Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere (4 page)

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Authors: Jacqueline West

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“Like the president?” Olive asked. Olive had memorized all the presidents when she was six, after her parents had bought her a placemat with the presidents’ names and pictures printed on it. Rutherford B. Hayes (number 19) had a bristly beard, and he was right next to Ulysses S. Grant (number 18), who had a slightly less bristly beard.
“No. Like Ernest Rutherford. The father of nuclear physics. He won the Nobel Prize in 1908. My parents are scientists. They’re in Sweden, doing research.”
Something in Olive’s mind flashed with recognition. “My parents are mathematicians,” she said. And before she could stop herself, she smiled at the boy. It was a crooked, slow, grimace-y sort of smile, but it was a smile nonetheless. “My name is Olive.”
The boy smiled back. “I know,” he said. Then he pushed through the lilacs and disappeared.
“TRAITOR!” shrieked a voice from the maple tree. Harvey’s greenish head popped through the leaves. “Traitor! Turncoat! Benedict Arnold!!”
Olive stood up and brushed off the seat of her shorts. “Harvey—”
“AGENT 1-800!!” the cat yowled. He stormed along the branch above Olive’s head. “How could you betray us to the enemy like that? How could you turn your back on your own countrymen?!”
“Harvey—I mean, Agent 1-800—come down. We can talk about this, but not out here. What if someone hears you?”
“What if someone hears
me
?” Harvey’s eyes boggled. “What if someone hears
you
? You could be courtmartialed! Exiled! Imprisoned for life!”
“For giving model knights back to the boy you stole them from?”
“Back to the master
spy,
you mean.” Harvey hunkered down on the branch and stared at Olive intently. “Listen to me.
Do not trust him
. Don’t believe anything he tells you. And don’t trust that woman he is staying with, either.”
“Mrs. Dewey?”
“She is not what she seems,” the cat whispered. “Neither of them is.”
“Harvey, this is crazy. Come down right now and take your bath.”
Harvey stared down at Olive for a moment. Then he bolted toward the trunk and clambered up into the higher branches.
Olive rolled her eyes and turned back toward the house. Her book still lay open on the porch, but the breeze had moved its pages around, and she had completely lost her place. She didn’t feel like reading Sherlock Holmes right now anyway.
She felt like reading something else.
4
 
T
HE LIBRARY WAS the biggest, dustiest room in the old stone house. It had a huge, tile-framed fireplace that looked as though it hadn’t been used in years, a painting of dancing girls in a meadow (who Olive knew for a fact were not as friendly as they looked), creaky rolling ladders reaching up to the ceilings, and battered velvet furniture with leaky stuffing trailing across the cushions like thick gray cobwebs. The library walls were lined with bookshelves that ran from the floor all the way up to the high ceilings, and every inch of the shelves was crammed with books. Olive guessed that it would take a person a hundred years to read all of them. Of course, that was just about how long Annabelle McMartin had lived.
Most of the books were very old. They were bound with cloth or leather, and the gold-painted words on their spines were fading. Olive loved to read, but she didn’t love to read these sorts of books. They had titles like
A Thoroughly Thorough and Exhaustive Exploration of the Fascinating Lives of Snails,
and
The Woeful Tale of a Maiden Who Went About without Her Tippet
. Once Olive had taken down a book titled
Wild Birds and How to Dress Them
, thinking it might have some good suggestions for catching birds and making tiny costumes for them to wear, but the rest of the title, which couldn’t fit on the cover and had to be printed on the front page, was
A Treatise on the Most Modern Methods of Plucking, Stuffing, and Basting Game Birds, Containing Sixty Handcolored Engravings of the Most Delightful Dishes Together with Invaluable Hints for the Home Cook.
Olive had put the book back.
Now she stood in the middle of the library and felt the dust tickling her nose. If the McMartins had left behind a book of spells—a
grimoire,
the boy had called it—then it made sense that it would be here, with all the other books. The memory of Rutherford Dewey’s eyes lighting up when she’d blurted those words—
my house used to be owned by witches
—made Olive’s whole body itch with embarrassment.
Why
had she said it? Why had she told him anything at all? Olive grabbed two fistfuls of her hair and yanked.
Stupid
, she told herself.
Stupid, stupid, stupid
.
She glanced around the library. One important, secret book could easily blend in with thousands of others. A whole book full of the McMartins’ plans and spells could be right here, hiding in plain sight!
The problem was where to begin.
Olive knew that the books weren’t arranged in any particular order. They weren’t alphabetized or sorted by subject, like in school libraries. Books about plants nobody had ever heard of were next to books about politicians nobody had ever heard of, and with the print rubbing off of the covers, a person would have to open up most of the books to be sure of what was inside.
Olive dragged the rolling ladder along the wall to the room’s right-hand corner. She climbed to its highest step, took a firm grip on the top shelf, and pulled down the very first book. A skin of dust smudged off on her fingers as she turned the book over.
Lineage of the Russian Tsars
, said the cover. Olive opened the book. A man wearing a hat that looked like a hairy cake stared back at her. There were no spells to be found here.
The next book,
Tales to Terrify Impudent Children
, was a bit more interesting, but it wasn’t what Olive was looking for. Flipping through the pages of each book and sneezing every now and then, Olive made her way slowly to the end of the first shelf. She was thumbing through a copy of
Truly Marvelous Advancements in the Manufacture of Canadian String
when a voice from below nearly startled her off of the ladder.
“What are you up to?” demanded Horatio as Olive wobbled and clutched the shelf for safety.
“I’m just . . . looking,” said Olive.
Horatio settled himself on the Oriental rug. “Yes, I suppose that’s what one usually does with a pair of eyes and a book,” he said. “Are you
looking
for anything in particular?”
“Sort of,” she said slowly. “Horatio, did the McMartins have a . . . a grimoire? You know, some kind of book of spells?”
Horatio looked up at Olive, his sharp green eyes scanning hers. “Why do you want to know that?”
“Just out of curiosity.”
Horatio blinked at her. “Olive, are you trying to kill me?”
“What?”
“You know: ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’ ”
A little smile tugged at the corner of Olive’s mouth. “Horatio, are you making a joke?”
Horatio gave a shrug that was almost bashful, and examined his toes.
“So,” Olive wheedled, looking through her lowered eyelashes at the gigantic orange cat, “
is
there a grimoire somewhere?”
Horatio sighed. He flopped over onto the rug, stretching his whole body into a furry orange parenthesis and then slowly spreading each individual paw. Bones realigned, he rolled into sphinx position and looked up at Olive. “There
was
a spellbook, yes,” he said, “although it was an incomplete record of the things the McMartins could do. Let’s just say that there are some types of magic that can’t be learned from a book. In any case, I haven’t seen the spellbook in more than seventy years. Aldous hid it, or Annabelle destroyed it, and either way, I doubt very much that you’ll find it.”
Naturally, this made Olive want to find it even more.
“But you cats were their assistants,” she argued. “Shouldn’t you know where something as important as their spellbook went?”
“Precisely. We
were
their assistants. Things stopped being warm and friendly between the McMartins and the three of us long before the spellbook disappeared. Aldous could still force us to obey, but he didn’t trust us anymore.” Horatio turned away, padding a sunny patch of the rug with his paws. “And now, I would suggest that you listen to a wise old saying, and let sleeping cats lie.”
“That’s
dogs,
” corrected Olive.
Horatio, already in napping position, ignored her.
Holding tightly to the ladder with one hand, Olive rolled along the wall to the next set of shelves and took down the first two books:
A Tremendous Hullabaloo
and
Whatever Shall We Do About Hortense?
Olive slumped on the step. Densely packed shelves surrounded her, covering the library walls from floor to ceiling. Even if the titles on the antique spines had been clear, the McMartins were certainly clever enough to hide a book of spells inside some misleading cover. Olive had done this herself sometimes. A paperback mystery fit very easily inside her math textbook.
It had taken her about fifteen minutes to look through the books on one shelf. There were four sets of shelves along each short wall, and six shelves along the longer walls, spaced between two tall windows, the fireplace, and the painting of girls frolicking in a meadow. Each set of shelves had nine shelves within it. If she added and then multiplied the total number of shelves by the number of minutes she spent on one shelf . . . The numbers ran around inside Olive’s head and smashed into each other like a bunch of blind football players. It would take her
a very long time
.
She pulled down the next book, inhaled a puff of dust, and sneezed until she could see spots.
“That’s one good thing about you, Olive,” murmured Horatio from the rug far below. “You’re not a quitter.”
Olive rubbed her itchy nose and got back to work.
 
