, where a moonlit path disappeared into the bony lace of bare trees. The last time Olive had seen this painting, she had been burying it in her backyard, and the trapped image of Annabelle McMartin had scowled furiously up at her from the canvas. There were still traces of dirt clinging to the painting, stuck in the whorls of the frame.
But where Annabelle’s angry face should have been, there was nothing—nothing but the moonlight falling on leaf-strewn stones. Leopold and Morton hurried closer, peering over her shoulders as Olive knelt down in front of the painting.
“Oh, no,” Olive breathed.
Nonsensically, she grabbed the sides of the heavy frame and shook it, as though Annabelle might fall back into view like an ant that’s been hiding at the edge of an ant farm. Nothing happened. There was no trace of Annabelle anywhere. And if she wasn’t in there, it meant that Annabelle McMartin was somewhere . . . out
here
.
“Olive Dunwoody,” said a woman’s voice.
24
 
O
LIVE WHIRLED AROUND. Of course, it’s very hard to whirl when you’re on all fours, so she sort of flopped from her knees into crab-walking position, with her back pressed against the painting. Morton turned as well, tripped on the trailing hem of the trench coat, and fell into Olive’s lap. Leopold hopped in front of the two of them and bared his teeth, hissing.
Annabelle McMartin glided gracefully through the doorway.
The last time Olive had seen Annabelle, her pretty face had been twisted with rage and her long brown hair had blown wildly in a cold wind. The Annabelle now standing in front of her looked like a different person. She looked like the young woman from the portrait again; the woman who had sweetly invited Olive to tea and listened to all her secrets; the woman who had paddled Olive into the middle of a raging lake and left her there to drown.
Each painted strand of Annabelle’s hair had been smoothed and fastened in place. Her string of pearls had been straightened, and her frilly antique dress was gone, replaced by a prim skirt and blouse set of Mrs. Nivens’s. But her eyes were the same pools of honeycolored paint, and her mouth, when she smiled, had the same deceptive sweetness.
Olive felt her body freeze. She could almost hear tiny ice cubes clinking in her veins. Morton and Leopold didn’t move either.

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