The sun was casting peach-colored trails through the library windows when Mr. Dunwoody strolled in, whistling “Inchworm” cheerily to himself. “Inchworm” was Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody’s special song. They had danced to it at their wedding, and in fact were probably dancing to it in the photo that sat on Mr. Dunwoody’s desk, in which a younger Alec and Alice beamed at each other in the middle of a tiny dance floor, romantic light reflecting off of the lenses of their large round glasses. These days, Mrs. Dunwoody wore contacts.
Mr. Dunwoody settled himself in the chair at his desk. Horatio made a beeline out of the room.
“I don’t think that cat likes me,” said Mr. Dunwoody.
“He doesn’t
dislike
you,” said Olive, perched like a bookish spider in one high corner. “He’s just sort of. . . reserved.”
Mr. Dunwoody looked up, startled. “Oh, hello, Olive. I didn’t know you were in here.”
“Then who were you talking to?”
Mr. Dunwoody stared thoughtfully up at the ceiling. “That’s a valid question.”
Olive blew a bit of dust off of her fingers. “Dad, about how many books do you think are in this room?”
“A rough estimate?” Mr. Dunwoody scanned the walls. “Twenty shelving units, nine shelves on each, and an average of forty-five books per shelf? Eight thousand one hundred books, give or take.”
Olive ran her fingertip across a row of battered spines as if she were playing a mute piano. “What if a person spent thirty seconds looking at each book, just flipping through the pages? How long would it take to look at all of them?”
Mr. Dunwoody tilted happily back in his chair. “Thirty seconds per book equals 243,000 seconds, equivalent to 4,050 minutes, or to 67.5 hours.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Olive. “A very long time.”
“A ‘long time’ is relative,” said Mr. Dunwoody. “Time itself is relative.”
Olive, who had been told this sort of thing as frequently as other children are told to brush their teeth, nodded obediently. “Well, do you think it’s almost time for dinner, here and now, in real-world time?”
Mr. Dunwoody sniffed the air. “Judging by the scent coming from the kitchen, I would say yes.”
“Good.” Olive climbed stiffly down the ladder, feeling sore in more ways than one. She was probably no closer to finding the book she was looking for, and even worse, the memory of her own voice blurting out “My house used to be owned by witches!”—
to a complete stranger
—made her flush with fury at herself every time she relived it. Why on earth had she told that boy her biggest secret?
“Dad,” said Olive as she and her father walked down the hall toward the lovely smell of lasagna, “if you told somebody a secret, and you weren’t sure you could trust that person to keep it a secret, what would you do?”
“Hmm,” said Mr. Dunwoody. “That’s tricky. People are so unpredictable. However, I would say your safest course of action would be to balance the equation.”
“What do you mean?” asked Olive, envisioning two numbers hopping onto a teeter-totter.

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